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The introduction elaborates the key concepts of the book: homosexuality, value, and labor. It contextualizes the importance of these concepts for modern Irish history and culture. Furthermore, it argues that the study brings together currently alienated critical discussions that both trace themselves to Foucault’s History of Sexuality: queer theory that has developed from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s reading of Foucault and studies of empire engaged with the work of Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. The chapter makes connections among queer theory, Irish studies, modernist studies, and theories of empire.

This chapter pursues the problem of what life is and what life may become outside of its capture within the forms of logistical order promoted in the name of a War on Terror, through recourse to the work of two of the most currently influential of all Foucauldian thinkers, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. What defines the work of Hardt and Negri, and certainly what has helped make their work so popular in recent years, is their attempt to reconstitute the historical tradition of refusal of and resistance to the logistical ordering of liberal societies. The chapter is organized as follows. One section provides an account of the development of the theory of the war of the multitude as it occurs in Negri's political thought. The text then examines how this contributes to the more recent account of Hardt and Negri's conceptualisation of the ‘two wars of liberal modernity’ through which, as they argue, the antagonistic relationship between the multitude and liberal regimes has developed. The final section addresses the problem of how this antagonism has been complicated by the emergence of Terror as a resistance to liberal regimes, and the question of whether Hardt and Negri are able to usefully distinguish their account of the contemporary character of the war of the multitude from it.

This chapter addresses the question of modernity in Haiti—first as political project and then as artistic production—by examining the quintessential theorists of a seemingly belated modernity in this presumably postmodernist moment: Jürgen Habermas, Arjun Appadurai, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. It studies the Habermasian and Appaduraian parameters of modernity—as an “unfinished project” and as postcolonial globalization, respectively—before considering Hardt and Negri's important delineations of altermodernity as a model for thinking about Haitian and Port-au-Princian politics. The Habermasian position on reason, rationality, truth, and values is that these categories remain the guiding principles of modernity, but they must be rethought and reconceptualized anew through an altered understanding of subjects and subjectivity. Meanwhile, Appadurai states that “modernity belongs to that small family of theories that both declares and desires universal applicability for itself,” which “aspired to create persons who would, after the fact, have wished to have become modern.”

This chapter offers a complementary analysis that seeks to identify the limits of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's Gilles Deleuze-inspired political theses. It criticises Hardt and Negri's concept of the multitude and introduces the problem of political composition in the context of communist politics, addressing the minor politics operating through the vacuoles of non-communication. The chapter investigates how politics can be rescued from the musty corners of self-referentiality and begins to engage the social once more.

This chapter examines William S. Burroughs’ late trilogy of novels—Cities of the Red Night (1981), The Place of Dead Roads (1983), and The Western Lands (1987)—as a critical response to American neoliberalism. It analyzes what Burroughs terms the trilogy’s retroactive utopianism, or the way in which it reactivates the potential of historical revolutions (including the American Revolution and the global revolts of the 1960s) as a way of reimagining the future of global politics. Focusing on The Place of Dead Roads, the chapter shows how Burroughs combines science fiction and the Western to envision the Frontier in utopian terms. It argues that Burroughs’s fiction builds on the politics of the multitude, or the antisystemic politics of the late 1990s to the present, articulating a vision of the nation in terms of communal property, egalitarian relations, and democratic self-rule.

The chapter opens with a distinction between political activism and artmaking by suggesting that activism tends to push the political as subject matter, while art has moved away this century from representing ‘the political’, returning to a concern for materials and their affects. However, such a crude distinction fails to account for nuances within practices, and thus the example of the Cuban artist, Tania Brugera, who uses political tools as material for her work, complicates the claim. Is it possible to define something as nebulous as an art community today? As with the contested space of aesthetics, Rancière argues that communities offer similar breaches that open and close, in this case between identities. There will be agreement in certain places and times on what constitutes an art community, but this is contingent upon an ongoing process of dissensus and transformation, subjectivation and disidentification. The chapter closes with an introduction to what became a global economic imperative from the 1970s, neo-liberalism, and it suggests that what is at stake for artists is a battle to define one’s practice against the contemporary figure of a complicit artist-entrepreneur. [185]

By what right do we speak of ‘Deleuzian philosophy’? If, encountering his monographs on other thinkers and artists we cannot help the sense that we are privy there to elements of Deleuze’s own philosophy, this is because ‘reading’ is Deleuze’s veritable philosophical method. Taking its cue from Badiou, this chapter will analyse Deleuze’s frequent use of ‘free indirect discourse’, a mode of speech as it were ‘in between’ the direct and indirect discourses, very seldom found in philosophical writing. Far more prevalent in literature, this discourse has traditionally been employed in order to write as if from inside the minds of the characters; in much the same way, through free indirect discourse Deleuze attains the underlying question compelling an author to think; and it is in the critique of this question that Deleuze sets forth his own philosophy.