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Many on the Left have looked upon “universal” as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. This book builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, the book shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. The book investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. It shows that every statement and institution of the universal—such as declarations of human rights—carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, the book suggests, the very conflict of the universal—constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction—also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, the book shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the writing of the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar’s thought. The contributors examine “Balibar and the Philosophy of the Concept” (Warren Montag), “Anthropological” (Bruce Robbins), “Border-concept” (Stathis Gourgouris), “Civil Religion” (Judith Butler), “Concept” (Etienne Balbar), “Contre- / Counter-” (Bernard E. Harcourt), “Conversion” (Monique David-Ménard), “Cosmopolitics” (Emily Apter), “Interior Frontiers” (Ann Laura Stoler), “Materialism” (Patrice Maniglier), “The Political” (Adi Ophir), “Punishment” (Didier Fassin), “Race” (Hanan Elsayed), “Relation” (Jacques Lezra), “Rights” (J.M. Bernstein), and “Solidarity” (Gary Wilder). The result is a hybrid lexicon-engagement that makes clear the depth and importance of Balibar’s contribution to the most urgent topics in contemporary thought. Each lexical entry/essay makes a startling, novel intervention in current debates, and as a whole Thinking with Balibar offers a model of collaborative critico-political reading of great importance to global academic culture.

Tales of neoliberalism’s death are serially overstated. Seemingly repudiated by historical events and yet staggering on like an undead cadaver, neoliberalism was proclaimed a “zombie” ideology following the 2008 financial crisis. After the major political shocks of 2016, the global rise of the far right, and the rebirth of democratic socialist politics, commentators declared “the end of neoliberalism” once again. Yet even as new political forces emerge from decades of neoliberal hegemony, it remains far from certain whether they will sound neoliberalism’s death knell or rather propel new movements within its dynamic development. Mutant Neoliberalism brings together leading scholars of neoliberalism from an array of disciplines—political theorists, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists—to reappraise ongoing transformations within our historical moment. Rethinking the shifting relationship between market rule and political rupture, the authors interrogate the decades of neoliberal governance, policy, and depoliticization that created conditions for thriving reactionary forces, while also investigating how recent trends may challenge, reconfigure, or extend neoliberalism’s reach. Facing the challenges of our dystopic present not only requires moving beyond expectations of neoliberalism’s inevitable death, but also grasping its ongoing mutations across spheres of political, economic, and social life. Mutant Neoliberalism recasts the stakes of contemporary debate, asking us to rethink what we know about neoliberalism in order to reorient critique and resistance within a rapidly changing landscape.

Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the art of law. Tracking the thread of philosophical influences upon the community of legal interpretation, both reception and resistance, the essays move from the translation and wake of Derrida to the work of Agamben, from deconstruction to oikononmia. Sharing roots in the philological excavation of the political theology of modern law, contributors assess the failure of secularism and the continuing theological borrowings of juridical interpretation. Contemporary critique is brought to bear upon the interpretative apparatuses of exclusion, the law of spectacular sovereignty, and the bodies that lie in its wake.

This volume invokes the “postcolonial contemporary” in order to recognize and reflect upon the emphatically postcolonial character of the contemporary conjuncture, as well as to inquire into whether postcolonial criticism can adequately grasp it. Neither simply for nor against postcolonialism, the volume seeks to cut across this false alternative, and to think with postcolonial theory about political contemporaneity. Many of the most influential frameworks of postcolonial theory were developed during the 1970s and 1990s, during what we may now recognize as the twilight of the postwar period. If forms of capitalist imperialism are entering into new configurations of neoliberal privatization, wars-without-end, xenophobic nationalism and unsustainable extraction, what aspects of postcolonial inquiry must be reworked or revised in order to grasp our political present? In twelve essays that draw from a number of disciplines—history, anthropology, literature, geography, indigenous studies— and regional locations (the Black Atlantic, South Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Australia, Argentina) The Postcolonial Contemporary seeks to move beyond the habitual oppositions that have often characterized the field, such as universal vs. particular; Marxism vs. postcolonialism; and politics vs. culture. These essays signal an attempt to reckon with new and persisting postcolonial predicaments and do so under four inter-related analytics: Postcolonial Temporality; Deprovincializing the Global South; Beyond Marxism versus Postcolonial Studies; and Postcolonial Spatiality and New Political Imaginaries.

