Description: Offers an interpretation of neoliberal ideology as a political theology of chance that both justifies and dissembles risk-laden market processes as obscure divination tools used both to determine fate and fortune and yet to deny that such determination is taking place by any accountable authority.
Brief description: Joshua Ramey is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Grinnell College. He is the author of The Hermetic Deleuze (2012), the co-translator of François Laruelle's Non-Philosophical Mysticism for Today (forthcoming), and the author of numerous articles on figures including Adorno, Zizek, Badiou, Deleuze, Bruno, Warhol, Hitchcock and Cronenburg. His work has appeared in Angelaki, Political Theology, Discourse, SubStance, and the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory.
Review Quotes:
"Ramey is an authority on the relations between philosophy and the hermetic traditions. Hermeticists devised techniques of divination in response to a world pervaded by chance and risk, and Ramey, in this compelling and fascinating book, makes the argument that neoliberalism resorts to analogous techniques in its quest to understand an economic world shot-through with contingency and undecidability." --Kenneth Surin, Professor of Literature and Professor of Religion and Critical Theory, Duke University
"In this very contemporary book, Ramey offers a twist on the classic dialectic of enlightenment: markets are divination tools, ways of dealing with contingency, chance and uncertainty. Yet, with disastrous effects, they restrict the outcome of chance to profit and loss. Ramey offers a highly original critique of neoliberalism, and an impassioned plea to recover a politics beyond individualism." --Philip Goodchild, Professor of Religion and Philosophy, University of Nottingham "Joshua Ramey breaks new ground with this account of how our current mania of financial speculation relates to the ways that human beings have long sought to interrogate the uncertain future, and to deal with chance and change. Politics of Divination takes a long view of human potentiality, and suggests how we might escape from the nightmare of what he calls our "neoliberal endgame"." --Steven Shaviro, emeritus professor of English, Wayne State University "Politics of Divination clearly does not aspire to be a definitive treatise, but rather to open up a new and unforeseen path for research. ... Overall it is undeniably successful in its core aims. Ramey has discovered a research project that could be a genuine life's work. We should all hope that he is able to continue down the path he has traced out here." --Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy