“In There Is No Unhappy Revolution, as if revolution were the only happiness we might pursue, Marcello Tarì 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
“It is hard today to escape the perception that financial violence and fascism are suffocating every possibility of happiness . . . There Is No Unhappy Revolution shows a possible way out from this despair.” —Franco “Bifo” Berardi, author of Futurability: The Age of Impotence and the Horizon of Possibility
Common Notions is pleased to announce the publication of the first book in English by Marcello Tarì. Known for his Italian translation of the Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection and his writings in French and Italian on Autonomia and other radical movements of the 1970s, with There Is No Unhappy Revolution he offers a powerful guide to the place of destituent thought in the revolutionary task of making life worth living.
Over a 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. At the heart of this rethinking is not the question of how to constitute a new order of things, but rather how to interrupt (or destitute)—on a juridical, ethical, and existential level—the present which “trap[s] within it a past that does not pass and a future that does not arrive.” Get Your Copy : )
Tarì insists that revolution requires that we learn how to overthrow the ruling order without establishing a new one. In short, it means “destituting” power and pursuing new “forms of life” outside of the suffocating grasp of capital and the state. These forms of life are not goals for the future, but emerge from a now that is all there ever is. They are forged in struggles that refuse the present order of things with a powerful and incessant “No!” Forged in struggles like those that tore across the United States last summer, and will continue to spread, whose relationships to the resurgent social-democratic movement in this country remain to be settled.
In There Is No Unhappy Revolution, Tarì seeks to grasp the unprecedented and disruptive content of contemporary revolutionary moments while, at the same time, charting a discontinuous and fragmentary theoretical line that runs from Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht to Giorgio Agamben and the Invisible Committee. Offering both a militant philosophy and a philosophy of militancy, Tarì writes, “by communism, we mean the real movement that destitutes the present state of things.”
“Destitution always opens up a becoming. What remains of the militant is the practice of a form of life that lives life as incompatible with the world as it is. The work of their existence is to render our present reality impossible.”
More Praise : )
“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
“A longtime militant, fellow traveler of the Invisible Committee, and author of one of the best books on Autonomia, Tarì’s work offers the fullest exploration to date of the concept of destitution.”
—Ill Will Editions
“When we write of ‘power,’ we do not refer to any eternal substance or idea, but to that which is before, around, and within us, i.e., the power of capital. This is what we know, this is what we live, this why we fight.”
Marcello Tarì is a militant 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 and Autonomie!: Italie, les années 1970, and is the translator of The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection. Marcello Tarì has lived in the last few years between France and Italy. There Is No Unhappy Revolution is his first book published in English.