A cultural and intellectual balance-sheet of the twentieth
century’s age of revolutions
This book
reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century
revolutions by composing a constellation of “dialectical images”:
Marx’s “locomotives of history,” Alexandra Kollontai’s
sexually liberated bodies, Lenin’s mummified body, Auguste
Blanqui’s barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune’s
demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others. It connects
theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who
elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary
intellectuals—from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the
Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos Mariátegui, C.
L. R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South—as
outcasts and pariahs. And finally, it analyzes the entanglement
between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of
the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and
representations by devoting an equal importance to theoretical and
iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new
intellectual history of the revolutionary past.
