Revolutionary Subject Research Articles

From Erasure to Restoration: Antisemitism and the Visual Reverberations of a Revolutionary Pedagogy

Abstract A set of rediscovered revolutionary posters by the Reprint Collective (which was presented as part of Documenta fifteen) in Brussels provided an incredibly moving window into times past. Notwithstanding how the events addressed by those political artefacts now lie in the historical past, the revolutionary reverberations of the posters remain something to treasure. They bring to life political causes that underline the importance of radical solidarity and activist alliances. To understand why such artefacts were banned, we need to recognise the role of contemporary racism – the projection of the figure of a Palestine-radical left-Muslim subject that encompasses everything the liberal mainstream supposedly is not. This article argues that the New Anti-Semitism is a merely ideological manifestation that has no contribution to make toward the struggle against antisemitism. The posters remind us that 1) the struggle against antisemitism cannot be separated from the struggle against Islamophobia, but also that 2) the erasure of a particular Jewish and Left revolutionary subjectivity is intrinsic to the workings of hegemonic forces that maintain contemporary politics. Going against the account in which antisemitism has conventionally been framed, this article aims to come to terms with the erasure of a left epistemology that had emerged from the region in the 1970s. Moroccan revolutionary Abraham Serfaty is an example of how the erasure of the radical history of Arab and Jewish progressives was no coincidence. Reversing this erasure not only helps in understanding progressive Jewish interventions in liberation politics but also that the flattening of complex histories and Arab, Left, and Jewish subjectivities is in fact a prerequisite for Zionism. Arab Jews do not fit neatly within a pro-Israel ideological framework that itself systematically feeds off anti-Arab racism. This article furthermore reflects on New Anti-Semitism as a key political instrument and as a powerful moralistic force that muzzles the expression of political context and social ambiguity. The notion ‘Arab Anti-Semitism’ arose against the backdrop of Israeli state terror and regional warfare. This article also provides insights into important intellectual interventions of the left between the 1960s and the 1980s. In combination with the rise of counter-revolutionary forces and major anti-left crackdowns, this emancipatory approach building on a critique of imperialism and capitalism, and solidarity politics based on progressive universal values, was undermined. Finally, coming to terms with the erasure of a left epistemology that had emerged from the region and recovering this very legacy serve as an antidote against historical amnesia. This spirit of a progressive universalism – as, for instance, illustrated in Mahmoud Darwish’s rejection of the opportunistic dictum ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ on the grounds that one can readily speak of a ‘world’s enemy’ – is born from the belief that our ethical and moral constellations carry universal value.

Indigenous environmentalism: For a political economy where people (and planet) matter

This article investigates how well E. F. Schumacher’s ideas travel beyond his own time and place. To do so, I contrast the environmental critique offered by Schumacher in Small is Beautiful with contemporary forms of everyday environmentalism provided by Indigenous communities in Latin America that form part of a response to processes of ongoing territorial dispossession. In exploring how well Schumacher’s ideas travel to Latin America, I argue that there are seemingly a significant number of similarities between these forms of environmental politics. However, they can be understood in two different registers. I submit that Schumacher’s environmental critique and political project remains at the level of idealism and contains a variety of elements that remain contradictory for a progressive praxis. By contrast, Indigenous environmentalism in Latin America offers a materially-grounded, structural critique of colonialism that concomitantly offers a new notion of a community-based revolutionary subject. It therefore provides a stronger basis for realising many of the goals Schumacher had in mind. Nevertheless, I conclude that whilst important and necessary, this mode of resistance remains insufficient on its own to achieve an alternative political economy where people and planet matter. For this to be realised, a more encompassing counter movement remains vital. The mantra of ‘small is beautiful’, therefore, still needs to grasp the scale of the ecological crisis.

