Post-Political and Its Discontents

Japhy Wilson is Research Coordinator at the National Strategic Centre for the Right to Territory (CENEDET) in Quito, Ecuador. His research explores the intertwining of space, power and ideology in the politics of international development. He has published in academic journals in the the fields of political economy, human geography, and development studies. He is the author of Jeffrey Sachs: The Strange Case of Dr. Shock and Mr. Aid (Verso 2014). Erik Swyngedouw is Professor of Geography at Manchester University. His research interests include critical theory, political-ecology, urban governance, democracy and political power, and the politics of globalisation. His was previously professor of geography at Oxford University (until 2006) and held the Vincent Wright Visiting Professorship in Political Science at Science Po, Paris, 2014. He is the author of Liquid Power: Contested Hydro-Modernities in Twentieth-Century Spain (MIT Press, 2015).

An excellent collection of theoretically innovative and empirically rich essays on practices of depoliticisation and repoliticisation, ranging from the everyday to the spectacular, The Post-Political and Its Discontents shows that liberal democracy and consensus building do not exhaust all political possibilities and futures.

• List of Contributors; Seeds of Dystopia: Post-Politics and the Return of the Political, Japhy Wilson and Erik Swyngedouw; Part I Spaces of Depoliticisation; 1. The Post-Politics of Sustainability Planning: Privatisation and the Demise of Democratic Government, Mike Raco; 2. The Post-Political and the End of Nature: The Genetically Modified Organism, Larry Reynolds and Bronislaw Szerszynski; 3. The New Development Architecture and the Post- Political in the Global South, Sangeeta Kamat; 4. Opening Up the Post-Political Condition: Multiculturalism and the Matrix of Depoliticisation, Nicolas Van Puymbroeck and Stijn Oosterlynck; 5. The Jouissance of Philanthrocapitalism: Enjoyment as a Post-Political Factor, Japhy Wilson; 6. Religious Antinomies of Post-Politics, Bülent Diken; 7. Post-Ecologist Governmentality: Post-Democracy, Post-Politics and the Politics of Unsustainability, Ingolfur Blühdorn; Part II Spectres of Radical Politics; 8. Insurgent Architects, Radical Cities and the Promise of the Political, Erik Swyngedouw; 9. The Limits of Post-Politics: Rethinking Radical Social Enterprise, Wendy Larner; 10. Neither Cosmopolitanism nor Multipolarity: The Political Beyond Global Governmentality, Hans-Martin Jaeger; 11. Against a Speculative Leftism, Alex Loftus; 12. Spatialising Politics: Antagonistic Imaginaries of Indignant Squares, Maria Kaika and Lazaros Karaliotas; 13. After Post-Politics: Occupation and the Return of Communism, Jodi Dean; 14. The Enigma of Revolt: Militant Politics in a ‘Post- Political’ Age, Andy Merrifield; There Is No Alternative, Erik Swyngedouw and Japhy Wilson; Index