CONTRIBUTI / 11 / Roberto Bravi e Giovanni Campailla /
The term communism appeared to be discredited. However, for more than a decade now, it has surprisingly come back. This is detectable, in the academic field, through a series of conferences that has taken place in recent years. The present article examines some of the contributions from the first of these conferences (which took place in London on 2009): those of Badiou, Rancière, Negri, and Žižek. Each section analyses the way in which the author, in his own way, proposes an answer to the question of the relationship between the idea of communism and its concrete or historical experience. The article will conclude that this is the true legacy of this debate. It is a theoretical knot that lies at the very heart of the traditional methodology of critical thinking: the relationship between theory and praxis. In light of this knot, we will remark the antinomies of this debate, but also the broader perspective opened by it, regarding, more than the term communism in itself, the subjective experience that can be named communist.
