Wild Materialism

Jacques Lezra is Distinguished Professor in the Departments of English and Hispanic Studies at the University of California, Riverside. His most recent publications are República salvaje (2019), On the Nature of Marx's Things (2018), Untranslating Machines: A Genealogy for the Ends of Global Thought (2017), and Contra todos los fueros de la Muerte (2016).

"Blends a discussion of terror with radical democracy in a way that is thoroughly original ... an important book on a large and crucial topic." -- -Marc Redfield Claremont Graduate University "Wild Materialism is a theoretical event. Not only is it one of the most brilliant, rigorous and transformative books since DeMan's Allegories of Reading or Jameson's Political Unconscious, in it we witness what Althusser would call 'an unexpected birth.' Like other wild children, when Lezra had to think the political-philosophic condition of present democracy, he had to work through and past the critical impasses of biopolitics, sovereignty, radical democratic theory, and post-politics, to inventively refigure an ethic of terror as fright. This fearless book not only revisits political theology's primal scenes, but through its unique standpoint of Spanish Republicanism it offers a haunting and haunted meta-reflection on exile and its experiences. Here at last is the affirmative secular response to the challenges of a post 9/11 present, where, as Lezra so effectively argues, only wounded sovereignty, weak concepts, unbounded events and defective social universals might save us." -- -Diane Rubenstein Cornell University "An urgently contemporary study of the relation between 'terror' as a state of expectancy in relation to an event to come, and 'terrorism' as the deadly deployment of force in situations of radical exploitation and oppression." -- -Julia Lupton University of California, Irvine "Lezra sketches a fascinating trip from the archaic scene of Oedipus, beyond the time of the founding of the individual and collective subject, to the events of September 11, at the threshold of our contingent future. Wild Materialism's path leads through the Paris of the 15th century, the Spanish empire, the war in Algeria, and on to the contemporary world, and delivers an analysis of the production of universals in and of political space, that prior instant from which dualisms and differences flow--inside/out, frien/enemy, private/public, terror/terrorism--divisions and reconstitutions of what is held in common. This is a work that refuses finally to dissolve politics into aesthetics, and seeks out an innovative, apt vocabulary for the tasks of ethics and politics, far from the fiction of sovereign, constituting power. Wild Materialism revises the sense of radical republicanism, basing itself in a fascinating interpretation of Levinas, Althusser and Freud, which forces us to rethink the classic arguments of the 20th century, from Arendt to Schmitt, from Koselleck to Habermas, Derrida to Negri." -- -Jose Luis Villacanas Universidad Complutense de Madrid