Books by Matthew MacLellan
In the late 1970s, Michel Foucault dedicated a number of controversial lectures on the subject o... more In the late 1970s, Michel Foucault dedicated a number of controversial lectures on the subject of neoliberalism. Had Foucault been seduced by neoliberalism? Did France’s premier leftist intellectual, near the end of his career, turn to the right? In this book, Geoffroy de Lagasnerie argues that far from abandoning the left, Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism was a means of probing the limits and lacunae of traditional political philosophy, social contract theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. For Lagasnerie, Foucault’s analysis was an attempt to discover neoliberalism’s singularity, understand its appeal, and unearth its emancipatory potential in order to construct a new art of rebelliousness. By reading Foucault’s lectures on neoliberalism as a means of developing new practices of emancipation, Lagasnerie offers an original and compelling account of Michel Foucault’s most controversial work.
Bloomsbury, 2019
Around the globe, contemporary protest movements are contesting the oligarchic appropriation of n... more Around the globe, contemporary protest movements are contesting the oligarchic appropriation of natural resources, public services, and shared networks of knowledge and communication. These struggles raise the same fundamental demand and rest on the same irreducible principle: the common.
In this exhaustive account, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval show how the common has become the defining principle of alternative political movements in the 21st century. In societies deeply shaped by neoliberal rationality, the common is increasingly invoked as the operative concept of practical struggles creating new forms of democratic governance. In a feat of analytic clarity, Dardot and Laval dissect and synthesize a vast repository on the concept of the commons, from the fields of philosophy, political theory, economics, legal theory, history, theology, and sociology.
Instead of conceptualizing the common as an essence of man or as inherent in nature, the thread developed by Dardot and Laval traces the active lives of human beings: only a practical activity of commoning can decide what will be shared in common and what rules will govern the common's citizen-subjects. This re-articulation of the common calls for nothing less than the institutional transformation of society by society: it calls for a revolution.
Papers by Matthew MacLellan
Constellations, 2020
This article theorizes democratic politics as a continual struggle to expand the sphere of the po... more This article theorizes democratic politics as a continual struggle to expand the sphere of the political over against attempts to assert a more or less strict demarcation between political space and social or private life. To this end, the specific analysis I offer here tries to reframe the logic and utility of identity politics as a strategy or practice of democratic struggle by linking it to Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. After drawing on recent work in political theory that defines identity politics on the basis of its critical universality, I offer a brief genealogy of identity politics that rearticulates this controversial form of politics as an adaptive (and adapting) response to the polyvalent ways in which liberalism has been employed to shield private power from democratic challenge. By reframing identity politics as a population- or demographic-based political rationality that tries to overcome the specific democratic limitations of liberalism—and especially liberalism’s unique form of universality—I conclude the article by arguing that contemporary identity politics constitutes a form of democratic biopolitics. Rethinking biopolitics in this manner offers an alternative to the hegemonic interpretation of the concept produced by theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, and it also suggests certain challenges, but also opportunities, for differently understanding and applying the political theory of Michel Foucault today.
he future looks bleak.” It would be difficult for any reader, of any social/political orientation... more he future looks bleak.” It would be difficult for any reader, of any social/political orientation, to read these opening words from Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval and not nod, even if only reluctantly, in agreement. If, however, the casual reader is able to gloss over this opening line without being immediately compelled to recognize the gravity of what is to come, in the second paragraph of the text Dardot and Laval issue a second, more immediate and urgent reminder, of the gravity of the moment within and against which they are writing: “The situation in which humanity finds itself is becoming increasingly intolerable.”1 Such propositions are easy to promulgate, (again) regardless of social/political orientation, and there is no shortage of material with which such propositions may be abundantly and exhaustingly supported. Fortunately for readers of Common, Dardot and Laval are far less interested in proving their characterization of the present moment, and far more
This article argues for a reading of contemporary gun culture in the United States as a transcode... more This article argues for a reading of contemporary gun culture in the United States as a transcoded instantiation of neoliberalism. Building on Fredric Jameson’s notion of “transcoding,” this article maps the historical relationship between neoliberalism and gun culture in the United States in two phases: an initial period of politicization in the late 1960s and 1970s in which early neoliberal reforms (particularly in public and urban housing) altered the demographics of gun owners and re-articulated gun ownership as a politically (if not yet constitutionally) legitimate means of self-defense; and a second phase in the 1980s and 1990s in which the rhetoric of gun culture evoked government tyranny or oppression as the prime threat against which guns protect. During this second phase of politicization, I show how guns effectively ceased to denote actual or empirical objects and instead began to circulate as transcoded objects of the neoliberal critique of welfare state interventionism ...
