Social and political philosophy Books

Book SynopsisFollowing the 1960s, that decade''s focus on consciousness-raising transformed into an array of intellectual projects far afield of movement politics. The mind''s powers came to preoccupy a range of thinkers and writers: ethicists pursuing contractual theories of justice, radical ecologists interested in the paleolithic brain, seventies cultists, and the devout of both evangelical and New Age persuasions. In Ideal Minds, Michael Trask presents a boldly revisionist argument about the revival of subjectivity in postmodern American culture, connecting familiar figures within the seventies intellectual landscape who share a commitment to what he calls neo-idealism as a weapon in the struggle against discredited materialist and behaviorist worldviews.In a heterodox intellectual and literary history of the 1970s, Ideal Minds mixes ideas from cognitive science, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, deep ecology, political theory, science fiction, neoclassical ecTrade Review[H]is reevaluation of the 1970s' intellectual and cultural currents is remarkable. * Choice *A convincing portrait of the zeitgeist. Trask's reevaluation of the 1970's intellectual and cultural currents is remarkable—Highly recommended. * Choice *Table of ContentsIntroduction: From Consciousness-Raising to Neo-idealism 1. Artificial Intelligence and the Rise of the Meritocracy 2. Radical Ecology's Mindfulness 3. That Seventies Cult 4. Millennial America and the World to Come Afterword: The Marketization of Everything

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Book SynopsisPolitical Theory and the Displacement of Politics, originally published in 1993, has been called a founding text of agonism, which treats political contestation not as a regrettably necessary way to correct political imperfections but as a necessary, sometimes joyful feature of democratic life. As Bonnie Honig writes in the preface to this thirtieth anniversary edition, the agonism that informs this book is democratic: it is committed to shared spaces and relational practices in which diverse groups and individuals set and reset the terms of living together as equals.By rethinking the established relation between politics and political theory, Honig argues that political theorists of opposing positions often treat political theory less as an exploration of politics than as a series of devices for its displacement. She characterizes Kant, Rawls, and Sandel as virtue theorists of politics, arguing that they rely on principles of right, rationality, communitTrade ReviewBonnie Honig concludes the introduction to this fine book by invoking the virago: the female warrior who will not be contained within categoriesthat oppose masculinity against femininity or human rationality against theforces of nature. It is a fitting emblem for a book that takes up and perturbs an opposition that functions variously to divide reason from violence, liberal humanism from poststructuralist skepticism, and feminine passivity from masculine bravado. This is the opposition between virtú and virtue, and Honig calibrates it against a new measure she terms the 'displacement of politics.'. (Praise for the 1st edition) * Political Theory *Honig's sharp genealogical sensibilities and insights, her development of a position of agonistic amendable authority, the questions which she raises and the soothing answers she refuses, come together in an excellent book that engages and provokes its readers in ways which exemplify political theory at its best, animated but not displaced by politics. (Praise for the 1st edition) * Journal of Politics *Thinkers as diverse as Plato, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, and Marx have relied,explicitly or implicitly, on the belief that there is some set of political and social arrangements most conducive to themaximization of human well-being and happiness. Bonnie Honig's illuminating and disquieting book provides an acute and much-needed analysis of some of the consequences and implications of this teleological assumption for contemporary political theory and, more generally, for the ways in which people tend to conceive of politics. Indeed, Honig argues that politics itself, at least insofar as it entails or expresses ultimately irreducible conflict, dissonance, resistance, and agonal struggle, has largely been displaced from or written out of political theory. (Praise for the 1st edition) * American Quarterly *

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Book SynopsisThe Life of Wisdom in Rousseau''s Reveries of the Solitary Walker is the first complete exegesis and interpretation of Rousseau''s final and culminating work, showing its full philosophic and moral teaching. The Reveries has been celebrated as a work of literature that is an acknowledged acme of French prose writing. Thomas L. Pangle argues that this aesthetic appreciation necessitates an in-depth interpretation of the writing''s complex and multileveled intended teaching about the normatively best way of lifeand how essential this is for a work that was initially bewildering.Rousseau stands out among modern political philosophers in that he restored, to political philosophy, what Socrates and his students (from Plato and Xenophon through Aristotle and the Stoics and Cicero) had made centraland that the previous modern, Enlightenment philosophers had eclipsed: the study of the life and soul of the exemplary, independent sage, as possessor of human Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. "First Walk"—Rousseau's Introduction 2. "Second Walk"—Nature, Mortality, God 3. "Third Walk"—A Spiritual-Religious Autobiography 4. "Fourth Walk"—The Virtue of Truthfulness 5. "Fifth Walk"—Happiness 6. "Sixth Walk"—Goodness versus Virtue 7. "Seventh Walk"—Botany as Consuming "Amusement" 8. "8"—Renewed Self-exploration 9. "9" and "10"—The Solitary Walker's "Truly Loving Heart"

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Book SynopsisThe Life of Wisdom in Rousseau''s Reveries of the Solitary Walker is the first complete exegesis and interpretation of Rousseau''s final and culminating work, showing its full philosophic and moral teaching. The Reveries has been celebrated as a work of literature that is an acknowledged acme of French prose writing. Thomas L. Pangle argues that this aesthetic appreciation necessitates an in-depth interpretation of the writing''s complex and multileveled intended teaching about the normatively best way of lifeand how essential this is for a work that was initially bewildering.Rousseau stands out among modern political philosophers in that he restored, to political philosophy, what Socrates and his students (from Plato and Xenophon through Aristotle and the Stoics and Cicero) had made centraland that the previous modern, Enlightenment philosophers had eclipsed: the study of the life and soul of the exemplary, independent sage, as possessor of human Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. "First Walk"—Rousseau's Introduction 2. "Second Walk"—Nature, Mortality, God 3. "Third Walk"—A Spiritual-Religious Autobiography 4. "Fourth Walk"—The Virtue of Truthfulness 5. "Fifth Walk"—Happiness 6. "Sixth Walk"—Goodness versus Virtue 7. "Seventh Walk"—Botany as Consuming "Amusement" 8. "8"—Renewed Self-exploration 9. "9" and "10"—The Solitary Walker's "Truly Loving Heart"

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Book SynopsisLeo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy critically interprets Strauss''s political philosophy from a conservative perspective. Most mainstream readers of Strauss have either condemned him from the Left as an extreme right-wing opponent of liberal democracy or celebrated him from the Right as a traditional defender of Western civilization. Rejecting both portrayals, Grant N. Havers shifts the debate beyond the conventional parameters stating that Strauss was neither a man of the Far Right nor a conservative but. in fact a secular Cold War liberal.In Leo Strauss and Anglo-American Democracy Havers contends that the most troubling implication of Straussianism is that it provides an ideological rationale for the aggressive spread of democratic values on a global basis while ignoring the preconditions that make these values possible. Concepts such as the rule of law, constitutional government, Christian morality, and the separation of church and state are not

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Book SynopsisMore than mere whistleblowers, Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning are exemplary figures who are inventing new political practices and calling old conceptions of the state and citizenship into question.Trade Review"This short, lucid book makes the case that the new security state's use of pervasive techniques of surveillance and data mining has engendered new forms of digital resistance. A manifesto of sorts, The Art of Revolt makes an argument friendly to specialists and non-specialists alike and offers a challenge for everyone concerned with today's new forms of political protest and alliance."—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley"Geoffroy de Lagasnerie is arguably one of the most talented of the new wave of French theory. In this incisive and unflinching book, he compellingly exposes the hardened skin of the perverse forms of power that endanger our liberties in this age of mass surveillance."—Achille Mbembe, author of The Critique of Black Reason"The Art of Revolt offers a striking and radical new perspective on truth-tellers in the Internet age: how they leak, wield anonymity, and find asylum in ways that break radically with established practices to effect change. Lagasnerie brings ideas to the table that even I, an insider, had never considered. Whether you agree or disagree with the actions of his protagonists, this book is a must-read for grasping the significance and innovation of their work. Its compelling ideas will inspire all readers to reflect on how they can engage productively in the betterment of our societies."—Sarah Harrison, Director of the Courage Foundation and WikiLeaks Associate"Lagasnerie discusses Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, and Chelsea Manning as developers of a new political art, a "different way of understanding what it means to resist"....This volume is of most interest to scholars of civil liberties and international communication....Recommended."—W.C. Johnson, CHOICE"Whether Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden are traitors or heroes is one of those 'debates' that is yet to be settled... Geoffroy de Lagasnerie's The Art of Revolt is not an account of these whistleblowers' deeds, but rather an interrogation of the categories and assumptions implicit in such questions."—Dzmitry Tsapkou, Cultural Critique

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Book SynopsisSediments of Time features the most important essays by renowned German historian Reinhart Koselleck not previously available in English, several of them essential to his theory of history. The volume sheds new light on Koselleck's crucial concerns, including his theory of sediments of time; his theory of historical repetition, duration, and acceleration; his encounters with philosophical hermeneutics and political and legal thought; his concern with the limits of historical meaning; and his views on historical commemoration, including that of the Second World War and the Holocaust. A critical introduction addresses some of the challenges and potentials of Koselleck's reception in the Anglophone world.Trade Review"The definitive collection in English of Reinhart Koselleck's major essays on time, the history of concepts, and memory, Sediments of Time reaches well beyond the scope of existing anthologies, substantiating the immense achievement of his work. The volume also serves as a brilliant introduction to the celebrated historian's thought at a time when interest in temporality, political iconology, and the relationship between concepts and society continues to grow." —Stefanos Geroulanos, New York University"In the Anglophone world, Reinhart Koselleck's story is that of an unfulfilled reception. Remarkably put together, this collection is a rectification that promises him a new career. Having trained as a historian in post-1945 Germany, Koselleck put the concepts of experience, waiting, and repetition at the center of his thought. In the midst of today's intellectual confusion, his work presents a major benchmark."—François Hartog, author of Regimes of Historicity"[I]t is the ambition to deconstruct, and not to underpin, the foundations of historical philosophy that runs like a red thread through the essays, which all display an immense erudition, an intellectual curiosity, and a remarkably wide range of thematic concerns that can be taken in many different directions...Sediments of Time provides an excellent (re)introduction to Koselleck, which can hopefully spur a more nuanced and comprehensive discussion and reception of his work in this part of the world."––Niklas Olsen, American Historical Review"Franzel and Hoffmann have created a volume that reads with both clarity and elegance in English....This volume will be [a] valuable resource for both practitioners and theorists of history who wish to undertake a deeper excavation of Koselleck's thought. It also promises to embed Koselleck more firmly among the layers of Anglophone historiography."—Jennifer Allen, German History"[These] texts address a wide range of philosophers and scientists alike, offering highly innovative 'food for thought.' One also finds therein signs of the important influence these Essays have already exerted, in new concepts such as 'mapping' and in the necessity for studies of History as Time to combine with geopolitics."—Raphaëlle Costa de Beauregard, Kronoscope"Sediments of Time, in short, offers literary historians the opportunity to reconsider the relation between history and fiction, bodily and linguistic experience, preverbal knowledge and discourse, singularity and repetition. With scholars across the humanities currently recovering ontological and materialist perspectives in order to move beyond the limitations of the linguistic turn, Koselleck's emphasis on the pre- and extralinguistic ought to become newly relevant at the present intellectual juncture."—Johannes Voelz, American Literary HistoryTable of Contents1. Sediments of Time 2. Fiction and Historical Reality 3. Space and History 4. Historik and Hermeneutics 5. Goethe's Untimely History 6. Does History Accelerate? 7. Constancy and Change of All Contemporary Histories 8. History, Law, and Justice 9. Linguistic Change and the History of Events 10. Structures of Repetition in Language and History 11. On the Meaning and Absurdity in History 12. Concepts of the Enemy 13. Sluices of Memory and Sediments of Experiences 14. Behind the Deadly Line: The Age of Totality 15. Some Forms and Traditions of Negative Memory 16. Histories in the Plural and the Theory of History. An Interview with Carsten Dutt

