European modernism, (post-)anarchism, and the commons

This essay examines modernist literature in light of post-anarchist scholarship that undermines contemporary neoliberal capitalism. After presenting an overview of novels, poems, and manifestos by British, French, and Italian modernists and their relevance to Marxist strategies in today’s neoliberal economy, this article coalesces in a reading of James Joyce’s Ulysses as a text that is aligned against neoliberalism through its latent anarchist potential. According to the post-anarchist collective Tiqqun’s Theory of Bloom, the main character of Ulysses, Leopold Bloom, represents the modern liberal individual under capitalism, a paradigm which the members of Tiqqun argue impedes anarchist action. However, as Tiqqun’s members demonstrate, Bloom also is a locus of complex dialectical tensions that represent the possibility of an anarchist future despite the onslaught of bourgeois ideology in Joyce’s moment (and our own). Using an analysis of modernist anarchist texts and a transhistorical reading of Ulysses, this essay argues for reading modernism alongside theories of the ‘commons’, an alternative to the state based around shared resources and non-hierarchical living.