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This chapter explores how Diderot makes the idler into a figure of modernity. Diderot's idler appears in urban space. In the title character of Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), he offers an example of alternative subjectivation. The dialogue between the philosopher and the vagabond brings face to face two opposing figures of idleness, as well as two opposing relationships to the work. Like Marivaux's Spectator, Diderot's philosopher enjoys free-floating, vaporous thought. The chapter shows how grouping idleness and laziness together under the rubric “désoeuvrement” (inactivity) establishes distinctions based on differences of social status and economic condition, which shed an interesting light on Diderot's dialogue.

The purpose of this chapter is to analyse bioprecarity in terms of two dimensions of Foucault’s biopolitics, categorization and subjectivization (Foucault 1977, 1982, 2002, 2008). With examples of the precarious lives of transpeople, especially those of colour, I engage with the conceptual arguments of Foucault), Judith Butler (1997, 2009) and Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991) regarding the relation between categorical framing and bioprecarity. The chapter explores how subjects as bodily selves are bound into population control and therefore normalized and regulated (Spade, 2011), how norms and regulations create bioprecarious situations for these bodily selves (Butler et al. 2013), the role of intersectionality (Crenshaw 1991) in creating such precarious positions and, finally, how such bioprecarity might be avoided (Lorey, 2010; Weheliye, 2014; Shotwell, 2016).

The conclusion outlines how the different chapters in the volume have contributed to elucidating the concept of bioprecarity. This involves analysing the complex entanglements created by the relationship between the body, life, the production, maintenance and application of categories, and intimate labour. These entanglements exist in a context of uneven distribution of power which means that particular social groups and individuals are rendered more bioprecarious than others through their positioning as bio-subjects. The volume shows that bioprecarity extends beyond contemporary, disenfranchised groups. It was also a key dimension of eugenicist histories, for example. At the same time however, we also indicate that bioprecarity is sometimes co-produced by those who install it and those who seek to benefit from bodily interventions and intimate labour. This means that questions of bio-citizenship needs to be addressed more widely since biotechnologization will remain a fact of contemporary life.

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]

This afterword departs more significantly from Rancière's own writings, as it makes an argument that Rancière himself has tended to resist. The chapter suggest that queer theory can serve to illuminate Rancière's account of democratic politics as a miscount (as a counting of those who do not count), and that, in complementary fashion, Rancière's sense of politics as the disruption of a hierarchical police order can productively illuminate the meaning and stakes of queer politics. The chapters shows the close compatibility between queer theory's relational sense of identity and Rancière's understanding of subjectivation not as identification but as disidentification. Reading together arguments from Judith Butler and from Rancière, the chapter develops the concept of unintelligibility, and shows that “the unintelligible” is a category that undoes the presumptions of liberal politics. Only a radical democratic politics, a queer politics, can make sense of the unintelligible without reducing it to a category of victimization or domination. A politics of and for queer theory is thus democratic in just Rancière's sense, and Rancière's democratic politics is queer, despite his protestations to the contrary.

This chapter presents a study on Médecins Sans Frontières and Médecins du Monde assistance programs in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to analyze the transformation of the status of witnesses in humanitarianism. Humanitarian workers, on the basis of a moral imperative, are increasingly taking on the role of witness for those they assist and thus end up as spokespeople for the oppressed in order to make their suffering public. The process of humanitarian subjectivation has found psychiatry a key tool for giving form to the experience of victims of war, disaster, and famine. The presence of mental health specialists in Médecins Sans Frontières and Médecins du Monde in their Palestinain missions where the health services are fairly equipped indicates their aim to expose the consequences of a humanitarian crisis. The massive overrepresentation of young men among the Palestinians who fought and died during the Second Intifada and the prevalence of enuresis in them is also discussed.

This chapter stresses the importance of Humboldt's relationship with Goethe and Schiller. Those great poets and playwrights inspired Humboldt and kept his mind focused upon the fundamental contribution made to language by great writers. This chapter highlights the creative nature of all language, and the expressive impulse in language which poets respond. Writers invigorate the shared understanding of the linguistic community. Men and women can choose to accept concepts and patterns of thinking, to criticise them and change them, or to invent new modes of expression. Most linguists find this aspect of Humboldt very difficult to digest. In contrast, a sensitive understanding of the creative potential of language can be found in the writing of the great contemporary, French, poet-linguist-translator, Henri Meschonnic. This chapter shows that Meschonnic is Humboldtian in that he understands language as a process of ‘Subjectivation’: we become individuals through language. Of the English linguists, with the exception of Sapir, few stress this aspect of language in discussions of linguistic worldviews.

In his earliest work, Deleuze presents a relational theory of subjectivity in constant flux. The larval, passive flux becomes an active subject capable of saying “I” through the exercise of certain capacities or faculties, namely, the habit of forming habits. Though the exercise of habit formation is passive, the result is an activated subject with the capacity to intervene in its own passive processes, capable of undertaking the difficult, transformative, and liberating work of destroying old habits of thinking and acting in favor of creating new ones that embrace fluidity, ambiguity, freedom, and difference. Yet, this capacity for catalyzing transformative change is frequently subverted from the inside. This is the ethical problem at the center of Deleuze’s ontology of change: the very habits that produce the conditions of becoming an ethical subject also produce the desire for repression of the fluidity of becoming. That is, the desire for fascism is the companion of the movement of subjectivation.