Becoming Awakened: Four Yue Opera Segments in Xie Jin’s Two Stage Sisters

Abstract: A major work of the renowned director Xie Jin, the 1964 film Two Stage Sisters (Wutai jiemei 舞台姐妹) has received popular reception and critical acclaim both domestically and internationally. Existing scholarship has interpreted Two Stage Sisters primarily through the film analysis methodology, which overlooks the critical component of the film’s aesthetics—the Chinese Yue opera performance. My analysis will shed new light on the film’s depiction of Yue opera actresses by examining details of Yue opera performances and their intermedial interactions with the film. Examination of the “drama-within-drama” device in Two Stage Sisters —in which several excerpted opera segments are inserted into the film’s narrative—reveals that it serves both political and humanistic purposes. Drawing on my fifteen years of personal experience with Yue opera theater, I analyze the film through a new methodological approach that takes into account the film’s transmedial and multimedia connections with the operatic lyrics, singing, music, costume, and movement. This paper invites a rereading of Two Stage Sisters by presenting an original decoding of four Yue opera segments, particularly regarding the parallels and tensions between the onstage opera world and the off-stage film narrative. I demonstrate that each opera segment directly matches one step in the four-step framework of “escape → anger → half-awakened → awakened” identified by Wang Hui as the construction trajectory of female protagonist Zhu Chunhua’s revolutionary subjectivity. In this, I hold that all the Yue opera segments are carefully chosen and crafted into the film holistically to bear meaning and purpose, both in relationship with each other and in relationship to the overall film narrative. I will argue that the selected opera segments serve three central purposes in Two Stage Sisters . First, they externalize Chunhua’s interiority in her becoming a revolutionary subject. Second, they showcase the historical transformation of Yue opera theater. Third, rather than posing a stark disconnect, the premodern opera segments speak to and connect with the historicity and sufferings of women depicted in the last two modern segments, thus integrating gender and collective consciousness into the overarching revolutionary discourse. Overall, this paper uncovers the unacknowledged subtleties and richness of the film owing to the Yue opera segments.

Thinking through the Home: Work, Rent, and the Reproduction of Society

Abstract: This essay explores the tensions between two positions on revolutionary subjectivity. The first confines it to the production process and the creation of value, and the second ignores the value-form as economistic Marxist orthodoxy. I consider a third position that tries to capture the reach and open-endedness of capitalism, and in the process imagine a more expansive conception of revolutionary subjectivity. Accounting for the vastness of capitalism’s reach entails thinking with and beyond the production of value—about the preconditions that make the wage-relation possible—that is the reproduction of society, broadly conceived. This not only encompasses reproductive labor but also implicates broader gender and race relations through precarity and the gig economy, as well as struggles over homes and housing, health care, and border crossing.

Visual, Spatial and Temporal Aporias in the Post-Palestinian Films of Basma Alsharif

Abstract This article focuses on the films of diasporic Palestinian artist Basma Alsharif, analyzing the visual strategies she mobilizes to negotiate three aporias in Palestinian experience around visuality, space and mobility and temporality. Focusing on Ouroboros (2017) and Home Movies Gaza (2013), I explore the ethical ways she represents a situation of suspended violence without spectacularizing suffering or relying on overdetermined visual conventions. The films evoke both feelings of spatial constraint, and conversely, a diasporic expansiveness that characterizes a Palestinian structure of feeling. Finally, I look at Alsharif’s engagement with the concept of the eternal return, paying particular attention to the ways that it suggests a notion of time not predicated on the unitary, revolutionary (i.e., heteromasculine) subject and proposes a way forward not based on the exclusionary rhetoric of the nation-state. Throughout the article, I put her work in conversation with other female Palestinian filmmakers handling similar themes to identify emerging patterns in how Palestine is portrayed and conceived.

The revolutionary subject: Masao Adachi and Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War

This article’s title originates from a line spoken by a revolutionary towards the end of the film Red Army/PFLP: Declaration of World War. Like the film born of the collaboration of politically radical Japanese experimental filmmakers and revolutionaries, this examination concerns revolution itself as a film subject. More specifically, it interrogates this film as a revolutionary tool and the limitations thereof, as well as revolution and revolutionaries captured in the film and the revolutionary as embodied in the film’s maker Masao Adachi. What it produces might be termed ‘the revolutionary subject’.

