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 labor market and by the undoing of social and political safety nets we inherited from modernity. The difficulties facing us no longer seem to be conceivable as temporary setbacks but are a permanent state of turmoil from which there is no escape.

To what degree is this sense of rolling crises merely an effective instrument of social discipline and administration? In The Age of Precarity, Dario Gentili identifies precariousness as the 'form of life' underlying crisis when it is understood as an art of government.