Overview

In The Book of Politics, Michael Dutton offers an affective theorization of the political and a political theorization of affect. Drawing on Western and Chinese social theory and practice, Dutton rethinks Carl Schmitt’s insistence that the political can be thought of only within the antagonistic pairing of friend and enemy. Dutton shows how the power of the friend/enemy binary must be understood by conceptualizing the political as the channeling, harnessing, and transforming of affective energy flows in relation to that binary. Given this affective nature of politics, Dutton contends that to rethink the political means moving away from a political science toward an art of the political. Such an art highlights fluidity and pulls away from Eurocentric political theory, requiring a conceptualization of the political as global. He juxtaposes ancient Chinese cosmology, medicine, and Maoism against the monuments of early capitalist modernity such as the Crystal Palace and the Eiffel Tower to highlight the differences in political investments and intensities. From the Chinese revolution to the global rise of right-wing movements, Dutton rethinks politics in the contemporary world.

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9781478030195

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“Reading The Book of Politics is an adventure. Michael Dutton’s intellectual omnivorousness is exuberantly and unapologetically on display here. I cannot think of another author who is equally at home explicating Schmitt, Mao, and Zhuangzi and rounding up many such unusual suspects into a wildly inventive and deeply penetrating meditation on the modern condition.” -- Haiyan Lee, author of * A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination *

“Reading The Book of Politics is an adventure. Michael Dutton’s intellectual omnivorousness is exuberantly and unapologetically on display here. I cannot think of another author who is equally at home explicating Schmitt, Mao, and Zhuangzi and rounding up many such unusual suspects into a wildly inventive and deeply penetrating meditation on the modern condition.” -- Haiyan Lee, author of * A Certain Justice: Toward an Ecology of the Chinese Legal Imagination * “We are all on the planet experiencing the closing of Westernization and the opening of ‘dewesternization’ and decoloniality demanding a radical departure from Western disciplinary regulation and management of intersubjective relations. Michael Dutton’s The Book of Politics assertively takes up the challenge. Dutton takes China as a method, reverting Orientalism and its continuity in area studies. He finds in art and literature the vital affective energy that allows him to depart from the measurement of reality demanded by the myth of (social) sciences. The arguments may, in his own words, be 'hard to swallow’ which is a defiant invitation to engage with this splendid book.” -- Walter Mignolo, author of * The Politics of Decolonial Investigations *

Author Information

Michael Dutton most recently taught at Beijing Capital Normal University and Goldsmiths, University of London, and is the author of Policing Chinese Politics: A History, also published by Duke University Press, and coauthor of Beijing Time.

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