Winner, French Voices Award This book, a crossover hit in France,
offers a fresh genealogy of our neoliberal moment. "We must adapt!"
These words can be heard almost everywhere and in every aspect of
our lives. Where does this widespread sense that we have fallen
behind come from? How can we explain this progressive colonization
of the economic, social, and political fields by this biological
vocabulary of evolution? Offering a lucid account of sophisticated
material, Barbara Stiegler uncovers the prehistories of today's
ubiquitous rhetoric in Darwinism and American liberalism, while, at
the same time, recovering powerful resistances to the rhetoric of
adaptation across the twentieth century. Walter Lippmann, an
American theorist of this new liberalism, believed democracy was
not adapted to the needs of globalization. Only a government of
experts could force society to evolve, he argued. Lippmann thus
found himself confronted with John Dewey, the great figure of
American Pragmatism. Both Lippmann and Dewey labored under the
impression that the world had changed and society needed to adapt.
However, Lippmann did not trust society to adapt on its own and
insisted on the need for experts who would force the necessary
adaptation. Dewey, by contrast, believed the necessary adaptation
could only come "from below" and should proceed in a democratic
fashion. Focusing on readings of Michel Foucault, Walter Lippmann,
and John Dewey, Adapt! paves the way for renewed insights into
neoliberalism's history, essence, characteristic forces, and
impacts, as well as biopolitical theory. Stiegler presents an
intriguing new genealogy for the development of neoliberalism,
examining whether humans are by nature lagging and require
biopolitical and disciplinary management to enforce adaptation.
Stiegler also reorients Foucault's genealogy of neoliberalism by
emphasizing the Darwinian rhetoric of adaptation, as it arose in
the Lippmann-Dewey Debate, and deftly handles the question of human
nature in a way that re-enlivens this traditional concept. As the
industrialization of our ways of life never stops destroying the
environment and the health of organisms (climate disruption, the
destruction of biodiversity, the growth of chronic diseases, the
return of large pandemics), how can we think of a democratic
government of life and the living? This is the question that
Stiegler's work helps us to confront.
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