Lacan, Deleuze and World Politics


Book Description

This book aims to re-think the way in which the subject is inscribed in the modern political, and does so by exploring the potentiality of Lacano-Deleuzian theoretical framework. It concerns a different ontology and a non-dualist understanding of political and legal existence, by focusing on questions such as how to think alternative notions of political existence and what kind of political, social and legal order do these come to create. This investigation into political appearance of subjects through concepts of law, body and life is led and influenced by the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, as well as Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and Slavoj Žižek. The book takes on various conceptualisations of life, explores the relationship between law and life and develops an alternative notion of legal and political existence in particular in the context of rights. On the back of Guantánamo’s legal and political discourses this work aims to show why and how the problems of world politics or the limitations of (human) rights discourse require an engagement with questions such as what it means to exist as a human being, what forms of life are politically recognised, which are not, and why this distinction. By pointing to a different ontology for thinking and understanding global politics and demonstrating how a trans-disciplinary and philosophical approaches can foster the debates in world politics, this book will be of interest to postgraduates and scholars working on critical normative ideas in international politics, critical security studies and critical legal studies.




Agency, Structure and International Politics


Book Description

The concepts of agency and structure are of increasing and defining importance to international relations and politics as fields of enquiry and knowledge. This is the first book to explore the two concepts in depth in that context. The agent-structure problem refers to questions concerning the interrelationship of agency and structure, and to the ways in which explanations of social phenomena integrate and account for them. This is an important contribution to the study of international relations and politics.




Ontological Politics in a Disposable World


Book Description

This book explores the intertwining of politics and ontology, shedding light on the ways in which, as our ability to investigate, regulate, appropriate, ‘enhance’ and destroy material reality have developed, so new social scientific accounts of nature and our relationship with it have emerged, together with new forms of power. Engaging with cutting-edge social theory and elaborating on the thought of Foucault, Heidegger, Adorno and Agamben, the author demonstrates that the convergence of ontology with politics is not simply an intellectual endeavour of growing import, but also a governmental practice which builds upon neoliberal programmes, the renewed accumulation of capital and the development of technosciences in areas such as climate change, geoengineering and biotechnology.




Ontological Security in International Relations


Book Description

The central assertion of this book is that states pursue social actions to serve self-identity needs, even when these actions compromise their physical existence. Three forms of social action, sometimes referred to as ‘motives’ of state behaviour (moral, humanitarian, and honour-driven) are analyzed here through an ontological security approach. Brent J. Steele develops an account of social action which interprets these behaviours as fulfilling a nation-state's drive to secure self-identity through time. The anxiety which consumes all social agents motivates them to secure their sense of being, and thus he posits that transformational possibilities exist in the ‘Self’ of a nation-state. The volume consequently both challenges and complements realist, liberal, constructivist and post-structural accounts to international politics. Using ontological security to interpret three cases - British neutrality during the American Civil War (1861-1865), Belgium’s decision to fight Germany in 1914, and NATO’s (1999) Kosovo intervention - the book concludes by discussing the importance for self-interrogation in both the study and practice of international relations. Ontological Security in International Relations will be of particular interest to students and researchers of international politics, international ethics, international relations and security studies.




Figure of This World


Book Description

What if we've been wrong when reading Agamben? Mathew Abbott argues that Agamben's thought is misunderstood when read in terms of critical theory or traditional political philosophy. Instead, he shows that it engages with political ontology: studying the political stakes of the question of being. Abbot demonstrates the crucial influence of Martin Heidegger on Agamben's work, locating it in the post-Heideggerian tradition of the critique of metaphysics. As he clarifies it, Abbott links Agamben's philosophy with Wittgenstein's picture theory and Heidegger's concept of the world-picture, showing the importance of this for understanding - and potentially overcoming - the forms of alienation characteristic of the society of the spectacle.




