The Alternative Communities of Alexander Trocchi

Abstract

This chapter analyses Alexander Trocchi’s centrality to the formation of three alternative communities throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Charting Trocchi’s role in the formation of the magazine Merlin through to the Situationist International in Paris, then project sigma in London, it is argued that these countercultural communities were rooted in Trocchi’s longstanding interest in existential philosophy. The chapter determines that Trocchi promoted a model of radical subjectivity as a strategic means to react against the stifling conservatism of the moral status quo, while also offering an alternative to the paralysing political dichotomy of the Cold War.