Ambiguity, Contingency, and Dominance: Decolonizing Theories of Modernity

Abstract Focusing on the work of Johann P. Arnason and Peter Wagner, this article examines in its first part recent sociological, non-linear and contingency-sensitive ways of engagement with modernity, which refer to different levels of socio-historical configuration (civilization analysis vs. world sociology) and attribute different significance to normative questions. While both authors acknowledge the entanglement of European and non-European cultural worlds as well as its power dynamics, they still fail to fully grasp and theorize the devastating role of colonialism, which today is still felt in the marginalisation and even erasure of knowledge, perspectives, ideas and experiences from the ‘non-West’. Their approaches also lack a serious engagement with post- and decolonial scholarship. The second part of this contribution presents decolonial thinking as a theoretical and normative-political project. Theorising modernity from ‘beyond’ invites us to ‘break the Western code’ (Mignolo) and engage with modernity from a perspective that is grounded in different epistemologies, philosophies and social imaginaries, ultimately questioning autonomy and mastery (over humans and nature) as basic premises or axioms of Western modernity. As a normative-political project decoloniality is future-oriented and, focusing on the temporally, spatially and socially contextualized acting subjects and collectives, aims to rebuild a polycentric world and establishes ‘pluriversality as a universal project’ (Mignolo). The Zapatista movement in Chiapas (Mexico), representing a new understanding of the revolutionary subject and the revolutionary praxis, illustrates how indigenous groups and (urban) Marxists can come together as equals, learn from each other and negotiate how to change the world in discourse and practice.

Ambiguity, Contingency, and Dominance: Decolonizing Theories of Modernity

Abstract Focusing on the work of Johann P. Arnason and Peter Wagner, this article examines in its first part recent sociological, non-linear and contingency-sensitive ways of engagement with modernity, which refer to different levels of socio-historical configuration (civilization analysis vs. world sociology) and attribute different significance to normative questions. While both authors acknowledge the entanglement of European and non-European cultural worlds as well as its power dynamics, they still fail to fully grasp and theorize the devastating role of colonialism, which today is still felt in the marginalisation and even erasure of knowledge, perspectives, ideas and experiences from the ‘non-West’. Their approaches also lack a serious engagement with post- and decolonial scholarship. The second part of this contribution presents decolonial thinking as a theoretical and normative-political project. Theorising modernity from ‘beyond’ invites us to ‘break the Western code’ (Mignolo) and engage with modernity from a perspective that is grounded in different epistemologies, philosophies and social imaginaries, ultimately questioning autonomy and mastery (over humans and nature) as basic premises or axioms of Western modernity. As a normative-political project decoloniality is future-oriented and, focusing on the temporally, spatially and socially contextualized acting subjects and collectives, aims to rebuild a polycentric world and establishes ‘pluriversality as a universal project’ (Mignolo). The Zapatista movement in Chiapas (Mexico), representing a new understanding of the revolutionary subject and the revolutionary praxis, illustrates how indigenous groups and (urban) Marxists can come together as equals, learn from each other and negotiate how to change the world in discourse and practice.

Radical Ecological Economics: Decolonizing Our Work

Abstract Who are the peasants/Indigenous people and what is their role in the history and future of Mexico? Questioning the dominant version of the socio-political dynamics, I start with corn, a grain created in Mesoamerica, to develop one of most admired agroecological systems in the world. It contributes to good nutrition and health, (re)shaping social structures and the territory itself. Today’s communities, transformed into a Communitarian Revolutionary Subject provide a model for post-capitalist societies. I apply the framework of Radical Ecological Economics to illustrate and accompany this dynamic.

The Communitarian Revolutionary Subject and the Possibilities of System Change

As capitalism continues to fuel the planetary crisis, David Barkin and Brian M. Napoletano propose that the communitarian revolutionary subject is already prefiguring alternatives constructed around the principles of self-determination, substantive equality, and sustainability.

Gone with the (West) Wind: Shelley, Apostrophe, and Inept Interpellation

ABSTRACT In this essay, I read Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’ as dramatizing the paradox of the apostrophe as a poetic device. Shelley presents a case where the speaker fails to understand the limitations of apostrophes before eventually realizing the revolutionary possibilities the serious (and embarrassing) employment of this device opens up. I read the poem alongside Althusser’s formulation of ‘interpellation’ and his ‘theatre’ of the encounter with the Police. Thus, reading Shelley’s ‘Oh hear!’ in the poem, alongside Althusser’s ‘Hey, you there!’, I argue, helps us better understand Shelley’s dramatization of the failure of the speaker’s attempts at interpellating the West Wind. This failure, however, quickly turns to admiration for the revolutionary non-subject that the Wind is in the poem. I show that Shelley’s desire to be the West Wind is not because it functions as a revolutionary subject but in fact because it doesn’t.

