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

__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. Cover Contents Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Tarrying with the Many: Against the Few, Beyond the One Rebecca Carson, Benjamin Halligan, Alexei Penzin and Stefano Pippa Part I The One, The Many And The Multitude Chapter 1 Bonds and Dispersion: Prometheus Dividual Gerald Raunig Chapter 2 The Centaur and the Multitude: From Machiavelli to Contemporary Italian Political Thought Dario Gentili Chapter 3 Flipping Your Schmitt: Human Nature and the Democracy of the Multitude Paul Mazzocchi Chapter 4 Unbuild the Party: Multitude and Autonomia Luhuna Carvalho Part II Towards A Politics Of The Many Chapter 5 Crowds and Publics Jodi Dean Chapter 6 Class Composition and the (Non)emergence of the Multitude Stevphen Shukaitis Chapter 7 Multitude Void: The Regal Mode of Imperial Legitimation Benjamin Halligan Chapter 8 The Gilets Jaunes as Unintentional Vanguard Marc James Léger Part III The Many Under Capital Chapter 9 The Necropolitics of Reproduction: Black Feminism, Mothers and the Death Drive Carina Brand Chapter 10 Insomnia@work: Between Neo-workerism and Psychoanalysis Lorenzo Chiesa Chapter 11 The Marxism of Post-Marxism: Political Subjectivity and the Monetary Link between Italian Operaismo and Capital Logic Rebecca Carson Chapter 12 ‘Il Faut Continuer’: Always-on Capitalism and Subjectivity Alexei Penzin Index Part I. Concepts. 1. Multitude in Italian thought: from Machiavelli to the political-philosophical debate of today / Dario Gentili, University of Roma Tre, Italy ; 2. Flipping Mouffe's Schmitt: exodus and human nature in Virno's multitude / Paul Mazzocchi, York University, Canada ; 3. The bond and the dispersion: Prometheus divided / Gerald Raunig, Zürich University of the Arts, Switzerland -- Part II. Politics. 4. Social reproduction and the necropolitical: the extraction of life (and death) in the multitude / Carina Brand, De Montfort University, UK ; 5. Insomnia @ work: between postworkerism and psychoanalysis / Lorenzo Chiesa, Genoa School of Humanities, Italy ; 6. Neoliberal personality / Alexei Penzin, University of Wolverhampton, UK -- Part III. Cultures. 7. The multitude, mass customization, imaginary infrastructure, nomad science / Thomas Mical, Auckland University of Technology, New Zealand ; 8. Artist groups, virtuosity, and the (non)emergence of the multitude / Stevphen Shukaitis, University of Essex, UK ; 9. The avant-garde after networks: strike art against cybercapitalism / Marc James Lǧer, Independent Scholar, Canada -- 10. "We are the poors": multitude, melodrama, media and history / Benjamin Halligan, University of Wolverhampton, UK "Since the turn of the millennium, protest movements and strategies have multiplied and diversified; old models of organization involving spokespeople, grand gestures and lobbying, have given way to new approaches. Protests in the 21st century are arranged around collectives as centreless, leaderless, amorphous assemblages. This tendency towards proliferation has been theorized through the concept of multitude, most famously put forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, which conceptualized a new proletariat for the age of globalization. The idea of multitude primarily sought to revisit and re-energize micro-models of protest, such as radical feminist movements, wildcat strikes, refugee and sex worker rights, hacktivism and reclaiming the streets, squatting and "dropping out", the "temporary autonomous zone" and occupy. Politics of the Many problematizes the concept of multitude, taking in the substantial criticisms produced in previous decades, and the concept's testing in the many global upheavals of the last decade, in order to interrogate the ways in which politics and ideology persist in the current moment."-- Provided by publisher