Revolution

This book reinterprets the history of nineteenth and twentieth-century revolutions by composing a constellation of “dialectical images”: Marx’s “locomotives of history,” Alexandra Kollontai’s sexually liberated bodies, Lenin’s mummified body, Auguste Blanqui’s barricades and red flags, the Paris Commune’s demolition of the Vendome Column, among several others.

It connects theories with the existential trajectories of the thinkers who elaborated them, by sketching the diverse profiles of revolutionary intellectuals—from Marx and Bakunin to Luxemburg and the Bolsheviks, from Mao and Ho Chi Minh to José Carlos Mariátegui, C.L.R. James, and other rebellious spirits from the South—as outcasts and pariahs.

And finally, it analyses the entanglement between revolution and communism that so deeply shaped the history of the twentieth century. This book thus merges ideas and representations by devoting equal importance to theoretical and iconographic sources, offering for our troubled present a new intellectual history of the revolutionary past.

Revolution provides a profound insight into the intertwining of revolutionary ideas and the vivid historic imagery associated with them, making it a critical read for understanding the lineage of revolutionary thought.