Browse

Autonomy is a vital concept in much of modern theory, defining the Subject as capable of self-governance. Democratic theory relies on the concept of autonomy to provide justification for participatory government and the normative goal of democratic governance, which is to protect the ability of the individual to self-govern. Offering an examination of the concept of autonomy from a postfoundationalist perspective, the book analyzes how the ideal of self-governance has shaped everyday life. The text begins by considering the academic terrain of autonomy, then it focuses on specific examples of political behavior that allow for these theories to be investigated. The book demonstrates how the adolescent—a not-yet-autonomous subject—highlights how the ideal of self-governance generates practices intended to cultivate autonomy by forming the individual’s relationship to his or her body. The book points up how the war on drugs rests on the perception that drug addicts are the antithesis of autonomy and thus must be regulated for their own good. Showing that the animal rights movement may challenge the distinction between human and animal, the book also examines the place of the endurance athlete in fitness culture, where self-management of the body is the exemplar of autonomous subjectivity.

The book advances a novel reading of Foucault’s writings on the Iranian revolution and further shows how his encounter with the revolution informs his later lectures on ethics, spirituality, and enlightenment. Foucault saw in the revolution, particularly in its religious expression, an instance of his anti-teleological philosophy, a revolution that did not simply fit into the normative progressive discourses of history. What attracted him to the Iranian revolution was its ambiguity, precisely the same feature for which his critics ridiculed him. Rather than his fascination with death or his absorption in the aesthetics of violence, as his critics assert, it was the inexplicability of “the man in revolt” that motivated much of his writing on the Iranian revolution. He defined the indeterminacy of the revolutionary movement together with the inexplicability of the revolutionary subject as an expression of political spirituality. This concept led many of his detractors to accuse the anti-humanist philosopher of defending theocracy in order to advance his critique of modern governmentality and its disciplinary technologies.

This book presents an English-language translation of the modern classic Hegel ou Spinoza. Published in French in 1979, it has been widely influential, particularly in the work of the philosophers Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri, and Gilles Deleuze. This book is a surgically precise interrogation of the points of misreading of Spinoza by Hegel. As is explained in this version, the necessity of Hegel’s misreading in the kernel of thought that is “indigestible” for Hegel, which makes the Spinozist system move in a way that Hegel cannot grasp. In doing so, this volume exposes the limited and situated truth of Hegel’s perspective-which reveals more about Hegel himself than about his object of analysis. Against Hegel’s characterization of Spinoza’s work as immobile, the book offers an alternative that upsets the accepted historical progression of philosophical knowledge. It finds in Spinoza an immanent philosophy that is not subordinated to the guarantee of an a priori truth.

This book argues for transforming our institutions and practices of citizenship and markets in order to release society from dependence on the state and capital. It changes Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of nomadology into a utopian project with immediate practical implications, developing ideas of a nonlinear Marxism and of the slow-motion general strike. Responding to the challenge of creating philosophical concepts with concrete applications, this book looks outside the state to analyze contemporary political and economic development using the ideas of nomad citizenship and free-market communism. The book’s nomadology seeks to displace capital-controlled free markets with truly free markets. Its goal is to rescue market exchange, not perpetuate capitalism#x2014;to enable noncapitalist markets to coordinate socialized production on a global scale and, with an eye to the common good, to liberate them from capitalist control. In suggesting the slow-motion general strike, the book aims to transform citizenship: to renew, enrich, and invigorate it by supplanting the monopoly of state citizenship with plural nomad citizenships. In the process, it offers critiques of both the Clinton and Bush regimes in the broader context of critiques of the social contract, the labor contract, and the form of the state itself.

What does it mean to think about, and with, Spinoza today? This book asserts the importance of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence for contemporary cultural and philosophical debates. Engaging with Spinoza’s insistence on the centrality of the passions as the site of the creative and productive forces shaping society, this book critiques the impulse to transcendence and regimes of mastery, exposing universal values as illusory. The book pursues Spinoza’s challenge to abandon the temptation to think through the prism of death in order to arrive at a truly liberatory notion of freedom. The chapters here extend the Spinozan project beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy to encompass all forms of life-affirming activity, including the arts and literature. The chapters, taken together, suggest that “Spinoza now” is not so much a statement about a “truth” that Spinoza’s writings can reveal to us in our present situation. It is, rather, the injunction to adhere to the attitude that affirms both necessity and impossibility.