Bøker av Marc James Leger

Bernie Bros Gone Woke offers a provocative analysis of the Sanders campaigns and argues for the continuing importance of emancipatoryuniversality.In 2016 and 2020, the Bernie Sanders campaign gave American leftists a path towards social change through electoral politics. In order to combat neoliberal and reactionary uses of identity, the 2020 Sanders campaign combined a working-class agenda of universalist policies with various forms of social movement activism. In doing so it compromised on universalist principles and socialist radicalism in order to appeal to distinct demographic groups and win the election.Bernie Bros Gone Woke reveals how intersectional politics contributed to the failure of the Sanders campaign - a lesson that the organized left must learn if it is to challenge progressive neoliberalism and move beyond postmodern post-politics.

CMOK to YOu To presents the 2015 email correspondence of the Serbian-born poet, art critic and playwright Nina Zivančevic and Canadian cultural theorist Marc James Léger. In December of 2014 Léger invited Zivančevic to contribute a text to the second volume of the book he was editing, The Idea of the Avant Garde - And What It Means Today. Taken with each other's idiosyncrasies, their correspondence gradually shifted from amiable professional exchanges and the eventual failure to organize a scholarly event to that of collaborating on some kind of writing project. Several titles were attempted for the eventual book - Marshmallow Muse: The Exact and Irreverent Letters of MJL and NZ, The Orange Jelly Bean, or, I Already Am Eating from the Trash Can All the Time: The Name of This Trash Can Is Ideology, The Secreted Correspondence of Mme Chatelet and Voltaire, and I'm Taken: The E-Pistolary Poetry of Kit le Minx and Cad - but none of these proved to be more telling than CMOK, the Serbian word for kiss, which sums up the authors' quest for "harmony" in an altogether imperfect world and literary medium.In this book, names of real people were changed in order to protect those who might otherwise be offended by the unguarded and absurdist commentary of its authors. Despite this fact, it is the fragility and elasticity of the writers' superegos that is tested as they vacillate from personal registers to intellectual strata. At once a cis-avant-gardist's exploration of anti-art and a poet's claim to some weak form of autonomy, CMOK delights in both the pleasures of casual email and the sublime realizations of Jacques Lacan's theory of sexuation. CMOK is a hybrid genre and a quest into the real of virtuality that defies the literary standards. Its authors, who never met, answer one another's basic needs and questions, separated as they are by time zones and the ocean, but not culturally or spiritually.

Vanguardia chronicles and theorises changing forms of socially engaged art and radical politics since the rise of the anti-globalisation movement. From Occupy Wall Street to Black Live Matter and MeToo, Vanguardia detects signs of avant-garde praxis in the new social movements and activist collectives that challenge global capitalism. -- .

The Neoliberal Undead describes the frightening world of class restoration, neoliberal austerity, ecological meltdown, and neo-imperialism a disaster capitalism that breeds mutant ideological justifications for itself and the inevitability of disorder, poverty and suffering. What role does culture play in this world of markets and how do new contestatory forms enable a leftist solidarity that can move cultural radicalism beyond the postmodern obsession with new subjectivities? Rather than become the symptoms of democratic materialism, signing up for endless culture wars, The Neoliberal Undead argues for a rethinking of radical cultural leftism against the terms of the dominant global situation. The relentless reduction of art criticism and art production under capitalist relations requires that the living separate themselves from the abstractions of globalization and reconnect with revolutionary theory.

The first volume of The Idea of the Avant Garde - And What It Means Today provided a lively forum on radical art theory and partisan practices. This second volume presents the work of another 50 artists and writers, exploring the diverse ways that avant-gardism develops reflexive and experimental combinations of aesthetic and political praxis.

Brave New Avant Garde provides an unexpected exploration of critical strategies for anticapitalist cultural theory and practice.