Riotous Epistemology. Imaginary Power, Art, and Insurrection

Riotous Epistemology. Imaginary Power, Art, and Insurrection
Richard Gilman-Opalsky & Stevphen Shukaitis

Riots. Revolts. Revolutions. All flashing moments which throw the world – and our relationship with it – into question. For centuries people have pinned their hopes on radical political change, on turning worlds upside down. But all too often the ever-renewed dream of changing the world for the better has ended either in failure or has been crushed.

Riotous Epistemology explores the significance of taking seriously the intellect of revolt, uprising as thinking, art as upheaval, and other forms of philosophy from below. To theorize revolt and subversive art practices as philosophy from below, it is necessary to refute conventional understandings of art and philosophy. 

Bios: Richard Gilman-Opalsky is Professor of Political Theory and Philosophy in the Department of Political Science at the University of Illinois. His research and teaching specializes in political philosophy, Continental and contemporary social theory, Marxism, capitalism, autonomist politics, critical theory, and global social movements. Dr. Gilman-Opalsky is author of four books: Unbounded Publics (2008), Spectacular Capitalism (2011), Precarious Communism (2014), and Specters of Revolt (2016). He is co-editor of Against Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2018) for Temple University Press. His books have been translated into Greek and Spanish. Dr. Gilman-Opalsky’s Ph.D. is from The New School for Social Research.

Stevphen Shukaitis is Senior Lecturer at the University of Essex, Centre for Work and Organization, and a member of the Autonomedia editorial collective. Since 2009 he has coordinated and edited Minor Compositions (https://www.minorcompositions.info). He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Day(2009) and The Composition of Movements to Come: Aesthetics and Cultural Labor After the Avant-Garde(2016), and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization(AK Press, 2007). His research focuses on the emergence of collective imagination in social movements and the changing compositions of cultural and artistic labor.

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Ordering Information

Released by Minor Compositions (Colchester / Brooklyn / Port Watson) and the Journal of Aesthetics & Protest Press (Leipzig)

Official release to the book trade in Winter 2019.

Available direct from Minor Compositions now for the special price of £7.

You can also download it here: Riotous Epistemology.

76 pages, hand risograph-printed, A5 Trim
UK: £12 / US: $15
ISBN 978-157027-359-9