Bad New World. The (Relative) Rebirth of the Commons
Bad New World. The (Relative) Rebirth of the Commons

Summary/Abstract: The state of the world is depressing. Neoliberal policies are global, while identity-politics is returning with a vengeance. In such a context, the existence of the commons is under threat, and so is the idea of community. This paper investigates how art responds to this return to barbarism, as Alain Badiou describes our world. It firstly investigates what images of the current crises tell about us. Then it presents three examples of artists engaging with the current world, resisting its neoliberal and even fascist tendencies: the Syrian group Abounaddara, the Ukrainean-Russian Femen and the Hungarian Two-Tailed Dog Party. In all of these cases, what is effective and emancipatory is the courage of a new conception of temporality. Events from the present are acted and judged from the perspective of the future, not in the bleak environment of today’s mass-media or academic world. The chance of the commons is thus related to what future art imagines and hopes for. In the neoliberal world that claims we live in post-history, the simple statement that history exists is courageous because it implies that history could be transformed.

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