Re-Imagining a Politics of Life: From Governance of Order to Politics of Movement [Paperback]

The prominence and variety of global movements of resistance indicates that the idea of politics as governance is contested. However, the political canon continues to reinforce a narrow definition of politics according to liberal principles and practices. This book develops a new theory of political life that includes, and highlights, the interconnectedness of forces of order, disorder, governance, resistance, violence and difference.

Using the concept of the milieu both a mechanism of governance and a force of difference and transformationthis book stages an encounter between the modern political and international thought of Thomas Hobbes and Immanuel Kant and the contemporary philosophy of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. The writings of Foucault and Deleuze will serve to explore and contextualize the milieu and will function to highlight the complex mobility and relationality of notions of politics, life, governance and resistance.

In this book, the author draws . . . on the impact of the ideas of Gilles Deleuze and F?lix 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 l³A