This article reads the work of Luiz Gama (1830-1882), the Brazilian abolitionist, former slave, and self-taught lawyer, as both theorizing and enacting a politics of institutional prefiguration. Against oligarchic domination by slave-owning elites and the monarchical rule of the Brazilian Emperor, Gama defended a radical republican vision of the law: the ‘right of revolution’ (direito de revolução), which he saw as already being practiced in acts of resistance. Repurposing the legal pluralism of Friedrich Carl von Savigny for emancipatory politics, Gama’s (...) provocation – his insurgent legality – consisted in envisioning the resistance of the enslaved as an inaugural site for a republican order in the making. More than strategically mobilizing law in freedom suits, Gama presented the self-organization of maroons as both defending usurped rights, inherited from Roman law, and laying the foundations of an emergent republic. Drawing on broader currents of plebeian republicanism in the Atlantic world, he conceptualized the resistance of the enslaved as a ‘civic virtue.’ Gama’s insurgent legality thereby recasts the relation between prefigurative politics and institutional forms, questioning dichotomies of resistance and order, rupture and durability. Beyond nineteenth-century Brazil, Gama’s institutional thought speaks to debates in contemporary radical democratic and republican theory. (shrink)

This article examines numerous conceptions of translation within the Marxist tradition. It begins with Antonio Gramsci’s theorisation of the concept before turning to the problem of Marxism in Latin America and how the Zapatistas have dealt with this problem. The aim is to shed light on a critical school of Marxist thinking, which requires that Marxism’s universalist claims be translated in response to changing historical conditions so that they may become concrete formulations capable of speaking to and intervening in concrete (...) situations. Yet the Zapatistas go further by maintaining that translation must also occur between the universalist claims of Marxist theory and the competing universalist claims of indigenous Maya cosmology. The article thus underscores what can be gleaned from different modes of translation in terms of Marxism’s future and its capacity to enter into mutually beneficial alliances with distinct worldviews and ongoing social movements. (shrink)

The aim of Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality is to return to Marxism’s original historical vocation by freeing it from the hegemony of the exchange system and the encompassing agency of value. At the heart of this project appears the recognition that time, space and thus history have been captured by capitalism and transformed into categories of its own to organise people and social relationships for capital’s programme of accumulation. In this way, capital has been able to hijack history and invert (...) it into a representation of the real, into a historical trompe-l’œil instead of ‘presentify(ing) the past’. In this regard contemporising the past is an act of intervening in history and actualising it rather than representing it. Through this operation Tomba is able to retrieve an inventory of repressed and forgotten histories, which will unveil the sources of an ‘alternate legacy of modernity’ and radical political possibilities for the present. (shrink)

Many current Marxist debates point to a crisis of imagination as a challenge to emancipatory thoughts and actions. The naturalisation of the capitalist mode of production within the production of subjectivity is among the chief reasons behind this state of affairs. This article contributes to the debate by focusing on the notion of imagination, marked by a deep ambivalence capable of both naturalising and denaturalising social relations constitutive of the established order. Such an understanding of imagination is constructed from within (...) the framework of historical materialism, and it draws on Spinoza and Marx, taking advantage of the similarities between the two with respect to the constitution of the subject. From this stems an investigation into the imagination as a material force that partakes both in subjection and liberation. This is further demonstrated in regard to juridical forms of subjectivation and the possibility of subverting these forms through imagination. (shrink)

Massimiliano Tomba’s Insurgent Universality traces a global history of revolutionary institution-building as ‘theory in action’, pushing radical democracy beyond an ontology of the political. This contribution aims to clarify the place of ‘insurgent institutions’ in Tomba’s work and suggests that an unresolved tension persists between insurgent universality as popular institutions on the one hand, and as a negative dis-ordering on the other. Exploring the promise and limitations of ‘insurgent institutions’ in light of their durability, its first part reads Insurgent Universality (...) alongside Santi Romano, the legal pluralist whose concept of the institution Tomba adopts. Secondly, the article turns to Hannah Arendt’s understanding of authority and Miguel Abensour’s discussion of ‘insurgent institutions’ as two potentially helpful accounts of democratic practice within durational time. Where Tomba remains focused on constellations between moments of rupture, Arendt and Abensour offer a politically generative understanding of durability specific to radical-democratic institutions. (shrink)

