Description: Examines the philosophical background to theories of conflict in political theory and their sources in philosophy.
Brief description: Dimitris Vardoulakis is Professor of Philosophy at Western Sydney University. He is the author of The Doppelgänger: Literature's Philosophy (2010), Sovereignty and its Other: Toward the Dejustification of Violence (2013), Freedom from the Free Will: On Kafka's Laughter (SUNY, 2016) and Stasis Before the State: Nine Theses on Agonistic Democracy (2018). He has edited or co-edited numerous books, including Spinoza Now (2011) and Spinoza's Authority (two volumes, 2018). He is co-series editor of Incitements and founding editor of the journal Philosophy, Politics and Critique, both at Edinburgh University Press.
Review Quotes: In The Agonistic Condition Dimitris Vardoulakis offers a deep and powerful critique of what he calls "ineffectualism," the idea, promoted by many left leaning philosophers, of the value of non-instrumentality. For Vardoulakis, this allows for a return of metaphysics, a disengagement with the actual world as such that leads to various forms of domination and control. By fundamentally accepting the Nietzschean concept of the death of God, Vardoulakis calls for a radical affirmation of instrumentality, not in terms (once again) of domination, but precisely for the opposite reason. Vardoulakis claims--very convincingly--that we must embrace instrumentality as being the basis for a human centered form of judgment that has no truck with the transcendental. This is the basis for the agonistic--i.e. human--condition itself. This book should be on the shelf of every scholar who is interested in having a radical rethinking of the entire basis of leftist anti metaphysics and the politics that result from it.--James Martel, San Francisco State University