Author(s): Kristin Ross

Philosophy, Politics & Current Affairs | Song

In this incisive political analysis, Kristin Ross thinks through everyday existence across a range of practices-from philosophy to history, from the visual arts to popular fiction-and across the forms taken by collective political action in contemporary struggles.
Ross returns to Henri Lefebvre's powerful intuition that ordinary life is both residue and resource, the site of profound alienation and, by the same token, the origin of all emancipator initiatives and desires. The Politics and Poetics of Everyday Life explores our attempts to represent our lived reality in media such as painting, literature and film, paying particular attention to contemporary transformations in the genre most embedded in the deep superficiality of ordinary life: detective fiction.
Elsewhere, in Ross's investigation of the present day politics of ecological occupations, such as the zad at Notre-Dame des Landes, the everyday emerges as a repository of rich oppositional resources and immanent social creativity.