A Preliminary Theoretical Report on Anarchist Insurrectionary Imagination

The announcement that we are witnessing an era of “post-politics” does not sound surprising, as we have long been hearing such “death announcements” as that of the end of ideology, the end of the nation-state, the end of history, the end of nature and the end of utopia, to name only a few. Ours is allegedly an era depleted of revolutionary imagination or faith in socio-political structural transformation. As this post-political plot goes, participatory and representational democracy and market economics have become a more inclusive and penetrating form of governance. “People,” no longer designating a valid category of political subjectivity, gives place to the demographic-statistical term “population,” while citizens become consumers, and elections nothing but a choice of lifestyles, fashions, images, commodities. . . . Over against this domain of liberal-democratic biopolitical management stands life itself as a matter of self-reflexive risk. Accordingly, politics is reduced to risk assessment and policy and loses whatever radical momentum it may have had.