Infrapolitics

Alberto Moreiras's Infrapolitics: A Handbook offers a timely and provocative manual, in the age-old tradition of spiritual practices and political catechisms, but with no less keen modernist intent and resolute activist gusto. The work gives further flesh and blood to a concept that subverts the available classical options and dilemmas of liberal individualism or political liberalism, on the one hand, and collective communitarianism, in both its conservative-reactionary and progressivist socialist and communist varieties, on the other. Without resorting to theologico-political or, for that matter, anarchical alternatives that likewise seek to avoid these very dichotomies, infrapolitics challenges the very notion of the political, its ontology and politics, while redirecting our understanding toward an appreciation of concrete and ontic uses the ancient and modern overarching concept once envisioned but failed to realize. Along the way, a host of new voices are added to the chorus and political theoretical canon (Maria Zambrano and Felipe Martinez Marzoa, to name just these two). An engagingly written manifesto written in robust and rigorous philosophical style.---Hent de Vries, Paulette Goddard Professor of the Humanities, New York University & Director, School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University
One of the most important books concerning contemporary thought written this century.---Brett Levinson, SUNY Binghamton
Provocative and gripping. You won't look at life and politics--and the wedge in between them--in the same way again.---Cristina Rivera Garza, author of Grieving: Dispatches from a Wounded Country