Vol. 6 No. 2 (2025): Political animals: animality, community, and the future body politic (continuous publication)
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Prefigurative politics: the (im)possible revolution in postmodernity

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Ricardo Mendes Mattos
University of Taubaté
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Published 2025-12-26

Keywords

  • prefigurative politics,
  • revolution,
  • anarchy,
  • postmodernity

Copyright (c) 2025 Ricardo Mendes Mattos

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MATTOS, Ricardo Mendes. Prefigurative politics: the (im)possible revolution in postmodernity. (Des)troços: revista de pensamento radical, Belo Horizonte, v. 6, n. 2, p. e60680, 2025. DOI: 10.53981/destrocos.v6i2.60680. Disponível em: https://periodicos.ufmg.br/index.php/revistadestrocos/article/view/60680. Acesso em: 16 jan. 2026.
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Abstract

The prefigurative politics of revolution here and now emerged simultaneously with reflections on the postmodern condition within the American New Left of the 1970s and 1980s. Through a theoretical study, this article aims to understand prefigurative politics within the historical, social, and political context of postmodernity. It concludes that the revolution here and now incorporates characteristics attributed to postmodernity: immediacy; plurality of narratives; space-time compression; the (con)fusion between public and private; the micropolitical or local sphere of political action; and historical discontinuity, which hinders confident projections of a utopian future. These characteristics demarcate the limits and potential of prefigurative politics as an (im)possible revolution in postmodernity.

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