A Treatment of the Idea(l) of the Commons: A Conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva

In the 2010s, the theme of the commons operated across different critiques of the global capitalist economy, helping to articulate alternatives for a fragmented left. This interview with a contemporary leading philosopher and anti-colonial Black feminist thinker addresses the intrinsic limitations of the theme of the commons. It specifically considers its deficiency as an emancipatory political descriptor with relation to colonial and cisheteropatriarchal modes of political subjugation. This manifests in the enduring presupposition and demand of universality, unity and identity which operate in the commons as a political fantasy. The interview argues that a recomposition of the notion of the commons as a general emancipatory proposition in the current global moment requires a shift at the level of imagination – that is, an image of existence that mobilizes the infinite and the elemental as providing a sense of commonality without unity or separability.