This doctoral dissertation investigates potential political shifts introduced by the post-industr... more This doctoral dissertation investigates potential political shifts introduced by the post-industrialization of Western societies. After a genealogical analysis that explains why the dimension of the technological has become an increasingly important site of politics for Marxist theory in the post-industrial age, the dissertation examines the work of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in order to demonstrate the contradictory way in which these theorists argue that the rise of new information and communication media has actually resulted in a lack or absence of mediation in a political sense. This dissertation asserts that this contradictory formulation of the politics of the post-industrial society is demonstrative of a conceptual incompatibility between contemporary media theory and political philosophy, and, accordingly, the remainder of the dissertation attempts to reconstruct the relationship between these otherwise disparate fields of thought, through a practice described within as comparative political mediaolgy. This combined media and politico-philosophical approach begins with a reading of Plato's Republic, in which it is argued that Plato's Introduction … 1
Environmental Humanities, 2015
This article argues that Garrett Hardin's primary object of critique in his influential "... more This article argues that Garrett Hardin's primary object of critique in his influential "The Tragedy of the Commons" is not the commons or shared property at all—as is almost universally assumed by Hardin's critics—but is rather Adam Smith's theory of markets and its viability for protecting scarce resources. On the basis of this revised understanding this article then offers a different interpretation of Hardin's thesis by assigning hermeneutic priority to the concept of "tragedy" (Aristotle, Nietzsche) rather than the concept of the "commons." Read through the concept of tragedy, it argues that Hardin's thesis effectively asserts a rigid incompatibility between market economics and environmental protection, and to this extent "The Tragedy of the Commons" is more aptly read as a political critique that questions the viability of unlimited growth as the axiomatic premise of planetary economics.
Constellations, 2020
This article theorizes democratic politics as a continual struggle to expand the sphere of the po... more This article theorizes democratic politics as a continual struggle to expand the sphere of the political over against attempts to assert a more or less strict demarcation between political space and social or private life. To this end, the specific analysis I offer here tries to reframe the logic and utility of identity politics as a strategy or practice of democratic struggle by linking it to Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. After drawing on recent work in political theory that defines identity politics on the basis of its critical universality, I offer a brief genealogy of identity politics that rearticulates this controversial form of politics as an adaptive (and adapting) response to the polyvalent ways in which liberalism has been employed to shield private power from democratic challenge. By reframing identity politics as a population- or demographic-based political rationality that tries to overcome the specific democratic limitations of liberalism—and especially liberalism’s unique form of universality—I conclude the article by arguing that contemporary identity politics constitutes a form of democratic biopolitics. Rethinking biopolitics in this manner offers an alternative to the hegemonic interpretation of the concept produced by theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, and it also suggests certain challenges, but also opportunities, for differently understanding and applying the political theory of Michel Foucault today.
he future looks bleak.” It would be difficult for any reader, of any social/political orientation... more he future looks bleak.” It would be difficult for any reader, of any social/political orientation, to read these opening words from Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval and not nod, even if only reluctantly, in agreement. If, however, the casual reader is able to gloss over this opening line without being immediately compelled to recognize the gravity of what is to come, in the second paragraph of the text Dardot and Laval issue a second, more immediate and urgent reminder, of the gravity of the moment within and against which they are writing: “The situation in which humanity finds itself is becoming increasingly intolerable.”1 Such propositions are easy to promulgate, (again) regardless of social/political orientation, and there is no shortage of material with which such propositions may be abundantly and exhaustingly supported. Fortunately for readers of Common, Dardot and Laval are far less interested in proving their characterization of the present moment, and far more
This article argues for a reading of contemporary gun culture in the United States as a transcode... more This article argues for a reading of contemporary gun culture in the United States as a transcoded instantiation of neoliberalism. Building on Fredric Jameson’s notion of “transcoding,” this article maps the historical relationship between neoliberalism and gun culture in the United States in two phases: an initial period of politicization in the late 1960s and 1970s in which early neoliberal reforms (particularly in public and urban housing) altered the demographics of gun owners and re-articulated gun ownership as a politically (if not yet constitutionally) legitimate means of self-defense; and a second phase in the 1980s and 1990s in which the rhetoric of gun culture evoked government tyranny or oppression as the prime threat against which guns protect. During this second phase of politicization, I show how guns effectively ceased to denote actual or empirical objects and instead began to circulate as transcoded objects of the neoliberal critique of welfare state interventionism ...
