Indifference to Difference organizes around Alain Badiou’s suggestion that, in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and practice of being indifferent to difference. Such a politics would be based on the superabundance of desire and its inability to settle into identity. Madhavi Menon shows that if we turn to another kind of universalism—not one that insists we are all different but one that recognizes we are all similar in our powerlessness to contain desire—then difference no longer becomes the focus of our identity. Instead, we enter the worlds of desire. Following up on ideas of sameness and difference that have animated queer theory, Menon argues that what is most queer about indifference is not that it gives us queerness as an identity but that it is able to change queerness into a resistance of ontology. Firmly committed to the detours of desire, queer universalism evades identity. This polemical book demonstrates that queerness is the condition within which we labor. Our desires are not ours to be owned; they are indifferent to our differences.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Since the publication of Homo Sacerin 1995, Giorgio Agamben has become one of the world’s most revered and controversial thinkers. His ideas on our current political situation have found supporters and enemies in almost equal measure. His wider thoughts on topics such as language, potentiality, life, law, messianism and aesthetics have had significant impact on such diverse fields as philosophy, law, theology, history, sociology, cultural studies and literary studies. Yet although Agamben is much read, his work has also often been misunderstood. This book is the first to fully take into account Agamben’s important recent publications, which clarify his method, complete his ideas on power, and finally reveal the role of language in his overall system. William Watkin presents a critical overview of Agamben’s work that, through the lens of indifference, aims to give a portrait of exactly why this thinker of indifferent and suspensive legal, political, ontological and living states can rightfully be considered one of the most important philosophers in the world today.

World-renowned scholar of human geography, development, and environmental change Antonio Ioris presents an original reconceptualisation of the notions of difference and indifference and their impacts on social structures. Drawing on a wide range of philosophical debates, and offering groundbreaking new insights into geographically specific trends through the lens of indigenous geographies, Ioris explores how political actors use notions of difference to foster indifference for the purposes of domination, which ultimately crystallizes in what he terms mis-difference: a calcified, difficult-to-overcome obstacle to concord and fairness that underpins capitalist relations of property and production. At the same time, Ioris shows how some social actors use the concept of difference for reconciliation, for overcoming indifference and mis-difference, and suggests how these moves can help to fight against ideologies that produce our unequal world and facilitate land-grabs. Ioris elucidates all of this in concrete terms through a study of the Guarani-Kaiowa people in Brazil: of how they have been oppressed by state-sanctioned indifference and misdifference, and of how they are resisting through a contestation of what difference can mean, and how it can function, in the contemporary world.

Living with Indifference is about the dimension of life that is utterly neutral, without care, feeling, or personality. In this provocative work that is anything but indifferent, Charles E. Scott explores the ways people have spoken and thought about indifference. Exploring topics such as time, chance, beauty, imagination, violence, and virtue, Scott shows how affirming indifference can be beneficial, and how destructive consequences can occur when we deny it. Scott's preoccupation with indifference issues a demand for focused attention in connection with personal values, ethics, and beliefs. This elegantly argued book speaks to the positive value of diversity and a world that is open to human passion.

In Indifference, Naisargi N. Davé examines the complex worlds of animalists and animalism in India. Through ethnographic fieldwork with animal healers, animal activists, farmers, laborers, transporters, and animals themselves, and moving across animal shelters and dairy farms to city streets and abattoirs, Davé shows how human-animal relations often manifest through care and violence. More surprisingly, what Davé also finds animating interspecies relationality in India is an ethic of indifference---that is, an orientation of mutual regard rather than curiosity, love, desire, or animus. For Davé, indifference is a respect for others in their otherness that allows human and nonhuman animals to flourish in immanent encounters. Indifference, then, becomes the basis for an interspecies ethics and a method of care and practice in everyday life. With indifference, Davé describes both a mode of relationality in the world and a scholarly approach: seeking what is possible when we approach ethico-political concepts with indifference rather than commitment or antagonism. Moments of indifference, Davé contends, offer the promise of otherwise worlds.

'Indifference to Difference' organises around Alain Badiou's suggestion that, in the face of increasing claims of identitarian specificity, one might consider the politics and practice of being indifferent to difference. Such a politics would be based on the superabundance of desire and its inability to settle into identity. Madhavi Menon shows that if we turn to another kind of universalism - not one that insists we are all different but one that recognizes we are all similar in our powerlessness to contain desire - then difference no longer becomes the focus of our identity.