Reading Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity alongside “developmentalist” approaches to evolutionary biology, this article endorses poststructuralist critiques of political ideals grounded in the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against (...) both groups, I argue that Foucault’s poststructuralism must be taken seriously, but that it is ultimately consistent with normative theory and liberal democracy. Linking poststructuralist attempts to transcend the dichotomy between agency and structure with recent efforts by evolutionary theorists to dissolve a similarly stubborn opposition between nature and nurture, I develop an anti-essentialist account of human nature and agency that vindicates poststructuralist criticism while enabling a novel defense of liberal democracy. (shrink)

In this article, I re-examine political subjectivity by way of looking at the canonical text of Chinese Daoist philosophy – Zhuangzi. I trace the course of how the body is conceived in Zhuangzi and discuss its relation with the unmaking of personhood. I then look into ways in which the body–self nexus in Zhuangzi gives rise to new conceptualization of political relations. I argue that, in Zhuangzi, the body is conceived as spontaneous and dispossessed. The body as such foregrounds the (...) condition for unsettling subjectivity. In staging ambivalent subjectivities, Zhuangzi describes a mode of politics where political relations thrive on indeterminacy and uncertainty. I submit that the authors of Zhuangzi propose a depoliticizing approach to politics whereby ‘effortless action’ replaces established processes in reinventing new relations and subjects. (shrink)