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In the following article, author argues that virtual worlds are characterized by a particular mode of governmentality. Rather than seeing virtual worlds as analogous to societies in the real world, he suggests regarding them as ''social factories'' in whi

The relationship between literature and the state has been controversial since the time of Plato. Until recently, however, the few scholars to write on this subject considered it an underdeveloped topic in literary studies. This survey article argues that

In the context of spiralling decay that, in recent decades, has engulfed all spheres of the human condition, this article seeks to endorse Tomaselli's essentially ethical position, advancing that the foremost contextual launching pad for cultural studies

The "aestheticisation of politics", a term coined by Walter Benjamin, refers to a critique of various modes of politics considered to be irrational in leftist, critical theory. The critique ties aestheticised politics to fascism and capitalism, thereby pr

Alain Badiou is a fierce critic of State-based parliamentary democracy and the supposedly radical democracy that fails to disentangle itself from the Statist logic of representation. This article traces Badiou's alternative proposal of a generic democracy

Recent scholarship on governmentality promises to reinvigorate literary critical analysis of how novels, poems, and plays help to organize the world's populations as they interact. In turn, literary criticism helps to illuminate the global implications of Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France, published in English as Security, Territory, Population (2007) and The Birth of Biopolitics (2008). By privileging varied practice over unifying theory, Foucault's approach leads scholars to examine the circulation of governmental techniques in conjunction with the circulation of governable populations. An emphasis on mobility and exchange should appeal particularly to specialists in immigrant, imperial, and postcolonial literature. While considering a range of literary critical and social scientific scholarship on governmentality, this essay also shows how literature itself authorizes discrepant forms of administration. I contend that literature and literary criticism engage in imaginative reformulations and reinventions of the art of government, and in so doing contribute to debates about governing that are every bit as cross-disciplinary as they are transnational.