posted on: Sept. 18, 2014, 3:58 p.m.

Manifesta Dialogue #9: A New Radical Subject?

While our topic is of global relevance, demanding comparative perspectives and transcending such categories as East and West, we focus our inquiry on the post-socialist world, and on Russia as its epicenter. Here the revolutionary impulse—profoundly if imperfectly realized in 1917 and then spreading throughout the vast territories of twentieth-century socialism—leaves us on especially fraught terrain. In the past twenty-five years, Russia has witnessed the rapid exchange of varieties of political violence, from the lawless streets of the 1990s to the state repression of activist energies (labeled “extremism”) in recent years. Here more than anywhere else, one is confronted with the disappointment of a militant tradition that never achieved its promised consummation. Is politically engaged art possible after state socialism?

The discussion will be chaired by Jonathan Platt and will include Keti Chukhrov, Jodi Dean, and Gerald Raunig 

Date and venue of the event: 18 September 2014 (Thursday) at 18:00, LenDoc Documentary Film Studio, Kryukov canal, 12