Release for Subaltern 2018 #3 & #4
Thursday 6 June 2019
7pm

Fifty years have passed since the strikes and protests in France in May-June 1968 and the Hot Autumn in Italy 1969, and one hundred years have passed since the Revolutions in Germany in 1918 and 1919. In Subaltern #3 and #4, we approach these uprisings and revolutions that have become museum exhibits and occasions for journals and publishing houses to produce memorial publications. If the forces put into motion in these years sought paths leading out of our world, it is today, from our perspective, possible to see how they pushed the technological civilization into a new phase. They are no longer part of our world, but lay the foundation of what Jacques Wajnsztejn has called the revolution of capital, an implementation of the socialist program within capitalism.

We do not turn towards these events only to denounce the way in which they have produced the contemporary, hedonistic human being, capable to see through the uprising as a naive meta-story, but also to demonstrate that in the ongoing decomposition of the world there is also a life-dynamic that time and again makes people think and act against the power of the apparatuses.

Editor and literary scholar Erik Erlanson presents the journal’s program and discusses Jean-François Lyotard’s reflections on his own transformation from a political activist to a bourgeois philosopher.

Editor and poet Gustav Sjöberg reads from his coming poetics, from which one of the contributions to #3/2018 is taken.