Desire. Trust. Escape!

Is it possible to conceptualize "escape" and turn it into a political strategy without being . . . escapist? Escape Routes, by Dimitris Papadopoulos, Niamh Stephenson, and Vassilis Tsianos, dares to answer this question with a resolutely nonescapist reading of capitalism's constitution in global North Atlantic societies at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Mirroring the thematically decentralized, nonhierarchically organized forms of left-wing politics out of which this project has developed over the last decade, the three authors provide a fresh, because nonteleologically organized, critique of capitalism. Instead of the usual introduction, chapters, and conclusion, the book offers fifteen autonomous sections; six of these focus on the political constitution of the present in the book's first part, while the other nine describe a contemporary itinerary of escape in the second, including "Vagabonds" (on desired forms of mobility dating back as far as 1350), "Everyday Excess and Continuous Experience" (on the constituent forces that undo subjectivity), and "Inappropriate/d Sociability" (on value creation in embodied capitalism). Stating at the outset that there is no such thing as an universalizable escape itself, Escape Routes refuses notions of revolution and revolt, which happen to be among the Left's most cherished concepts and which allow us to imagine sociopolitical change solely in terms of events. Instead, a new and up-to-date understanding of the political is forged by working strenuously with the terms life, migration, and precarity. Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos are interested in continuous transformational practices as an undoing of contemporary political sovereignties. They track down modes of resistance in transnational migration and queer politics alike to demonstrate how escape neither belongs to individual acts of breaking away nor can be discussed as an act of mere political irresponsibility. In fact, one can only ever speak of "escape from" after control has tried to recapture such an attempt. Change, then, is inextricably tied to the present and occurs without being considered to be trans-formative by its practitioners —silently and beyond the commonly perceptible.

Borrowing heavily from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, the three authors actualize the duo's concept of becoming-imperceptible to develop their own theory of escape as "an attack on the productionist, heteronormative, majoritarian subject-form" (57). They consider escape and representation to be centrifugal and centripetal forces, which revolve around the subject-form and secure its central role in organizing political power, with escape being the force that puts the subject-form's coherence under challenge. This coherence, they argue, is mostly a product of representational practices, and so they concentrate on a new understanding of undoing representation as a main practice for the tactic of becoming-imperceptible: if you want to create change, exit yourself and merge with the process of sustained decoding that does not rely on eventful political ruptures. This act of immanent escape is supposed to constitute an indeterminate materiality that allows for new connections and a subjectless social change to happen, just as it is already widely practiced in the forms of transnational migration today. As migration is not strictly about relocating but transforming the social space one inhabits, "You never arrive somewhere" (210). Similarly, queer politics helps create new forms of sociabilities beyond the commonly accepted ones. Imperceptible politics —which doesn't mean to become invisible but to become "incommensurable with a majoritarian commonsense" (157) —pays attention to the excess of everyday life in postliberal sovereignty. As a strategy, it does not exclusively belong to migrants, queers, or precarious workers but concerns everyone being positioned as a productive subject in the regime of embodied capitalism. This makes the book's rich trajectory widely applicable to apparently disparate contexts of political struggle, even though the authors cautiously admit that "the possibilities for new collectivities are present and yet not formed" (257).

Papadopoulos, Stephenson, and Tsianos do not deliver another DIY guide to "the revolution." DIWY, Do It Without Yourself, is their sassy answer for a conceptual rethinking of strategies. What they offer...