Abigail Susik

This project expands upon my first book, Surrealist Sabotage and the War on Work (Manchester UP, 2021). My in-progress second book, Change Life: The Avant-Garde and Social Transformation in Europe and the Americas, examines episodes in the international avant-garde to investigate the influence of ultraleft political concepts: abolitionism (eradication of social forms), prefiguration (desired futures lived in the present), and post-figuration (imagining desired pasts as if from a revolutionary future). At IAS, I will research and write a long chapter devoted to anti-work abolitionism in the community surrounding the Belgian journal, Les Lèvres nues (1953-8; 12 issues), founded by artist Marcel Mariën and featuring other artists who were also seeking the demise of capitalism, such as René Magritte, as well as members of the Situationist International, like Guy Debord. My study queries, how can avant-garde histories combined with ultraleft political theory radically transform the role of work in our lives?

Website address: https://willamette.edu/undergraduate/arth/faculty/susik/index.html