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.

One of the great merits of Shapiro's crisply written, insightful, often original, and always engaging book is to show that there is nothing new in our newfound interest in the body and embodiment. For one thing, it is the story of twentieth-century philosophy, which, off the Continent as well as on it, rebelled against the traditional Platonist admiration for disembodied rational objectivity. The idea that one becomes richer in timeless truths to the extent that one succeeds in freeing oneself from one's body and everything associated with it, such as perceptions, feelings, situatedness, finitude, temporality, vulnerability, and mortality, may live on in the sciences but has been widely rejected by philosophers and, more generally, in the humanities. On the other hand, concern for the body in its substantial sense is intimately bound up with the larger history of modernity, which from Descartes on becomes more and more materialistic in its view of the natural world.

Shapiro's special interests are the nation and the state. How have political theorists imagined the state in relation to the body and its counterpart, the mind—the rational Cartesian ego, the Kantian transcendental subject, Hegelian spirit? His larger intention, however, is to establish terms for the political somatic that go beyond ideas about it that are invoked to shore up this or that ideological orientation toward an emancipatory or transformative politics. Instead, Shapiro turns to classical theorists of established or normative political institutions in order to, as he puts it, “articulate the somatic dimensions of prevalent political forms” (p. 14), above all the nation and the state. This yields a meditation on the ways in which national identity is achieved not only through “strategies of representation,” such as the images of the nation by which citizens are hailed and with which they come to identify, but also “in the corresponding production and distribution of habits and desires” (p. 16).

In pursuing this project, Shapiro offers a genealogy of the body as habit and as a force for the interruption of habit, each being imagined with ethical overtones. This takes up Chapter 1, “Thinking about the Body,” which offers pithy and pointed commentary on Nietzsche's and Jacques Derrida's attempts to conceptualize what for Augustine are the relentless paradoxes of embodiment. Whereas Augustine is the exemplary ascetic, setting the normative terms for how embodiment will be dealt with in the “prevalent political forms,” Nietzsche and Derrida suggest different approaches. Nietzsche exposes the Platonic Other World that Augustine sets against the body as itself an “excitement of various affects” (p. 35). Far from eschewing his passions in order to make contact with a disembodied, affectless world, the ascetic merely gives up certain affects for the sake of others that are presumably more intense and gratifying. And having thus reclaimed the spiritual value of the body, Nietzsche develops a theory of “brief habits,” the pursuit of which (as opposed to enduring habits) is consistent with a pluralistic and open-ended conception of the self and world. It is necessary, he shows, to nurture the ability to free oneself of existing habits and to acquire new ones—such, at any rate, is the virtue of the “free spirit” or the practitioner of the “gay science.” Finally, Shapiro suggests ways of “fleshing out deconstruction” (p. 56) so that the critique of the metaphysics of presence can be seen not only as a way of thinking differently at the end of philosophy but also as a way of feeling otherwise.

In Chapter 2, “Somnambulist Nation: Habit in Hegel's Political Philosophy,” Shapiro presents a detailed examination of Hegel's understanding of the relationship between subjectivity and embodiment and its implications for his theory of the state. In this chapter, as well as in Chapter 3, “Decision, Myth, and Intensity: Carl Schmitt's Affective Nationalism,” we find the substance of Shapiro's understanding of how the political somatic has traditionally manifested itself in Western political theory. In both Hegel and Schmitt, Shapiro finds powerful (but generally neglected) concerns with embodiment understood as the establishment of habits, routines, and everyday activities. Shapiro suggests that Hegel's claim for the rationality of “externalized” activities, which are presented as stages in a teleological process running from the satisfaction of desire to the exercise of skill, rests on his assumption that affects come already organized, as it were, in the form of habits. And it is at bottom institutionalized “stable habits” (as opposed to Nietzsche's brief ones) that undergird the state and make sovereignty possible (p. 95). In our own day, of course, the stability of the state tends to be undone by the anarchic action of global market forces for which Hegel makes little or no place. For an answer to the question of how it is that national identity and sovereignty nevertheless persist, Shapiro turns to Schmitt, who imagines the political as that which breaks with or interrupts everything concerned with the habitual, the normal, and the ordinary, including the state and its institutions when they are behaving in an unexceptional manner. Given that Schmitt identifies the essence of the political with the isolation of an existential threat to one's way of life, Shapiro finds affect, and hence embodiment, at the center of his political philosophy, and more particularly in the conception of the state and its legitimacy. The state persists, paradoxically, as an exception that is in fact unexceptional (pp. 101–3).

Having made his case for the centrality of a political somatic to normative conceptions of political theory oriented to the state and its legitimation, Shapiro turns to Walter Benjamin for a more emancipatory or radical understanding of the habits (though he had already anticipated this in his reading of Nietzsche). The chapter on Benjamin (Chapter 4, “Walter Benjamin: Toward a Political Somatics”) is by far the most rewarding part of Sovereign Nations, Carnal States. It pulls together an enormous amount of what would otherwise remain scattered comments and shows their unity in an account of “revolutionary habits” (pp. 152ff), or the identification of habits of perception, analysis, and conception that are conducive to revolutionary transformations on these levels. Benjamin's writings point the way toward a “Baroque” strategy of indirection, machination, and trickery as habitual ways of being in urban settings in which traditional political sovereignty has been overwhelmed by a capitalist market that thrives on nonsovereignty.

This summary can hardly do justice, however, to what is a remarkably subtle and original reading of the tradition of political theory and its modernist critics—including, which I have not mentioned here, contemporary commentators—that should be found rewarding by anyone interested in the vicissitudes of the tradition and its possibilities of renewal.