Speaking Against Number

Numbers and politics are inter-related at almost every level -- be it the abstract geometry of understandings of territory, the explosion of population statistics and measures of economic standards, the popularity of Utilitarianism, Rawlsian notions of justice, the notion of value, or simply the very idea of political science. Time and space are reduced to co-ordinates, illustrating a very real take on the political: a way of measuring and controlling it.
This book engages with the relation between politics and number through a reading, exegesis and critique of the work of Martin Heidegger. The importance of mathematics and the role played by the understandings of calculation is a recurrent concern in his writing and is regularly contrasted with understandings of speech and language. This book provides the most detailed analysis of the relation between language, politics and mathematics in Heidegger's work. It insists that questions of language and calculation in Heidegger are inherently political, and that a far broader range of his work is concerned with politics than is usually admitted.
Key Features:
A unique introduction to the political dimension of Heidegger's work, opening it up to a wider audience
Offers an original exploration of the relationship between language, mathematics and politics in Heidegger's thinking
Shows how questions of politics and calculation are inter-related in modern conceptions of the political

Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick

"I wholeheartedly recommend this book with its rich lode of expositions of Heidegger's texts on the political in its ancient, modern and postmodern manifestations." -- Theodore Kisiel,, Northern Illinois University