A Violence Other than Violence

This article looks at several attempts to conceptualize a legitimate use of revolutionary violence in the anti-authoritarian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and 1970s. The central problem confronting the repertoire of action in this period lay in understanding how a violence deployed to fight power could avoid reproducing instances of this same power. Some, like Guy Debord, proposed a framework in which the revolutionary subject employs violence without becoming subject to such violence itself. Others, like Antonio Negri, sought to distinguish among various regimes of violence, arguing that true state violence was modally distinct from revolutionary violence, or the concrete materialization of a proletarian potentiality. Although opposed, both of these perspectives strive to mitigate or restrain the brutal subjectivation attending the exercise of violence. Placing this debate against the background of Walter Benjamin's claim, in his “Critique of Violence,” that a “divine violence” that would neither sustain nor uphold law is “undisclosed to human beings,” this article argues that the Autonomia movement in 1970s Italy reveals how such undisclosedness, such invisibility, becomes incarnated in a social form. If it is only by abandoning a concept of sovereign victory that a form of divine violence can appear, this is because its appearance coincides with the destitution of the cohesion of the social body upholding state sovereignty. Revolutionary violence is not nonviolence but, rather, a violence other than violence, a form of power whose content is a subjectivation beyond the problematic of sovereignty.

REVOLUTIONARY SPECTATORSHIP AND SUBALTERNITY: FOUCAULT IN IRAN

ABSTRACTIn this article, I offer a novel reading of Michel Foucault's Iranian writings and probe their unexplored linkages with longstanding historiographical debates. I argue that these writings run headlong into the conceptual aporias of political modernity by contesting the assumed parallelism between consciousness and history and between subjects of history and history as Subject. I take up this problem through the double frame of revolutionary spectatorship and subalternity. In the first instance, I analyze Kant's contradictory reflections on the French Revolution and Marx and Engel's response to the (failed) revolutions of 1848 to show how uprisings are made to conform to a theory of the subject. In the second instance, in conversation with subaltern studies (Guha, Chakrabarty, and Spivak), I focus on the problem of representing the revolutionary subject or insurgent consciousness. Foucault's Iranian writings problematize the particular way the revolutionary subject (the person who rises up [se lève], in Foucault's vocabulary) is represented, or historiographically phrased. I argue that the confounding factor in this phrasing, the hard object that resists integration, is religion. I build a set of relays between genres of writing—philosophical journalism, philosophy of history, and subaltern historiography—that are subtended by this problem of incommensurability in order to illustrate the double bind of phrasing a religious subject in revolt. Across these heterogeneous conceptual grammars of historical analysis, I track “religion” and the “colonial” as différends in relation to what counts as a subject of history or history as Subject, and I show how religious and colonial phrasings (of history and subjectivity) find themselves in a position that has lost the capacity to claim a position.

“To be Transformed into Thought Itself”

Ali Shariati is typically understood as a theorist of “political Islam.” Yet his theological innovations within what is called “mystical thought” are also worthy of attention. Shariati does not consider mystical thought as an escapist, transcendent paradigm, but as a means to interpret and navigate the socio-political world. Of particular relevance to Shariati is an idea ubiquitous across Islamic mysticism: the transformation of the self. Within Islamic mysticism, there are various iterations of the idea that to become closer to God, one must enact a radical transfiguration of the self, one that occurs simultaneously at the divine and existential registers. For Shariati, this transformation of the self is tied not only to one’s relationship with God, but also to the desire to alter the social realm. This is an ethos that, for Shariati, should infiltrate all aspects of life, material and immaterial, cerebral and social. If one wishes to overturn the status quo, one must cultivate not only a revolutionary subjectivity but a mystically-oriented subjectivity as well, or one that is characterized by constant change and growth.

"РЕВОЛЮЦИОННЫЙ СУБЪЕКТ" В ПСИХИАТРИИ И ЛИТЕРАТУРЕ

This article examines the transformations taking place in German psychiatry and literature in the 1970 s. On the one hand, it traces the development of an anti-psychiatric “revolutionary subject” through the example of the Heidelberg Patient Socialist Collective led by Dr. Wolfgang Huber. On the other hand, in contrast to the marginality of Huber's circle, we analyze the somewhat different path taken by the “revolutionary schizophrenic subject” in literature, using Heinar Kipphardt's novel Marz as an example. With a number of similarities and differences, both phenomena transform cultural space in different ways.

