“Fail Better”: Utopia, Rosa Luxemburg, and Learning from Failure with Maša Mrovlje, University of Leeds (1 May)

Thursday 1 May, 3pm – 4.30pm, Conference Room 3.15, Chrystal Macmillan Building

“Fail Better”: Utopia, Rosa Luxemburg, and Learning from Failure

Maša Mrovlje University of Leeds

This is a pre-read seminar.

Abstract

The paper explores how Rosa Luxemburg’s practice of learning from failure can enrich engagements with failure among scholars of utopia. Recently, scholars of utopia have integrated failure as an unavoidable aspect of social dreaming. Inspired by Samuel Beckett’s dictum “Try Again. Fail Again. Fail Better”, these accounts view failure not as a lamentable lack but as a valuable opportunity for new experiments in alternative ways of being and acting. Moreover, scholars have developed how this revaluing of failure can inspire activists to continue working for a better world despite the possibility of failure. Yet what is still missing is a sustained exploration of the lived experience of failure as a site of both loss and possibility. Here Luxemburg can prove a valuable resource. Drawing on her theoretical and political writings as well as her correspondence, I show how her practice of learning from failure allows for a deeper recognition of both the crushing impact of failure and its productive political value. Thus, I suggest, it valuably reconceptualises the utopian studies’ focus on failing better and offers activists more robust resources to weather disappointment and productively engage with failure.