Overview

Considering solidarity and mutual aid at the intersection of political philosophy and biology, made more urgent and prescient by the COVID-19 crisis, this book is grounded in the work of Catherine Malabou and takes her theories in creative new directions. To think about solidarity mutual aid is to think about how we can and do live together, and how we might do so differently. Mutual aid is, in Peter Kropotkin’s famous formulation, a factor of evolution, but also a conscious political strategy undertaken by activists in times of crisis. While this combination of biology and politics has been a source of controversy, and even embarrassment, recent developments demand a rethink. The contributions in this volume aim to renew interest in the idea of mutual aid, and to consider how biological claims might be incorporated into political projects without appearing as essentialist constraints. They do so in dialogue with Catherine Malabou, whose work insists on the importance of the biological while rejecting any notions of biological determinism. They thus point to the necessity of solidarity and mutual aid for understanding our social life, while releasing them from the biological and symbolic chains in which they often appear.

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9781538157954

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Reviews

Let this stunning gathering of theorists surprise, puzzle, and entertain you: their work unchains altogether different mode of analysis, one that calls attention to the politics of mutual aid, solidarity, and care.--Andrej Grubacic, professor of anthropology at California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, editor of the Journal of World-Systems Research, and the author of Living at the Edges of Capitalism, Wobblies and Zapatistas This collection of thoughtful reflections on solidarity takes off from its character and role in the mutual aid tradition of anarchism. Exploring ideas about how to make such solidarity concrete and accessible, it has much to offer activist philosophers concerned to re-appropriate the term.--Bob Brecher, emeritus professor of moral philosophy, University of Brighton Unchaining Solidarity composes a bracing study of anarchist social forms to reveal their capacity to unleash the protean, emancipatory powers of the commons in singular figurations of non-reciprocity. Voicing variations on Catherine Malabou's opening invocation of a politics of plasticity, its essays deploy a powerfully conceived political and conceptual force as they range freely across the contemporary forms of anarchist solidarity, from neuroplasticity and new materialism to Covid and feminist solidarity.--Nick Nesbitt, Professor of French and Italian, Princeton University

Author Information

Petr Kouba is senior researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of The Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic. His publications include Margins of Phenomenology and The Phenomenon of Mental Disorder: Perspectives of Heidegger's Thought in Psychopathology. Catherine Malabou is a French philosopher. She is a professor of philosophy at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy (CRMEP) at Kingston University, at the European Graduate School, and in the department of Comparative Literature at the University of California Irvine, a position formerly held by Jacques Derrida. She is the author of many books, including The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic, What Should We Do with Our Brain?, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage and Before Tomorrow: Epigenesis and Rationality. Her most recent book is Morphing Intelligence, from IQ to IA. Dan Swain is research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences and Assistant Professor at the Czech University of Life Sciences Prague. He is the author of None So Fit to Break the Chains: Marx’s Ethics of Self-Emancipation and Alienation: An Introduction to Marx’s Theory which was nominated for the Bread and Roses prize for radical publishing. Petr Urban is senior researcher in the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic. He is co-editor of Care Ethics, Democratic Citizenship and the State.

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