The Russian Revolution as Ideal and Practice: Failures, Legacies, and the Future of Revolution

309 Pages·2020·2.54 MB·English

by  Thomas Telios, Dieter Thomä, Ulrich Schmid

CRITICAL POLITICAL THEORY AND RADICAL PRACTICE
THE RUSSIAN
REVOLUTION
AS IDEAL AND
PRACTICE
Failures, Legacies, and
the Future of Revolution
Edited by
Thomas Telios, Dieter Thomä, and Ulrich Schmid
Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice
Series Editor
Stephen Eric Bronner
Department of Political Science
Rutgers University
New Brunswick, NJ, USA
The series introduces new authors, unorthodox themes, critical interpre-
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Thomas Telios · Dieter Thomä ·
Ulrich Schmid
Editors
The Russian
Revolution as Ideal
and Practice
Failures, Legacies, and the Future of Revolution
Editors
Thomas Telios Dieter Thomä
University of St. Gallen University of St. Gallen
St. Gallen, Switzerland St. Gallen, Switzerland
Ulrich Schmid
University of St. Gallen
St. Gallen, Switzerland
Critical Political Theory and Radical Practice
ISBN 978-3-030-14236-0 ISBN 978-3-030-14237-7 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14237-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019933313
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C
ontents
1 Preface 1
Thomas Telios, Dieter Thomä and Ulrich Schmid
Part I Reconsidering the Russian Revolution
2 Beyond the Horizon: The Russian Revolution Seen
from Afar 21
Karl Schlögel
3 Reenacting Revolution? Theater and Politics
of Repetition 35
Sylvia Sasse
4 Revolution in Sexual Ethics: Communism
and the “Sex Problem” 51
Enikő Darabos
5 Revolution and Salvation 67
Christian Schmidt
v
vi CoNTENTS
6 Law, Absolute Will, and the “Withering of the State”:
Sovereignty at the Limits of Lenin’s “Dictatorship
of the Proletariat” 83
Naveen Kanalu
7 What Is Life Like After Revolution? Administration,
Habit, and Democracy in Lenin’s “The State and
Revolution”—and Beyond 101
Dieter Thomä
Part II Retelling the Russian Revolution
8 German and Jewish Conspiracies: The October
Revolution from the Perspective of the Italian Fascists
and the German National Socialists 129
Ulrich Schmid
9 A Narrative Theory for the October Revolution
(From Maugham to Benjamin and Back) 143
Tatjana Jukić
10 October and the Prospects for Revolution: The Views
of Arendt, Adorno, and Marcuse 165
Marie-Josée Lavallée
11 Memory Politics and the “Politics of Memory” 191
Tora Lane
12 Into Historical Limbo: The Legacy of the October
Revolution in Russia 207
Stephan Rindlisbacher
Part III Reenabling Revolution
13 The Concepts of Revolution 227
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie
CoNTENTS vii
14 The Possibility of the Revolution 243
Christoph Menke
15 Time Intensification in Revolutionary Dynamics 261
Donatella della Porta
16 Postscript: Communist Subjectivity and the Politics
of Collectiversalism 283
Thomas Telios
n C
otes on ontributors
Enikő Darabos is Lecturer in Hungarian literature and literary the-
ory at the Eötvös Loránd University (ELTE, Hungary). She completed
her Ph.D. dissertation at the University of Szeged in Literary Studies
with an emphasis on critical and psychoanalytical theories. Her research
interests include contemporary Hungarian literature, critical theories,
gender studies and theories of the body. Being supported by the János
Bolyai Research Scholarship of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences,
she is currently working on the topic of corporeality in the narratives of
Péter Nádas. Recent publications: Body Metaphors in the Contemporary
Hungarian Literature (2017).
Geoffroy de Lagasnerie is Professor of Philosophy and Sociology at the
École Nationale Supérieure d’Arts de Paris-Cergy and the author of The
Art of Revolt. Snowden, Assange, Manning (Stanford, 2017) and Judge
and Punish. The Penal State on Trial (Stanford 2018). He is the co-au-
thor, with the writer Edouard Loui, of “Manifesto for an Intellectual
and Political Counteroffensive”, published in English by the Los Angeles
Review of Books.
Donatella della Porta is Professor of Political Science, Dean of the
Department of Political and Social Sciences at the Scuola Normale
Superiore in Florence, where she also leads the Center on Social
Movement Studies (Cosmos). Among the main topics of her research:
social movements, political violence, terrorism, corruption, the police
and protest policing. Recipient of prestigious awards and Honorary
ix
x NoTES oN CoNTRIBUToRS
Doctor of a series of universities, she is the author or editor of 90
books, 135 journal articles and 135 contributions in edited volumes.
Recent publications: Legacies and Memories in Movements (oxford
University Press, 2018); Sessantotto. Passato e presente dell’anno ribelle
(Fertrinelli, 2018); Contentious moves (Palgrave 2017), Global Diffusion
of Protest (Amsterdam University Press, 2017), Late Neoliberalism and
its Discontents (Palgrave, 2017); Movement Parties in Times of Austerity
(Polity 2017), Where did the Revolution go? (Cambridge University Press,
2016); Social Movements in Times of Austerity (Polity 2015), etc.
Tatjana Jukić is Professor and Chair of English Literature in the
Department of English at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences,
University of Zagreb. She also teaches in the doctoral programs of
Comparative Literature and of Croatian Language and Literature. In
addition to two books—Revolution and Melancholia. Limits of Literary
Memory (2011), and Liking, Dislike, Supervision. Literature and the
Visual in Victorian Britain (2002)—she has published articles on nine-
teenth- and twentieth-century literature, psychoanalysis, film and phi-
losophy. Jukić is currently completing a book provisionally titled The
Invention of Masochism.
Naveen Kanalu is Doctoral Candidate in History at the University of
California, Los Angeles. His research pertains to the legal and politi-
cal culture of the Mughal Empire in the second half of the seventeenth
century. Ancien élève of Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris, he was
Attaché temporaire d’enseignement et de recherche at the Université
de Strasbourg. Last publications: “Darstellung matérialiste: le cinéma en
tant que perception non-intentionnelle du réel chez Walter Benjamin”
in Marc Berdet and Thomas Ebke, eds., Matérialisme anthropologique
et matérialisme de la rencontre (Berlin 2014), “Krishna Bharadwaj’s
‘Return to Classical Theory’: An Attempt towards an Archaeological
Reconstruction” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought
(2015).
Tora Lane is Lecturer in Aesthetics and Research leader at CBEES,
Södertörn University. She has a Ph.D. in Russian Literature and special-
izes in aesthetic issues of Russian Modernism and Soviet Literature. She
has published several articles on the poetry of Tsvetaeva, the prose of
Andrei Platonov. Last publications: Rendering the Sublime. A Reading of
the Fairy Tale Poem The Swain by Marina Cvetaeva (2009) (dissertation),