The texts in this volume represent Kristin Ross's attempt to think
the question of the everyday across a range of discourses, practices
and knowledges, from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to
popular fiction, all the way to the forms taken by collective
political action in the territorial struggles of today. If everyday
life is, as many have come to believe, the ideal vantage point for an
analysis of the social, it is also the crucial first step in its
transformation.
The volume opens with a return to Henri Lefebvre's powerful attempt
to think the everyday as both residue and resource, as the site of
profound alienation and-by the same token-the site where all
emancipatory initiatives and desires begin. The second section
focuses on our attempts to represent our lived reality to ourselves
in cultural forms, from painting and literature and film to an
analysis of the contemporary transformations of the sub-genre most
embedded in the deep superficiality of everyday life: detective
fiction. The final section turns to present-day ecological
occupations in the wake of the zad at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, and
locates the everyday as a site for rich oppositional resources and
immanent social creativity.