Authority Experience and the Life of Power

<p>Taking up the challenge of understanding power in its complexity this volume returns to and revitalises the concept of ‘authority’. It provides a powerful analysis of the ways that relationships of trust attachment governance and inequality become possible when subjectivities and bodies are invested in the life of power. The collection offers a vibrant new analysis of the biopolitical arguing that ‘experience of life’ has become equated with ‘objectivity’ in contemporary culture and has thus become a primary basis of authority. ‘Biopolitical’ or ‘experiential’ authority can be generated through reference to a variety of experiences performances or intensities of life including creativity radicalism risk-taking experimentation inter-relation suffering and proximity to death. The authority-producing capacities of community and aesthetics are key issues pointing to vexed relationships between politics and policing inventiveness and violence.</p><p>The contributors develop their theoretical analyses through discussion of a range of specific sites including mental-health service user and survivor politics biological knowledge refugee activism stories of suffering urban art anarchism neo-liberal community politics and marketization. <i>Authority Experience & the Life of Power </i>challenges thinking on what ‘the political’ is and isn’t pushing against the all too easy equivocation of revolutionary break and empowerment.</p><p>This book was published as a special issue of the <em>Journal of Political Power</em>.</p>