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This chapter addresses the question of how alterity transforms the political. It re-examines a famously fraught question in Emmanuel Levinas's work, which is what remains of politics and the political after ‘ethics as first philosophy’. The chapter investigates how the body of the political subject signifies political obligations, and how signification prescribes certain ways of thinking about community and hegemony.

“Who Changes the World: The Political Subject-in-Outline” introduces the idea of the political subject-in-outline to creatively engage with the tension between the exclusionary character of the political subject and its necessity for agency. It explains why giving up on the subject altogether or theorizing it as a constantly shifting entity is implicated in the project of capitalism, and acknowledges the necessity of defining a political subject to critique and transform capitalism. Yet its outline reminds people that any definition of the political subject must remain permanently open for contestation to avoid its exclusionary character. This chapter also explains that the subject-in-outline aims to establish a mediated relation between the universal and particular, as well as mind and body. Furthermore, it shows that the idea of a political subject-in-outline can help people avoid alienation, instrumental relations, and the coldness of love in capitalism.

This chapter relates that in the past two decades, postcolonial theory has been preoccupied with two categories that underpin the operations of colonial discourse; that of the subject and that of history. The discriminatory function of aesthetic culture is what makes it a necessary object of postcolonial theory and which makes critical a rethinking of the aesthetic from the place of the sensible body as an arrangement of differentiation rather than identity. This chapter also points out that both the transcendental and physiological accounts of the aesthetic and political subject remain inscribed within a precocious, as well as unilateral, universalization of a singular conception of the human.

“Introduction” introduces the reader to the tensions inherent in theorizing the when, who, how, and what of sociopolitical change and the controversial debates it has created. It shows how the ideas of the “moment of the limit” and the “political subject-in-outline” allow one to creatively engage with these tensions and solve the dilemmas inherent in the idea of the political subject. It furthermore introduces the reader to the figures that are central in the book: Marx, Adorno, and Lacan. It explains why these figures have been kept at the margins of political and feminist theory, and why people need to engage with these thinkers to theorize sociopolitical change. Finally, it explains the structure of the book in two parts, where the first part develops the idea of the political subject-in-outline, and the second part applies this idea to the feminist political subject and the working-class woman as a political subject.

“The When of Sociopolitical Transformation: The Moment of the Limit” introduces the idea of the moment of the limit to engage with the first tension inherent in the idea of the political subject—the tension between the idea of a free and autonomous subject that is not impacted by power, and the idea of a subject as completely subjected to power. It acknowledges the ways in which subjects are subjected to power in capitalism, but avoids postulating the idea of a subjected subject through theorizing the moment of the limit, which it accomplishes through a reading of the real (Lacan) and the non-identical (Adorno). The moment of the limit is the moment when power fails to completely subject or subordinate individuals, and at this moment the political subject with the capacity to not only resist but to transform the status quo can emerge.

The chapter presents a trajectory of community development in India. It places a special emphasis on the processes of mobilization and collective action that transform underprivileged communities into political subjects. It analyses communities as agents and subjects of development with agency to act and dissent vis-a-vis policies and programmes of state, government and non-governmental organizations. The paper explains India’s hierarchical social structure and its implications for communities’ experiences of power and powerlessness. The multidimensional aspects of poverty, deprivation and exclusion are elaborated upon, and the chapter argues that identity-based experiences of exclusion highlight both the limits and potential of community organization. Drawing from a case study of community-based organization led by Dalits, the chapter also highlights experiences of indignity and un-freedom as it brings forth examples of resistance against situations of marginality and deprivation.

The recent wave of ethno-racial reforms in Colombia and Brazil not only institutionalized black political subjects into the law but they also created ethno-racial state apparatuses that catalyzed the institutionalization of black movement actors. This chapter examines how everyday political practices in these new contexts—in which blacks were now legitimated as the subjects of rights and in which a myriad of new state institutions managed ethno-racial issues—have constructed new kinds of black political subjects in Colombia and Brazil. It draws on government documents, interviews, and insights from ethnographic fieldwork to make sense of how black movement actors in Colombia and Brazil navigated the new political landscape.

