Unchaining Solidarity

On Mutual Aid and Anarchism with Catherine Malabou

Edited by Dan Swain; Petr Urban; Catherine Malabou and Petr Kouba

Considering solidarity and mutual aid at the intersection of political philosophy and biology, made more urgent by the COVID-19 crisis, this book is grounded in the work of Catherine Malabou and takes her theories in creative new directions.

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 272 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-5381-5795-4 • Hardback • November 2021 • $128.00 • (£98.00)

978-1-5381-5797-8 • Paperback • April 2024 • $40.00 • (£30.00)

978-1-5381-5796-1 • eBook • November 2021 • $121.50 • (£94.00)

Subjects: Philosophy / Political, Political Science / Political Ideologies / Anarchism, Social Science / Technology Studies

Unchaining Solidarity

On Mutual Aid and Anarchism with Catherine Malabou

Hardback

Paperback

eBook

Summary

Considering solidarity and mutual aid at the intersection of political philosophy and biology, made more urgent by the COVID-19 crisis, this book is grounded in the work of Catherine Malabou and takes her theories in creative new directions.

Details

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International

Pages: 272 • Trim: 6½ x 9

978-1-5381-5795-4 • Hardback • November 2021 • $128.00 • (£98.00)

978-1-5381-5797-8 • Paperback • April 2024 • $40.00 • (£30.00)

978-1-5381-5796-1 • eBook • November 2021 • $121.50 • (£94.00)

Subjects: Philosophy / Political, Political Science / Political Ideologies / Anarchism, Social Science / Technology Studies

Author

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 at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic. He is the author of several books and co-editor of Care Ethics, Democratic Citizenship and the State.
Catherine Malabou is 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 and Morphing Intelligence, from IQ to IA.
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.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 Unchaining Solidarity, Mutual Aid and Anarchism – Dan Swain, Petr Urban, Catherine Malabou, and Petr Kouba
Chapter 2 Politics of Plasticity: Cooperation without Chains – Catherine Malabou
Part I ‘An Internal Principle of Cooperation, Assistance and Repair’ - Solidarity and Plasticity
Chapter 3 Solidarity as Necessity: Subject, Structure, Practices – Thomas Telios
Chapter 4 What Prevents Mutual Aid? On Trauma and Destructive Plasticity – Petr Kouba
Chapter 5 The Dynamics of Plasticity: Absolute Knowing and Sympoiesis – Rasmus Sandnes Haukedal
Chapter 6 Ethics of the Care for the Brain: Neuroplasticity with Stirner, Malabou, and Foucault – Tim Elmo Feiten
Chapter 7Individuation and Anarchy in Gilbert Simondon and Catherine Malabou – Arianne Conty
Part II‘The War of Each Against All Is Not the Law of Nature’ - Mutual Aid, Anarchism and Evolutionary Biology
Chapter 8 The Anarchist Impulse: A Factor of Human and Non-Human Nature - Gearóid Brinn & Georgina Butterfield
Chapter 9 Mutual Aid Armature: Plasticity All the Way Down – Eugene Kuchinov
Chapter10 Solidarity Is Not Reciprocal Altruism – Jonas Faria Costa
Chapter 11 Selfish Genes, Evil Nature: The Christian Echoes in Neo-Atheism – Ole Martin Sandberg
Part III ‘At the End of the Day, It’s Just Us’ - The Actuality of Mutual Aid
Chapter 12 Plastic Encounters: COVID-19 and (De)Racialization in Canada – Jade Crimson Rose Da Costa
Chapter 13 Counterpublics of the Common: Feminist Solidarity Unchained – Ewa Majewska
Chapter 14 Prefigurative Biology: Mutual Aid, Social Reproduction and Plasticity – Dan Swain

Reviews

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, Princeton University

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

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 Grubačić, 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