Many on the Left have looked upon "universal" as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. In this book, one of our most important political philosophers builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, Balibar shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. In dialogue with such philosophers as Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, and Jacques Ranciere, he meticulously investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. With critical rigor and keen historical insight, Balibar shows that every statement and institution of the universal-such as declarations of human rights-carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, Balibar suggests, the very conflict of the universal-constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction-also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, Balibar shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.

Many on the Left have looked upon "universal" as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. In rejecting universalism, we have learned to reorient politics around particulars, positionalities, identities, immanence, and multiple modernities. In this book, one of our most important political philosophers builds on these critiques of the tacit exclusions of Enlightenment thought, while at the same time working to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common. In the contemporary quarrel of universals, Balibar shows, the stakes are no less than the future of our democracies. In dialogue with such philosophers as Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, and Jacques Ranciere, he meticulously investigates the paradoxical processes by which the universal is constructed and deconstructed, instituted and challenged, in modern society. With critical rigor and keen historical insight, Balibar shows that every statement and institution of the universal-such as declarations of human rights-carry an exclusionary, particularizing principle within themselves and that every universalism immediately falls prey to countervailing universalisms. Always equivocal and plural, the universal is thus a persistent site of conflict within societies and within subjects themselves. And yet, Balibar suggests, the very conflict of the universal-constituted as an ever-unfolding performative contradiction-also provides the emancipatory force needed to reinvigorate and reimagine contemporary politics and philosophy. In conversation with a range of thinkers from Marx, Freud, and Benjamin through Foucault, Derrida, and Scott, Balibar shows the power that resides not in the adoption of a single universalism but in harnessing the energies made available by claims to universality in order to establish a common answerable to difference.

An argument that under capitalism, debt has become infinite and unpayable, expressing a political relation of subjection and enslavement. Experts, pundits, and politicians agree: public debt is hindering growth and increasing unemployment. Governments must reduce debt at all cost if they want to restore confidence and get back on a path to prosperity. Maurizio Lazzarato's diagnosis, however, is completely different: under capitalism, debt is not primarily a question of budget and economic concerns but a political relation of subjection and enslavement. Debt has become infinite and unpayable. It disciplines populations, calls for structural reforms, justifies authoritarian crackdowns, and even legitimizes the suspension of democracy in favor of "technocratic governments" beholden to the interests of capital. The 2008 economic crisis only accelerated the establishment of a "new State capitalism," which has carried out a massive confiscation of societies' wealth through taxes. And who benefits? Finance capital. In a calamitous return to the situation before the two world wars, the entire process of accumulation is now governed by finance, which has absorbed sectors it once ignored, like higher education, and today is often identified with life itself. Faced with the current catastrophe and the disaster to come, Lazzarato contends, we must overcome capitalist valorization and reappropriate our existence, knowledge, and technology. In Governing by Debt, Lazzarato confronts a wide range of thinkers-from Felix Guattari and Michel Foucault to David Graeber and Carl Schmitt-and draws on examples from the United States and Europe to argue that it is time that we unite in a collective refusal of this most dire status quo.

