Patricia Pisters (ed.): Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari (2001)

This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler’s List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing (‘in transition’) in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given.

Publisher Amsterdam University Press, 2001
ISBN 9053564721, 9789053564721
302 pages

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Philip Armstrong: Reticulations: Jean-Luc Nancy and the Networks of the Political (2009)

“Significantly advancing our notion of what constitutes a network, Philip Armstrong proposes a rethinking of political public space that specifically separates networks from the current popular discussion of globalization and information technology.

Analyzing a wide range of Jean-Luc Nancy’s works, Reticulations shows how his project of articulating the political in terms of singularities, pluralities, and multiplicities can deepen our understanding of networks and how they influence community and politics. Even more striking is the way Armstrong associates this general complex in Nancy’s writing with his concern for what Nancy calls the retreat of the political. Armstrong highlights what Nancy’s perspective on networks reveals about movement politics as seen in the 1999 protests in Seattle against the World Trade Organization, the impact of technology on citizenship, and finally how this perspective critiques the model of networked communism constructed by Hardt and Negri.

Contesting the exclusive link between technology and networks, Reticulations ultimately demonstrates how network society creates an entirely new politics, one surprisingly rooted in community.”

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2009
Volume 27 of Electronic mediations
ISBN 0816654905, 9780816654901
307 pages

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Oliver Marchart: Post-foundational Political Thought: Political Difference in Nancy, Lefort, Badiou and Laclau (2007)

“A wide-ranging overview of the emergence of post-foundationalism and a survey of the work of its key contemporary exponents. This book presents the first systematic coverage of the conceptual difference between ‘politics’ (the practice of conventional politics: the political system or political forms of action) and ‘the political’ (a much more radical aspect which cannot be restricted to the realms of institutional politics). It is also the first introductory overview of post-foundationalism and the tradition of ‘left Heideggerianism’: the political thought of contemporary theorists who make frequent use of the idea of political difference: Jean-Luc Nancy, Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, and Ernesto Laclau. After an overview of current trends in social post-foundationalism and a genealogical chapter on the historical emergence of the difference between the concepts of ‘politics’ and ‘the political’, the work of individual theorists is presented and discussed at length. Individual chapters are presented on the political thought of Jean-Luc Nancy (including Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe), Claude Lefort, Alain Badiou, and Ernesto Laclau (including Chantal Mouffe). Overall the book offers an elaboration of the idea of a post-foundational conception of politics.”

Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2007
ISBN 0748624988, 9780748624980
198 pages

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