This book explores the possibilities for a genuinely radical critique of globalized culture and politics—at a time when intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike struggle to understand the configuration of the contemporary world. This book seeks to unsettle a naturalized and commonsensical assumption: that democracy and the economic market must be viewed as either united or at odds. Against both neoliberalists and cultural pluralists, the book argues that the state is not yielding to the market, but that the universe now turns on a “duopoly” between statist and global forms, one that generates ... More

This book explores the possibilities for a genuinely radical critique of globalized culture and politics—at a time when intellectuals and non-intellectuals alike struggle to understand the configuration of the contemporary world. This book seeks to unsettle a naturalized and commonsensical assumption: that democracy and the economic market must be viewed as either united or at odds. Against both neoliberalists and cultural pluralists, the book argues that the state is not yielding to the market, but that the universe now turns on a “duopoly” between statist and global forms, one that generates not only economic and cultural sites but also ways of knowing, a postdemocratic episteme. Touching upon current issues such as terrorism, human rights, the attack on the World Trade Center, and the notion of the “people”, delving into the idea of biopolitics, and investigating the essential relation between language and political praxis, the book engages with the work of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Etienne Balibar, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, and others.