Trauma and ineloquence

The article is an attempt to interrogate the idea of anti‐capitalist politics in the light Rosa Luxemberg's notion of radical autonomism. My argument is that Luxemberg's hesitation before the Leninist demand for the strategic appropriation of political difference, gestures towards an idea of “the untimely” which is revived in the work of Naomi Klein and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. The essence of this idea is that the media‐techno‐scientific organization of capitalism has given rise to unexpected forms of resistance and communication, and that these provide the basis of a new anti‐capitalist politics. In the concluding section of the paper I will present the difference between Klein and Hardt and Negri's versions of anti‐capitalism through a reading of Derrida's Spectres of Marx. I will suggest that if we take the “untimeliness of the untimely” seriously, then it is Klein's gesture of welcome to the different forms of political activism that arise from the global organization of capital, which is closer to the spirit of Luxemberg's anti‐Leninism.