Overview

One of the notable trends within contemporary critical theory is the re-emergence of communism as a political proposition during a time of global financial crisis. This takes the form of explicit attempts to reformulate a communist project (Badiou), readings of a communist tradition (Žižek), and a reimagining of a communist inheritance (Rancière, Balibar). Within the field of critical theory these positions have tended to pass relatively unchallenged as other theoretical idioms (psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, feminism, post-structuralism) have been occupied in the last few years with archival and micro-level analysis. The poverty of the Speculative turn in object-oriented philosophy has also allowed the contemporary discourse on communism to run unquestioned. Through a series of readings of Derrida, Marx, de Man, fiction, film and contemporary politics this book problematizes the idea of political articulation within the public realm with a view to interrogating and enriching the dominant notion of communism at work in theoretical writing today. It sees in theory a difficult yet essential gesture that ties the questioning of truth to a necessary undecidability that guarantees that truth and its relation to democratic engagement. The Communism of Theory is a riff on a phrase used by Blanchot to describe the curious social bond, means of affiliation and thought, that characterizes writing as testimony within a displaced community of critical readers. This book responds to key topics in contemporary thought and also turns the text of deconstruction in a direction that provokes a challenge to its own traditions.

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9781350010871

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Martin McQuillan is Co-Director of the London Graduate School. He is PVC (Research), Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, and Professor of Literary Theory and Cultural Analysis at Kingston University, London

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