The 1870s in France - Rimbaud's moment, and the
subject of this book - is a decade virtually ignored in
most standard histories in France. Yet it was the moment
of two significant spatial events: France's expansion on
a global scale, and, in the spring of 1871, the brief
existence on the Paris Commune - the construction of the
revolutionary urban space. Arguing that space, as a
social fact, is always political and strategic, Kristin
Ross has written a book that is at once a history and
geography of the Commune's anarchist culture - its
political language and social relations, its values,
strategies, and stances. Central to her analysis of the
Commune as a social space and oppositional culture is a
close textual reading of Arthur Rimabaud's poetry. His
poems - a common thread running through the book - are
one set of documents among many in Ross's recreation of
the Communard experience. Rimbaud, Paul Lafargue, and
the social geographer elisee Reclus serve as emblematic
figures moving within and on the periphery of the
Commune; in their resistance to the logic and economy of
the capitalist conception of work, in their challenge to
work itself as a term of identity, all three posed a
threat to the existing order. Ross looks at these and
other emancipatory notions as aspects of Communard life,
each with an analogous strategy in Rimbaud's poetry.
Applying contemporary theory, to a wealth of
little-known archival material, she has written a fresh,
persuasive, and original book. |
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