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The discussion opens with some brief reflections by Fernand Léger, Samuel Beckett, and Roland Barthes on the relationship between art and labour. The work of Jacques Rancière is then introduced and shown to be centrally relevant to this question, in particular his Le Maître ignorant [The Ignorant Schoolmaster] and Courts voyages au pays du peuple [Short Voyages to the Land of the People]. Rejecting the bourgeois distinction that sees art accorded prestige and manual work devalorized, Rancière insists on the homology that links the handling of tools and of words. He uses this equalizing to endorse both literary endeavour and manual labour. In his essay in Courts voyages on Rossellini’s film Europa 51, Rancière writes of an ‘aesthetic and ethical practice of equality’ and an important aim of the present book will be to explore forms of imbrication involving textual poetics and social ethics. The Introduction then sets out the range of texts and authors to be considered in the course of the book. How they present certain cultural objects and practices will form an overarching motif in the book.

This essay focuses on the inherent globality of anticaste thought, and underscores the significance of historical comparison (race, class, minority) in the writings of key thinkers who predicated radical equality on the annihilation of caste. The essay argues against culturalizing caste, which has been the dominant mode for apprehending its social specificity, and instead argues that efforts at political commensuration offer key instances for understanding heterodox histories and practices of subject formation. By placing anticaste thought within a global field of concern about historic dispossession and human emancipation, the essay also addresses the politics of the twentieth century through a genealogy of the exceptional subject, e.g., the Dalit [outcaste] or the remainder, and argues that this offers rich possibilities for enlarging the conceptual matrix of “politics” and political subjectivity.

The essays collected in this volume demonstrate that a critical perspective anchored in conflict and multiplicity at the edge of what is termed “human” can generate fresh assessments of the ways in which Latin American cultural production has confronted historical, ethical, political, and economic processes. Such cultural production at the edge of the human promotes awareness of the ways in which the decentering of the human subject, now so often invoked as a means of encouraging radical equality across species lines, has also been used as an instrument of oppression and exclusion across history. Our principal argument is that a conceptual focus on “limits” as figures of human-nonhuman relations allows for the opening up of new dimensions to longstanding debates around identity and difference, the local and the global, and coloniality and power in Latin American culture.

The fifth chapter seeks to position anarchism as an ethical philosophy of nonviolence and the absolute rejection of war. The argument contextualizes outside of religion and within the processual framework of radical democracy and agonism in seeking to redress the ageographical and ahistorical notions of politics that comprise the contemporary post-political zeitgeist. If archy is generically understood as systematized rule, it stands to reason that any form of it must be learned. Before children are born into identities, nationalities, religions, genders, or otherwise, they are simply babies. Babies know nothing of the political, economic, social, and cultural structures and strictures into which they have arrived. At the moment of birth, they are “radical equals”, and in this way peace is attainable.