The current social turmoil enveloping the world has produced knee jerk reactions and a plethora of policy declarations. At the same time, the scenario is marked with response of those with low socioeconomic status to the worldwide chaos and precarious living conditions. In this context, how do we make sense of what is being described variously as a breakdown of democracy, its exhaustion, and the new challenges in the form of an alternative politics of life or a phenomenon that we may term as “biopolitics from below”?
The theme of the book is crisis, conjuncture, and rupture. It relates to the question of correlation of social and political forces in the emergence of certain events, presents certain events as illustrations, and takes a historiographical-analytical route to argue why certain things happen in the way they happen. Usually, crisis is the explanatory factor. This book seeks to go deeper and find out why some crises and not all produce unexpected outcomes. Or, as this book puts it differently, the essential gradient of a crisis is the correlation of forces at a particular time - and thus the question of conjuncture. The book seeks to open up to new adventures in thought, imagining new openings, and creating exits from the situation we find ourselves in.
- Contents
- Notes 123
- Spectral Worldmaking—a Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Conjuncture, Crisis, and Biopolitics from Below
- India in 1971: Crisis, Conjuncture, and the Entry of People in Biopolitics
- Passive Revolution
- The Link between Crisis and Conjuncture
- The Theme of Conjuncture
- The Theme of Crisis
- The Gray World of Biopolitics from Below
- Contingencies Shape Themes of Biopolitics
- Gray Histories of Biopolitics from Below
- Fractured Geography of the City and Biopolitics from Below
- Logistical Labor, Migrant Workers, and the Physicality of Life
- Strategic Dimension of Biopolitics from Below
- The Argument So Far
- Covid-19, Multiple Crises, and the Biopolitical Response
- Practical Ethics: Solidarity, Care, Protection, and Responsibility
- A New Kind of Public Power
- Conclusion
- Notes
- Index
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