Moving grammars of the political: Beyond sovereign thought and action

This dissertation challenges the failure of the contemporary political imagination. Effectively to do politics today is to say I oppose. With this failure in mind, the dissertation explores what it can mean to affirm new horizons of political possibility by being attentive to political grammars. I ask what it means to exceed the political grammar of sovereignty and, by moving grammars of the political, affirm different verbs in its wake. In the wake of sovereignty, I explore the following types of questions: (1) how can what exceeds accepted structures of intelligibility be appreciated. (2) How can difference be politicized without reducing it to the logic of the same? (3) How is it possible to think about a politics of time? How is language, grammatically and rhetorically, a set of limits that holds people to singular identities and calibrates political action to predetermined positions? With these questions in mind, the general question being asked is: how can different linguistic practices open up competing political grammars? To this end, the dissertation pushes Gilles Deleuze beyond his inherited political grammar. Specifically, I amplify Deleuze's philosophy, which celebrates creating concepts above all else, into a moving politics. The dissertation demonstrates that Deleuze's emphasis on the concept neglects the verb "to create" which is always indebted to sovereignty's intellectual patrimony. For Deleuze to become political, other verbs are needed that do not reproduce sovereignty's political grammar. To aid developing different verbs, I dedicate a chapter to re-writing the Pacific Rim as a temporal Event in order to affirm the verb to exceed. In a chapter dedicated to reading the genre of Science Fiction, the verb to encounter is affirmed. Finally, in a chapter dedicated to the problem of Music appreciation, the verb to amplify is affirmed. Such affirmations offer a contribution to political and philosophical discussions about the crisis of the political. They push celebrating movement and change towards developing linguistic practices that embody movement and change.