Verso 2024. Paperback, 480 pp.
A cultural and intellectual balance-sheet of the twentieth century's age of revolutions. This
book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century
revolutions by composing a constellation of "dialectical images": Marx's
"locomotives of history," Alexandra Kollontai's sexually liberated
bodies, Lenin's mummified body, Auguste Blanqui's barricades and red
flags, the Paris Commune's demolition of the Vendome Column, among
several others. It connects theories with the existential
trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the
diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals--from Marx and Bakunin
to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos
Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the
South--as outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the
entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the
history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and
representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and
iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new
intellectual history of the revolutionary past.