1st Edition

The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism The Liberal Spirit and the Making of Western Radicalism

By Daniel Fletcher Copyright 2018
    198 Pages
    by Routledge

    198 Pages 1 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    Does contemporary anti-capitalism tend towards, as Slavoj Žižek believes, nihilism, or does it tend towards, as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri believe, true egalitarian freedom?



    Within The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism, Fletcher presents an answer that manages to tend towards both simultaneously. In entering into contemporary debates on radicalism, this innovative volume proposes a revised conception of Hardt and Negri’s philosophy of emancipatory desire. Indeed, Fletcher reassesses Hardt and Negri’s history of Western radicalism and challenges their notion of an alter-modernity break from bourgeois modernity. In addition to this, this title proposes the idea of Western anti-capitalism as a spirit within a spirit, exploring how anti-capitalist movements in the West pose a genuine challenge to the capitalist order while remaining dependent on liberalist assumptions about the emancipatory individual.



    Inspired by post-structuralism and rejecting both revolutionary transcendence and notions of an underlying desiring purity, The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism offers new insight into how liberal capitalist society persistently produces its own forms of resistance against itself. This book will appeal to graduate and postgraduate students interested in fields such as: Sociology, Politics, International Relations, Cultural Studies, History, and Philosophy.

    Introduction: Overview and Key Theoretical Argument





    Chapter 1



    Perspectives on Contemporary Radicalism: Transcendence and the Immanentist Break





    Chapter 2



    A Short History of Bourgeois Self-Emancipation: From Spinoza to Locke and Onwards.





    Chapter 3



    May 1968: Towards the Limits of Self-Emancipatory Radicalism.





    Chapter 4



    Varieties of Self-Emancipatory Experience: French and Anglo-Saxon Cultures of Self-Emancipation





    Chapter 5



    Deleuze and Guattari: Self-Emancipatory Philosophy in the ’68 Era





    Chapter 6



    Hardt and Negri on Postmodernisation: Self-Emancipatory Radicalism in the Politics of the Multitude





    Chapter 7



    Flexible Re-Institutionalisation:From Revolutionary Anti-Capitalism to Transnationalist Alter-Globalism





    Conclusion





    Bibliography





     

    Biography

    Daniel Fletcher is an independent researcher and writer living in the West Midlands, England.

    Daniel Fletcher’s The Cultural Contradictions of Anti-Capitalism is an outstanding cultural history of the globalised present that sheds new light on the relationship between the liberal capitalist spirit and anti-capitalist radicalism. Reading Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus and Hardt and Negri’s Empire through the lens of the history of the liberal spirit, Fletcher shows how the cultural contradictions of the contemporary global capitalist system, comprising both a dynamic ultra-modern tendency towards over-coming and a socialistic democratic idealism concerned with establishing connection, mean that the post-modern left will need to rethink its visions of the future if it is to ever escape its liberal, capitalist pre-history.

    Mark Featherstone, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, Keele University, UK

    This book importantly traces the emergence of the anti-capitalist ethos back via five key stages in the development of the Western bourgeois-individual spirit, to which this book argues the anti-capitalist ethos remains inextricably wedded. In doing so, the book offers a welcome rereading of Deleuze and Guattari’s arguments regarding desire, showing that much that goes under the header of left-wing activism actually bypasses indigenous and working class populations in spite of its own arguments to the contrary. This book is required reading for anyone seeking to understand the conundrums of contemporary political struggles.

    Ingrid Hoofd, Assistant Professor, Department of Media and Culture Studies, Universiteit Utrecht, UK

    Daniel Fletcher analyses in intricate detail the origins and development of the bourgeois ethos of self-emancipation, caught as it is¿ between contradictory tendencies towards¿ being-with and being-over. This highly original work opens a new vista on ¿the agony which Western radical culture has dragged itself