Output details

Violating Failures: Rosa Luxemburg's Spartacus Manifesto and Dada Berlin Anti-manifestation

The themed edition ‘Bodies of Failure’ for Somatechnics Journal, Edinburgh University Press that Eve Katsouraki has co-edited with Dr. Dan Watt (Loughborough University), is a part of a larger project of research that explores the intersections between political philosophy and performance theory. ‘Bodies of Failure’ is the first journal edition that seeks to unthink failure in a cultural and political context from a performative and philosophical perspective. Failure is perceived as other than ‘disappointment’ or ‘stigma’, and the edition seeks to explore the potential of failure as a radically subversive practice – a practice that entails a socially transformative mode of production intrinsically linked to ideology, politics, and the production of value through meaning. Katsouraki contributes the introduction to this edition as well as an article that explores the failed revolutionary project of the Spartacus League in relation to Dada’s politicised artistic activity in the practice of the anti-manifesto. The anti-manifesto stands for the embodiment of a negative poiesis that employs ‘failure’ as determinate negation. Failure is thus proposed as a radical alternative to progress, of the subject’s fidelity to the cause, as well as in terms of Badiou’s Evental site. This research has been delivered in several important conferences so far. The journal edition will be now followed by a book edition (Routledge), the first of its kind, which includes contributions from some of the most prominent scholars working around the subject of ‘failure’ today.