Drawing on Western and Chinese social theory and practice, Michael Dutton offers an affective theorization of the political and a political theorization of affect that rethinks politics in the contemporary world.
In The Book of Politics, Michael Dutton offers an affective theorization of the political and a political theorization of affect. Drawing on Western and Chinese social theory and practice, Dutton rethinks Carl Schmitt’s insistence that the political can only be thought within the antagonistic pairing of friend and enemy. Dutton shows how the power of the friend/enemy binary must be understood by conceptualizing the political as the channeling, harnessing, and transforming of affective energy flows in relation to that binary. Given this affective nature of politics, Dutton contends that to rethink the political means moving away from a political science toward an art of the political. Such an art highlights fluidity and pulls away from Eurocentric political theory, requiring a conceptualization of the political as global. He juxtaposes ancient Chinese cosmology, medicine, and Maoism against the monuments of early capitalist modernity such as the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower to highlight the differences in political investments and intensities. From the Chinese revolution to the global rise of right-wing movements, Dutton rethinks politics in the contemporary world.
Arvustused
Reading The Book of Politics is an adventure. Michael Duttons intellectual omnivorousness is exuberantly and unapologetically on display here. I cannot think of another author who is equally at home explicating Schmitt, Mao, and Zhuangzi and rounding up many such unusual suspects into a wildly inventive and deeply penetrating meditation on the modern condition. - Haiyan Lee, author of (A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination) We are all on the planet experiencing the closing of Westernization and the opening of dewesternization and decoloniality demanding a radical departure from Western disciplinary regulation and management of intersubjective relations. Michael Duttons The Book of Politics assertively takes up the challenge. Dutton takes China as a method, reverting Orientalism and its continuity in area studies. He finds in art and literature the vital affective energy that allows him to depart from the measurement of reality demanded by the myth of (social) sciences. The arguments may, in his own words, be 'hard to swallow which is a defiant invitation to engage with this splendid book. - Walter Mignolo, author of (The Politics of Decolonial Investigations)
List of Illustrations xi
Foreword xv
Acknowledgments xix
Context 1
Part
1. Beginnings 19
1. Almost Aphoristic 21
2. Numismatics 57
3. Callings 73
Part
2. Contagions 85
4. 911 87
5. Heroics? 110
6. Monumental Hiccup in GÖttingen: From Living Dangerously to a Barer Life
116
Part
3. Reconstructions 133
7. Channeling Intensity: A Design Process 137
8. Anren: Friend and Enemy in Peace and Benevolence? 153
9. From Hiccup to Habit: From Cultural Revolution to Culture Industry 166
Part
4. Becoming Modern 177
10. From the Crystal Palace to the Eiffel Tower 179
11. Eiffel Tower-Ante: The Ferris Wheel 202
12. Eiffel Tower-Anti: Tatlins Tower 222
Part
5. Becoming Political 233
13. Becoming Maoist 235
14. Becoming Maoist II: Language, Economy, Security 261
Part
6. Strokes, Not Words 291
15. Calligraphy 293
16. Spilling Off the Page 306
Afterwords 315
Glossary A. Terms and Concepts 337
Glossary B. Chinese Terms, Names, Titles, Words, and Phrases 347
Bibliography 365
Index
Michael Dutton most recently taught at Beijing Capital Normal University and Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of Policing Chinese Politics: A History, also published by Duke University Press, and coauthor of Beijing Time.
