In a time of crisis, Marcello Tarì reclaims the revolutionary task of making life worth living.
In a time of ongoing political, economic, and climate crisis, can we afford our collective unhappiness any longer? There Is No Unhappy Revolution gives expression to the age of revolution unfolding before us. With equal parts sophistication and raw urgency, Marcello Tarì identifies the original moments as well as the powerful disruptive and creative content haunting our times like a specter.
One hundred years after the October Revolution, amidst our current civilizational crisis, is it still possible to think and build communism? Yes, Tarì responds, provided we radically rethink the tradition of revolutionary movements that have followed one century to another. Offering both a militant philosophy and a philosophy of militancy, he deftly confronts the different contemporary movements from the Argentinean insurrection of 2001 to Occupy Wall Street, the Spanish Indignados, the French movement against the labor law, and the Arab spring, resurrecting and renewing a lineage of revolutionary thought, from Walter Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben, that promises to make life livable.
About the Author
Marcello Tarì is a “barefoot” researcher of contemporary struggles and movements. He is author of numerous essays and books in French and Italian, including Il ghiaccio era sottile: Per una storia dell’autonomia (Derive Approdi, 2012) and Non esiste la rivoluzione infelice: Il comunismo della destituzione (Derive Approdi, 2017); as well as Autonomie!: Italie, les années 1970 (La Fabrique, 2011) and Il n y a pas de révolution malheureuse: Le communisme de la destitution (Editions Divergences, 2019). Tarì has lived in the last few years between France and Italy. There Is No Unhappy Revolution is his first book in English.
What Are People Saying
“It is hard today to escape the perception that financial violence and fascism are suffocating every possibility of happiness in a plural world. There is No Unhappy Revolution shows a possible way out from this despair, though an important line of escape: friendship. Indeed, friends are those who have nothing and nevertheless own everything. The revolution to which Marcello Tarì refers urgently names the ‘plurality of worlds’ in joy and in common.” Franco “Bifo” Berardi, author of Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility
“A bold and inquisitive attempt to rethink militancy and revolution through the paradigm of destituent power, outside of any progressive investment in governing the present. Beyond the end of communism, Tarì sketches the figure of a communism of the end, threading its way through contemporary insurgencies and unmanageable forms of life.” Alberto Toscano, author of Fanaticism: On the Uses of an Idea
“In There Is No Unhappy Revolution, as if revolution were the only happiness we might pursue, Marcello Tari makes a powerful case for the persistent questioning and existential interruption that accompanies that pursuit, and fuels it, and constitutes and ruptures its vagrant, open end.” Fred Moten, author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition