Re-Imagining a Politics of Life

Leonie Ansems de Vries is lecturer in politics at Queen Mary University of London. She has written journal articles for Theoria, Global Society and Cultural Politics.

In this book, the author draws . . . on the impact of the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, a pair whose influence on French thought . . . made a deep impression on her. De Vries mentions them together many times in her introduction and throughout the book apears [sic] to follow their lead. She seeks to reconfigure the ways in which politics has been understood. The method requires the 'denaturalization' of political concepts and the 're-imagination' of them, according to 'the favored methods' typically pursued in 'critical and post-structuralism scholarship.' Applying these methods to two important figures in political thought, Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant, de Vries says she will pursue the notion of the milieu as it emerges in the thought of Hobbes and Kant, then of Michel Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari. The idea of the milieu enables the study of 'modes of movement,' an approach to imagining political life 'without constructing solid foundations or positing an end point.' In the last analysis, the emphasis on 'milieu-relations' brings forward a 'different relationality of politics-life.'

• Prologue / Acknowledgements / Introduction: Politics of Life / 1. Sovereignty, War, Nature / 2. Mechanics, Movement, Organization / 3. Biology, Security, Life / 4. Circulation, Naturalization, (De)politicization / 5. Complexity, Relationality, Involution / 6. Politics, Life, Movement / Bibliography / Index