Common Groundexplores the philosophical relationship between collectivity, individuality, affect and agency in the neoliberal era. Jeremy Gilbert argues that individualism is forced upon us by neoliberal culture, fatally limiting our capacity to escape the current crisis of democratic politics.
The book asks how forces and ideas opposed to neoliberal hegemony, and to the individualist tradition in Western thought, might serve to protect some form of communality, and how far we must accept assumptions about the nature of individuality and collectivity which are the legacy of an elitist tradition. Along the way it examines different ideas and practices of collectivity, from conservative notions of hierarchical and patriarchal communities to the politics of ‘horizontality’ and ‘the commons’ which are at the heart of radical movements today.
Exploring this fundamental faultline in contemporary political struggle,Common Groundproposes a radically non-individualist mode of imagining social life, collective creativity and democratic possibility.
Jeremy Gilbert is Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London and editor of the journal New Formations. He is the co-author of Discographies: Dance, Music, Culture and the Politics of Sound (2002) and the author of Anti-capitalism and Culture: Radical Theory and Popular Politics (2008).
Preface
1 Postmodernity and the Crisis of Democracy
2 A War of All Against All: Neoliberal Hegemony and Competitive Individualism
3 Leviathan Logics: Group Psychology from Hobbes to Laclau
4 The State of Community Opened: Multitude and Multiplicity
5 The Non-Fascist Crowd: Individuation and Infinite Relationality
6 Feeling Together: Affect, Identity and the Politics of the Common
7 On the Impossibility of Making Decisions: Affect, Agency and the Democratic Sublime
Conclusions
Notes
Index
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