Politics of the Many

Contemporary Radical Thought and the Crisis of Agency

Dr Benjamin Halligan editor Alexei Penzin editor Stefano Pippa editor Rebecca Carson editor

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Published:20th Apr '23

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Politics of the Many cover

Critically taking on the concept of the multitude, this book assesses its relevance to contemporary movements within anti-globalization and anti-capitalist politics and activism.

Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 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 Léger, Paul Mazzocchi, Alexei Penzin, Stefano Pippa, Gerald Raunig, and Stevphen Shukaitis.

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. Let’s 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, Università di Milano-Bicocca, Italy *

ISBN: 9781350268081

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

248 pages