This chapter argues that the complex phenomenon known as neoliberalism reveals a radicalization and further internalization of the economic regime of desire, which defines liberalism, and which consists in a normalization of subjectivity through the promotion of self-interest and the maximization of utility. But it also departs from liberalism on a few key aspects, and introduces new norms and new technologies of desire. So, whilst neoliberalism inherits the normative framework initially introduced by the likes of James Stuart, Adam Smith, and John Stuart Mill, it also builds on it, and innovates: to the norms of interest and utility, through which individuals experience and govern their own subjectivity, it adds those of competition, efficiency, and management (of one’s life, one’s human capital, and the risks one is willing or encouraged to take). It sees those norms as inseparable, and as revealing the true mechanisms behind the actions and motivations of human beings.

This chapter extends the critical conclusion introduced in the previous chapter. Its main claim is that recognition is essentially misrecognition. Recognition is supposed to be about people’s right to be acknowledged as what they already really are. But what people "really are," the categories through which they identify themselves – categories of gender, ethnicity, nationality, race, sexuality – are generated not by the oppressed or the subordinated, but by the systems of power that generate the subordination. As a result, the struggle for recognition remains internal to the very rationality it seeks to challenge, and to the sphere of power it disputes. In other words, the desire and struggle for recognition is not critical enough. That is the reason why it’s only recognitive, rather than creative. In the end, a truly critical approach - one that can be found in Foucault, Butler, Deleuze-Guattari and various post-colonial thinkers - would dispute the very categories that are put forward as defining who or what one really is, denounce the assemblages of knowing and power they help secure, and seek to create the concepts ("becoming," "deterritorialization") and techniques through which one can become a different kind of self, and learn to desire differently.

Chapter 7 revisits the problems of colonialism and the colonial state by analyzing the brittle foundations of French power in rural Senegal and the deeply contested history of colonial rule in the Siin. Picking up on the discussion of state forms and political landscape begun in earlier chapters, it argues that rural milieus offer clues about the materiality of colonial rule, more specifically, about the logics of colonial government, and the conduits and channels through which French officials sought to manage colonized subjects. Peanut cash cropping is important to this story, and the material networks of commerce, habits, monetization and debt/credit it set in motion developed into central vectors of colonial transformation. The apparatus of peanut imperialism unfolded side-by-side with the development of colonial forms of knowledge designed to assist the subjection of Africans. Here, however, and in tandem with colonial ethnographies, rural assemblages also hint at the anxieties and epistemic confusion inhabiting the early days of colonial rule, as well as obstacles to its implementation. Siin’s colonial countryside thus emerges as a hesitant and nervous geography of power, whose outcomes were disputed, partial, and not quite foreseeable.

The introduction presents the basic question this book seeks to explore: How did the idea that humans are essentially their brains become thinkable? It also positions itself not “against” brain research, but against some of the most extravagant claims of the “neuro.” It explains that although the book does not explicitly explore the biopolitical repercussions of the neurosciences, it is “political” in the general sense that it deals with processes that touch on people’s lives, the constitution of subjectivities, and the distribution of power within societies. The introduction also presents the book’s threefold argument: First, the identification between brain and mind was made possible by early modern scientific and philosophical developments that affected notions of personhood. Second, neuroscientific research did not substantiate the “cerebralization” of personhood either conceptually or empirically; rather, it is an underlying presupposition that dictates the way research is done and its results interpreted. Finally, despite its powerful rhetoric, the cerebralization of personhood is neither necessary nor inevitable.

This chapter analyses whether narratives of politics and leadership that women members of Parliament employ and perform suggest that women’s precarious position within Parliament, party politics, and on the borders of the public and the private generate a vocabulary of service rather than leadership, which is seen as an appropriate characterisation of women’s public work. In order to study the subjectivation of women members of Parliament, the chapter analyses their subject narratives when they describe what they do, how others describe what they do, and how their roles are received by citizen audiences. In so doing, the chapter concludes that the subjectivation of women members of Parliament reflects, negotiates, and sometimes challenges gender relations that they encounter, perform, and sometimes defy.

Chapter three rethinks the notions of political community and democracy through Alex de la Iglesia’s La Comunidad (2000), and places them in the context of the anxieties attending Spain’s integration in the European Monetary Union (EMU) in 1999. Taking as starting points Jean Baudrillard’s vision of the “consumer society” and Jacques Rancière’s account of the “politics of consensus,” this chapter suggests that La Comunidad launches a powerful critique of the ideological presuppositions and “regimes of visibility” of Western liberal democracies. However, departing from previous analyses, it is argued that the real strength of the film lies not in its ability to render visible this order of domination, but rather in its ability to create an aesthetics of dissensus within the sensory world of the viewer. In this way, the film demonstrates not just the aesthetic dimension of politics, but the political character of aesthetics.

This chapter engages closely with Butler’s self-named “theory of subjection.” It demonstrates that by reading Althusser through Hegel, Butler strips away Althusser’s rich understanding of the social order as uneven and overdetermined. Butler’s narrow focus on desire and a philosophical “theory of subject” gives her no way to grasp or make sense of the social formation that provides the historical conditions of possibility for all subjects. Butler’s ontology of vulnerability and finitude serves the purpose of standing in for a more rigorous account of the social formation, and this substitution proves to be a poor one, since it reduces Butler’s work to the terms of liberal political philosophy.