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This book clears a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. It considers globalization as a new, and increasingly unmoored, ordering for which modern political theory, including its theories of political subjectivation, has proven largely obsolete. Globalization is the hollowing out and expiration of the political-theological imagination of the modern juridical system of states. In this regard Infrapolitical Passages provides (1) a theory of globalization as a crisis of symbolic organization and (2) a theory of global economic warfare as the positing itself of both directionlessness and facticity. In contrast, the work of clearing proposes “infrapolitics” as a distance from the biopolitical, which it understands as the contemporary forms of domination, that is, as the production of specific forms of subjectivity that pertain to the age of the ontology of the commodity. It is the relation of the subject to domination—and the subsequent obscuring of any question for being—that signals the need to circumvent the instrumentalization of life as a relation of subordination to the metaphysics of subjectivity, representation, and politics.

In the Book of Judges, the Gileadites use the word shibboleth to target and kill members of a closely related tribe, the Ephraimites, who cannot pronounce the initial shin phoneme. In modern European languages, shibboleth has come to mean a hard-to-falsify sign that winnows identities and establishes and confirms borders; it has also acquired the ancillary meanings of slogan or cliché. The semantic field of shibboleth thus seems keyed to the waning of the logos in an era of technical reproducibility—to the proliferation of technologies and practices of encryption, decryption, exclusion and inclusion that saturate modern life. In the context of an unending refugee crisis and a general displacement, monitoring and quarantining of populations within a global regime of technics, Paul Celan’s subtle yet fierce reorientation of shibboleth merits scrupulous reading. Building on Jacques Derrida’s Shibboleth: For Paul Celan, but following its own itinerary, this book interprets the episode in Judges together with texts by Celan, passages from William Faulkner’s Absalom! Absalom!, and Doris Salcedo’s 2007 installation Shibboleth at the Tate Modern, pursuing the track of a word to which no language can properly lay claim—a word that is both less and more than a word, that signifies both the epitome and the ruin of border control technology, and that thus, despite its violent role in the Biblical story, offers Celan a locus of poetico-political affirmation.

Theory for Beginners explores how philosophy and theory draw on children’s literature and have even come to resemble it in their strategies for cultivating the child and/or the beginner. After centuries of ignoring the child, some philosophy now considers the child an exemplary practitioner as well as subject. This attitude drives the Philosophy for Children or P4C movement, which got its start in the United States in the early 1970s and has since spread to other countries and continents. P4C has affirmed children’s literature as important philosophical work. Theory, meanwhile, has invested in some children’s classics and has also developed a literature for beginners that resembles children’s literature. After examining the P4C movement, the book turns its attention to theory for beginners and especially in the form of illustrated or graphic guides. These guides emerged from the anticolonial and Marxist work of Mexican activist and author-illustrator Eduardo del Rio, aka Rius. Rius’ Cuba Para Principiantes, or Cuba for Beginners (1970), kicked off the Beginners graphic series, emphasizing the self-teaching of political-critical awareness. The genre gradually went mainstream, losing the political edge. If philosophy is for children, and theory is for beginners, then children’s literature might also be described as a literature for minors. The third and final chapter pursues that idea, proposing more specifically that children’s and young adult literature can sometimes function as queer theory for kids.

World Literature for the Wretched of the Earth recovers an alternative strain of anticolonialism that does not seek national sovereignty, authority, and political recognition, but advocates instead inexpertise, unknowing, unintelligibility, and collective unrecognizability. Early twentieth-century anticolonial thinkers endeavored to imagine a world emancipated from colonial rule, but it was a world they knew they would likely not live to see. Written in exile, in abjection, or in the face of death, anticolonial thought could not afford to base its politics on the hope of eventual success. This book shows how anticolonial thinkers theorized inconsequential practices of egalitarianism in the service of impossibility: a world without colonialism. To trace this impossible political theory, this book foregrounds anticolonial theories of reading and critique in the writing of four thinkers, Lala Har Dayal, B. R. Ambedkar, M. K. Gandhi, and Bhagat Singh. These activists theorized reading not as a way to cultivate mastery and expertise, but as a way of rather to disavow mastery and expertise altogether. Reading was antiauthoritarian precisely because it urged readers to refuse authorship and, relatedly, authority. To become or remain a reader, and divest oneself of authorial claims, was to challenge the logic of the British Empire and European fascism, which prized self-mastery, authority, and sovereignty. Bringing together the histories of comparative literature and anticolonial thought, Elam demonstrates how these early twentieth-century theories of reading force us to reconsider the commitments of humanistic critique and egalitarian politics.