Kristin Ross: Communal Luxuary

Kristin Ross on how May '68 is remembered in France

The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud & the Paris Commune

by Kristin Ross
Foreword by Terry Eagleton
 

A thrilling ride through the literature of Rimbaud in a France in the throes of revolution.

The 1870s in France – Rimbaud’s moment, and the subject of this book – is a decade virtually ignored in most standard histories in France. Yet it was the moment of two significant spatial events: France’s expansion on a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief existence on the Paris Commune – the construction of the revolutionary urban space.

Arguing that space, as a social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristin Ross has written a book that is at once a history and geography of the Commune’s anarchist culture – its political language and social relations, its values, strategies, and stances.

Kristin Ross on Jacques Ranciere

In the spring of 2005 in the village of Cerisy-la-Salle in Normandy, a group of scholars met for three days to celebrate the work of Jacques Ranciere. In France, a colloquium held in one's honor at Cerisy is acknowledgment of a major contribution to philosophical thought, and among the participants were prominent French philosophers: Alain Badiou was a featured speaker, for instance, while Jean-Luc Nancy contributed an essay to the published proceedings. Yet as the weekend progressed, it was clear that what had brought thinkers from Brazil, England, the United States, Greece, and elsewhere to Cerisy was not the need to bear witness to the replacement of one epistemological theory by another, or to celebrate some other step in the development of a specialized science. Cinema, sociology, literature, politics, and aesthetics were all topics of discussion; Heidegger's name, I believe, was never mentioned. This list of fields gives some idea of the range of thinking Ranciere's work has touched and invigorated, but it does not explain the contingencies and detours that have caused him to become, at different moments, a historian, a critic of social science, a philosopher, or a commentator on cinema, on current politics, or, more recently, on contemporary art practices.

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture

by Kristin Ross, 1996

Fast Cars, Clean Bodies examines the crucial decade from Dien Bien Phu to the mid-1960s when France shifted rapidly from an agrarian, insular, and empire-oriented society to a decolonized, Americanized, and fully industrial one. In this analysis of a startling cultural transformation Kristin Ross finds the contradictions of the period embedded in its various commodities and cultural artifacts - automobiles, washing machines, women's magazines, film, popular fiction, even structuralism - as well as in the practices that shape, determine, and delimit their uses.

May '68 and Its Afterlives

May '68 & its Afterlives

by Kristin Ross, 2002

During May 1968, students and workers in France united in the biggest strike and the largest mass movement in French history. Protesting capitalism, American imperialism, and Gaullism, 9 million people from all walks of life, from shipbuilders to department store clerks, stopped working. The nation was paralyzed—no sector of the workplace was untouched. Yet, just thirty years later, the mainstream image of May '68 in France has become that of a mellow youth revolt, a cultural transformation stripped of its violence and profound sociopolitical implications.