Environmental Humanities, 2015
This article argues that Garrett Hardin's primary object of critique in his influential "... more This article argues that Garrett Hardin's primary object of critique in his influential "The Tragedy of the Commons" is not the commons or shared property at all—as is almost universally assumed by Hardin's critics—but is rather Adam Smith's theory of markets and its viability for protecting scarce resources. On the basis of this revised understanding this article then offers a different interpretation of Hardin's thesis by assigning hermeneutic priority to the concept of "tragedy" (Aristotle, Nietzsche) rather than the concept of the "commons." Read through the concept of tragedy, it argues that Hardin's thesis effectively asserts a rigid incompatibility between market economics and environmental protection, and to this extent "The Tragedy of the Commons" is more aptly read as a political critique that questions the viability of unlimited growth as the axiomatic premise of planetary economics.
Rethinking Marxism, 2013
Within the scholarly literature there is a general consensus that the significance of Marx's ... more Within the scholarly literature there is a general consensus that the significance of Marx's vampire metaphor is limited to accentuating the excessive and predatory nature of capitalist accumulation. Against the predominant view, this essay argues that the standard reading of Marx's vampire metaphor implicitly endows the category of “living labor” or the “worker” with a transcendent rather than immanent ontology. Drawing predominantly from Louis Althusser's reading of Marx in Reading Capital, this essay argues that interpreting Marx's vampire metaphor as representing the concept of value—or surplus-value more specifically—avoids the problematic tendency to reify living labor by underscoring the immanent and totalizing character of Marx's critique of capital.
Rethinking Marxism, 2013
Within the scholarly literature there is a general consensus that the significance of Marx's ... more Within the scholarly literature there is a general consensus that the significance of Marx's vampire metaphor is limited to accentuating the excessive and predatory nature of capitalist accumulation. Against the predominant view, this essay argues that the standard reading of Marx's vampire metaphor implicitly endows the category of “living labor” or the “worker” with a transcendent rather than immanent ontology. Drawing predominantly from Louis Althusser's reading of Marx in Reading Capital, this essay argues that interpreting Marx's vampire metaphor as representing the concept of value—or surplus-value more specifically—avoids the problematic tendency to reify living labor by underscoring the immanent and totalizing character of Marx's critique of capital.
Constellations, 2020
This article theorizes democratic politics as a continual struggle to expand the sphere of the po... more This article theorizes democratic politics as a continual struggle to expand the sphere of the political over against attempts to assert a more or less strict demarcation between political space and social or private life. To this end, the specific analysis I offer here tries to reframe the logic and utility of identity politics as a strategy or practice of democratic struggle by linking it to Michel Foucault’s concept of biopolitics. After drawing on recent work in political theory that defines identity politics on the basis of its critical universality, I offer a brief genealogy of identity politics that rearticulates this controversial form of politics as an adaptive (and adapting) response to the polyvalent ways in which liberalism has been employed to shield private power from democratic challenge. By reframing identity politics as a population- or demographic-based political rationality that tries to overcome the specific democratic limitations of liberalism—and especially liberalism’s unique form of universality—I conclude the article by arguing that contemporary identity politics constitutes a form of democratic biopolitics. Rethinking biopolitics in this manner offers an alternative to the hegemonic interpretation of the concept produced by theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito, and it also suggests certain challenges, but also opportunities, for differently understanding and applying the political theory of Michel Foucault today.
Theory and Event, 2018
This article argues for a reading of biopolitics as a mechanism of political empowerment under co... more This article argues for a reading of biopolitics as a mechanism of political empowerment under conditions in which the state perpetuates exclusion by paradoxically affirming the political equality of marginalized individuals or groups. After differentiating Michel Foucault’s conceptualization of biopolitics from its conventional interpretation in Giorgio Agamben, I show how the Canadian state counterintuitively perpetuates Indigenous exclusion through an inclusive liberalism that re-affirms indigenous persons as full and equal citizens. I then conclude the article by showing how a statistics or information-based discourse of population—an Indigenous infopolitics—has concomitantly become an indispensible means of Indigenous resistance in Canada today
This article argues that Garrett Hardin’s primary object of critique in his influential “The Trag... more This article argues that Garrett Hardin’s primary object of critique in his influential “The Tragedy of the Commons” is not the commons or shared property at all—as is almost universally assumed by Hardin’s critics—but is rather Adam Smith’s theory of markets and its viability for protecting scarce resources. On the basis of this revised understanding this article then offers a different interpretation of Hardin’s thesis by assigning hermeneutic priority to the concept of “tragedy” (Aristotle, Nietzsche) rather than the concept of the “commons.” Read through the concept of tragedy, it argues that Hardin’s thesis effectively asserts a rigid incompatibility between market economics and environmental protection, and to this extent “The Tragedy of the Commons” is more aptly read as a political critique that questions the viability of unlimited growth as the axiomatic premise of planetary economics.
