Ebook: The Refusal of Politics

Denounces contemporary politics through an engagement with political theory, the arts and what it is to live well

Laurent Dubreuil provocatively proposes an extremist rethinking of the limits of politics – toward a break from politics, the political and policies. Rather than yet another re-articulation, he calls for a refusal of politics, suggesting a form of apolitics that would make our lives more liveable.

The first chapter situates the refusal of politics in relation to different contemporary theoretical attempts to renew politics, and makes the case for a greater rupture. The second moment takes up what is liveable in life by way of apolitical experience, in contrast to appropriations of the collective, including a discussion of the arts. Finally, Dubreuil draws up an incomplete inventory of means: forms of existence – often frail and fleeting – that make an exit toward atopia.

Key Features

• Opens a dialogue at the crossroads of French leftism (from the Situationists to Jacques Rancière), Italian contemporary philosophy (from operaismo to authors such as Agamben or Esposito) and English-speaking academic activism (with figures such as Herbert Marcuse, Judith Butler and Slavoj Žižek)
• Includes a section on the connection between literature, the arts and the political, as perceived in Surrealism, Situationism and Adorno and Marcuse
• Explores how extremist practices may encounter the very limits of politics
• Gives a performative account of what apolitical experiences and instants could mean