Infrapolitical Passages: Global Turmoil, Narco-Accumulation, and the Post-Sovereign State - Paperback

by Gareth Williams (Author)

This book makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale.

Infrapolitical Passages proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. In doing so, Gareth Williams makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale.

The book offers a theory of globalization as a gigantic, directionless crisis in humanity's symbolic organization, as well as a theory of global economic warfare as the very positing of directionlessness and, at the same time, facticity. Williams's infrapolitics stands at a distance from the biopolitical, which it understands as domination presenting itself as the production of specific forms of subjectivity in the face of the commodity. The subsequent obscuring of being signals the need to circumvent the instrumentalization of life as subordination to the metaphysics of subjectivity, representation, and politics.

Infrapolitical Passages works to confront that which is unavailable in subjectivity and representation, opening a way for facticity in the age of globalization in order to make room for the infrapolitical question for existence.

Back Jacket

"Powerful in its assessment and truly revelatory in its ability to demonstrate the need for a 'different relation to the political, ' Infrapolitical Passages gives language and scope to a new politico-economic conjuncture and offers us the opportunity to fully appreciate the scale of this shift. It asks us to walk away from the old, tired narratives of political modernity, and to reflect upon the need to effectively start over in our reflections on what the political means now and what the future within what Williams call the 'Post-Katechontic' shall now consist of."--Abraham Acosta, University of Arizona

"Gareth Williams has a gift for announcing problems, perhaps intractable, and then reeling them in and walking them back out step by step. You find yourself confronted with 'infrapolitics, ' 'decontainment, ' 'narco-accumulation, ' and 'katechon, ' which may or may not ring a bell. It all seems intimidating, but then a couple of pages later you feel like you're handling a new concept, and connections start to litter your consciousness. It's brilliantly useful."--Joshua Lund, University of Notre Dame

Infrapolitical Passages proposes to clear a way through some of the dominant political determinations and violent symptoms of contemporary globalization. In doing so, Gareth Williams makes a case for infrapolitics as an enactment of intellectual responsibility in the face of a tumultuous world of war and of technological value extraction on a planetary scale.

The book offers a theory of globalization as a gigantic, directionless crisis in humanity's symbolic organization, as well as a theory of global economic warfare as the very positing of directionlessness and, at the same time, facticity. Williams's infrapolitics stands at a distance from the biopolitical, which it understands as domination presenting itself as the production of specific forms of subjectivity in the face of the commodity. The subsequent obscuring of being signals the need to circumvent the instrumentalization of life as subordination to the metaphysics of subjectivity, representation, and politics.

Infrapolitical Passages works to confront that which is unavailable in subjectivity and representation, opening a way for facticity in the age of globalization, in order to make room for the infrapolitical question for existence.

Gareth Williams is Professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan.

Author Biography

Gareth Williams is Professor of Spanish and Latin American & Caribbean Studies at the University of Michigan, where he is Chair of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures.