“This book is an assembly - a collection of voices from Germany and Spain, Italy, England, France and every country - a colourful and strong intersection of proposals in search for a (transnational and non-identitarian) democracy of the multitude and of difference, of truth and the joy of life.”

– Antonio Negri, co-author of Empire

“Weaving and unweaving the political philosophy of Rousseau, Derrida, Benjamin, Foucault and Negri, Isabell Lorey assembles a constellation of debates around keywords: democracy, time, sovereignty, commune. She does so in order to systematize the discontinuous struggles that inhabit these words, the possible futures that their meanings open up, and to place them at the disposal of a queer-feminist theory that locates the strike as one of its inspirational practices. Thus an "infinitive present" opens up as a time of becoming, defined by the encounter of bodies, which expands the present through processes of indeterminate differentiation. By highlighting the non-democratic foundations of democracy one by one, the definition of a "Presentist Democracy" emerges. This is woven out of care and debt: collective care and the debts of assuming relations of interdependence. This book is a tool for continuing to nourish the desire to change everything”

– Verónica Gago

“Less a utopian manifesto than an experimentation with the means and time of politics, this work shows us in persuasive terms how enduring and persistent experimentation constitutes our present struggle.”

– Judith Butler, author of The Force of Nonviolence

“Democracy in the Political Present is queer-feminist political theory of and for our time.”

– Fred Moten, author of The Undercommons