ABSTRACT
Jodi Dean’s essay “A Comrade for the Anthropocene” begins with the assertion that theory and activism is today dominated by a post-humanist concern with systems, on the one hand, and the survivalism of ecologists and identitarians, on the other. Both of these are attributed to “communicative capitalism” and the neoliberal conditions of economic insecurity. A neofeudal tendency, she argues, abandons the bourgeois rights tradition and individualizes political thinking, giving rise to the personalization of politics that one finds in contemporary identity politics and the discourse of allyship. With reference to the work of Jacques Lacan and Slavoj Žižek, Dean defines the advocacy of allyship as a symptom of the weakening of symbolic efficiency, which she relates also to the weakening of revolutionary left politics. Against this, Dean develops a theory of the comrade in egalitarian, generic and utopian terms. As a form of political belonging, the politics of comradeship rejects the imaginary captivation of identity in favour of the universality of partisan subjectivation.
