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9781804295311

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Praise for Communal Luxury: No work specifies more fully Marx's claim that, the greatest achievement of the Paris Commune was its 'actual working existence.' * Jacobin * Praise for Communal Luxury: In recent years, the Paris Commune has again moved to the center of political thinking. Kristin Ross's new book now, virtually for the first time, gives us an account of the intellectual antecedents of the Commune as well as its contemporary impact. This is an indispensable text for all current left theory! -- Fredric Jameson Praise for Communal Luxury: Communal Luxury is a rich and complex book. It is an inspired rereading of the Paris Commune. It is a critique of historical accounts that ignore the ways in which the practices of insurrectionary movements generate their own theory. It is a call to historians to attend to the alternatives offered at decisive moments of political and economic consolidation. It is, as well, Ross's own manifesto about how we might think our futures differently. This is a history with enormous relevance for our contemporary political moment. -- Joan W. Scott, Institute For Advanced Study, Princeton Praise for Communal Luxury: Although this is a book of ideas, it is neither dry nor overburdened by scholarly references. Ross's vision of the Commune extends beyond the 72 days, and beyond the space of Paris (and indeed of France), to encompass its echoes throughout the rest of the 19th century. For Ross, the story of the Commune is not a tragedy, because it is not finished. * Financial Times * Praise for Communal Luxury: In Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune Kristin Ross argues that the spirit of the Commune is alive today among the Indignados in Spain and inside the Occupy movement. Ross discusses the 'political imaginary' that fuelled and outlived the Commune. -- Philippe Marlière * London Review of Books * Praise for Communal Luxury: A timely, elegant and rather useful cartography of the Paris Commune. This small book is a sort of parable, about another time and place, but not really about the past as past. It is more about the possibility of other kinds of action in time, as indeed are most parables. -- McKenzie Wark

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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), Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (Verso, 2015) and The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life (Verso, 2023). She has also translated works by Jacques Rancière and by the militant collective, Mauvaise Troupe. She lives in Stone Ridge, New York and Paris.

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