Does sovereignty have a future in the 21st century?Through a sustained engagement with the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and against the background of contemporary political phenomena, Arne De Boever explores what positive political possibilities the notion of sovereignty might still hold. Using the philosophy of Catherine Malabou, he argues that these possibilities reside in an aesthetic reconceptualisation of sovereignty as a plastic power that is able to give, receive and explode the forms of our political future.

This book brings together papers that employ postfoundational theory to critically investigate the social, political, economic and ecological dynamics and power structures that shaped Western democracies, non-Western societies and international politics during the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 pandemic disrupted not only social relations and personal lives across the globe, but also the landscape of postfoundational theory. Giorgio Agamben, one of its most prominent figures, attracted harsh criticism for his suggestion that the pandemic was nothing but an invented tool of state power. In the face of a collectively experienced emergency, it seemed tempting to forgo critical questioning in favour of taking action on a manifestly real, viral threat. Resisting this temptation, this volume makes the case that COVID-19 has rendered postfoundational critique urgently necessary. The chapters collected here use postfoundational theory to unpack the pandemic’s global social event beyond dominant narratives of unprecedentedness, exception and necessity. The authors explore where the pandemic has actually altered political, social and economic dynamics. But they also highlight where divisions, inequalities and expropriation continued unchanged, or even reinforced, throughout and after the COVID-19 event. The chapters apply, scrutinise and re-work the writings of postfoundational thinkers from Jacques Derrida, Roberto Esposito and Gilles Deleuze to Jasbir Puar to both offer a better understanding of the pandemic’s social reality and to draw from it visions for a different post-pandemic future. Viral Critique will be a key resource for academics, researchers, and advanced students of Philosophy, Political Science, Sociology, Economics and Cultural Studies. The chapters included in this book were originally published as a special issue of Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory.

We are living in a time of acute vulnerability. From climate change to drone warfare, terrorist attacks to mass shootings, safe spaces to trigger warnings, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, homo vulnerabilis is once again coming to terms with the fact that it can be wounded, or even killed. Against such finitude, sovereignty is now reasserting itself as a political power that might save us from our ontological state. The irony is, of course, that such sovereignty – for example through camps, walls, police violence, or drones – is also the underlying, historical cause of many of our most intense contemporary experiences of vulnerabilization. Interrupting the dialectic by which sovereignty manages to be both the cause of our vulnerabilization and the phantasmatic tool of its prevention, in Being Vulnerable Arne De Boever explores how today’s experiences of vulnerabilization can be translated into a collective human power that dismantles the form of sovereignty that is producing this state of affairs. Focused on theories, paradigms, and alternative formations of sovereignty, Being Vulnerable reconsiders the tradition of thinking through a political concept in order to approach it anew.

A new vision of politics “below the radar” One way to grasp the nature of politics is to understand the key terms in which it is discussed. Unexceptional Politics develops a political vocabulary drawn from a wide range of media (political fiction, art, film, and TV), highlighting the scams, imbroglios, information trafficking, brinkmanship, and parliamentary procedures that obstruct and block progressive politics. The book reviews and renews modes of thinking about micropolitics that counter notions of the “state of exception” embedded in theories of the “political” from Thomas Hobbes to Carl Schmitt. Emily Apter develops a critical model of politics behind the scenes, a politics that operates outside the norms of classical political theory. She focuses on micropolitics, defined as small events, happening in series, that often pass unnoticed yet disturb and interfere with the institutional structures of capitalist parliamentary systems, even as they secure their reproduction and longevity. Apter’s experimental glossary is arranged under headings that look at the apparently incidental, immaterial, and increasingly virtual practices of politicking: “obstruction,” “obstinacy,” “psychopolitics,” “managed life,” “serial politics.” Such terms frame an argument for taking stock of the realization that we really do not know what politics is, where it begins and ends, or how its micro-events should be described.

Politicians and philosophers presenting themselves as the ultimate bearers of truth and reality have created unprecedented technological, cultural, and political framings. This new order conspires to undermine the interpretive practices of open-ended critique, normalizing a sense of threat to preserve control. The greatest emergency has become the absence of emergencies. Tracing an intellectual alliance between academics such as Jordan Peterson and Christina Hoff Sommers and right-wing populist politicians such as Donald Trump and Marine Le Pen, this book denounces framings that make a claim to objectivity. With the help of contemporary thinkers including Bruno Latour, Judith Butler, and Giorgio Agamben, as well as discussion of the Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie and the emergency of biodiversity loss due to climate change, Santiago Zabala illustrates that the twenty-first-century question is not whether we can be free, but how to be at large - unconstrained by the new realist order. Being at Large demonstrates the anarchic power of hermeneutics, calling for interpretive disruptions of the authoritarian narrative as a way of reclaiming freedom in the age of alternative facts.

