ABSTRACT
This chapter, bringing the work of Butler, Lefebvre, and Rancière together, theorises precarity as a condition of social life and the (im)possibility of politics mediated by the spatiality of capitalist abstractions. First, it makes a conceptual distinction between precariousness and precarity, before emphasising the specificity of precarity as a spatially engendered condition of everyday life given over to suffering that accompanies the production of abstract space. Second, it discusses the spatiality of precarisation, emphasising how abstraction constitutes precarity. Third, the chapter explains how this spatial relation between socio-material orders of capital and precarity is mediated through the interplay of structural, symbolic, and direct violence that, subjecting a human body to harm, heightens its ontological precariousness, thereby folding social life into precarity. Fourth, discussing how precarisation harbours possibilities of politics, the chapter outlines how possibilities of politics are constituted by in-the-making political subjects that introduce dissensus into established spatial orders that give certain lives over to suffering. Taken together, this theorisation of precarity in relation to space, violence, and politics provides a theoretical framework for analysing the politics of precarity – and the politics of (un)liveability more broadly – mediated by contemporary capitalist development.
