Antipolitics as Utopian Politics

• In Event: Utopias, Radical Politics, and the Political Imaginary

Abstract

My paper examines how absurd, nihilistic and self-cancelling acts have emancipatory and radical political significance. Food gorging (Coney Island hot dog eating contest [Joey Chestnut]), self-starvation, radical passivity, withdrawal, unteachability and other modes of self-cancellation emerge as null points of politics that grind to a halt the machinery that produces functional capitalist subjectivity. These forms of antipolitics also disrupt and shatter the reproduction of the status quo and open utopian horizons. I draw on anti-social and utopian strands in queer theory to advance this argument.

Author

• William W. Sokoloff, University of Texas, Rio Grande Valley