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A rebel universality from below

Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity
Forfatter: Massimiliano Tomba
Forlag: Oxford University Press (Storbritannien)
TRACKING OF THE ORDER / The ruling order does everything in its power to derail the uprisings.




(THIS ARTICLE IS MACHINE TRANSLATED by Google from Norwegian)

The new uprising cycle has now lasted almost ten years – if we say, it begins with the demonstrations in Tunisia triggered by Mohamed Bouazizi's suicide on 17. December 2010. As is well known, the protests against local gunfire and an odd post-colonial world spread to a number of countries in North Africa and the Middle East, including Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria.

At the same time that the Arab revolts were gaining momentum, the southern European space occupation movements began in earnest in the summer of 2011. These rejected the European Central Bank's savings programs, which were to buy out the mafia banks and pass the bill on to the European peoples. In the fall of 2011, the trip to the United States came, with the occupy movement occupying places in American cities and criticizing the enormous economic inequality that the financial crisis had exposed.

The past is pregnant with possible futures.

The period since 2011 has been the sign of the uprising – Ukraine, France, Brazil, Hong Kong, Chile etc. – but it has also been marked by a violent counter-revolutionary counter-movement that has taken the form of invasions (in Libya, Mali and Syria, among others). ) to liquidations (Khashoggi) and the return of fascism as culture and governance (from Trump and Bolsonaro to the Danish Social Democracy's complete affirmation of DF's Islamophobia). The ruling order does everything in its power to derail the uprisings from turning into a revolution against capital and the nation-state.

Alternative modernity

With his book Insurgent Universality the Italian philosopher and Marx expert Massimiliano Tomba makes a contribution to the historical analysis of the uprisings and the particular temporality that characterizes an uprising. We know this from, among others, Furio Jesi's analysis of the German revolution, which is where Tomba's analysis lies. It is the unrealized historical potential of the uprisings that Tomba pulls out from the darkness of history, whereby he outlines an extended alternative modernity, where different perspectives emerge than the progressive history of the victors, which we know from the history of the nation-states and their kings and politicians. In other words, the history which, despite post-colonial criticism, is still the dominant one in most contexts and which governs the way in which political narratives are told. The so-called war on terror and all the discussions about national identity, there have huserin most European public opinion in the past five to ten years, are all expressions of this notion of a teleological history with (Western) nation-states and democracies as the protagonists and end goal of history.

Facing this story, the history of the West with big H,en, in which all non-Western subjects and communities are reduced to laid-back barbarians or beleaguered descendants of Western modernity, Tomba places an anonymous and fractured historical temporality on revolt. He analyzes four moments – from the French Revolution in 1793, the Paris Commune in 1871, from the Russian Revolution in 1918 and the Zapatist revolt in Mexico in 1994. In these, Tomba finds a kind of underground or marginalized understanding of human rights in favor of an open and revolutionary idea. on freedom that does not subscribe to the notions of nation, individual and property.

In contrast to the state universalism from above, which we find in both the United States Declaration of Independence and the Declaration of Human Rights of 1789 as well as in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, Tomba finds a rebel universe from below in 1793, 1871, 1918 and 1994, where the state's legal individualism is challenged by a collective political universality, that puts joint ownership of private property. Both the League of Companies in 1793, the Communards in 1871 and the Zapatists in 1994 rebelled against the state's notion of an abstract and passive right-individual to be protected (or punished by the same state), as well as against the private ownership of the means of production.

A fractious story

Tomba's historical analysis is an attempt to open up the past and point to unresolved opportunities that can help the revolutionaries who are once again on the streets of Paris, Hong Kong and Cairo. It is a kind of Benjaminian constellation, he projects, where the past and present intersect and coexist as layers in a form of geological formation. The story becomes elastic and breaks into pieces, whereby the story in the singular is replaced by stories in the majority. The museum opens up, and all the captured alternate temporalities swarm into the streets. It is a complex and discontinuous planetary history where the past is pregnant with possible futures. When the Communards cite the corporation's company, but also medieval peasant rebellions, they reactivate history and break through Napoleon Bonaparte's and Thier's unified Euro-modernist history. Instead of a normative world history with the West as the end goal, in which all non-governmental forms of organization and non-capitalist modes of production become backward pre-state and pre-capitalist societies that have not yet reached the West, a fractious history opens, containing many different layers and that change at different rates.

Mikkel Bolt
Mikkel Bolt
Professor of political aesthetics at the University of Copenhagen.

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