Revolutions

The Editors: Agata Stopinska, Anke Bartels and Raj Kollmorgen all teach at the University of Magdeburg (Germany) and are on the board of the Transdisciplinary Forum Magdeburg which, among other activities, organises the annual Transforma conference.

Revolution: Few terms have been as characteristic of the social, political, and intellectual history of the 19th and 20th century as this one. After the "French" and "Industrial Revolution" as well as the "academic and scientific" revolutions and the artistic vanguards from the end of the 19th century onwards, social conflicts have been deeply impregnated by the idea of revolution. "Revolution" was not only regarded in terms of a radical break with the old order swept away in an explosive act of emancipatory practice, but it has often been rejected as a senseless dissolution of all order and as a symptom of social decline. According to neo-conservative and neo-liberal circles, the era of political and social revolutions in world history has ended with the "revolutionary" collapse of state-socialist regimes in Central and Eastern Europe around 1989. Yet recently these diagnoses have been increasingly called into question, both in theory and in practice. "Revolution" has been set on the agenda again as a result of populist and revolutionary movements, the critique of neoliberalism, but also the new intellectual debates about strategies of the Left in a globalized capitalism.

Contents: Raj Kollmorgen/Anke Bartels/Agata Stopinska: Revolution after the End of History: An Introduction - Gerald Raunig: Revolutionary Machines: Art and the Molecular Revolution - Benjamin Herborth/Oliver Kessler: Revolution and Democracy: On the Historical Semantics of Political Change - Daniel Loick: Let It Be: Towards a Post-Sovereign Concept of Revolution - Bertel Nygaard: Revolutions and World History: A Long View - Fetih Açikel: 'Models of Revolution' and 'Institutional Reproduction': How Revolutionary Elites Contribute to Institutional Model-Dependence in the World-System - Anil K. Jain: Anchors of Resistance: The Reagent of Discomfort - Christoph Spehr: Doing Change: What Does «Revolution» Mean Today? - Steven Corcoran: The Subject of Revolution: Marxism, Badiou, Antagonism - André Mommen: The Ongoing Populist Revolution in Latin America - Philipp Casula: Interpreting the 'Democratic Revolutions': Culture, Hegemony, Discourse - Jurij Halajko: Genesis and Aesthetics of the Ukrainian Orange Revolution - Marta Zimniak- Halajko: Invisible Revolutions: Revolutionary Concepts of New Social Movements of Right and Left in Contemporary Poland - Abdelilah Bouasria: Is Sufism a Revolutionary Discourse in Morocco? A Comparative Case Study of the Boutshishiyya Sufi Order and Abdesslam Yassine's Islamic Movement - Holger Rossow: Unlikely Heirs: New Labour and the 'Thatcher Revolution' - Gene Ray: On the Conditions of Anti-Capitalist Art: Radical Cultural Practices and the Capitalist Art System - Ulf Schulenberg: From Conceptual Revolutions to the Privacy of Mourning: Barthes, Proust, and the « désir d'écrire » - Viola Brisolin: Displacement and Incessant Subversion: Critical Ideas and Practices in the Late Barthes and Pasolini - Anja Meyerrose: The Fashion Revolution? Transformation of Men's Clothing in Germany's '1968' - Steffen Hantke: The Imagery of Revolution in Recent Blockbuster Films.