"Every institution is, or can be imagined to be 'defective,' entailing its own abolition in an anarchic inversion of its constitutive tautology. This is where Jacques Lezra brings us through a series of unexpected readings. It will be hard not to follow where the deadly possibility of happiness awaits us. Republicanism and risk are the twin faces of freedom. Do we not agree?"-Etienne Balibar, author of Citizen Subject
"Lezra's scope and range of references, nuance, and sophistication are extraordinary. No one else thinks or writes quite like him. Defective Institutions is exhilarating to read."-Elissa Marder, Emory University
Defective Institutions overturns the basis of institutionalism. Faith in classic institutions-exposed as clamorously inadequate by the failure of governance under neoliberalism--does not result in greater democracy, greater horizontality, or more equitable living. Nor does trust in the standing of decisions, in the authority of antecedent cases, in the coherence, strength, continuity, or solidity of the institutions that frame and render legitimate these decisions and the rules they buttress. To the contrary: the classically-imagined institution and our faith in it lie at the heart of neoliberal unfreedom and racialized violence.
Working at the point of contact and conflict between socialist and anarcho-philosophical traditions, Defective Institutions offers an alternative, which is also an alternative to the figures of governance associated with the liberal conception of the state: an aberrant republicanism comprised of defective institutions, run through with the necessity of their abolition. Lezra's book moves from the primitive scenes of Western political institution-the city; the family; the university; the first person; "race"-through recent work in the philosophy of translation, decolonial studies, abolitionism, Afropessimism and its critiques, psvchoanalysis, and musicology.
At a time when some call for strengthening institutions and for defending liberties ostensibly protected by such institutions, and others long for the destruction of institutions that have long been oppressive, Lezra's book offers today's Left a new framework for confronting institutions' necessity and their necessary abolition.
Jacques Lezra is Distinguished Professor of English and Hispanic Studies at the University of California-Riverside. His books include On the Nature of Marx's Things; Untranslating Machines; and Wild Materialism.
