When Marx takes it upon himself to listen to the revolutionary activity of his time, to the popular historical disorder, it is a matter of pinpointing in the latter, pursuant to harsh theoretical and practical work, the dialectical form of the political subject as such. The deduction of its general activity presupposes only the riots of the nineteenth century. 69
Whether he names this subject people, proletariat, party, or Paris, Marx finds it where it will have been.
1 H. A. Taine, The Revolution, “Les origines de la France contemporaine” vol. 1, trans. John Durand, London: Daldy, Isbister & Co, 1878, 30–1.
2 Ibid.
3 Bill Buford, Among the Thugs (New York: Vintage, 1993), 166. Thanks to Joe Mink for bringing this book to my attention.
4 Ibid., 190.
5 Ibid., 194.
6 Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1984; original German publication in 1960, 17.
7 Ibid., 18.
8 See my Democracy and Other Neoliberal Fantasies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009) for a discussion ofstrange attractors, 67–70.
9 Canetti, Crowds and Power, 29.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid., 19.
12 Ibid., 20.
13 Ibid., 29.
14 “To be faithful to an event is to move within the situation that this event has supplemented, by thinking (although all thought is a practice, a putting to the test) the situation ‘according to’ the event,” Alain Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward, London: Verso, 2001, 41.
15 Stewart Edwards, ed., The Communards of Paris, 1871 (Documents of Revolution), Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1973, 62–3.
16 Canetti, Crowds and Power, 80.
17 Prosper Olivier Lissagaray, History of the Paris Commune of 1871, trans. Eleanor Marx, London: New Park Publications, 1976, 65.
18 Frank, The Paris Commune of 1871, New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1965, 112.
19 Edwards, The Communards of Paris, 59.
20 Jellinek, The Paris Commune of1871, 113–14.
21 Edwards, The Communards ofParis, 65.
22 Martin Breaugh, The Plebian Experience, trans. Lazer Lederhendler, New York: Columbia University Press, 2013, 177.
23 Ibid., 178.
24 Karl Marx, “Civil War in France,” Selected Writings, ed. Lawrence H. Simons, Indianapolis: Hackett
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