Patrick R. Mullen
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780199746699
- eISBN:
- 9780199950270
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199746699.003.0000
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Julian Reid
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719074059
- eISBN:
- 9781781701676
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719074059.003.0006
- Subject:
- Political Science, Political Theory
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Jana Evans Braziel
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- May 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781496812742
- eISBN:
- 9781496812780
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University Press of Mississippi
- DOI:
- 10.14325/mississippi/9781496812742.003.0003
- Subject:
- Sociology, Culture
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 ...
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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.”Less
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.”
Nicholas Thoburn
- Published in print:
- 2006
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748623419
- eISBN:
- 9780748652389
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748623419.003.0002
- Subject:
- Philosophy, General
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 ...
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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.Less
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.
Adrian Little and Moya Lloyd
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633999
- eISBN:
- 9780748652723
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633999.001.0001
- Subject:
- Political Science, Democratization
This book addresses the idea of radical democracy and, in particular, its poststructuralist articulation. It analyses the approach to radical democracy taken by a number of contemporary theorists and ...
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This book addresses the idea of radical democracy and, in particular, its poststructuralist articulation. It analyses the approach to radical democracy taken by a number of contemporary theorists and political commentators, including Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, William Connolly, Jacques Ranciére, Claude Lefort, Sheldon Wolin, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben. By examining critically the accounts of democracy advanced by these theorists, the book explores how a more radically conceived theory of democracy might be extended in a more egalitarian and inclusive direction. It draws on the insights of radical democratic theory to explore a range of concrete political cases (e.g. the struggles of indigenous people, same-sex marriage, societies emerging from prolonged social and political strife, and the role of social movements in opposing processes of globalistion) in order to illustrate its practical nature.Less
This book addresses the idea of radical democracy and, in particular, its poststructuralist articulation. It analyses the approach to radical democracy taken by a number of contemporary theorists and political commentators, including Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Judith Butler, William Connolly, Jacques Ranciére, Claude Lefort, Sheldon Wolin, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri and Giorgio Agamben. By examining critically the accounts of democracy advanced by these theorists, the book explores how a more radically conceived theory of democracy might be extended in a more egalitarian and inclusive direction. It draws on the insights of radical democratic theory to explore a range of concrete political cases (e.g. the struggles of indigenous people, same-sex marriage, societies emerging from prolonged social and political strife, and the role of social movements in opposing processes of globalistion) in order to illustrate its practical nature.
Joel Nickels
- Published in print:
- 2012
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816676088
- eISBN:
- 9781452947716
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816676088.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book challenges the conventional image of modernism as a socially phobic formation, arguing that modernism’s abstractions and difficulties are ways of imagining unrealized powers of collective ...
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This book challenges the conventional image of modernism as a socially phobic formation, arguing that modernism’s abstractions and difficulties are ways of imagining unrealized powers of collective self-organization. Establishing a conceptual continuum between modernism and contemporary theorists such as Paulo Virno, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou, this book rediscovers modernism’s attempts to document the creative potenza of the multitude. By examining scenes of collective life in works by William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding, and Wallace Stevens, this book resurrects modernism’s obsession with constituent power: the raw, indeterminate capacity for reciprocal counsel that continually constitutes and reconstitutes established political regimes. In doing so, it reminds us that our own attempts to imagine leaderless networks of collective initiative are not so much breaks with modernist forms of knowledge as restagings of some of modernism’s most radical moments of political speculation.Less
This book challenges the conventional image of modernism as a socially phobic formation, arguing that modernism’s abstractions and difficulties are ways of imagining unrealized powers of collective self-organization. Establishing a conceptual continuum between modernism and contemporary theorists such as Paulo Virno, Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou, this book rediscovers modernism’s attempts to document the creative potenza of the multitude. By examining scenes of collective life in works by William Carlos Williams, Wyndham Lewis, Laura Riding, and Wallace Stevens, this book resurrects modernism’s obsession with constituent power: the raw, indeterminate capacity for reciprocal counsel that continually constitutes and reconstitutes established political regimes. In doing so, it reminds us that our own attempts to imagine leaderless networks of collective initiative are not so much breaks with modernist forms of knowledge as restagings of some of modernism’s most radical moments of political speculation.
Christopher Breu
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780816688913
- eISBN:
- 9781452949178
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of Minnesota Press
- DOI:
- 10.5749/minnesota/9780816688913.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This book engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to ...
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This book engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to readings that emphasize the metafictional qualities of these works, this book examines this literature’s focus on the material conditions of everyday life, from the body to built environments, and from ecosystems to economic production. The book rethinks contemporary understandings of biopolitics, affirming the importance of forms of materiality that refuse full socialization and resist symbolic manipulation. The text considers a range of novels that reflect questions of materiality in a biopolitical era, including William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Thomas Pynchon’s V., J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Drawing from accounts of the emergence of immaterial production and biopolitics by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, this book reveals the confrontational dimensions of materiality itself in a world devoted to the idea of its easy malleability and transcendence.Less
This book engages with recent theories of materiality and biopolitics to provide a radical reinterpretation of experimental fiction in the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast to readings that emphasize the metafictional qualities of these works, this book examines this literature’s focus on the material conditions of everyday life, from the body to built environments, and from ecosystems to economic production. The book rethinks contemporary understandings of biopolitics, affirming the importance of forms of materiality that refuse full socialization and resist symbolic manipulation. The text considers a range of novels that reflect questions of materiality in a biopolitical era, including William S. Burroughs’s Naked Lunch, Thomas Pynchon’s V., J. G. Ballard’s Crash, Dodie Bellamy’s The Letters of Mina Harker, and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Almanac of the Dead. Drawing from accounts of the emergence of immaterial production and biopolitics by Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, this book reveals the confrontational dimensions of materiality itself in a world devoted to the idea of its easy malleability and transcendence.
Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- November 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780231158039
- eISBN:
- 9780231528078
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Columbia University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7312/columbia/9780231158039.001.0001
- Subject:
- Philosophy, Political Philosophy
Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal ...
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Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall. Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy conception of the proletariat, this text recasts Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings—in technology, empire, and industrialization—are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, this text expresses a fear that this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, it adopts an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities yet intervenes against violence.Less
Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall. Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy conception of the proletariat, this text recasts Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings—in technology, empire, and industrialization—are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, this text expresses a fear that this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, it adopts an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty. Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities yet intervenes against violence.
