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This chapter examines Park Chan Wook's “vengeance trilogy”: Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance (Boksuneun naui geot, 2002), Oldboy (2003), and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance (Chinjeolhan geumjassi, 2005). It analyzes a number of elements that characterize the main trope of Park's films including the trope of captivity, mystification of spatial markers, separation of planes of representation and signification, and the camera's “flat” wide-angle shot. It also evaluates whether or not the post-politics or anti-history of Park Chan-wook can yield a political reading when placed in a Korean historical context.

The Conclusion offers a metaphor from the physics of flow for understanding the methodology and substance in this book. As opposed to laminar flow, which has a linear or unidirectional force, turbulent flow exemplifies dynamic, sometimes explosive, variation. The turbulent flow of politics needs an approach that can match its character. It notes that interdisciplinarity was necessary to capture the full measure of what is at stake and what has transpired in the development of post-politics. After discussing turbulence, the Conclusion recaps key insights from the book. And, in the hopes of provoking additional work on post-politics, the Conclusion discusses recent examples, namely Barack Obama’s continued support for My Brother’s Keeper; Michelle Obama’s memoir Becoming; 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidate Kamala Harris; and the reaction to the documentary Surviving R. Kelly. The Conclusion pays special attention to the way in which post-politics explains the surprise some experienced at the ascension of Donald Trump, arguing that post-politics is best seen as range of competing fantasies that still vie for public attention and action, all designed to undermine collective efforts at progressive social change. Post-politics is an analytic we need to understand turbulent futures.

This chapter examines the contribution that G.H. Mead’s conception of the self can make to understanding political subjectivity, and deploys this approach in a case study of urban politics in the UK. Mead argued that the social self is created through relations with other human actors, but that the emergent and impulsive ‘I’ of the self can disrupt, reject and challenge intersubjectively created ‘significant symbols’ that guide and give meaning to actors and society through recognition by both the conveyer and responder, shaping what he called the ‘me’. Mead’s conceptions of the ‘I and me’ of the self, and the role of powerful significant symbols, are deployed in an examination of new forms of city-regional government in England. This case study demonstrates how political agency is partly constructed by broader significant symbols that are utilised in the construction of this new governance arena, and how local actors seek to conform to or contest this new political landscape. The chapter applies Mead’s pragmatism as a counterpoint to dominant academic ideas about the power of neoliberalism and the post-political in understanding these and other developments.

In recent years a growing body of literature has begun to theorise contemporary depoliticisation in terms of post-politics, post-democracy, and the post-political. This chapter provides an introduction to this literature, in preparations for the more involved debates that form the substance of the book. We conceptualise the post-political as a ‘Borromean Knot’ comprising the Imaginary – the ideology of ‘the end of history’; the Symbolic – the institutional mechanisms through which politics is reduced to the consensual management of economic necessity; and the Real – the ontological erasure of ‘the political difference’ between a given social order and the establishment of that order on an always absent ground. We then introduce the conceptualizations of the post-political in the work of Chantal Mouffe, Jacques Rancière, and Slavoj Žižek. We argue that Mouffe is concerned with the post-political as the repression of antagonism, Rancière with post-democracy as the disavowal of equality, and Žižek with post-politics as the foreclosure of class struggle. These distinct theoretical approaches provide the grounds for divergent understandings of ‘the return of the political’. We conclude by outlining the key arguments that are played out in the book.

This chapter focuses on the legacies of privatisation in key welfare sectors in the UK, and the structural limits that Public Private Partnerships and Private Finance Initiatives place on their governance and management. It contends that the principles of accountability and democracy that underpinned the post-war settlement are being systematically eroded at the same time as administrations have consistently promised greater community empowerment and control. The discussion looks, in particular, at the role of the ‘new contractualism’ in shaping the boundaries of the political and in seeking to limit the scope and scale of urban conflict. It examines the extent to which this is occurring and the implications of the findings for broader understandings of the ‘political’.

