Sovereign Nations, Carnal States. By Kam Shapiro. Ithaca,
NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 208p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95
paper.
Kam Shapiro's book is part of a larger literature of radical
political theory whose inspiration can be traced to Friedrich Nietzsche
and Baruch Spinoza as read by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, and
richly translated into the terms of political theory by William E.
Connolly, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Brian Massumi, among
others. Hardt and Negri's Empire (2001), Massumi's
Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002),
and Connolly's Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed
(2002) are among recent works that provide a context for the studies
that Shapiro presents here, for each of them develops concepts for what
is taken to be a newly emerging and unprecedented arrangement of
society. With the new arrangement of things, “political
somatics”—to use a phrase that Shapiro borrows from Terry
Eagleton—becomes central to decision making and the exercise of
power, even as these might appear to have been overwhelmed by the less
tangible, more “virtual” phenomena of global
communications. The study of embodiment, of what politics does to the
body and how the body defines the political, takes on central
importance.