[NYU Kevorkian Center] Global Uprising: Space & Time II: The Square and the Commune

Speakers: Joshua Clover (UC Davis), Dean Saranillio (NYU), Nazan Üstündağ (Independent Scholar) and discussant Lenora Hanson (NYU)

Abstract: Our age of uprising has also been the age of the urban insurrection. And yet for all their sublime spectacularity, the insurrections seem to reach their own limit, unable to disrupt economic infrastructures or defeat repressive apparatuses. To add to the weakness of organized labor, insurrectionary forms of blockade and occupation—our so-called “movement of the squares,” signaled most emphatically by the name, Tahrir—themselves seem mired in a kind of fatal cycle of reenactment.  In this context, the figure of the commune has returned to political thought almost as a line of flight; an exit from the square to more prosaic but durable forms of association.  How do we think about this tension between insurrection and autonomy? What histories of ‘the commune,’ beyond its Eurocentric iterations, do we need to engage? What otherwise absented political traditions—anti-colonial, indigenous, feminist, antiracist—