Never before has it been more important for Left thinking to
champion expansive visions for societal transformation. Yet
influential currents of critical theory have lost sight of this
political imperative. Provincial notions of places, periods, and
subjects obstruct our capacity to invent new alignments and
envision a world we wish to see. Political imagination is misread
as optimism. Utopianism is conflated with idealism. Revolutionary
traditions of non-liberal universalism and non-bourgeois humanism
are rendered illegible. Negative critique becomes an end in itself.
Pessimism is mistaken for radicalism and political fatalism risks
winning the day. In this book, Gary Wilder insists that we place
solidarity and temporality at the center of our political thinking.
He develops a critique of Left realism, Left culturalism, and Left
pessimism from the standpoint of heterodox Marxism and Black
radicalism. These traditions offer precious resources to relate
cultural singularity and translocal solidarity, political autonomy
and worldwide interdependence. They develop modes of immanent
critique and forms of poetic knowledge to envision alternative
futures that may already dwell within our world: traces of past
ways of being, knowing, and relating that persist within an
untimely present; or charged residues of unrealized possibilities
that were the focus of an earlier generation's dreams and
struggles; or opportunities for dialectical reversals embedded in
the contradictory tendencies of the given order. Concrete
Utopianism makes a bold case for embracing what Wilder calls a
politics of the possible-impossible. Attentive to the non-identical
character of places, periods, and subjects, insisting that axes of
political alignment and contestation are neither self-evident nor
unchanging, reworking Lenin's call to "transform the imperial war
into a civil war," he invites Left thinkers see beyond inherited
distinctions between here and there, now and then, us and them.
Guided by the spirit of Marx's call for revolutionaries to draw
their poetry from a future they cannot fathom yet must nevertheless
invent, he calls for practices of anticipation that envision and
enact, call for and call forth, seemingly impossible ways of being
together. He elaborates a critical orientation that emphasizes the
dialectical relations between aesthetics and politics, political
imagination and transformative practice, concrete interventions and
revolutionary restructuring, past dreams and possible worlds, means
of struggle and its ultimate aims. This orientation requires
nonrealist epistemologies that do not mistake immediate appearances
with the really real. Such epistemologies would allow critics to
recognize uncanny and untimely aspects of social life, whether
oppressive or potentially emancipatory. They may help actors to
render the world subversively uncanny and untimely. They may clear
pathways for the kind of critical internationalism and concrete
utopianism that Left politics cannot afford to ignore.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
