Description

After almost four decades of a neoliberal counterrevolution throughout the Western world, the notion of direct political violence as strategic action and instrument of collective emancipation has become unthinkable, if not utterly demonized, mostly associated with natural catastrophes and religious terrorism.

But in the meantime the shrinking of public space and dismantlement of existing sociopolitical organizations has made radical existential choices and forms of direct oppositional action the only options in several corners of our disenchanted societies — as witnessed, under various forms, by the likes of Southern European urban secessions, French rural resistance known as “ZADs”, and even the short-lived North-American experience of Occupy Wall Street. Left-wing violence is back from the dead 1970s, or non-discursive protest becomes available again, at last? Scattered notes from a research in progress.

A former director of the New York-based French Publishers’ Agency and currently professor of American Studies at the University of Paris-Nanterre, François Cusset also teaches critical theory seminars at Paris’ Institute of Political Science and the Swiss art school Ecal. He is the author of two novels and several critically acclaimed essays in the field of contemporary political and intellectual history, including: “French Theory” (2003, eng.tr. In 2008 with U.of Minnesota Press), “Queer Critics” (2002, eng. Tr. In 2011 as “The Inverted Gaze” with Arsenal Pulp), and “La Décennie” (a history of 1980s France published in 2006).