Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Text
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Political History and the Diagnostic of Revolutionary Praxis
- 2 Intervention and the Future Anterior
- 3 The Body Politic and the Process of Participation
- 4 Political Affinity and Singular-Universal Solidarity
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 August 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- A Note on the Text
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 Political History and the Diagnostic of Revolutionary Praxis
- 2 Intervention and the Future Anterior
- 3 The Body Politic and the Process of Participation
- 4 Political Affinity and Singular-Universal Solidarity
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
We have to try and think a little about the meaning of revolution. This term is now so broken and worn out, and has been dragged through so many places, that it's necessary to go back to a basic, albeit elementary, definition. A revolution is something of the nature of a process, a change that makes it impossible to go back to the same point … a repetition that changes something, a repetition that brings about the irreversible. A process that produces history, taking us away from a repetition of the same attitudes and the same significances. Therefore, by definition, a revolution cannot be programmed, because what is programmed is always the déjà-là. Revolutions, like history, always bring surprises. By nature they are always unpredictable. That doesn't prevent one from working for revolution, as long as one understands ‘working for revolution’ as working for the unpredictable.
(Guattari 2008: 258)We are witnessing today the return of a new theory and practice of revolution. This return, however, takes none of the traditional forms: the capture of the state, the political representation of the party, the centrality of the proletariat, or the leadership of the vanguard. Rather, given the failure of such tactics over the last century, coupled with the socio-economic changes brought by neoliberalism in the 1980s, revolutionary strategy has developed in more heterogeneous and non-representational directions. The aim of this book is thus to map an outline of these new directions by drawing on the theory and practice of two of its main inspirations: French political philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari and what many have called ‘the fi rst post-modern revolutionaries’, the Zapatistas of Chiapas, Mexico (Burbach 1994, 1996; Carrigan 1995; Golden 1994, 2001).
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Returning to RevolutionDeleuze, Guattari and Zapatismo, pp. 1 - 36Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2012