Biopolitics

While for many on the Left, the theory of ultra-left communist Jacques Camatte has long been condemned for its ‘nostalgia’ and ‘primitivism’, our current moment of climate crisis and a ‘generalised madness’ brought on by capitalism’s psyche harvesting reveals these works to have a powerful relevance.

The austerity programme imposed by the IMF after Argentina’s 2001 economic crisis, far from imposing debt universally as Maurizio Lazzarato’s figure of the ‘indebted man’ would have it, hit women hardest. George Jepson revisits this history to extract the figure of the ‘indebted woman’ it forged and the collective female body of protest that erupted as a result.

Although close to anti-psychiatry’s diagnosis of the social causes of mental illness, the ‘sociogenic’ approaches of the Black and Asian therapeutic community have been largely overlooked. Their reversal of psychiatry’s individualising techniques, argues Howard Slater, reveals the patient to be western society and its endemic racism which imposes a maddening, monohumanist strait-jacket onto the earth’s majority

‘I’d rather be bright mad

Than dull and well.

My complications me excite,

Taking the case of Tunisia’s Dignity Revolution, Oana Parvan examines the structural connections between the growing global category of those designated ‘surplus life’ by the neo-imperial economy – and by extension, condemned to social and often actual death – and the preconditions of revolution

What can the work of radical anti-psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, documented in John Foot's new book, teach us about contemporary crises in 'mental health'? In his review, Howard Slater revisits  the debate around the closure of asylums and the cut-rate 'care in the community' policies they supposedly triggered, and salvages Basaglia's political reading of social alienation as his true legacy

Garments Against Women by Anne Boyer, Mute Books (European Edition)

First published by Ahsahta Press, 2015.

ISBN: (paperback) 978-1-906496-38-8 price £14 16 €

104 pages, 148mm x 210mm (A5), black and white with colour covers.

The world’s first synthetic fabric, rayon, made from congealed vegetable matter and human labour, was spun into artificial silk stockings and worn by the same women that mass produced it. Hannah Proctor uses this as a guiding metaphor for her analysis of interwar gender politics and their relation to today

In the final, as yet untranslated, instalment of his Homo Sacer project, L’uso dei corpi, Giorgio Agamben presents a new ontology of use. Richard Braude reviews the Italian edition and speculates on how Agamben's philosophy may in turn be put to use

In this transcript of a presentation given at the Accelerationism symposium in Berlin December 2013, Josephine Berry Slater questions whether, in the era of biopolitics, forms of epistemic ‘accelerationism’ can be divorced from the management of life from which they flee