Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of War
“This collection is an intellectual feast and a dazzling commentary on political thinking, contemporary and classical. Here an intelligence honed on Schmitt and Machiavelli reviews a range of theoretical texts with courteous sarcasm and radical interrogation; the results are wityy, devastating and full of suggestive speculation, culminating in the horizon of an astounding new vision of Machiavelli, well beyond the stereotypical discourse of conventional political science or journalistic commentary.”—Fredric Jameson“Hegel wrote that the moment of triumph of a social movement is simultaneously the moment of its disintegration: when the external enemy disappears, inherent antagonisms explode. Gopal Balakrishnan shows how this holds for the worldwide triumph of liberal democracy in the 1990s—Fukuyama’s dream of the ‘end of history’ has morphed into economic crisis and foreign policy failure.Antagonisticsis a book for all those who want to orient themselves in the chaos of our historical moment—which means it is a book foreveryone.”—Slavoj Žižek