I recently signed the contract for my next book "The Anarchy of the Ethical" with ill will editions, to be published in 2027. The book is divided into four chapters (I. Ethics, II. Aesthetics, III. Insurrection, IV. Commune), and theorizes an ethics oriented by the common and the free. The text builds upon the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Simone Weil, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, The Invisible Committee, and Tiqqun. A brief excerpt is included below:
There are ethical truths whose beauty is easy to grasp, and yet following where they lead requires parting ways with the whole order of our lives today. The refusal to dominate or be dominated is one of these beautiful truths, a truth that is not concerned with uncovering some ideal form of rule, nor with deciding whether any particular form of rule is just, but only with asking what it would mean to live our lives as a rejection of all rule, among one another rather than above or below. The beauty of this truth can be found in a free and common way of life, in a meaningful and shared existence whose wealth is realized as human dignity and possibility. But just as the elegant movement of the sea is inseparable from the fierce crash of its waves upon the shore, there is also a tumultuous and riotous dimension of this beauty, an insurgent quality that cannot help but conflict with a world where the flourishing of some is premised upon the degradation of others, where forms of well-being are reflected in neighboring forms of subjugation and desolation, abandonment and loss. This beauty can in the end be glimpsed in the tenderness of those who give shape to ways of living that break away from domination, just as it can be in the prowess of those who strive to break domination and its world apart once and for all.If you haven't already had a chance, check out the page for ill will editions' exciting new press by clicking here.
If the refusal of domination necessarily conflicts with the present order of things, this is only because it opens the way towards a life that is no longer lived on the basis of ruling and being ruled, and thus a life that is free to develop its own relations to itself, to others, and to the Earth. From the perspective of order, this life and its freedom can appear only as the purest of disorders, as a severe danger to a world that aims only to subdue, and to manage, and to constrain. A life that departs from domination in this sense lives as a contradiction to the intricate hierarchies and suffocating arrangements that otherwise everywhere prevail, always threatening to unravel and unsettle the dominant order within which everything has been cheapened and made disposable, where life can be policed and exploited as easily as it can be expelled or wiped away. But in this departure from domination, a life also sharpens its sense of its freedom to give shape to its own existence and to the common existence that it lives within, seeing life itself not as something fixed or bound but as the continuous unfolding of a creative and common gesture. Which is to say that even as the refusal of domination must necessarily clash with the political and economic order of our time, irresistibly drawn to bring a destructive end to the world of capital and of the police, this refusal in the end remains most intensely ethical as it confronts us with nothing less than the question of how to live.