Sovereign Nations, Carnal States. By Kam Shapiro. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. 208p. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Kam Shapiro's book is part of a larger literature of radical political theory whose inspiration can be traced to Friedrich Nietzsche and Baruch Spinoza as read by Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault, and richly translated into the terms of political theory by William E. Connolly, Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Brian Massumi, among others. Hardt and Negri's Empire (2001), Massumi's Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002), and Connolly's Neuropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (2002) are among recent works that provide a context for the studies that Shapiro presents here, for each of them develops concepts for what is taken to be a newly emerging and unprecedented arrangement of society. With the new arrangement of things, “political somatics”—to use a phrase that Shapiro borrows from Terry Eagleton—becomes central to decision making and the exercise of power, even as these might appear to have been overwhelmed by the less tangible, more “virtual” phenomena of global communications. The study of embodiment, of what politics does to the body and how the body defines the political, takes on central importance.