Телеграм канал «Политическая теория и философия (Political theory and philosophy)»

Léa Antonicelli - The Impolitical Concept of Uselessness as a Heuristic Category for Critical Resistance to the Neoliberal Order: A Foucauldian Approach

This article proposes a Foucauldian genealogy of uselessness and argues that uselessness can function not only as a mechanism of exclusion within neoliberal governmentality but also as a potential tool of resistance. Neoliberal rationality constructs uselessness as the negative counterpart of productivity, efficiency, and measurable performance, drawing on two liberal regimes of truth: the juridico-deductive logic, which frames the useless as a parasitic element of the social body, and the utilitarian logic, which disqualifies what produces no quantifiable effects. While neoliberalism intensifies these logics through governance by numbers and New Public Management, the article contends that uselessness occupies a paradoxical position at the margins of governmentality. Precisely because it lies outside dominant regimes of value, uselessness can be reinterpreted as an impolitical category that exposes the contingency and violence of neoliberal norms. When reappropriated under specific material and political conditions, uselessness becomes a critical lens and, potentially, a site of resistance against productivist and functionalist imperatives.

G. Altinors, P. Chacko, M. Davidson, A. Kazharski, S. Valluvan, C. Zhang - The Uses and Abuses of the Anti-Colonial in Global Reactionary Politics

Drawing on a range of regional expertise and perspectives from international relations, political economy, political theory, and sociology, this collective discussion makes the following contributions to research on global reactionary politics and discussions of decolonization. First, we argue that the erosion of the legitimacy of liberal orders renders the anti-colonial language available for authoritarian and conservative projects in both the Global South and North to articulate a selective rejection of universalism. While framing liberal universalism as imperialist, they remain embedded within neoliberal structures and embrace a market universalism in tandem with claims of cultural particularity. Secondly, the contributions explore a series of ironies, reversals, and convergences not only across regional divides, but also across conventional ideological boundaries. This includes conceptual affinities between the radical right’s emphasis on ontological difference and the nativist temptation within the history of anti-colonial nationalism, as well as the confluence between the radical conservatives, the postcolonial authoritarians, and a certain strand of decolonial discourse in their envisioning of a multipolar civilizational order. Finally, we suggest that for international political sociology, this urges us to deepen engagement with anti-colonial traditions that are radically incompatible with the far right and to center forms of vernacular anti-colonial theorizing from marginalized places.

Sebastian Veg - Three Vistas of Hong Kong

Sebastian Veg on Ming-Sho Ho, Be Water; Ching Kwan Lee, Forever Hong Kong; Edmund Cheng and Samson Yuen, The Making of Leaderful Mobilization. Studies of Hong Kong’s 2019 protests.

In 2019, Hong Kong witnessed a social movement that was unprecedented for the territory, both in terms of its scale and geographical spread. Over roughly six months, from June through December, mass protests took place across the region’s eighteen districts. Initially provoked by the Hong Kong government’s proposed extradition bill, which would have allowed the transfer of suspects to mainland China, the demonstrations swelled into a civic uprising that called for democratizing measures. In a May 2020 survey conducted by the Chinese University of Hong Kong, over 45 per cent of the residents polled said they had taken part in at least one protest, which would suggest that more than 3 million of the region’s 7 million inhabitants were involved. Despite the massive numbers, fatal casualties were few: one person died of injuries inflicted by protesters; the death of one activist has been attributed to police pursuit and a small number of others to suicide.

https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii158/articles/sebastian-veg-three-vistas-of-hong-kong

С чем можно сравнить тревоги французов, британцев и американцев конца XVIII века?

Отрывок из книги Бенедикта Андерсона «Призраки наций. Эссе 1986–2013»

Большинство читателей «Горького» наверняка знают культовую книгу Бенедикта Андерсона «Воображаемые сообщества: размышления о происхождении и распространении национализма» и наверняка не знают других его книг. Теперь у нас будет возможность ознакомиться еще с одной: издательство Mamont press выпускает сборник эссе, написанных Андерсоном в 1986–2013 годах. Предлагаем вашему вниманию одно из них.

https://gorky.media/fragments/s-chem-mozhno-sravnit-trevogi-frantsuzov-britantsev-i-amerikantsev-kontsa-xviii-veka

Alexander Billet - Red Specters and Right-Wing Fever Dreams

A. J. A. Woods’s new book explores how the Right’s obsession with Cultural Marxism emerged from the backlash against the 1960s.

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/cultural-marxism-conspiracy-aja-woods-right-frankfurt-school