Ontology and World Politics


Book Description

Together these two companion volumes develop an innovative theory of world politics, grounded in the reinterpretation of the concepts of ‘world’ and ‘politics’ from an ontological perspective. Ontology and World Politics presents a new approach to political universalism, grounded in the reinterpretation of world politics from an ontological perspective. In the discipline of International Relations the concept of world politics remains ambivalent, functioning both as a synonym of international relations and their antonym, denoting the aspirations for the overcoming of interstate pluralism in favour of a universalist politics of the global community or the world state. Rather than distinguish ‘world politics’ from ‘international politics’ by its site, level or issues, Prozorov interprets it as another kind of politics. Drawing on Martin Heidegger’s account of world disclosure and Alain Badiou’s phenomenology of worlds, this book posits world politics as a practice of the affirmation of universal axioms across an infinite plurality of limited and particular situations or ‘worlds’. Prozorov reinterprets the familiar principles of community, equality and freedom in ontological terms as attributes of pure being, subtracted from all positive determinations, and presents them as axioms of universalist politics valid in any world whatsoever. This approach to world politics serves as the groundwork for a comprehensive reconsideration of the central themes of political and international relations theory. Systematic and accessible, these works will be key reading for all students and scholars of political science and international relations.




Lacan and Deleuze


Book Description

It is often said that Lacan is the most radical representative of structuralism, a thinker of negativity and alienation, whereas Deleuze is pictured as a great opponent of the structuralist project, a vitalist and a thinker of creative potentialities of desire. It seems the two cannot be further apart. This volume of 12 new essays breaks the myth of their foreignness (if not hostility) and places the two in a productive conversation. By taking on topics such as baroque, perversion, death drive, ontology/topology, face, linguistics and formalism the essays highlight key entry points for a discussion between Lacan's and Deleuze's respective thoughts. The proposed lines of investigation do not argue for a simple equation of their thoughts, but for a 'disjunctive synthesis', which acknowledges their differences, while insisting on their positive and mutually informed reading.




Theory of the Political Subject


Book Description

Together these two companion volumes develop an innovative theory of world politics, grounded in the reinterpretation of the concepts of ‘world’ and ‘politics’ from an ontological perspective. Theory of the Political Subject continues the project of reconstruction of political universalism begun in Ontology of World Politics. Having redefined world politics in terms of the affirmation of the universal ontological axioms of freedom, equality and community in an infinite multiplicity of particular situations or ‘worlds’, in this book Prozorov focuses on the way this affirmation is actually practiced, analysing the conditions for the emergence within a world of the subject of its radical transformation. Drawing on the contemporary reassessment of the notion of the subject in continental political thought, particularly the work of Alain Badiou, Prozorov defines the political subject in terms of one’s subtraction from the positive order of one’s world, the weakening of one’s particular identity that makes possible one’s participation in the affirmation of the universal. The book proceeds with outlining the path of the political subject within its world, from the point of its inception to its confrontation with ethical, epistemic and other limits to its activity. This account of the subjective aspect of world politics also offers new and stimulating perspectives on such key issues of political theory as the relation of politics to human nature, the role of violence in politics and the conditioning of politics by philosophical or scientific knowledge. Systematic and accessible, these works will be key reading for all students and scholars of political science and international relations.




Agents, Structures and International Relations


Book Description

The agent-structure problem is a much discussed issue in the field of international relations. In his comprehensive 2006 analysis of this problem, Colin Wight deconstructs the accounts of structure and agency embedded within differing IR theories and, on the basis of this analysis, explores the implications of ontology - the metaphysical study of existence and reality. Wight argues that there are many gaps in IR theory that can only be understood by focusing on the ontological differences that construct the theoretical landscape. By integrating the treatment of the agent-structure problem in IR theory with that in social theory, Wight makes a positive contribution to the problem as an issue of concern to the wider human sciences. At the most fundamental level politics is concerned with competing visions of how the world is and how it should be, thus politics is ontology.




A Leftist Ontology


Book Description

Rich with analyses of concepts from deconstruction, systems theory, and post-Marxism, with critiques of fundamentalist thought and the war on terror, this volume argues for developing a philosophy of being in order to overcome the quandary of postmodern relativism. Undergirding the contributions are the premises that ontology is a vital concept for philosophy today, that an acceptable leftist ontology must avoid the kind of identity politics that has dominated recent cultural studies, and that a new ontology must be situated within global capitalism.