Writing the Body Politic

Mark Featherstone is Senior Lecturer at Keele University, UK, and author of Tocqueville’s Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Thought (2006) and Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, Globalisation (2017). Thomas Kemple is Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and author of Reading Marx Writing: Marx, Melodrama, and the ‘Grundrisse’ (1995), Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber’s Calling (2014), and Simmel (2018).

• Editors’ Introduction Part 1: The Bio-Body 1. Foucault’s Optics: The (In)vision of Mortality and Modernity 2. The Specular Body: Merleau-Ponty and Lacan on Infant Self and Other 3. Childhood and Embodiment 4. Infant Theory Part 2: The Productive Body 5. The Disciplinary Society: From Weber to Foucault 6. Orphic Marxism 7. Televideo Ergo Sum: Some Hypotheses on the Specular Functions of the Media 8. Empire versus Empire: A Post-Communist Manifesto Part 3: The Libidinal Body 9. Marcuse’s Maternal Ethic: Myths of Narcissism and Maternalism in Utopian Critical Memory 10. Structure, Flow and Balance in Montaigne’s ‘Of Idleness’ 11. Mecum Meditari: Descartes Demolishing Doubt, Building a Prayer 12. Psychoanalysis and Sociology: From Freudo-Marxism to Freudo-Feminism Part 4: The Civic Body 13. Vico’s Arborescence 14. Oh, My Others, There is No Other! Capital Culture, Class, and Hegelian Other-wiseness 15. Ecce Homo: The Political Theology of Good and Evil 16. The Circle and the Line: Kinship, Vanishment, and Globalization Narratives in a Rich/Poor World Appendix A: Body Politics, Civic Schooling, and Alien-nation: An Interview with John O’Neill Appendix B: Biographical Notes on John O’Neill, with an Autobiographical Postscript Appendix C: Selected Works by John O’Neill