1st Edition
Occupying Subjectivity Being and Becoming Radical in the 21st Century
This book explores a variety of forms of radical political subjectivity. It takes its cue from the 2011 uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, the Occupy Movement and the European Anti-Austerity Movement, alongside the wider opposition to authoritarian and neoliberal forms of governance from which they sprang, in order to ask an urgent series of questions about the subject of radical politics: Who or what is it that engages in resistance? Who or what should they be? And how are we to negotiate the many complexities of that second question?
The contributions, drawing on a wide range of theoretical traditions, offer a rich series of provocations towards new ways of conceptualising, evaluating and imagining radical political praxis. They engage different kinds of subjects, including protestors, dancers, self-burners, academics, settlers and humans, in order to think through the ways in which contemporary subjects are constituted within and work to unsettle dominant relations of power. Together, the chapters open up spaces to think about how political and intellectual commitment to social change can be enlivened through attention to the subject of radical politics.
This book was published as a special issue of Globalizations.
1. Occupying Subjectivity: Being and Becoming Radical in the Twenty-First Century: Introduction Chris Rossdale
2. Derrida and Political Resistance: The Radical Potential of Deconstruction Aggie Hirst
3. Paradoxical Peace: A Scholar-activist’s Auto-ethnography on Religious Pacifism and Anti-capitalism Ruth Halaj Reitan
4. ‘A Direct Act of Resurgence, a Direct Act of Sovereignty’: Reflections on Idle No More, Indigenous Activism, and Canadian Settler Colonialism Adam J. Barker
5. Real Politics in Occupy: Transcending the Rules of the Day Anna Szolucha
6. The Political Subject of Self-immolation Nicholas Michelsen
7. Maze of Resistance: Crowd, Space and the Politics of Resisting Subjectivity Andreja Zevnik
8. Dancing Ourselves to Death: The Subject of Emma Goldman’s Nietzschean Anarchism Chris Rossdale
9. Liberation for Straw Dogs? Old Materialism, New Materialism, and the Challenge of an Emancipatory Posthumanism Erika Cudworth and Stephen Hobden
Biography
Chris Rossdale lectures in PAIS at the University of Warwick. His research focuses on international political theory and the political philosophy of resistance, with a particular focus on militarism and anti-militarism. He has published in International Political Sociology, Millennium: Journal of International Studies, Global Society, and Globalizations, and in 2014 was awarded the BISA Michael Nicolson Thesis Prize.
