front cover of The Powers of Sensibility
The Powers of Sensibility
Aesthetic Politics through Adorno, Foucault, and Rancière
Michael Feola
Northwestern University Press, 2018
The Powers of Sensibility: Aesthetic Politics through Adorno, Foucault, and Rancière explores the role aesthetic resources can play in an emancipatory politics.  Michael Feola engages both critical theory and unruly political movements to challenge familiar anxieties about the intersection of politics and aesthetics. He shows how perception, sensibility, and feeling may contribute vital resources for conceptualizing citizenship, agency, and those spectacles that increasingly define global protest culture.
 
Feola provides insightful engagements with the works of Adorno, Foucault, and Rancière as well as a survey of contemporary debates on aesthetics and politics. He uses this aesthetic framework to develop a more robust account of political agency, demonstrating that politics is not reducible to the exchange of views or the building of institutions, but rather incorporates public modes of feeling, seeing, and hearing (or not-seeing and not-hearing). These sensory modes must themselves be transformed in the work of emancipatory politics.
 
The book explores the core question: what does the aesthetic offer that is missing from the official languages of politics, citizenship, and power? Of interest to readers in the fields of critical theory, political theory, continental philosophy, and aesthetics, The Powers of Sensibility roots itself within the classical tradition of critical theory and yet uses these resources to speak to a variety of contemporary political movements.
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The Rage of Replacement
Far Right Politics and Demographic Fear
Michael Feola
University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Tracing how the “Great Replacement” narrative has shaped far-right extremism and propelled its dangerous political projects and acts of violence

The “Great Replacement” narrative, which imagines that historic white majorities are being intentionally replaced through immigration policies crafted by global elites, has effectively mobilized racist, nationalist, and nativist movements in the United States and Europe. The Rage of Replacement tracks how this narrative has shaped the politics and worldview of the far right, binding its various camps into a community of rage obsessed with nostalgia for a white-supremacist past.

Showing how the replacement narrative has found significant purchase in recent mainstream discourse through the rise of Trumpism, right-wing media figures like Tucker Carlson, and events such as 2017’s “Unite the Right” rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Michael Feola diagnoses the dangers this racist theory poses as it shapes the far-right imagination, expands through civil society, and deforms political culture. In particular, he tracks how the replacement narrative has given rise to malignant political strategies designed to “take back” the nation from its perceived enemies—by force if deemed necessary.

Identifying the Great Replacement narrative as a central force behind the rise and expansion of far-right extremism, Feola shows how it has motivated a variety of dangerous political projects in pursuit of illiberal, antidemocratic futures. From calls for the creation of segregated white ethnostates to extremist violence such as the mass shootings in Christchurch, El Paso, and Buffalo, The Rage of Replacement makes clear that replacement theory poses a dire threat to democracy and safety.

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