Reified Life: Speculative Capital and the Ahuman Condition addresses the most pressing political question of the 21st century: what forms of life are free and what forms are perceived legally and economically as surplus or expendable, human and otherwise. Reified Life theorizes the dangerous social implications of a posthuman future, whereby human agency is secondary to algorithmic processes, digital protocols, speculative financial instruments, and nonhuman market and technological forces. Narkunas contends that it is premature to speak of a posthuman or inhuman future, or employ an ‘ism, given how dynamic and contingent human practices and their material figurations can be. Over several chapters he diagnoses the rise of “market humans,” the instrumentalization of culture to decide the life worth living along utilitarian categories, and the varied ways human rights and humanitarianism actually throw members of the species like refugees outside the human order. Reified Life argues against posthumanist calls to abandon the human and humanism, and instead proposes the ahuman to think alongside the human. Reified Life elaborates speculative fictions as critical mechanisms for envisioning alternative futures and freedoms from the domineering forces of speculative capital, whose fictions have become our realities. Narkunas offers, to that end, a novel interpretation of the post-anthropocentric turn in the humanities by linking the diminished centrality of humanism to the waning dominion of nation-states over their populations and the intensification of financial capitalism, which reconfigures politics along economic categories of risk management.

How is political change possible when even the most radical revolutions only reproduce sovereign power? Via the analysis of the contradictory meanings of stasis, Vardoulakis argues that the opportunity for political change is located in the agonistic relation between sovereignty and democracy and thus demands a radical rethinking.

This book explores the conceptual trajectories of two of the twentieth century's most vital thinkers of the political: Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil. Taking Homer's Iliad as the common origin and point of departure for our understanding of Western philosophical and political traditions, the book examines the foundational relation between war and the political. Drawing actively and extensively on Arendt's and Weil's voluminous writings, but also sparring with thinkers from Marx to Heidegger, the book traverses the relation between polemos and polis, between Greece, Rome, God, force, technicity, evil, and the extension of the Christian imperial tradition, while at the same time delineating the conceptual and hermeneutic ground for the development of the notion and practice of “the impolitical.” Within the book, Arendt and Weil emerge “in the inverse of the other's thought, in the shadow of the other's light,” to “think what the thought of the other excludes not as something that is foreign, but rather as something that appears unthinkable and, for that very reason, remains to be thought.” Moving slowly toward their conceptualizations of love and heroism, the book unravels the West's illusory metaphysical dream of peace, obliging us to reevaluate ceaselessly what it means to be responsible in the wake of past and contemporary forms of war.

In the contemporary world of neoliberalism, efficiency is treated as the vehicle of political and economic health. State bureaucracy, but not corporate bureaucracy, is seen as inefficient, and privatization is seen as a magic cure for social ills. This book asks whether democracy is possible in the absence of public services, spaces, and utilities. In other words, if neoliberalism leaves to democracy merely electoral majoritarianism and procedures of deliberation while divesting democratic states of their ownership of public things, what will the impact be? This book suggests that democracy postulates public things—infrastructure, monuments, libraries—that citizens use, care for, repair, and are gathered up by. To be “gathered up” refers to the work of D. W. Winnicott, the object relations psychoanalyst who popularized the idea of “transitional objects”—the toys, teddy bears, or favorite blankets by way of which infants come to understand themselves as unified selves with an inside and an outside in relation to others. The wager of this book is that the work transitional objects do for infants is analogously performed for democratic citizens by public things, which press us into object relations with others and with ourselves. The book attends also to the historically racial character of public things: public lands taken from indigenous peoples, access to public goods restricted to white majorities. The book underlines the material and psychological conditions necessary for object permanence and the reparative work needed for a more egalitarian democracy.

What can the universals of political philosophy offer to those who experience “the living paradox of an inegalitarian construction of egalitarian citizenship”? This title considers the necessary and necessarily antagonistic relation between the categories of citizen and subject. In this book, the question of modernity is framed anew with special attention to the self-enunciation of the subject (in Descartes, Locke, Rousseau, and Derrida), the constitution of the community as “we” (in Hegel, Marx, and Tolstoy), and the aporia of the judgment of self and others (in Foucault, Freud, Kelsen, and Blanchot). After the “humanist controversy” that preoccupied twentieth-century philosophy, the book proposes foundations for philosophical anthropology today, in terms of two contrary movements: the becoming-citizen of the subject and the becoming-subject of the citizen. The citizen-subject who is constituted in the claim to a “right to have rights” (Arendt) cannot exist without an underside that contests and defies it. He—or she, because the text is concerned throughout this volume with questions of sexual difference—figures not only the social relation but also the discontent or the uneasiness at the heart of this relation. The human can be instituted only if it betrays itself by upholding “anthropological differences” that impose normality and identity as conditions of belonging to the community. The violence of “civil” bourgeois universality, the text argues, is greater (and less legitimate, therefore less stable) than that of theological or cosmological universality. Right is thus founded on insubordination, and emancipation derives its force from otherness.