Book review: The Arts of the Political: New Openings for the Left, by Ash Amin and

Nigel Thrift

Reconceptualizing the notion of the political and what it stands for in today’s world is what Ash Amin
and Nigel Thrift endeavour to do in this book. By opening up this much contested concept to other
disciplines and fields of social life, they demonstrate its wider implications, overlappings and
crossovers into the world of arts and the affective. The challenge that presents itself in their project,
however, is how to thread the line between the same old politics of organized rationality and the
normatively “undetermined” spaces and practices of imaginative creativity without sounding too
dogmatic or giving the impression of the “anything goes” mentality. Harnessing the political arts of
invention, organization and shared structures of feeling, they contend, opens the way to “world
making” and imagining new possible ways of societal and human being. The book is primarily
targeted at those who include themselves within the political grouping of “the Left”, the leftists
nostalgic of the old social democratic order, traditional Marxists and radical activists alike. The
authors urge the Left to come to terms with the post-industrial capitalist reality and devise strategies
that will mobilize desires to promote action against widespread inequalities and oppression, even if
in a reformist fashion from within the system. With references ranging from Bruno Latour, Jane
Bennett, Peter Sloterdijk, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Paolo Virno, Max Weber, Michel Foucault, and
the authors themselves, the book compiles and staples together a diverse array of concepts and
theories that can be at times contradictory when considered within the wider view of their authors’
oeuvre. But Amin and Thrift advise us not to worry about it, at least not for now when the Left seems
to have lost its traditional appeal. The logic of combining the imaginative creativity of arts and the
organizational drive of politics is demonstrated through the example of the European Union. The
authors believe that its evolving structures and procedures have enabled to sustain the Union and
adopt some important progressive EU-wide policies through the strategies of diplomacy and
innovation. They purposefully avoid making any judgements on the organization’s effectiveness and
democratic deficit, however.

Amin and Thrift are clear at the very beginning that the book is not a theoretical work, and in terms
of theory it really does not offer anything more than building up on already discussed concepts. It
serves more as a compilation of the already existing debates on the Left with a call for more
experimentation and open-ended creativity balanced with political pragmatism and organizational
drive.

ALEN TOPLIŠEK (PhD funded by the Slovene Human Resources Development and Scholarship
Fund)
Queen Mary, University of London