Patricia Ticineto Clough, Craig Willse (eds.): Beyond Biopolitics: Essays on the Governance of Life and Death (2011)

Under the auspices of neoliberalism, technical systems of compliance and efficiency have come to underwrite the relations among the state, the economy, and a biopolitics of war, terror, and surveillance. In Beyond Biopolitics, prominent theorists seek to account for and critically engage the tendencies that have informed neoliberal governance in the past and are expressed in its reformulation today. As studies of military occupation, the policing of migration, blood trades, financial markets, the war on terror, media ecologies, and consumer branding, the essays explore the governance of life and death in a near-future, a present emptied of future potentialities. The contributors delve into political and theoretical matters central to projects of neoliberal governance, including states of exception that are not exceptional but foundational; risk analysis applied to the adjudication of “ethical” forms of war, terror, and occupation; racism and the management of the life capacities of populations; the production and circulation of death as political and economic currency; and the potential for critical and aesthetic response. Together, the essays offer ways to conceptualize biopolitics as the ground for today’s reformulation of governance.

Contributors: Ann Anagnost, Una Chung, Patricia Ticineto Clough, Steve Goodman, Sora Y. Han, Stefano Harney, May Joseph, Randy Martin, Brian Massumi, Luciana Parisi, Jasbir Puar, Amit S. Rai, Eugene Thacker, Çağatay Topal, and Craig Willse.

Publisher Duke University Press, 2011
ISBN 0822350173, 9780822350170
400 pages

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Gary Genosko (ed.): The Guattari Reader (1996)

Félix Guattari (1930-1992) was a radical analyst, social theorist and activist-intellectual. Best known for his collaborations with the philosopher Gilles Deleuze on Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus and What is Philosophy?, The Guattari Reader makes available for the first time the broad canvas of Guattari’s formidable theoretical and activist writings, many previously untranslated, to provide an indispensable companion to the existing literature.Aside from illustrating the salience of Guattari’s collaborative work with Deleuze and other European intellectuals, this volume charts Guattari’s own solo writing career – from his tenure as Lacan’s analysand in the 1950s and his prominent role in the international anti-psychiatry movement of the 1960s through his participation in queer politics, outlaw radio, and the formation of subversive collective organizations. This volume provides an important register of Guattari’s more political side, documenting his interventions in particular political conflicts in contemporary Europe. Guattari’s ideas and projects defy disciplinary boundaries and escape compartmentalization. They will appeal to those working in and between politics, philosophy, semiotics, psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural studies.

Publisher Blackwell Publishers, 1996
ISBN 0631197079, 9780631197072
304 pages

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Jane Bennett: Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (2010)

“In Vibrant Matter the political theorist Jane Bennett, renowned for her work on nature, ethics, and affect, shifts her focus from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of nonhuman forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and nonhuman. Bennett explores how political analyses of public events might change were we to acknowledge that agency always emerges as the effect of ad hoc configurations of human and nonhuman forces. She suggests that recognizing that agency is distributed this way, and is not solely the province of humans, might spur the cultivation of a more responsible, ecologically sound politics: a politics less devoted to blaming and condemning individuals than to discerning the web of forces affecting situations and events.

Bennett examines the political and theoretical implications of vital materialism through extended discussions of commonplace things and physical phenomena including stem cells, fish oils, electricity, metal, and trash. She reflects on the vital power of material formations such as landfills, which generate lively streams of chemicals, and omega-3 fatty acids, which can transform brain chemistry and mood. Along the way, she engages with the concepts and claims of Spinoza, Nietzsche, Thoreau, Darwin, Adorno, and Deleuze, disclosing a long history of thinking about vibrant matter in Western philosophy, including attempts by Kant, Bergson, and the embryologist Hans Driesch to name the “vital force” inherent in material forms. Bennett concludes by sketching the contours of a “green materialist” ecophilosophy.”

Publisher Duke University Press, 2010
John Hope Franklin Center Book series
ISBN 0822346338, 9780822346333
200 pages

interview (Peter Gratton)
the book’s reading group: announcement, wrap-up, final overview

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PDF, PDF (thanks to esco_bar; updated on 2012-7-25)