Bøger af Marc Lombardo

"Lombardo has perfect aim and wicked wit in this stinging expose of enduring white-skin privilege. Take to Starbucks, read aloud, and watch the hipsters squirm." - Mike Davis, author of City of Quartz Commemorating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail," Economies of Whiteness (EoW) takes its theme largely from King's exasperation with the calls from so many of the white liberals of his day to "go slow" in seeking justice. 50 years later, white liberals are still going slow. This book is an attempt to assess what, if anything, such a strategy has gotten them and what its implications might be for all the rest of us. How do we understand white liberals' near complete disregard for financial fraud? Or their cowardice-fueled collaborationism in the face of Bush's wars of fancy? Or their deafening silence regarding the everyday horrors of the Drug War? The rapid turnover of the media cycle predisposes us to understand the ideological positions of white liberals as rational calculations in the interest of short-term political gains and indeed they are. However, there is a deeper question that the short-term analysis of white liberal policy failures leaves unasked: what is it that makes white liberals so ready to play a game they know to be rigged against them? The more perplexing, serious, and immediate question is not What's the Matter with Kansas? but rather "What's the matter with San Francisco?" In the effort to pose such a question, Economies of Whiteness endeavors to provide a social ecological account of white liberal existence. Looking at the whole chain of production, what is it exactly that white liberals do? How do they feed themselves? Who do they serve and upon whom do they rely? In the process of asking these basic questions, EoW examines contemporary white liberal culture (with its emphasis upon valueless irony), white liberal social myths (the stories that get passed down among white liberals intergenerationally, such as Education-for-Education's-sake), and the best and worst of white liberal intellectual history (from Mill to Ricardo to Thomas Frank). In its most comically accusatory moments, EoW aspires to the biting tone of W.E.B. Du Bois' tragicomic classic "The Souls of White Folk."

Using the Western tradition of metaphysical and political thought as a backdrop, Critique of Sovereignty (a work in 4 volumes) re-examines the concept of sovereignty in order to better understand why our ethical values and technical capacities often seem so divorced from our lived realities. On the one hand, ostensibly self-enclosed entities like the nation-state and the person are rhetorically bolstered as sites of technical agency and/or moral responsibility. On the other hand, these same entities appear fragile - if not purely fictional - in relation to ever ongoing tidal processes such as the migration, diffusion, and conglomeration of bodies, capital, ideas, etc. While some of our institutions might work some of the time, they always seem to work differently than we like to think they do. Accordingly, the forging of more humane institutions might very well entail if not require ways of thinking that strive to undo the self-imagined binds, exceptions, and sureties of thought for the sake of embracing a continuity with all that withers, decays, and falls away.Book I, "Contemporary Theories of Sovereignty," compares the varied interpretations of sovereignty given by a range of 20th-century political theorists (Maritain, Foucault, Derrida, Schmitt, Agamben, Hardt, and Negri) with Jean Bodin's initial outline of the concept, rendered at the outset of modern political thought in the 16th century. The analytic framework of sovereignty encountered in these comparative readings provides an initial point of departure for unfolding a method of critique appropriate to the concept of sovereignty. Sovereignty is an ideal starting point for a critique of the deadlocks between thought and reality for a simple reason: it doesn't actually exist. When it serves as a guide to action, sovereignty may be regarded as a particularly captivating fantasy. The closer it appears, the further it recedes, and, too often, the more vigorously it is pursued.Other books to appear later in this series include Book II: The Concept of Sovereignty in the History of Philosophy, Book III: Aristotle's Politics, and Book IV: Consequences of Sovereignty.