Reconsiders exceptionalism between aesthetics and politics Here, Arne De Boever proposes the notion of aesthetic exceptionalism to describe the widespread belief that art and artists are exceptional. Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism challenges that belief by focusing on the sovereign artist as genius, as well as the original artwork as the foundation of the art market. Engaging with sculpture, conceptual artwork, and painting by emerging and established artists, De Boever proposes a worldly, democratic notion of unexceptional art as an antidote to the problems of aesthetic exceptionalism. Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the lead

A capacious history of decolonization, from the decline of empires to the era of globalization Empires, until recently, were everywhere. They shaped borders, stirred conflicts, and set the terms of international politics. With the collapse of empire came a fundamental reorganization of our world. Decolonization unfolded across territories as well as within them. Its struggles became internationalized and transnational, as much global campaigns of moral disarmament against colonial injustice as local contests of arms. In this expansive history, Martin Thomas tells the story of decolonization and its intrinsic link to globalization. He traces the connections between these two transformative processes: the end of formal empire and the acceleration of global integration, market reorganization, cultural exchange, and migration. The End of Empires and a World Remade shows how profoundly decolonization shaped the process of globalization in the wake of empire collapse. In the second half of the twentieth century, decolonization catalyzed new international coalitions; it triggered partitions and wars; and it reshaped North-South dynamics. Globalization promised the decolonized greater access to essential resources, to wider networks of influence, and to worldwide audiences, but its neoliberal variant has reinforced economic inequalities and imperial forms of political and cultural influences. In surveying these two codependent histories across the world, from Latin America to Asia, Thomas explains why the deck was so heavily stacked against newly independent nations. Decolonization stands alongside the great world wars as the most transformative event of twentieth-century history. In The End of Empires and a World Remade, Thomas offers a masterful analysis of the greatest process of state-making (and empire-unmaking) in modern history.

Other Global Issues books are a rather eclectic mash up of topics, headlines du jour, with an "and now this!" organizational scheme. The "hot" topics may have cooled by press time, and the presentation to students is disjointed, not clear. The approach is often a "scare 'em and leave 'em" presentation of a global horror show of problems, without clear arguments about the connections among the issues, or integrated discussions of solutions. In contrast, Global Issues Beyond Sovereignty provides a thesis and a common narrative throughout the "issue" chapters. The range of responses to manage global issues are compared and discussed throughout. Global problems move at internet speed; governments do not move so quickly. This creates gaps in what citizens expect the state to do, and what countries have the capacities to do. This paradox is a problem not only for weak or failing states; even the strongest states in the system struggle in how to effectively respond to global issues, from cybersecurity to environmental toxins. States cannot solve or manage trans-sovereign issues alone. The power of the private sector is growing (both legal and illegal, for profit and non-profit), while state power is flat or in some places declining. While private sector actors have means to impact transnational issues, they do not have a public mandate to do so. Countries increasingly must learn how to play well with others; this is easier said than done. Attempts to manage global issues flow through three channels: public sector responses, private sector responses, and mixed public-private partnerships. All three channels are explored throughout the book, uniting the issue chapters in a common discussion of challenges and responses. The conclusion presents lessons learned for theory and practice from managing global issues.

Peter Iver Kaufman shows that, although Giorgio Agamben represents Augustine as an admired pioneer of an alternative form of life, he also considers Augustine an obstacle keeping readers from discovering their potential. Kaufman develops a compelling, radical alternative to progressive politics by continuing the line of thought he introduced in On Agamben, Arendt, Christianity, and the Dark Arts of Civilization. Kaufman starts with a comparison of Agamben and Augustine's projects, both of which challenge reigning concepts of citizenship. He argues that Agamben, troubled by Augustine's opposition to Donatists and Pelagians, failed to forge links between his own redefinitions of authenticity and “the coming community” and the bishop's understandings of grace, community, and compassion. On Agamben, Donatism, Pelagianism, and the Missing Links sheds new light on Augustine's “political theology,” introducing ways it can be used as a resource for alternative polities while supplementing Agamben's scholarship and scholarship on Agamben.

If the September 11 terror attacks opened up an era of crises and exceptions of which we are yet to see the end, it is perhaps not surprising that care has emerged in the early twenty-first century as a key political issue. This book approaches contemporary narratives of care through the lens of a growing body of theoretical writings on biopolitics. Through close-readings of J.M. Coetzee's Slow Man, Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go, Paul Auster's The Book of Illusions, and Tom McCarthy's Remainder, it seeks to reframe debates about realism in the novel ranging from Ian Watt to Zadie Smith as engagements with the novel's biopolitical origins: its relation to pastoral care, the camps, and the welfare state. Within such an understanding of the novel, what possibilities for a critical aesthetics of existence does the contemporary novel include?