A Defence of Armed Art/Struggle

This book constitutes a first approach to the idea of aesthetic justice. It does so in the context of a critique and recovery of the normative and principled aspect of utopia and denunciation, crucial in the theory and practice of human rights, and for the political philosophy of what Ernesto Laclau termed "radical investment". Beginning with an approach to the persistence of the political in the Americas, the book argues in favour of the inseparable relation between ethics and politics, against more recent attempts to subtract the ethical from the political and subordinate the latter to the former. To this end, the initial chapters reclaim the legacy of the II Russell Tribunal. Specifically, its development of a different rhetoric based on the creative and performative force of trope and image. The subject is given further consideration in relation to the role of popular activism and the construction of publics and people, the idea of "permanent decolonisation", and creolisation as a method in political theory. The book concludes with the re-invention of a set of concepts that link up the activism of current social movements in the Americas and elsewhere with the aesthetics and politics of Tricontinentalism, dream-work and the struggle against former and current forms of fascism.