Within the scholarly literature there is a general consensus that the significance of Marx's vamp... more Within the scholarly literature there is a general consensus that the significance of Marx's vampire metaphor is limited to accentuating the excessive and predatory nature of capitalist accumulation. Against the predominant view, this essay argues that the standard reading of Marx's vampire metaphor implicitly endows the category of "living labor" or the "worker" with a transcendent rather than immanent ontology. Drawing predominantly from Louis Althusser's reading of Marx in Reading Capital, this essay argues that interpreting Marx's vampire metaphor as representing the concept of value-or surplus-value more specifically-avoids the problematic tendency to reify living labor by underscoring the immanent and totalizing character of Marx's critique of capital.
Book Reviews by Matthew MacLellan
A follow-up to his Art and Revolution (2007), Gerald Raunig's A Th ousand Machines uses a combina... more A follow-up to his Art and Revolution (2007), Gerald Raunig's A Th ousand Machines uses a combination of Marxian theory and Deleuzian philosophy to examine today's radical social movements as they negotiate the post-fordist landscape. Combining theoretical rigour with an approach that is part genealogical exploration, part activist reportage, A Th ousand Machines theorizes artistically inclined or infl ected social movements in an attempt to determine how these "art machines" resist the imperatives of transnational capital while altering the ways in which protest movements imagine themselves under twenty-fi rst century capitalism. In the fi rst instance, the force of A Th ousand Machines' thesis would seem to turn on the dialectic between a Marxian-Deleuzian theoretical framework and the book's particular contents: do these artistic social movements gesture toward some real critical potential, or are they simply further symptomatic manifestations of a neoliberal hegemony in which all utopias can only be imagined as a rupture or fl ight from a repressive statism? However, against this somewhat limited view, I would suggest that the real critical potential of A Th ousand Machines is manifest in the way in which the text implicitly collapses this binary itself. By way of its clear enunciation of the ideological similarities between the 1968-inspired anti-capitalist movements and the logics of global capital itself, A Th ousand Machines, above and beyond its actual content, is ultimately a call to dialectically think the implications for resistance to capital when both oppressor and the oppressed champion the same ethos of creativity, freedom, authenticity, and production.
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Books by Matthew MacLellan
In this exhaustive account, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval show how the common has become the defining principle of alternative political movements in the 21st century. In societies deeply shaped by neoliberal rationality, the common is increasingly invoked as the operative concept of practical struggles creating new forms of democratic governance. In a feat of analytic clarity, Dardot and Laval dissect and synthesize a vast repository on the concept of the commons, from the fields of philosophy, political theory, economics, legal theory, history, theology, and sociology.
Instead of conceptualizing the common as an essence of man or as inherent in nature, the thread developed by Dardot and Laval traces the active lives of human beings: only a practical activity of commoning can decide what will be shared in common and what rules will govern the common's citizen-subjects. This re-articulation of the common calls for nothing less than the institutional transformation of society by society: it calls for a revolution.
Papers by Matthew MacLellan
Book Reviews by Matthew MacLellan
In this exhaustive account, Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval show how the common has become the defining principle of alternative political movements in the 21st century. In societies deeply shaped by neoliberal rationality, the common is increasingly invoked as the operative concept of practical struggles creating new forms of democratic governance. In a feat of analytic clarity, Dardot and Laval dissect and synthesize a vast repository on the concept of the commons, from the fields of philosophy, political theory, economics, legal theory, history, theology, and sociology.
Instead of conceptualizing the common as an essence of man or as inherent in nature, the thread developed by Dardot and Laval traces the active lives of human beings: only a practical activity of commoning can decide what will be shared in common and what rules will govern the common's citizen-subjects. This re-articulation of the common calls for nothing less than the institutional transformation of society by society: it calls for a revolution.