Politics of the Many: Contemporary Radical Thought and the Crisis of Agency

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Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelleys celebrated call to arms: Ye are many they are few! This idea of the Many, as a general form of emancipatory subjectivity that cannot be erased for the sake of the One, is the philosophical and political assumption shared by contributors to this book. They raise questions of collective agency, and its crisis in contemporary capitalism, via new engagements with Marxist philosophy, psychoanalysis, theories of social reproduction and value-form, and post-colonial critiques, and drawing on activist thought and strategies. This book interrogates both established and emergent formations of the Many (the people, classes, publics, crowds, masses, multitudes), tracing their genealogies, their recent failures and victories, and their potentials to change the world. The book proposes and explores an intense and provoking series of new or reinvented concepts, figures, and theoretical constellations, including dividuality, the centaur, unintentional vanguard, insomnia at work, always-on capitalism, multitude (from its voiding to a (non)emergence), crowds, necropolitics, and the link between political subjectivity and value-form. The contributors to Politics of the Many are both acclaimed and emergent thinkers including Carina Brand, Rebecca Carson, Luhuna Carvalho, Lorenzo Chiesa, Jodi Dean, Dario Gentili, Benjamin Halligan, Marc James Lger, Paul Mazzocchi, Alexei Penzin, Stefano Pippa, Gerald Raunig, and Stevphen Shukaitis.

Reviews

In this rich and diverse collection of essays, a group of young imaginative intellectuals and experienced scholars tackle head on the question acutely political, deeply metaphysical - of the productivity of number. They turn the page of abstract unity and open the chapter of complex, emancipatory multiplicity. Lets follow them. * Etienne Balibar, Anniversary Chair of Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, UK *
A collective work capable of offering, through different perspectives and disciplinary approaches, an extremely precise survey of one of the central categories of the contemporary theoretical-political debate: the category of multitude in itself and in its metamorphosis. But the authors do not limit themselves to this, rather they propose a whole new series of theoretical tools to analyse the transformation of contemporary capitalism and, at the same time, to grasp chances for political action for many. * Vittorio Morfino, Full Professor in History of Philosophy, Universit di Milano-Bicocca, Italy *

Author Bio

Benjamin Halligan is Director of the Doctoral College of the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Alexei Penzin is Reader in Art at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Stefano Pippa is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wolverhampton, UK. Rebecca Carson is a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Kingston, University of London, UK and teaches in the Critical and Historical Studies programme at the Royal College of Art, London, UK.