Chapter 5 reflects on a Kristevan conception of maternal time in contrast to a conception of national time. National time is progressive (teleological): it has a clear start, middle and end point, which is normally used to distinguish the self from an Other temporally and spatially. This chapter considers how maternal time is linked to eternity and cycles rather than progress and thus undermines the ability to base the idea of ‘I’ in a particular moment in time (the present) which can be distinguished from a similar moment (in the future or the past) and therefore an ‘Other’ which is distinct from the ‘self’. Kristeva's notion of maternal time is used here to destabilise, the prominence of national time and to explore how we can think about alternative temporal possibilities more generally. The experiences of intergenerational migrant youth are recast in this chapter through the possibility that the political subject itself is fragmented in terms of many different types of contingent space and fragmented temporality, rather than located only in dualistic space and linear progressive temporality without limits. The chapter argues that exploring this line of inquiry is an example of actually challenging the existing spatio-temporal terms of The Citizenship Debate.

“Rejecting the Politics of (Mis)Recognition: Butler Revisited,” applies some of the ideas of Part I of the book to the idea of the feminist political subject. It explains that although Butler does not propose a wholeness of power, her selective reading of Lacan—her rejection of the real and his notion of the unconscious, her holding on to the language of recognition, and her use of his notion of the ego—generates a wholeness of power, which makes it difficult to envision agency within her theoretical framework. It explains that the idea of the (feminist) political subject-in-outline embraces limit concepts and the concept of the unconscious, and aims at a clear break with the language of recognition and the politics of the ego.

“Conclusion” comes back to the tensions inherent in the idea of the political subject, and reviews how the book addresses these tensions. It discusses the tensions inherent in the idea of the political subject in Part I of the book, and how the idea of the political subject-in-outline developed in the book creatively engages with these tensions. It also explains the ways in which Part II related to the first part of the book by discussing how cultural and economic forces are interconnected, and how the conception of the unconscious connects Part I and Part II of the book.

This chapter briefly discusses three insights into early modern British engagement with risk: the presence of a distinct conceptual refinement in late seventeenth-century sources; the tight relationship between risk and trust in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century political thought and political economy; and the character of the political subject, which is worked out in the early modern engagement with risk. Beyond these three observations, the chapter also argues that early modern British engagement with risk offers two narratives—views of risk that persist in our own time and shape our orientation toward an unknown future. These include accounts of risk as a threat to security, as well as depictions of risk as an opportunity to be exploited for profit or gain.

A legacy of the ‘Long Cold War’ can be found in the multiple large-scale interrelated remote sensing systems operative in the present. Smart dust, for example, constitutes the basis of polyscalar computer systems of remote sensing at micro-levels and relates to ubiquitous computing, ‘pervasive networks’ and ‘utility fogs’ as potentially transmitting endless streams of ‘real time’ or stored data. Developed initially for DARPA, Smart Dust started with work by Kris Pister's team at UC Berkeley, who refer to the project as ‘autonomous sensing and communication in a cubic millimetre.’ The Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963 pushed nuclear testing underground, forcing innovations in modes of remote sensing for purposes of verification. Because so much of teletechnological development depends on the understanding of the subject as an agent enacting its will upon a world of objects (including other subjects), the means of imagining extensions of that sensing and acting self invariably fold into and influence the interpretation of that self. The chapter provides a meditation on 'the auto-' and ‘the nomos’ as they pertain to autonomous sensing systems and the immaterial worlds that helped them come into being as well as their continuation into further systems of control at a distance.

The conversation begins with an exploration about what it means to think with multiple resources (in theoretical and disciplinary terms). It then turns to the importance of seeing political subjects ’behaving badly’. It then explores the productive problems of defining NGOs, before ending with troubling thoughts.

This chapter presents the author's account of how she came to consciousness as a Caribbean American subject. Her story begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King was killed during her freshman year in university. It was in a university in Eastern Shore, Maryland, in a close-knit community of African American students from the D.C./Maryland/North East Corridor that she came to a full understanding of herself as a black political subject in the U.S. racial context in the middle of the Black Power movement. King's passing in many ways captured the transition to a youth movement through which one could actually make tangible political claims beyond the meaning of civil rights.