ABSTRACT
The politics for social change sounds less convincing today, since the source of oppression has become unclear in complex power relationships. In order to secure their own lives, people tend to submit themselves to what could be an oppressive authority. This chapter examines how various political theories, namely liberalism, feminist ethics of care and post-anarchism, respond to such self-divided individuals. Although many political theorists are keen to articulate a legitimate order, rule, or decision-making procedure, they often neglect the motivation of vulnerable bodies to take action. While the liberal’s trust in rational subjects and the care ethicist’s call for a utopian authority both fail to pay attention to the emergence of political subjects, the anarchist view considers politics as the experimental process in which alienated bodies build political agency. By reviewing the concepts such as ‘multitude’, politics of ‘flight’ and ‘rhizome’, this chapter constructs the framework of radical politics in the age of precarity. It is the politics of non-identity and non-teleology, which starts from an emotional burst to reject a particular experience of alienation, that then creates alternatives through activism.