The majority of the literature on the post-political is focused on Europe and North America. This chapter draws on the case of India to argue that processes of post-politicisation are equally underway across the Global South. Politics seems to be the stuff of everyday life in India, with its numerous political parties representing every possible ideological hue from nationalist right to communist left; its diverse array of non-governmental organizations; and numerous organizations engaged in struggles for people’s rights. However, this image of a vibrant, dynamic political culture overlays a subtle and discernable shift towards a post-political society. Across a class divide that has only deepened in a ‘globalizing’ India, ideological debates between high growth rates versus sustainable development have all but disappeared from public discourse. The chapter charts the ways in which civil society has gradually been evacuated as a site of radical politics through the growth of the NGO sector, the rise of the ‘new institutional economics’, and the institutionalisation of the ‘self-help’ movement.

Philanthrocapitalism is the name given to the recent trend towards the funding and management of development programmes by philanthropic foundations. This chapter analyses philanthrocapitalism as an ideological formation, which I locate within the ‘post-political’ modality of contemporary depoliticization. Drawing on the work of Slavoj Žižek, I suggest that this ideological formation is sustained by a specific economy of jouissance, which sutures the class antagonism of Western capitalist societies through fostering libidinal attachments and fantasies of organic wholeness against the unknowable enjoyment of an African Other. I argue that the post-political should therefore be understood as operating not only at the level of discourses and institutions, but also through the mobilisation and regulation of specific forms of jouissance. This argument is developed through a critique of the Millennium Promise foundation. Millennium Promise was founded in 2005 by the billionaire venture capitalist Ray Chambers and the celebrity development economist Jeffrey Sachs, with the aim of ‘ending poverty’ in a series of model villages across sub-Saharan Africa. Millennium Promise embodies the post-political consensus of contemporary ‘global governance’, while its celebration of philanthropic largesse, its discursive framing of ‘Africa’, and its developmental fantasies all demonstrate the operation of jouissance as a post-political factor.

The article discusses post-politics in relation to the contemporary ‘return’ of religion. I start with considering some of the paradoxes that are visible in the horizon of post-political society. The pivot around which this discussion is organized is the sovereignty-governmentality-visibility nexus. In this context I am especially interested in the relationship between sovereignty and governmentality, which takes the form of a disjunctive synthesis. Then, to articulate the religious motives that are constitutive of this paradoxical relationship, I turn to political and economic theology. To end with, I discuss capitalism as religion, linking this back to the concept of post-politics.

This chapter examines the limits of post-politics through a case study of CoExist. CoExist is a registered Community Interest Company based in Stokes Croft, Bristol. It was set up in August 2008 to manage spaces in which people can coexist (verb – to exist in harmony) with themselves, with each other, and with the environment. The expressed ambition is to establish CoExist specifically, and the city of Bristol more generally, as a ‘beacon of good practice’ that will enable others to emulate this grass-roots model of socio-environmental innovation. Can CoExist’s model for fostering economically and environmentally sustainable futures avoid the traps of gentrification and subsequent socio-economic displacement? Why does CoExist want to build ‘inter-institutional relationships of mutual benefit’ when we already know the problems that arise when government agencies and universities ‘partner’ with NGOs and community organisations? This chapter reviews relevant theoretical and substantive debates in an effort to analyse the new political-economic formations and processes of political re-invention ensuing after neoliberalism. It argues that claims about post-politicization risk overlooking the importance of micro-political experiments such as CoExist in the search for alternative socio-environmental futures.

This chapter builds on recent criticisms of the speculative left and more abstract-declarative or metaphysical readings of the truly political. It does so by turning to the historically and geographically nuanced critique of speculative philosophy in the writings of Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci, I argue, critiques what we understand as the ‘post-political condition’ through a philosophy of praxis that is deeply attentive to questions of translation, both between different contexts and between philosophy and politics. Nevertheless, understandings of Gramsci have been refracted over the last four decades through a range of different projects, each of which have sought to capture his legacy for its own ‘political’ ends. In this regard, I trace Chantal Mouffe’s relationship with Gramsci as in part representative of both changing understandings of the political and also of the changing reception of Gramsci’s work. For Gramsci to become a key ally in the contemporary critique of the post-political condition, we need to understand not only how to transform a philosophy of praxis from a speculative to an absolute immanence but also the manner in which readings of Gramsci and the political are overdetermined by the different conjunctures in which they appear.

