Mario Neumann

Sandro Mezzadra

Klasse, Linkspopulismus und das Erbe von 1968

Jenseits von Interesse und Identität

Julian Reid

Ranabir Samaddar

This book offers an original analysis and theorization of the biopolitics of development in the postcolonial present, and draws significantly from the later works of Michel Foucault on biopolitics. Foucault’s works have had a massive influence on postcolonial literatures, particularly in political science and international relations, and several authors of this book have themselves made significant contributions to that influence. While Foucault’s thought has been inspirational for understanding colonial biopolitics as well as governmental rationalities concerned with development, his works have too often failed to inspire studies of political subjectivity. Instead, they have been used to stoke the myth of the inevitability of the decline of collective political subjects, often describing an increasingly limited horizon of political possibilities, and provoking a disenchantment with the political itself in postcolonial works and studies. Working against the grain of current Foucauldian scholarship, this book underlines the importance of Foucault’s work for the capacity to recognize how this degraded view of political subjectivity came about, particularly within the framework of the discourses and politics of ‘development’, and with particular attention to the predicaments of postcolonial peoples. It explores how we can use Foucault’s ideas to recover the vital capacity to think and act politically at a time when fundamentally human capacities to think, know and to act purposively in the world are being pathologized as expressions of the hubris and ‘underdevelopment’ of postcolonial peoples. Why and how it is that life in postcolonial settings has been depoliticized to such dramatic effect? The immediacy of these themes will be obvious to anyone living in the South of the world. But within the academy they remain heavily under-addressed. In thinking about what it means to read Michel Foucault today, this book tackles some significant questions and problems: Not simply that of how to explain the ways in which postcolonial regimes of governance have achieved the debasements of political subjectivity they have; nor that of how we might better equip them with the means to suborn the life of postcolonial peoples more fully; but that of how such peoples, in their subjection to governance, can and do resist, subvert, escape and defy the imposition of modes of governance which seek to remove their lives of those very capacities for resistance, subversion, flight, and defiance.

Reading Michel Foucault in the Postcolonial Present

The Biopolitics of Development

Brett Neilson

Far from creating a borderless world, contemporary globalization has generated a proliferation of borders. In Border as Method, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson chart this proliferation, investigating its implications for migratory movements, capitalist transformations, and political life. They explore the atmospheric violence that surrounds borderlands and border struggles across various geographical scales, illustrating their theoretical arguments with illuminating case studies drawn from Europe, Asia, the Pacific, the Americas, and elsewhere. Mezzadra and Neilson approach the border not only as a research object but also as an epistemic framework. Their use of the border as method enables new perspectives on the crisis and transformations of the nation-state, as well as powerful reassessments of political concepts such as citizenship and sovereignty.

Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor

Andrea Fumagalli

Crisis in the Global Economy is the latest and most innovative collective reflectionon the state of global capitalism, developed in the mobile "multiversity" of the UniNomadenetwork of international researchers and activists during the months immediately following the firstsignals of the current financial and economic crisis. It constitutes the first organic andinterdisciplinary attempt to analyze a crisis that is not merely financial in nature but implicatesglobalization and neoliberal capitalism.Crisis in the Global Economy begins with the recognitionthat the current financial crisis is a systemic crisis of the entire capitalistic system as it hasbeen developing since the 1890s. Taking as its premise that today's financial markets are thepulsing heart of cognitive capitalism, financing the activity of accumulation, Crisis in the GlobalEconomy shows how the flow of capital rewards production that exploits knowledge and controls spacesbeyond traditional business. The ineffectiveness of the extraordinary economic measures taken bysingle nation-states over the past few months demonstrates that this crisis is of a completelydifferent order. A financial crisis that affects the "real economy" shows thatfinancialization is one of the most recent and perverse articulations of capitalism.Thecontributions to Crisis in the Global Economy invite us to consider exit strategies from the currentcrisis--strategies that may lead us toward a new horizon of constructing the common.

Sandro Mezzadra

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