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Following the publication in France of her latest work L’imaginaire de la commune by the Éditions la Fabrique en 2015, ( Communal Luxury: The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune, Verso), Kristin Ross here spells out the theoretical and political issues at the heart of her research. The interview gives her the opportunity to present the way she goes about her work, those who have influenced her (H. Lefebvre, J. Rancière), and her presuppositions. It emphasizes the degree to which her reading of history, whether of May 68, the Paris Commune, or of the 1960s, breaks with the dominant, reactionary and determinist narratives, while also pointing to the fact that it is in rupture with those progressive narratives which, very often, constitute the nourishment of the militant imaginary. Her work thus represents a project undertaken at some distance from the question of the State, that is not amenable to didactic approaches, to strategic visions, or to the cult of great men, and which is attuned to the gestures and words of emancipation and to the experimental and inventive dimensions of a politics.