Benjamin Halligan

Alexei Penzin

Stefano Pippa

Rebecca Carson

Politics of the Many draws inspiration from Percy Bysshe Shelley's celebrated call to arms: 'Ye are many – they are few!' This idea of the Many, as a general form of emancipatory subjectivity that cannot be erased for the sake of the One, is the philosophical and political assumption shared by contributors to this book. They raise questions of collective agency, and its crisis in contemporary capitalism, via new engagements with Marxist philosophy, psychoanalysis, theories of social reproduction and value-form, and post-colonial critiques, and drawing on activist thought and strategies. This book interrogates both established and emergent formations of the Many (the people, classes, publics, crowds, masses, multitudes), tracing their genealogies, their recent failures and victories, and their potentials to change the world. The book proposes and explores an intense and provoking series of new or reinvented concepts, figures, and theoretical constellations, including dividuality, the centaur, unintentional vanguard, insomnia at work, always-on capitalism, multitude (from its 'voiding' to a '(non)emergence'), crowds, necropolitics, and the link between political subjectivity and value-form. The contributors to Politics of the Many are both acclaimed and emergent thinkers including Carina Brand, Rebecca Carson, Luhuna Carvalho, Lorenzo Chiesa, Jodi Dean, Dario Gentili, Benjamin Halligan, Marc James Léger, Paul Mazzocchi, Alexei Penzin, Stefano Pippa, Gerald Raunig, and Stevphen Shukaitis.

Contemporary Radical Thought and the Crisis of Agency

Politics of the Many

"Since the turn of the millennium, protest movements and strategies have multiplied and diversified; old models of organization involving spokespeople, grand gestures and lobbying, have given way to new approaches. Protests in the 21st century are arranged around collectives as centreless, leaderless, amorphous assemblages. This tendency towards proliferation has been theorized through the concept of multitude, most famously put forward by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, which conceptualized a new proletariat for the age of globalization. The idea of multitude primarily sought to revisit and re-energize micro-models of protest, such as radical feminist movements, wildcat strikes, refugee and sex worker rights, hacktivism and reclaiming the streets, squatting and "dropping out", the "temporary autonomous zone" and occupy. Politics of the Many problematizes the concept of multitude, taking in the substantial criticisms produced in previous decades, and the concept's testing in the many global upheavals of the last decade, in order to interrogate the ways in which politics and ideology persist in the current moment"--

The notion of contingency plays a central role in Althusser's attempt to recast Marxist philosophy and to free the Marxist conception of history from notions such as teleology, necessity and origin. Drawing on a wealth of published and unpublished material, Stefano Pippa discusses how Althusser's unfaltering commitment to contingency should encourage us to revisit our understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology, politics and materialism. As grounded on contingency, Althusser's so-called 'Structural Marxism' originates in fact a 'logic of interruption' and a notion of structurally under-determined becoming; just like his theory of ideology is radically reinterpreted on the basis of his notion of 'overinterpellation'. Though constant, Althusser's relationship with contingency has not been monolithic throughout his career. As observed by Pippa, it is possible to distinguish a 'political' and a 'philosophical' moment in Althusser's late materialism of contingency. Perhaps, as this volume suggests, the problematic coexistence of these two aspects might account for the unstable character of Althusser's late philosophical project.

Stefano Pippa

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