About this item
How do mass protests become an organized activist collective? Crowds and Party channels the energies of the riotous crowds who took to the streets in the past five years into an argument for the political party. Rejecting the emphasis on individuals and multitudes, Jodi Dean argues that we need to rethink the collective subject of politics. When crowds appear in spaces unauthorized by capital and the state - such as in the Occupy movement in New York, London and across the world - they create a gap of possibility. But too many on the Left remain stuck in this beautiful moment of promise - they argue for more of the same, further fragmenting issues and identities, rehearsing the last thirty years of left-wing defeat. In Crowds and Party, Dean argues that previous discussions of the party have missed its affective dimensions, the way it operates as a knot of unconscious processes and binds people together.
About the Author
Jodi Dean teaches political theory in upstate NY where she is also actively involved in grassroots political organizing. Raised in Mississippi and Alabama, she went north for college, earning her BA at Princeton University and her MA and PhD at Columbia University. Initially, her focus was on Soviet area studies. In her second year of graduate school, she switched to political theory, which was a good thing since the Soviet Union ceased to exist and the field dissolved. Her books take up questions of solidarity, the conditions of possibility for democracy, communicative capitalism, and the necessity of building a politics that has communism as its horizon. She has given invited lectures in art and academic venues all over the world.