Market and thought : meditations on the political and biopolitical / Brett Levinson.

Format:

• Book

Author/Creator:

• Levinson, Brett, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

• Capitalism.
• Social change.
• Political science--Philosophy.

Physical Description:

viii, 279 pages ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2004.

Summary:

• In this ambitious book, Brett Levinson explores the possibilities for a genuinely radical critique of globalized culture and politics-at a time when intellectuals and nonintellectuals alike struggle to understand the configuration of the contemporary world.
• Levinson seeks to unsettle a naturalized and commonsensical assumption: that democracy and the economic market must be viewed as either united or at odds. Against both neoliberalists and cultural pluralists, he argues that the state is not yielding to the market, but that the universe now turns on a "duopoly" between statist and global forms, one that generates not only economic and cultural sites but also ways of knowing, a postdemocratic episteme.
• Touching on current issues such as terrorism, human rights, civil liberties, the attack on the World Trade Center, the notion of the "people," delving into the idea of biopolitics, and investigating the essential relation between language and political praxis, Levinson engages with the work of Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Ranciere, Alain Badiou, Etienne Balibar, Michael Hardt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Antonio Negri, Michel Foucault, and others.
• Brett Levinson's work will be an important voice for readers looking for conceptual tools to grasp what political and intellectual possibilities might exist in the postcommunist world and how this world has come to be shaped in our time.

Contents:

• Introduction: The State/Market Duopoly-Definitions Forthcoming 1
• 1 Gramsci: Subalternity and Common Sense 19
• 2 Biopolitics and Duopolies: Toward Foucault's "Society Must Be Defended" 40
• 3 The People, the Uncounted, and Discardable Life in Ranciere 59
• 4 Dictatorship, Human Rights, and Psychoanalysis in Derrida's Argentina: One Discourse or Three? 79
• 5 Levinas and Civil/Human Liberties after September 11: What's God Got to Do with It? 100
• 6 If It Goes without Saying: Notes toward the Investigation of the Ideological State Apparatus 123
• 7 Laclau and Mouffe: The Closure of an Open Politics, or, Undecidability on the Left 144
• 8 Negri and Marx on Language and Activism: Has Deconstruction Anything to Say Now to Marxism? 164
• 9 The Culture Wars, Interdisciplinarity, Globalization: Meditations on Cultural and Postcolonial Studies 190
• 10 "Empire": Anti-aestheticism, Leftist Solutions, and the Commodification of the Multitude 214
• 11 Biopolitics/Foucault II: Statements on the New Media 230
• Conclusion: The Frail Empire and the Commodity's Embrace 245.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 267-276) and index.

ISBN:

• 0823223841
• 082322385X

OCLC:

56057912