Through a study of Gandhian political writings in mid-twentieth-century India, this article explores the neglected question of how the issue of representative democracy shaped anticolonial thought. The rise of a Gandhian perspective on electoral representation was made possible by the account of modern democracy given in Gandhi’s "Hind Swaraj" (1909). From the 1930s, four key Indian thinkers influenced by Gandhi expanded on "Hind Swaraj" to argue that capitalist economics were a threat to democratic equality and produced the kinds of unaccountability (...) and elite capture of legislatures that they identified in Western European parliamentary states. In response, Gandhian thinkers developed proposals for federalist postcolonial constitutions, combining a system of participatory legislative councils with collectivist agrarian socialism. I trace the intellectual origins of Gandhian democratic thought in the 1930s and 1940s and outline how its main proponents articulated ideas of antiparliamentarism and moral economics. Revisiting the Gandhian tradition, I suggest, highlights the importance of economic ethics in participatory theories of democracy and popular sovereignty. (shrink)

The primary aim of this article is to present the rule of law universalism as a relevant theoretical and socio-political issue that critical legal thought needs to contend with. In order to do so, this issue is described through a Marxist theoretical framework, which aids in identifying the consequences of this universalism. Furthermore, the Marxist theoretical framework is suggested as a countermeasure that allows for going beyond it. The rule of law universalism is analysed as a process connected to establishing (...) hegemony and status quo that affects both the way the law is thought of and practiced. The post-communist context serves in fleshing out some of these consequences. Although the transition is not the main subject of inquiry, it is a starting point to a set of philosophical questions directed towards the rule of law universalism, mainly regarding historical embeddedness and socio-political dependency of the rule of law. The transitional context illustrates the tension between the rule of law treated as a generalized blueprint and the reality it is introduced to. The method of approach to this tension argued for in this paper is Marxian theorization of concept as an interplay between concrete and abstract that underlies historical materialism. This movement within concept is juxtaposed to the universalism. The philosophical investigations are followed by findings from Marxist legal theory that pinpoint the importance of concrete interventions into the legal theory that abate its ever-growing abstractness. In particular, the import of knowledges and practices divorced from the capitalist system is brought into focus. The paper concludes with a brief assessment of the possibility of overturning the rule of law universalism and a discussion on the emancipatory potential of law. (shrink)

This article intends to summarise the content of my book Insurgent Universality: An Alternative Legacy of Modernity and expand the meaning of the term ‘universality’. Universality is not defined in abstract legal terms or by juxtaposition vis-à-vis a common enemy. Instead, I clarify the meaning of a more concrete and open practice of universality through historical examples and theories that I excavate from social practices.

Through an engagement with Massimiliano Tomba’s work Insurgent Universality, this paper explores the possibilities and limitations that reside at the heart of historical thinking.

Insurgent Universality offers a novel attempt to access history through a problematisation of the notion of universalism. Its main argument is based on three notions articulated in revolutionary events: temporalities, universality and insurgency. In this article we review their theoretical aspects, comment on their limitations, and outline potential reformulations.

The modern outlook on emancipation has made its quest inseparable from a quest for endless enhancement, based on an ever-more intensive exploitation of the biophysical world. This accounts for how unsustainable ways of living are reiterated worldwide, in spite of evidence of their deleterious effects. The underpinnings of unsustainability, and a major impediment to conceiving alternatives, come from an account of the human as ontologically indeterminate, crushed on doing, both vulnerable and powerful towards the world. The impasse of such ambivalence (...) hampers social theory critique, from post-humanist ontologies to the case for degrowth and lifestyle politics. The article outlines a different take on emancipation. An account is provided of form-of-life as a doing tailored to being – not as a self-enclosed monad but as a result of the encounter between own ‘inclination’ and the world. This theoretical perspective discloses a research program on emergent mobilisations. (shrink)

The ideas and political commitments of the revolutionary abolitionist and Spencean Robert Wedderburn (1762–1835) represent a compelling example of a form of universality, articulated in the midst of the Age of Revolution, which defied European colonialism and plantation slavery. An engagement with Wedderburn’s writings on the Haitian Revolution, maroon warfare and his proposal of a Spencean communist programme will clarify ongoing debates about Enlightenment, empire, slavery and universality, and might inform a re-engagement with the idea of universal emancipation in the (...) political present. (shrink)

Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 6, Page 904-933, July 2022. In this article, I reconstruct Étienne Balibar’s work against the background of the debate on modern universal citizenship. I argue that universal citizenship is neither fundamentally emancipatory nor fundamentally oppressive but is rather both. In order to defend this position, I build on Balibar’s concept of the “citizen subject.” First, I parse this concept, showing how it allows us to think about the contradictions of modern universal citizenship. In (...) the second section, I elucidate its temporal logic and show how it undermines the telos of modern universal citizenship. In sections three to five, I show how citizenship’s universalism clarifies both its oppressive and its emancipatory thrust. The dialectic of universal citizenship, I argue, unfolds as a conflict between and within political universals. In the conclusion, I will tie up these different strands and end with some reflections on the conditions of possibility of this dialectic. (shrink)