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Book SynopsisA sustained engagement with Theodor Adorno, Jazz As Critique looks to jazz for ways of understanding the inadequacies of contemporary life. Adorno's writings on jazz are notoriously dismissive. Nevertheless, Adorno does have faith in the critical potential of some musical traditions. Music, he suggests, can provide insight into the controlling, destructive nature of modern society while offering a glimpse of more empathetic and less violent ways of being together in the world. Taking Adorno down a path he did not go, this book calls attention to an alternative sociality made manifest in jazz. In response to writing that tends to portray it as a mirror of American individualism and democracy, Fumi Okiji makes the case for jazz as a model of "gathering in difference."Noting that this mode of subjectivity emerged in response to the distinctive history of black America, she reveals that the music cannot but call the integrity of the world into question.Trade Review"A lucidly argued, historically grounded, theoretically sophisticated, and timely book, Jazz as Critique redraws our maps of the relationship between black cultures, jazz music, and critical theory." -- Alexander G. Weheliye * Northwestern University *"Fumi Okiji combines a serious understanding of Adorno with a powerful portrayal of the black experience in the United States and melds it all with an encyclopedic knowledge of and respect for the jazz tradition. The world needs a book like this, as much as it needs jazz." -- Martin Shuster * Goucher College *"This important and engagingly written study offers new angles of vision on Adorno's notorious 'jazz critique,' on the nature of the jazz work, and on jazz's utopian promise. Informed both by a judicious reading of Adorno and by considerable jazz literacy, it illuminates the intersections of critical theory, jazz studies, and African American studies." -- Lorenzo C. Simpson * Stony Brook University *"Jazz As Critique serves as an invaluable resource for thinking about the types of listening and conversations that need to take place in order to confront today's outstanding racial injustice and inequalities." -- Alexander K. Rothe, Core Lecturer * Columbia University *"Okiji's book is a rare treat, unexpected in its outcome, and unconventional in its methodological approach." -- James B. Haile III * The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism *"At stake in Okiji's text is not whether Adorno could have changed his mind about jazz but rather whether Black expression can, and should, change its mind about Adorno." -- Mark Christian Thompson * Monatshefte *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Jazz, Individualism, and the Black Modern chapter abstractThis chapter seeks to establish the socio-historical basis of an alternate subjectivity, a gathering in difference in jazz, in contrast to the claims presented by some commentators—shown to relate more closely to the historical trajectory of the bourgeois. The inattention of both Adorno and jazz critics to the significance of a distinctive black American subject is shown to be a crucial oversight. It is argued that the notion of personal sovereignty (and its loss) must be seen as subordinate to fundamental everyday, often passive, battles between black life and how society tends to define it beyond recognition, the sequela of the dehumanization of African captives. This distinction is crucial to appreciating the manner in which jazz and other black expressive forms contribute to a model of a possible praxis. 2Double Consciousness and the Critical Potential of Black Expression chapter abstractAccording to Adorno, autonomous works of art, by virtue of their peculiar attuned-outsider perspective, are ideally positioned to provide a kind of social critique. Although implicated socio-historically in the advance of techno-rationality—in fact, because they are so implicated—musical works are able, in rearticulating available musical material, to expose the poor state of human relations within late capitalist society. It is essential to consider black expression's attuned-outsiderness within the specific historical and material conditions from which it emerged. These provide an alternative vantage to that of radical music of the European tradition. Resting on Nahum Chandler's illuminating interpretation of W.E.B. Du Bois's ideas concerning double consciousness, this chapter draws to the fore the importance of African America's contradictory nature, the critical character of its obligatory retention of conflicting positions. The chapter culminates in a discussion of jazz syncopation as a manifestation of this. 3Black Dwelling, a Refuge for the Homeless chapter abstractThis chapter frames some key turns of the study's central argument within a universalist inclination in black radical thought and expression. The chapter focuses on the opportunity the disjuncture between blackness and the world presents, and how it allows us to speculate on the broad ethical implications of black living in critical reflection on the world. Black wordlessness and homelessness are put into conversation with Adorno's ethics of resistance, particularly the imploration to not be at home in one's home. It is suggested that an embrace of blackness is a way to give up one's place in the world, and the prerequisite to any utopic future. 4Storytelling, Sound, and Silence chapter abstractThis chapter establishes the aesthetic terms of jazz's social character by showing that the tension between wanting to tell communal stories and doing so with distinction permeates jazz work and tradition. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov," on black thought, and on the music itself, a descriptive formulation of collaborative work in jazz is advanced. Storytelling in jazz scholarship has traditionally been associated with the linearity and coherence of the individual solo, with values modeled closely on those of the modern European tradition. The inadequacy of such approaches is discussed. The chapter shows how the elision between sound and sense (an evasion of designation but also a refusal to relinquish meaning) enabled black music to continue to communicate content of social significance, despite being faced with traumas comparable to those that have robbed Benjamin's storytelling community of its ability to communicate experience. 5Postscript: Some Thoughts on the Inadequacy and Indispensability of Jazz Records chapter abstractThe study concludes with a dialectical riffing on the indispensability and the inadequacy of jazz recording as a representative of the music's principles of structuration. It is suggested that jazz recording is destructive, that it congeals and obscured how jazz work is done and compromises the incompletion, partiality, and imperfection encoded the practice. And yet, jazz records are shown to be of crucial importance to the way the tradition has developed, particularly for how it has democratized study and has facilitated inter-generational collaborations while retaining the features of oral tradition. Introduction chapter abstractThis introductory chapter sketches the broad strokes of the argument that unfolds over the course of the book. A recording of the Charles Mingus Sextet at Cornell University anchors the chapter. In it is heard socio-musical work that appears to instantiate Adorno's ideas of art's potential for providing social theory. It prepares the ground for the extended conversation staged between the critical theorist and black thought and expression.

