The talk is taken from Communal Luxury (forthcoming from Editions La fabrique). Ross discusses the political imaginary that fueled and outlived the Paris Commune of 1871, here considered within frames provided by contemporary militant concerns: the problem of refashioning an internationalist conjuncture; the future of education, labor and the status of art; the commune-form and its relation to ecological theory. The “communal luxury” produced by the Commune’s “working existence” was prolonged and elaborated in the political thought produced in the 1870s and the 1880s, when Communard exiles met up and collaborated with a number of their supporters and fellow travelers, notably Marx, Kropotkin and William Morris.

Kristin Ross is Professor of Comparative Literature at New York University. She is the author of The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (1988); Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (1995); and May ’68 and its Afterlives (2002).

This talk is presented by the Crisis in the Cultures of Capitalism Research Cluster, and the History of Consciousness and Literature Departments.