Mark Neocleous

The violence and destruction hiding behind the obsession with immunity Our contemporary political condition is obsessed with immunity. The immunity of bodies and the body politic; personal immunity and herd immunity; how to immunize the social system against breakdown. The obsession intensifies with every new crisis and the mobilization of yet more powers of war and police, from quarantine to border closures and from vaccination certificates to immunological surveillance. Engaging four key concepts with enormous cultural weight – Cell, Self, System and Sovereignty – Politics of Immunity moves from philosophical biology to intellectual history and from critical theory to psychoanalysis to expose the politics underpinning the way immunity is imagined. At the heart of this imagination is the way security has come to dominate the whole realm of human experience. From biological cell to political subject, and from physiological system to the social body, immunity folds into security, just as security folds into immunity. The book thus opens into a critique of the violence of security and spells out immunity’s tendency towards self-destruction and death: immunity, like security, can turn its aggression inwards, into the autoimmune disorder. Wide-ranging and polemical, Politics of Immunity lays down a major challenge to the ways in which the immunity of the self and the social are imagined.

Security and the Policing of Bodies

The Politics of Immunity

Provides a concise overview of debates surrounding fascism.

Fascism

Putting police power into the centre of the picture of capitalism The ubiquitous nature and political attraction of the concept of order has to be understood in conjunction with the idea of police. Since its first publication, this book has been one of the most powerful and wide-ranging critiques of the police power. Neocleous argues for an expanded concept of police, able to account for the range of institutions through which policing takes place. These institutions are concerned not just with the maintenance and reproduction of order, but with its very fabrication, especially the fabrication of a social order founded on wage labour. By situating the police power in relation to both capital and the state and at the heart of the politics of security, the book opens up into an understanding of the ways in which the state administers civil society and fabricates order through law and the ideology of crime. The discretionary violence of the police on the street is thereby connected to the wider administrative powers of the state, and the thud of the truncheon to the dull compulsion of economic relations.

The Fabrication of the Social Order

A Critical Theory of Police Power

Outstanding contributors include Pierre Macherey, Charles Wolfe, Alex Callinicos and Judith Revel

The Fabrication of Social Order

尼古拉斯

本书分五章介绍了永恒的战争和理性的毁灭、“我首先成为一个民族主义者”、针对革命的革命(一):资本主义、国家权力和保守革命、针对革命的革命(二):法西斯主义之作为反动的现代主义、自然的刚性逻辑。

法西斯主义

Faşizm

Presents a critique of security and its study. Challenging the common assumption that treats security as an unquestionable good, this title explores the ways in which security has been deployed towards a vision of social order in which state power and liberal subjectivity have been inscribed into human experience.

Critique of Security

Examines the use of metaphors of monstrosity and the place of the dead in political theory, specifically in relation to conservatism, Marxism and fascism.

Burke, Marx, Fascism

The Monstrous and the Dead

“This is an excellent study… a valuable asset for anyone teaching or studying political theory or political sociology.” Network "Mark Neocleous offers a contemporary understanding of the modern state through the unusual medium of its body, mind and personality, and through the space it occupies in the social world. It's a work that not only draws upon our existing imagination of the state, but also feeds it." Professor Robert Fine *What is the connection between Ronald Reagan's bottom and the King's head? *Why are weather maps profoundly ideological? *How do corporations get away with murder? *Who are the scum of the earth? In this book Mark Neocleous explores such questions through a critique of what he describes as the statist political imaginary. Unpicking this imaginary while also avoiding traditional approaches to state power, the book examines the way that the state has been imagined in terms traditionally associated with human subjectivity: body, mind, personality and home. Around these themes and through an engagement with the work of a diverse range of writers, Neocleous weaves a set of arguments concerning the three icons of the political imagination - the political collective, the sovereign agency and the enemy figure. From these arguments he draws out some telling connections between the role of the state in fabricating order, the social and juridical power of capital, and the relation between fascism and bourgeois ideology.

EBOOK: Imagining the State

George S. Rigakos

Security has reached an analytic blockage. The more security seems post-political, post-social, or even post-modern the more it escapes analytic scrutiny. The more security attaches itself to innumerable social relationships the more it becomes the very glue that binds social reality. Social problems become security problems while projects of pacification continue to be legitimized under the rubric of security. To be against security today is to stand against the entire global economic system. If security has become the dominant, perhaps impenetrable concept of our times, then we must start entertaining the impossible. We must begin asking: what would doing anti-security look like? Also contains "Anti-Security: A Declaration" (by Neocleous & Rigakos) Contents: Introduction 7; Anti-Security: A Declaration 15; [1] Security as Pacification, by: Mark Neocleous; [2] 'To Extend the Scope of Productive Labour': Pacification as a Police Project, by: George S. Rigakos; [3] Public Policing, Private Security, Pacifying Populations, by: Michael Kempa; [4] War on the Poor: Urban Poverty, Target Policing and Social Control, by: Gaetan Heroux; [5] 'Poor Rogues' and Social Police: Subsistence Wages, Payday Lending and the Politics of Security, by: Olena Kobzar; [6] Liberal Intellectuals and the Politics of Security, by: Will Jackson; [7] Security: Resistance, by: Heidi Rimke; [8] Security and the Void: Aleatory Materialism contra Governmentality, by: Ronjon Paul Datta; [9] 'All the People Necessary Will Die to Achieve Security', by: Guillermina Seri; Notes on contributors ..".'punches a hole' in the body of the depressingly 'pacified' strand of scholarship that police sociology has become..." - Georgios Papanicolaou, Teeside University

Anti-Security

The history of bourgeois modernity is a history of the Enemy. This book is a radical exploration of an Enemy that has recently emerged from within security documents released by the US security state: the Universal Adversary. The Universal Adversary is now central to emergency planning in general and, more specifically, to security preparations for future attacks. But an attack from who, or what? This book – the first to appear on the topic – shows how the concept of the Universal Adversary draws on several key figures in the history of ideas, said to pose a threat to state power and capital accumulation. Within the Universal Adversary there lies the problem not just of the ‘terrorist’ but, more generally, of the ‘subversive’, and what the emergency planning documents refer to as the ‘disgruntled worker’. This reference reveals the conjoined power of the contemporary mobilisation of security and the defence of capital. But it also reveals much more. Taking the figure of the disgruntled worker as its starting point, the book introduces some of this worker’s close cousins – figures often regarded not simply as a threat to security and capital but as nothing less than the Enemy of all Mankind: the Zombie, the Devil and the Pirate. In situating these figures of enmity within debates about security and capital, the book engages an extraordinary variety of issues that now comprise a contemporary politics of security. From crowd control to contagion, from the witch-hunt to the apocalypse, from pigs to intellectual property, this book provides a compelling analysis of the ways in which security and capital are organized against nothing less than the ‘Enemies of all Mankind’.

Mark Neocleous

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