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Book SynopsisWhat does it mean to be responsible for our actions? In this brief and elegant study, Giorgio Agamben traces our most profound moral intuitions back to their roots in the sphere of law and punishment. Moral accountability, human free agency, and even the very concept of cause and effect all find their origin in the language of the trial, which Western philosophy and theology both transform into the paradigm for all of human life. In his search for a way out of this destructive paradigm, Agamben not only draws on minority opinions within the Western tradition but engages at length with Buddhist texts and concepts for the first time. In sum, Karman deepens and rearticulates some of Agamben's core insights while breaking significant new ground.

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Book SynopsisNeoliberalism has become a dirty word. In political discourse, it stigmatizes a political opponent as a market fundamentalist; in academia, the concept is also mainly wielded by its critics, while those who might be seen as actual neoliberals deny its very existence. Yet the term remains necessary for understanding the varieties of capitalism across space and time. Arguing that neoliberalism is widely misunderstood when reduced to a doctrine of markets and economics alone, this book shows that it has a political dimension that we can reconstruct and critique. Recognizing the heterogeneities within and between both neoliberal theory and practice, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism looks to distinguish between the two as well as to theorize their relationship. By examining the views of state, democracy, science, and politics in the work of six major figures—Eucken, Röpke, Rüstow, Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan—it offers the first comprehensive account of the varieties of neoliberal political thought. Ordoliberal perspectives, in particular, emerge in a new light. Turning from abstract to concrete, the book also interprets recent neoliberal reforms of the European Union to offer a diagnosis of contemporary capitalism more generally. The latest economic crises hardly brought the neoliberal era to an end. Instead, as Thomas Biebricher shows, we are witnessing an authoritarian liberalism whose reign has only just begun. Trade Review"This book makes a timely and formidable intervention in current political theory, combining a meticulous analysis of the history of neoliberal thought with a compelling critique of elitist, technocratic, and undemocratic modes of economic governance in this age of austerity." -- Yves Winter * McGill University *"A concise, nuanced, and wide-ranging introduction to the leading theorists of neoliberalism and to the role their ideas have played in recent economic crises.Thomas Biebricher looks beyond familiar critiques of neoliberal ideology and its proponents to ask provocative, insightful questions that are rooted in deep engagement." -- Angus Burgin * Johns Hopkins University *"Thomas Biebricher carefully demonstrates that what unites the many varieties of neoliberalism is not a unified 'theory of politics,' but rather that neoliberalisms share a distinctly political theory. A powerful corrective to the existing scholarship, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism shows readers that within the sweeping generalizations so often made about neoliberalism, the devil truly is in the details." -- Andrew Dilts * Loyola Marymount University *"This is a brilliant book—one of the most illuminating I have read in a long time. Biebricher provides an original account of the emergence of neoliberalism, tracing its development from the 1930s into the present. At once deeply scholarly and profoundly relevant, it is a model of what political theory should be." -- Margaret Kohn * University of Toronto *"At once addressing...skeptics and guiding newcomers to the concept, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism provides one of the most perceptive and analytic treatments of neoliberal thought to date....Going beneath and beyond its usual associations with "mere" economic theory and economic policy, Biebricher offers a compelling reading of neoliberalism as a distinct and internally diverse tradition of political thought." -- William Callison * Contemporary Political Theory *

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Book SynopsisBy both its supporters and detractors, neoliberalism is usually considered an economic policy agenda. Neoliberalism's Demons argues that it is much more than that: a complete worldview, neoliberalism presents the competitive marketplace as the model for true human flourishing. And it has enjoyed great success: from the struggle for "global competitiveness" on the world stage down to our individual practices of self-branding and social networking, neoliberalism has transformed every aspect of our shared social life. The book explores the sources of neoliberalism's remarkable success and the roots of its current decline. Neoliberalism's appeal is its promise of freedom in the form of unfettered free choice. But that freedom is a trap: we have just enough freedom to be accountable for our failings, but not enough to create genuine change. If we choose rightly, we ratify our own exploitation. And if we choose wrongly, we are consigned to the outer darkness—and then demonized as the cause of social ills. By tracing the political and theological roots of the neoliberal concept of freedom, Adam Kotsko offers a fresh perspective, one that emphasizes the dynamics of race, gender, and sexuality. More than that, he accounts for the rise of right-wing populism, arguing that, far from breaking with the neoliberal model, it actually doubles down on neoliberalism's most destructive features. Trade Review"In all of the hubbub about neoliberalism, one often feels that there is not much more to say. Adam Kotsko's premise—that the devil and the neoliberal subject can only ever choose their own damnation—is as original as it is breathtaking. