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Defective Institutions overturns the basis of institutionalism. Faith in classic institutions—exposed as clamorously inadequate by the failure of governance under neoliberalism--does not result in greater democracy, greater horizontality, or more equitable living. Nor does trust in the standing of decisions, in the authority of antecedent cases, in the coherence, strength, continuity, or solidity of the institutions that frame and render legitimate these decisions and the rules they buttress. To the contrary: the classically-imagined institution and our faith in it lie at the heart of neoliberal unfreedom and racialized violence.Working at the point of contact and conflict between socialist and anarcho-philosophical traditions, Defective Institutions offers an alternative, which is also an alternative to the figures of governance associated with the liberal conception of the state: an aberrant republicanism comprised of defective institutions, run through with the necessity of their abolition. Lezra's book moves from the primitive scenes of Western political institution—the city; the family; the university; the first person; "race"—through recent work in the philosophy of translation, decolonial studies, abolitionism, Afropessimism and its critiques, psvchoanalysis, and musicology.To offer an original wedding of abolition and institution, Lezra brings together genealogies of contemporary institutionalism (from Durkheim and Hauriou to Searle); post-Marxist accounts of the state (Balibar, Abensour); philosophical and anthropological anarchism (Wolff, Malabou, Graeber, Scott); critical legal theory (analyses of Marbury v. Madison as well as Dobbs v. Jackson); continental and analytic versions and critiques of foundationalism (Heidegger, Lyotard and Butler; Quine, Searle and Fine); and political and sociological abolitionism (Lewis, O'Brien). At a time when some call for strengthening institutions and for defending liberties ostensibly protected by such institutions, and others long for the destruction of institutions that have long been oppressive, Lezra's book offers today's Left a new framework for confronting institutions' necessity and their necessary abolition

Wild Materialism speaks to three related questions in contemporary political philosophy. How, if different social interests and demands are constitutively antagonistic, can social unity emerge out of heterogeneity? Does such unity require corresponding universals, and, if so, what are they, where are they found, or how are they built? Finally, how must the concept of democracy be revised in response to economic globalization, state and nonstate terrorism, and religious, ethnic, or national fundamentalism?Polemically rehabilitating the term terror, Lezra argues that it can and should operate as a social universal.

Humanism returns for the New Materialism in 'nonhuman' form as matter. New 'matter' and new materialism thus fashion the world to human advantage in the gesture of abjecting us. They commit us to the humanism of masochists. They offer an animistic and paradisiacal realm of immediate transactions, human to human, human to and with nonhuman, face to face, world without end. The impulse is tactically and strategically useful. But 'matter' will not help us if we fashion it so that it bears in its concept the signature of a human hand in its making. Can we do otherwise? Only by conceiving matter as what absolutizes what is not-one: matter from which no discipline will normally, normatively, produce an object or take its concept; on which heroical abjection will founder; matter non-human in ways the human animal can neither designate, nor ever count.

Schmitt's claim that European modernity (the modern state form, the construction of human subjects as potentially and actually political subjects) emerges with the secularization of theological concepts stands on a weak account of mediation. This essay shows how a fantasy of the immediate encounter between two seemingly consubstantial domains —politics, theology— shapes contemporary critical language, making particular forms of freedom and sovereignty unthinkable. Freud's reading of Schiller, and Lacan's reading of Freud, serve as examples and as a methodological frame for showing how a strong account of literary mediation can set the scene for a different account of sovereignty and freedom than is available in the Schmittian tradition. ; La propuesta de Schmitt, que la modernidad europea (es decir, la forma moderna del Estado, la construcción del ser humano en tanto sujeto potencial o actualmente político) emerge con la secularización de los conceptos teológicos, se funda en el concepto débil de la mediación. Este ensayo muestra que la fantasía de un encuentro inmediato entre dos campos en apariencia consustanciales, la teología y la política, deforma el idioma crítico-filosófico contemporáneo, haciendo impensable un pensamiento determinado de la libertad y de la soberanía. La lectura que hace Freud de Schiller, y la que nos ofrece Lacan de Freud, nos sirven de ejemplo y de patrón metodológico para demostrar cómo un pensamiento más consecuente de la mediación literaria puede llevar a otras formas de soberanía y de libertad que las que puede contemplar la tradición que se funda en Schmitt.

"The Animal in Translation" shows, through analyses of works by Quine, Hearne, and Derrida, how animality studies and translation studies serve to limit one another, but by the same stroke disclose aspects of each field which remain otherwise obscure. Each provides for the other a way of avoiding the disabling conceptual traps set by seemingly necessary essentialisms, linguistic and species-ist. Animality studies and translation studies and theory provide these limiting-disclosing functions for each other just where they come to rely on accounts of mediation in order to produce rules for conduct or for thought more generally.

jacques lezra, Professor of English and Spanish at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, is the author of Unspeakable Subjects:The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (Stanford University Press, 1997) and the editor of Depositions: Althusser, Balibar, Macherey and the Labor of Reading (Yale French Studies, 1995). His translation into Spanish of Paul de Man's Blindness and Insight (Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1991) was awarded a pen Writers Club Prize. Most recently, he has published an edition (with Georgina Dopico Black) of Sebastián de Covarrubias's Suplemento al `Tesoro de la lengua castellana'(Polifemo, 2001).

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Foreword: Encounter and Translation -- Introduction -- 1. On the Nature of Marx's Things -- 2. Capital, Catastrophe: Marx's "Dynamic Objects" -- 3. Necrophilology -- 4. The Primal Scenes of Political Theology -- 5. Adorno and the Humanist Dialectic -- 6. Uncountable Matters -- Acknowledgments -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index

Cover -- THINKING WITH BALIBAR -- Title -- Copyright -- CONTENTS -- Preface -- Introduction: Balibar and the Philosophy of the Concept -- Anthropological -- Border-Concept (of the Political) -- Civil Religion: Secularism as Religion? -- Concept -- Contre-/ Counter- -- Conversion -- Cosmopolitics -- Interior Frontiers -- Materialism -- The Political -- Punishment -- Race -- Relation -- Rights -- Solidarity -- Bibliography -- List of Contributors -- Index

Diano's Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy, anticipating the work of Deleuze, Badiou, Esposito, and Agamben. It now appears in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy