The Book of Politics: China in Theory

In The Book of Politics, Michael Dutton offers an affective theorization of the political and a political theorization of affect. Drawing on Western and Chinese social theory and practice, Dutton rethinks Carl Schmitt’s insistence that the political can be thought of only within the antagonistic pairing of friend and enemy. Dutton shows how the power of the friend/enemy binary must be understood by conceptualizing the political as the channeling, harnessing, and transforming of affective en...