Author(s): Kristin Ross

Politics | Literature | Philosophy | Theory

In this incisive political analysis, Kristin Ross thinks through everyday existence across a range of practices-from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction-and across the forms taken by collective political action in contemporary struggles.
Ross returns to Henri Lefebvre's powerful intuition that ordinary life is both residue and resource, the site of profound alienation and, by the same token, the origin of all emancipator initiatives and desires. The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life explores our attempts to represent our lived reality in media such as painting, literature and film, paying particular attention to contemporary transformations in the genre most embedded in the deep superficiality of ordinary life: detective fiction.
Elsewhere, in Ross's investigation of the present day politics of ecological occupations, such as the zad at Notre-Dame des Landes, the everyday emerges as a repository of rich oppositional resources and immanent social creativity.

Review: In these remarkably lucid essays, real critics, rebellious farmers, artisans, and diverse character-types are summoned to remind us of moments of conformist immobility, disavowals of colonialism, violence and class difference; but also, of how French cultural history offers paths toward public beauty, collectivity, ecological ways of living. Ross has an uncanny ability to zero in on what matters in the forms of the Paris Commune and beyond, letting participants speak without the usual virtue-signaling. -- Karen Pinkus, Professor of Romance Studies and Comparative Literature, Cornell University
This volume recalls why Kristin Ross's work is a necessary point of entry into the infinite insurrection of everyday life envisaged by Karl Marx and Henri Lefebvre, Arthur Rimbaud and Jacques Ranciere, variously enacted from the Commune to May 68, and that animates the rural radicalism of today's Zad. Anyone interested in altering the questions of our day towards a new everyday life will find here an abundant reservoir to think and do anew. -- Manu Goswami, New York University

Author Biography: Kristin Ross was born in State College, Pennsylvania in 1953. She attended the University of California at Santa Cruz and received a PhD in French Literature from Yale in 1981. She is the author of a number of books on modern French politics and culture, all of which have been widely translated: The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune (Minnesota, 1988; Verso, 2008); Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (MIT, 1995); May 68 and its Afterlives (Chicago, 2002), and Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015). She has also translated works by Jacques Ranciere and by the militant collective, Mauvaise Troupe. She lives in Stone Ridge, New York and Paris.