medisoli.blogg.se - Pierced utopia

Yes, he tips open the visionary, mechano-morphic romanticism of the mid-nineteenth-century radicals of Paris, and does so using an archival pry bar of real precision. But at the same time, he manages to vignette our vista by means of a tale so lurid and glimmering one can readily imagine it accidentally anthologized in a volume of Edgar Allan Poe. What kind of history is this? Historical fiction? Not really. Fictionalized history? That won’t do either. One is tempted to say that Tresch has here given us history as the integration of the actual and the possible.

And to quote Violette/Octave once again: “It shows how far dreams may reach.” History contaminated by its subject? Yes.

Let me offer a few words to introduce this translation. I stumbled upon the original, a forgotten memoir by a now legendary author, in a bound, yellowed volume of radical newspapers in Paris’ Bibliothèque Nationale. It dates from 1895, when both the past and future of the workers’ movement were rethought under the force of unrest and uncertainty. I was researching Elisée Reclus, the French anarchist geographer. “Man is nature taking consciousness of itself”, Reclus believed the liberation of humanity and the earth went hand in hand. What Lenin called Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism, was at that time being consolidated on a global scale.

Anarchy, Geography, Modernity: The Radical Social Thought of Elisée Reclus.Įlisée Reclus was one of those who could see a different future: “Our destiny is to reach that state of ideal perfection in which nations no longer need to be under the tutelage of a government or another nation it is the absence of government, it is anarchy which is the highest expression of order.” 1 Yet many fought it with new forms of thought and action they wanted to redirect the power of new technologies, and their world-spanning reach, away from the usual endpoints of nationalist aggression and imperial subjugation.

In her words, the “black flag is the flag of strikes and the flag of those who are hungry” - as well as a refutation of the red flag which had come to represent state socialism.

In Michel, Louise, Red Virgin: Memoirs of Louise Michel. Bullitt Lowry and Elizabeth Gunter, trans.

See also Carolyn Eichner, Surmounting the Barricades: Women in the Paris Commune. Indiana University Press, 2004 Naomi Andrews, Socialism's Muse: Gender in the Intellectual Landscape of French Romantic Socialism. Originally published in AR June 1996, this piece was republished online in June 2016 Toute chose meurt, mon petit, c’est indéniable mais tout ce qui meurt, peut un jour revenir.” (The resemblance here seems to be merely coincidental: - Translator’s note).The greatness of Stirling and Wildford’s last job together lies not in its grand gestures but in the way a huge programme has been transformed into a network of places linked in urban conversation.In English: Channel for Cosmographic Comparisons… or Co-Co Channel - trans. Singapore is perhaps the nearest place there has ever been to Thomas More’s Utopia: pure and prosperous, a place where hard work and decency are enforced with severity. Part of the city-state’s success lies in providing excellent education.