Epic Humor: Elpidio Valdés and the Mythopoetics of Populist Laughter

Whether emplotted as epic or as tragedy, the tales told about a nation’s revolutionary past do not tend to elicit laughter as much as awe and solemnity. This is the case with Cuba’s national epic, the story of its nineteenth-century wars for independence (1868–98)—the story of Cuba Libre. This essay analyzes how the animated cartoon shorts and film series Elpidio Valdés (1974–2003) comically inflects the story of Cuba Libre with ridiculing laughter and choteo (folk humor). The series puts forth both a hero more akin to a populist trickster than a Spartan and a revolutionary war more akin to carnivalesque drama than to the Homeric epic. In so doing, it subtly critiques the didactic and panegyric rhetoric that has shrouded the national (as well as the socialist) epic and, in its stead, offers a jocular and fallible revolutionary subject in a more participatory and less austere epic.

“What Ghosts are Haunting us Today?” Slavoj Žižek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto in Post-Pandemic Capitalist Realism. The Revolutionary Subject and Work

However controversial a topic, Marxist thought still remains the most complex tool for the critique of Capitalism. Derrida calls Marxism “hauntological”, always reappearing as a spectre of the past, always quasipresent, but also as a potential lost future. After the dismantling of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc, the relevance of The Communist Manifesto seemed to have slowly waned, in a world that adopted the tenets of Neoliberalism partly as a defense against authoritarian regimes, and partly as a mean to converge toward the countries at the forefront of the global system, that had already accrued a massive lead in economic and social development. The Covid-19 virus has shocked the world to its core, but it remains to be seen whether it has brought about a paradigm shift or it has merely accentuated some of the past problems, while also triggering a kind of forced nostalgia for the apparent normality of a system that was already ridden with issues. Mark Fisher points out that “it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism” (Fisher 1), thus indicating the need for criticism and measures against a neoliberal monopoly on thought itself. As for Žižek’s The Relevance of the Communist Manifesto, it remains to be analyzed whether it can revive the interest in the original text, as to begin compounding a viable alternative for a postpandemic global system that does not yet seem to fully grasp that it is running out of time.

A new intelligence fuzzy-based hybrid metaheuristic algorithm for analyzing the application of tea waste in concrete as natural fiber

Concrete is an ecologically friendly substance in which green concrete is a revolutionary subject in concrete industry records. The emphasis of this study was on the impact of Tea Waste (CA) as natural fiber onhardened concrete characteristics as a substitution for cement. Taking account of CO2 generation in cement manufacture, green concrete decreases emissions of CO2 into environmental production to an environmentally-friendly technique of pollution prevention. C1, C2, C3, C4 were then made of concrete of a class of 1, 2, 3, 4 kg reinforced in 1 m3 mix, then prepared and molded 4 distinct concrete types. After 28 days, the flexural and compressive strength tests have been carried out in a proper curing environment on the concrete. The findings were evaluated using the adaptive inference system neuro-fuzzy (ANFIS) to accurately predictthe concrete flexural and compressive strengthwith low error rates. Finally, the reinforced concrete with tea wastes raised the water requirement, but reduced the compressive and flexural strength compared to control mix, however, it was raised while using up to 5.4 kg waste in 1 m3 concrete. The result showed that up to 5 kg of tea wastes in 1 m3 of concrete could also be utilized as natural fibers. Also, ANFIS could show its outperformance in analyzing test results in predicting the compressive and flexural strength.

Building Worlds, Losing Friends

Building Worlds, Losing Friends

Emergence of the Revolutionary Subject: Evolutionary Psychology and the Exaptive Tactics of the Everyday.

This article proposes an alternative view of the revolutionary subject. By building on insights from the critical streams of evolutionary psychology, it argues for the notion of revolutionary consciousness to be grounded in the categories of 'exaptive actorness' which are most notably manifested in everyday micropolitics. By emphasising the role of contingency, spontaneity, creativity, resourcefulness and, crucially, formal indeterminism and autonomy, exaptationism emerges as an irreducible and irrevocable enabling tactic of subsistence and subversion, as well as the very essence of the revolutionary act. The discussion will turn to the case of the Arab revolutions to demonstrate the everyday grammars of present-day popular uprisings.