The Age of Precarity: Endless Crisis as an Art of Government

If crisis is the norm, how do we demand change? Crisis dominates the present historical moment. The economy is in crisis, politics in both its past and present forms is in crisis, and our own individual lives are in crisis, made vulnerable by the fluctuations of the labour market and by the undoing of social and political ties we inherited from modernity. Traditional views of crises as just temporary setbacks do not seem to hold any longer; this crisis seems permanent, with no way out and no alternatives on the horizon. Since its origin, the trope of crisis has proven to be one of the most effective instruments of social discipline and administration. The analytical trajectory followed by this book identifies precariousness as the “form of life” that characterises crisis understood as an art of government.