RECLAIMING THE PARIS COMMUNE WITH KRISTIN ROSS
The Commune events ended in May 1871 in Paris, but since they never stopped ringing in our minds. Kristin Ross tries to figure this international and permanent influence in her last book, Communal Luxury.
Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune by Kristin Ross, published by Verso Books
Kristin Ross is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. Specialist of Rimbaud, she received great reviews for The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, on which French journal La vie des idées published an article (you can read it in French here).
With this new book, Kristin Ross tries to understand how 72 days of Paris uprising – that we call “La Commune - went far beyond the political sphere to invade the social, artistic and pedagogic fields. Getting deeply immersed in the Communards’s language, Communal Luxury does, as its author says herself, far more than writing the a history of the Paris Commune.
Kristin Ross interviewed by Joseph Confavreux
French journalist Joseph Confavreux interviewed Kristin Ross on Communal Luxury for the Mediapart website. Thanks to her publisher Verso, we are publishing an extract here (the complete interview can be read through this link).
Joseph Confavreux: What new can be said about the Commune, whose history has been written and rewritten. What have you added to the dominant historiographies of the Commune?
Kristin Ross: It is actually a very good moment to see and say something new about the Commune because the event has become “liberated,” so to speak, from the two dominant historiographies that managed or framed what we could perceive and understand about the insurrection: the official state-Communist history, on the one hand, and the French national fiction, on the other. Since 1989 the Commune is no longer forced to play the role of failed revolution to the Bolshevik one which was to have provided the corrective. And much of my book is directed at showing how the fierce anti-statism of the Commune, its profoundly non-national imaginary, has always made its integration into even the more radical sequence of the history of French Republicanism tenuous if not impossible. The Commune does not really belong to either of those stories. Like those trousers in the back of your closet that you keep trying on, it will never fit.
Communal Luxury is not a history of the Paris Commune. It is more of an attempt on my part to intervene into the history of that extraordinary event in order, as Sartre once said, to “ouvrir le champ du possible” today. But such an intervention can only be made, I think, by respecting the singularity of the event, its distinct phenomenology and modes of being—what the particular individuals who made the Commune said and did, what they thought they were doing, the words and names they borrowed, invented, debated. For me, this involved a preference in my research for the texts written by Communards over those written about them. And it involved a closer reading of those texts than is usually performed by historians or politologues—neither of which I am. This kind of attention is something I learned in part from my training in literary studies and in part long ago when I encountered and translated the early work of Jacques Rancière, to whom I owe the idea that the voices of workers from the past are entitled to as much of our attention as the voices of those who construct theories around them today. By focusing on the words and agency of concrete individuals acting in common to dismantle the hierarchical organization of their society, I’ve tried to think the Commune historically—as belonging to the past—and, at the same time, as the figuration of a possible future. The book is my way of reopening, in other words, from the midst of our current struggles, the possibility of a history and a future different from the course taken by capitalist modernization on the one hand, and by utilitarian state socialism on the other. This is a project that I think many of us today share, and I see the Commune as central to that project.
Histories of the Commune, especially the old classics, were often preoccupied by the military maneuvers and the street-fighting, and by the legislative squabbling in the Hotel de Ville. A more recent strand of British empiricism has become obsessed with ascertaining a numerically precise body-count of dead Communards. In the end such recalibrations of the body-count serves to minimalize the significance of the massacre—an agenda that I certainly don’t share. Minimizing the significance of a massacre or maximizing the “success” of an illegal war always involves emphasizing body-counts. As for me, I view that extraordinary attempt by the state to kill off one by one and en bloc its class enemy—regardless of how many it successfully exterminated—to be the foundational act of the Third Republic. But my own attention has been drawn much more to showing the way Communard thought continued to be prolonged and elaborated beyond the Semaine Sanglante, as Communard exiles and refugees like Malon, Lafargue, Reclus and Léo met up with and collaborated with supporters like Marx, Kropotkin and William Morris. The French word “survie” nicely invokes such a life beyond life—the continuation of the struggle in other forms. Henri Lefebvre—a thinker ignored for the most part in France today but widely read in North and South America—believed that the thought or theory of a movement is generated only with and after the movement itself; it is an integral part of the energies unleashed by political action. In the discussions and practices that took place in the cafes of London and the mountains of the Jura in the years following the Commune, we see a focus on the commune-form that we call today ecological, an attempt to think together the insurrectional commune—what had transpired that spring in a major European city—in tandem with what remained of the ancient agrarian communes of the countryside. We see a profound rethinking of the practice of solidarity not as moral or ethical conduct—but as political strategy. And we see the development of a vision of social transformation slavishly beholden to neither anarchism nor Marxism but borrowing from both—a vision its originators, mostly former Communards, called “anarchist communism.” This kind of political analysis, one that unites rather than opposes the political battle against oppression with the economic battle against exploitation, can only resonate strongly, I think, in militant circles today.
Reclaiming the Paris Commune on Thursday 21 May
Kristin Ross will be in conversation with writer and journalist Owen Hatherley at the French Institute on Thursday 21 May. You’ll find all details here.
Meanwhile get a chance to win her book by entering our Book of the Week competition on Facebook and Twitter!