The recent 'material turn' focuses on materiality in two distinctive ways: one, by including nonhuman agencies, another, by mining indigenous knowledges for alternative conceptions of agency and human-thing relations. A troubling gap persists between the two endeavors. The gap insinuates an us-them dichotomy, and more importantly, curtails communication between radically different visions of thingly agency-thereby impeding the political drive of these conceptual enterprises. This paper is an essay in cross-cultural transposition. Through a close reading of a story of a useless tree in an ancient proto-Daoist text, Zhuangzi (莊子), I show how its fabulist and oneiric form illuminates a distinctive perspective on uselessness. Conversely, the trope of uselessness lets us begin from what I call a 'situated affectivity' amidst more-than-human materialities. The paper concludes with a brief comparison of three modalities of uselessness from different 'cosmologies' of thought-a foretaste of the potentials of cross-cosmological endeavors.

Benedict Spinoza (1634-1677) is feted as the philosopher par excellence of the popular democratic multitude by Antonio Negri and others. But Spinoza himself expresses a marked ambivalence about the multitude in brief asides, and as for his thoughts on what he calls "the rule of (the) multitude," that is, democracy, these exist only as meager fragments in his unfinished Tractatus Politicus or Political Treatise. This essay addresses the problem of Spinoza's multitude. First, I reconstruct a vision of power that is found in the Ethics but that tends to be overlooked in the scholarly literature: power is not just sheer efficacy or imposition of will, but rather involves a capacity for beingaffected; I call this the conception of power as sensitivity. The second part of my argument shows how, given Spinoza's emphatic political naturalism, the conception of power as sensitivity can be extended to his political philosophy to shed light on what Spinoza calls potentia multitudinis, or "the power of the multitude"-a term found solely in the Political Treatise and nowhere else in his oeuvre. This juxtaposition reveals significant qualifications to the liberatory potential of the multitude currently claimed in the scholarly literature.

No abstract

No abstract

Book Reviews 445 expansion, meme dans des domaines ou Ton peine a imaginer qu'ils puissent y etre transplants, comme la justice. De fait, l'introduction progressive d'un droit composite de la gouvernance publique est la manifestation de la transformation de l'Etat providence. Face a l'echec patent de la dereglementation, le nouveau paradigme de la gouvernance publique represente une sorte de moyen terme entre l'Etat social, que plus aucun pays n'a les moyens de s'offrir, et le retrait pur et simple de l'Etat. La transformation se situe surtout au niveau de l'axe d'intervention qui passe de la verticalite a l'horizontalite, de l'unilateralite a la bilateralite. Ces mutations dans les modes d'intervention de l'Etat ont a tout le moins comme consequence positive de rapprocher les droits nationaux. On peut ainsi s'attendre a une certaine uniformisation du droit administratif pour l'avenir, ce qui, sauf pour les disciples irreductibles de Dicey, ne peut qu'etre porteur de bonnes nouvelles pour le droit administratif en general.