Could the vitality of embodied experience create a foundation for a new form of revolutionary authority? The Life of the City is a bold and innovative reassessment of the early urban avant-garde movements that sought to re-imagine and reinvent the experiential life of the city. Constructing a ground-breaking theoretical analysis of the relationships between biological life, urban culture, and modern forms of biopolitical experiential authority, Julian Brigstocke traces the failed attempts of Parisian radicals to turn the crisis of authority in late nineteenth-century Paris into an opportunity...

Taking up the challenge of understanding power in its complexity, this volume returns to and revitalises the concept of `authority'. It provides a powerful analysis of the ways that relationships of trust, attachment, governance and inequality become possible when subjectivities and bodies are invested in the life of power. The collection offers a vibrant new analysis of the biopolitical, arguing that `experience of life' has become equated with `objectivity' in contemporary culture and has thus become a primary basis of authority. `Biopolitical' or `experiential' authority can be generated...