This book arises from the acknowledgment that in spite of numerous proclamations concerning the ‘death of the subject’, it lives on. Although one can locate several divergences in conceptual and normative orientation within contemporary political theory, the subject – including the identities by which it is coordinated and the institutions through which it travels – is still retained as the indispensable precondition of thought, meaning and action. It has thus become the sine quo non of politics. It is my view that such a vision of the political serves to obscure the genuine site of political transformation and, with its emphasis on a subject-identity-institution triad, assists the very power relations and macropolitical structures (bio-power, governmentality) that forestall genuine emancipatory work. The genuine site I have in mind is that of the ‘micropolitical’. At its most basic, this can be understood in terms of the unconscious and affective self, the life of desire and libidinal attachment, which conditions our subjective experience of reality, preceding and determining the self in the guise of an ego and the identities by which it coordinates itself and thereby underpinning and directing our conscious deliberations and actions. Though such a life conditions reality it is simultaneously conditioned by the experience itself, typically in the form of macropolitical structures. There is as such no truly public-private distinction to be had, or nothing truly beyond that which we live in ultimate flux that can be relied upon as a pre-socio-political or extra-socio-political ground.

I arrived at this understanding of the micropolitical primarily through the works of Michel Foucault and Giles Deleuze, though it was significantly enhanced and shaped by my encounters with various other philosophers, especially Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The aforementioned develop extremely similar themes to Deleuze and Foucault, specifically in that they all employ an ontology of ‘pure’ immanence as a means of locating a pre-personal and pre-individual zone of political subjectivity and transformation, and insofar as they all place great emphasis on existential practices of the self as a form of authentic resistance to relations of power. What truly struck me in my readings, however, was the lack of coincidence in such similarity and the veritable fact that this has yet to be truly identified and discussed within the context of political philosophy.