Lacan, Deleuze and World Politics : Rethinking the Ontology of the Political Subject

This book re-thinks the way in which the subject is inscribed in the modern political by exploring the potentiality of a monist ontology in a Lacano-Deleuzian theoretical framework. It concerns a different ontology and a non-dualist understanding of political and legal being, focusing on the questions: how to think alternative notions of existence and what their political, social and legal implications are? This book will be of interest to postgraduates and scholars working on critical normative ideas in international politics, critical security studies and critical legal studies.

This book aims to re-think the way in which the subject is inscribed in the modern political, and does so by exploring the potentiality of Lacano-Deleuzian theoretical framework. It concerns a different ontology and a non-dualist understanding of political and legal existence, by focusing on questions such as how to think alternative notions of political existence and what kind of political, social and legal order do these come to create.

This investigation into political appearance of subjects through concepts of law, body and life is led and influenced by the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, as well as Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and Slavoj Žižek. The book takes on various conceptualisations of life, explores the relationship between law and life and develops an alternative notion of legal and political existence in particular in the context of rights. On the back of Guantánamo’s legal and political discourses this work aims to show why and how the problems of world politics or the limitations of (human) rights discourse require an engagement with questions such as what it means to exist as a human being, what forms of life are politically recognised, which are not, and why this distinction.

By pointing to a different ontology for thinking and understanding global politics and demonstrating how a trans-disciplinary and philosophical approaches can foster the debates in world politics, this book will be of interest to postgraduates and scholars working on critical normative ideas in international politics, critical security studies and critical legal studies.