This chapter performs an ethnographic reading of the Indignants’ occupation of Athens’ Syntagma Square during the summer of 2011. In doing so, we move beyond approaches that either demonize the Indignant Squares as an apolitical/post-post political crowd gathering or idealize them as the model of 21^st century political praxis. Reading the spatial and discursive repertoires that unfolded in and through the Indignant Squares, we highlight the existence of not one, but two distinct Indignant Squares, each with its own topography (upper and lower square), and its own discursive and material practices. While both squares staged dissent, they nevertheless articulated conflicting, and at times radically opposing, political imaginaries. On the one hand, the ‘upper square’ remained confined within ritualistic moaning and cursing, often emanating nationalist and/or xenophobic discourses. On the other, the ‘lower square’ evolved around more organized efforts to stage a politics of direct democratic practices and solidarity. Building on this account, we argue for a more nuanced analysis of the organizational, spatial and discursive choreographies of events like the Indignant Squares. Reading Indignant Squares in the plural, we maintain, helps explore in more grounded ways the possibilities as well as the limitations of these events in instituting democratic politics.

During 2011, popular movements in Greece, Spain, and the United States included claims that the movements were “post-political.” Neither left nor right, some activists urged, the massing of thousands in public squares was a rejection of politics and a move to something else. This chapter will consider the oddness of a politics claiming not to be political, elaborating on the contexts in which the claims are raised, as well as the political conflicts the label of “post-political” obscures. I argue that in popular movements of occupation the claim to be post-political operates in multiple registers: a rejection of parliamentarianism, an attempt to constitute a new political space, and as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet cutting through all these registers is a more profound division that the language of post-politics attempts to repress or displace – class conflict. Thus, I argue that the very attempt to displace class via an emphasis on post-politics is helping to usher in the contemporary return of communism.

In the concluding chapter, the authors return to the question of democracy. Yet in the on-going fallout from the global financial crisis, even the least radical of democrats would struggle to disagree with Alain Badiou’s assertion that democracy now means ‘nothing more than an eager willingness to service the needs of the banks’ or his claim that what passes for democracy would be more accurately named ‘capitalo-parliamentarism’. In this context, the chapter argues that any commitment to democracy that precludes the urgent transformation of the capitalist mode of production can only be regarded as part of the problem. It is from this perspective that the idea of communism is discussed, an idea that may galvanize a new emancipatory imaginary.

Science Fiction Film discusses a range of sci-fi films addressing specific aspects of the political dimension in the post-political age such as the end of liberalism (and ideology), politics-as-administration, security, the state of emergency, totalitarianism, and biopolitics that, insofar as one can talk about a demarcated genre paradigm, situate these films apart from their predecessors. These films, in different ways, reactivate political potential through plots that involve envisioning a radically unpredictable future at a time when we perhaps more intensely than ever before have become aware of the limits of our imagination, of our ability to think beyond ourselves. If the collective imagination of the present can no longer think beyond the notion of a post-political society, the sense of the political, albeit in deferred form, may be resuscitated precisely through a genre that intensely explores political images of our future and thus allows us to rediscover the possibility of moving beyond the post-political malaise. What this late version of the sci fi film genre ultimately attempts to articulate is the impossible: to predict the political implications of a future that remains radically unpredictable in the present.

The littérature-monde Manifesto, published in March 2007 by Michel Le Bris, Jean Rouaud, and other writers, deconstructs the French/Francophone binary and calls for ‘world literature in French’. The manifesto, along with the follow up chapters written by Le Bris and Rouaud for their edited collection, is haunted by the potential dissolution of literature in general and French literature in particular. This chapter focuses on the contributions of Édouard Glissant and the Haitian novelist Lyonel Trouillot, two of those who signed the original Manifesto, and its ‘post-politics’. It examines the Manifesto's fetishistic representation of ‘literature’ under threat and Glissant's contribution to the collection: an interview entitled ‘Solitaire et solidaire’.