A new and radical reexamination of today's neoliberalist "new economy" through the political lens of the debtor/creditor relation. "The debtor-creditor relation, which is at the heart of this book, sharpens mechanisms of exploitation and domination indiscriminately, since, in it, there is no distinction between workers and the unemployed, consumers and producers, working and non-working populations, between retirees and welfare recipients. They are all 'debtors,' guilty and responsible in the eyes of capital, which has become the Great, the Universal, Creditor." -from The Making of the Indebted Man Debt-both public debt and private debt-has become a major concern of economic and political leaders. In The Making of the Indebted Man, Maurizio Lazzarato shows that, far from being a threat to the capitalist economy, debt lies at the very core of the neoliberal project. Through a reading of Karl Marx's lesser-known youthful writings on John Mill, and a rereading of writings by Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, and Michel Foucault, Lazzarato demonstrates that debt is above all a political construction, and that the creditor/debtor relation is the fundamental social relation of Western societies. Debt cannot be reduced to a simple economic mechanism, for it is also a technique of "public safety" through which individual and collective subjectivities are governed and controlled. Its aim is to minimize the uncertainty of the time and behavior of the governed. We are forever sinking further into debt to the State, to private insurance, and, on a more general level, to corporations. To insure that we honor our debts, we are at once encouraged and compelled to become the "entrepreneurs" of our lives, of our "human capital." In this way, our entire material, psychological, and affective horizon is upended and reconfigured. How do we extricate ourselves from this impossible situation? How do we escape the neoliberal condition of the indebted man? Lazzarato argues that we will have to recognize that there is no simple technical, economic, or financial solution. We must instead radically challenge the fundamental social relation structuring capitalism: the system of debt.

One of the first comprehensive treatments of Deleuzian thought. There is always something schizophrenic about logic in Deleuze, which represents another distinctive characteristic: a deep perversion of the very heart of philosophy. Thus, a preliminary definition of Deleuze's philosophy emerges: an irrational logic of aberrant movements. -from Aberrant Movements In Aberrant Movements, David Lapoujade offers one of the first comprehensive treatments of Deleuzian thought. Drawing on the entirety of Deleuze's work as well as his collaborations with Felix Guattari, from the "transcendental empiricism" of Difference and Repetition to the schizoanalysis and geophilosophy of Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Lapoujade explores the central problem underlying the delirious coherence of Deleuze's philosophy: aberrant movements. These are the movements that Deleuze wrests from Kantian idealism, Nietzsche's eternal return, and the nonsense of Lewis Carroll; they are the schizophrenic processes of the unconscious and the nomadic line of flight traversing history-in short, the forces that permeate life and thought. Tracing and classifying their "irrational logics" represent the quintessential tasks of Deleuzian philosophy. Rather than abstract notions, though, these logics constitute various modes of populating the earth-involving the human as much as the animal, physical, and chemical-and the affective, mental, and political populations that populate human thought. Lapoujade argues that aberrant movements become the figures in a combat against the forms of political, social, philosophical, aesthetic, and scientific organization that attempt to deny, counter, or crush their existence. In this study of a thinker whose insights, theoretical confrontations, and perverse critiques have profoundly influenced philosophy, literature, film, and art over the last fifty years, Lapoujade invites us to join in the discordant harmonies of Deleuze's work-and in the battle that constitutes the thought of philosophy, politics, and life.

An analysis of how capitalism today produces subjectivity like any other "good," and what would allow us to escape its hold. "Capital is a semiotic operator": this assertion by Felix Guattari is at the heart of Maurizio Lazzarato's Signs and Machines, which asks us to leave behind the logocentrism that still informs so many critical theories. Lazzarato calls instead for a new theory capable of explaining how signs function in the economy, in power apparatuses, and in the production of subjectivity. Moving beyond the dualism of signifier and signified, Signs and Machines shows how signs act as "sign-operators" that enter directly into material flows and into the functioning of machines. Money, the stock market, price differentials, algorithms, and scientific equations and formulas constitute semiotic "motors" that make capitalism's social and technical machines run, bypassing representation and consciousness to produce social subjections and semiotic enslavements. Lazzarato contrasts Deleuze and Guattari's complex semiotics with the political theories of Jacques Ranciere, Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Paolo Virno, and Judith Butler, for whom language and the public space it opens still play a fundamental role. Lazzarato asks: What are the conditions necessary for political and existential rupture at a time when the production of subjectivity represents the primary and perhaps most important work of capitalism? What are the specific tools required to undo the industrial mass production of subjectivity undertaken by business and the state? What types of organization must we construct for a process of subjectivation that would allow us to escape the hold of social subjection and machinic enslavement? In addressing these questions, Signs and Machines takes on a task that is today more urgent than ever.