Universality from Below: Communisation and the Subject of Emancipatory Politics

This talk will think through the concept of universality in emancipatory politics, insisting on the need to move beyond “bad,” transcendental, or identitarian universals toward a universality from below, emerging immanently through collective struggle. 

Revisiting debates on communisation — and returning, a decade later, to the ideas and contradictions that surfaced in exchanges between Endnotes, Ray Brassier, Marina Vishmidt, and others — against the backdrop of a bleak present marked by the ongoing genocide in Gaza, it asks after the who, when, and how of revolutionary politics, and the promises and limits of communisation.

 Engaging with “the paradox of self-abolition” (Brassier, 2014), the fraught relation between theory and social practice, and the question of political violence, the talk foregrounds universality as an open, contingent horizon constituted through the self-activity of those “surplus” populations of capital who, rendered marginal, have always maintained a relation to the outside.

Image: ev (Unsplash)