Experiments/On the Political – serie

In the wake of new far-right populisms, the fragmentation of progressive global narratives and the dismantling of economic globalization, there are signs that neoliberalism is beginning to enter its death throes. Using 1968 as one of the inaugural moments of neoliberalism, this interdisciplinary collection is a critical and comparative resource that reexamines the significance and legacy of the global 1968 uprisings from today’s vantage point. For scholars and students alike, this interdisciplinary collection will help readers understand why the global uprisings of 1968 continue to resonate and what it means for theory and culture today.

Every politics is an aesthetic. If necropolitics is the (accelerated) politics of what is usually referred to as the ‘apolitical age’, what are its manoeuvres, temporalities, intensities, textures, and tipping points? Bypassing revelatory and reconstructionist approaches – the tendency of which is to show that a particular site or practice is necropolitical by bringing its genealogy into evidence – this collection of essays by artist-philosophers and theorist curators articulates the pre-perceptual working of necropolitics through a focus on the senses, assignments of energy, attitudes, cognitive processes, and discursive frameworks.Drawing on different yet complementary methodologies (visual, performance, affect, and network analysis; historiography and ethnography), the contributors analyse cultural fetishes, taboos, sensorial and relational processes anchored in everyday practices, or cued by specific artworks. By mapping the necropolitics’ affective cartography, they expand the concept beyond its teleological, anthropocentric, and reductive horizon of ‘making and letting die’ to include posthuman and posthumous actants, effectively arguing for the necropolitics’ transformatory, political potential.

Friend, enemy; loyalist, traitor: politics today seems caught in the grip of a binary reduction machine. Bidding us either with or against our neighbors as though we were already combined in, and owed allegiance to, mutually external, nameable collective entities - ‘communities’, ‘nations’, ‘races’ – denominations in general. Beginning with an examination of processes (‘routines’) of denomination in Northern Ireland, Maurice Macartney examines the era of Empire and enslavement to show that similar processes were at work then in ‘viceregally’ arranged structures for the authorization and organization of the violence of hostility and of indifference to the suffering of others.Macartney then brings the analysis up to date, arguing that the hostility of populism and the indifference of the global market overlap to intensify the violence unfolding today. Finally, taking seriously the Copernican revolution of nonviolence, for which the enemy is not ‘the enemy’, but violence itself, the book calls for a different kind of combination, for the coming together of a ‘community of others’, commoners on the one common, working, for all our differences, toward the democratic empowerment of everyone in the neighborhood, in an equitable, sustainable, ‘neighborhood democracy’ that would open beyond hostility, beyond denomination, beyond all boundaries.

Home is a word brimming with emotion, expectation and contradiction. It is where love and comfort are sought, yet it can also feel oppressive or unreachable. Subversive Mothers, Disturbing Domesticity unpacks the many dimensions of what it means to inhabit this space – physically, emotionally, and socially. Is home a sanctuary, a workplace, or a battleground for equality? Far from a simple haven, home carries the weight of invisible labor, tension, and even danger. It is shaped by routines and rhythms, often dismissed as mundane or unproductive, yet requiring vast effort. Through engaging with these complexities, this book challenges the simplistic binaries that reduce home to a private, insignificant space.By turning towards the discomfort produced by our encounters there with dirt, disorder, and ambiguity – aspects most associated with mothers and domestic work – we uncover how home embodies power dynamics and acts of resistance. Subversive Mothers, Disturbing Domesticity invites readers to rethink this deeply familiar yet elusive space, recognizing the hidden histories, emotions, and struggles that exist within its walls. Thoughtful and compelling, it sheds light on why home is never just a place, but a profound experience that both shapes us and is shaped by us.