On Frédéric Neyrat’s Critical Thought

Frédéric Neyrat knows philosophy’s ins—and especially its outs. One might go so far as to claim—and Neyrat’s philosophical manifesto Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism enables one to make such a claim—that Neyrat works on the outside (le dehors) and philosophical narratives of the outside. The unfolding of some of his work’s other major accomplishments can be read in light of that claim: from his book L’Indemne on destruction and the phantasm of indemnity—an early title in what, by now and after publications in this area by scholars like Wendy Brown, Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Jasbir Puar, or Isabell Llorey, one can call “vulnerability studies”—to his critiques of catastrophe biopolitics (a book that followed on the heels of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine and reads like a philosophical development of The work of the philosopher consists first and foremost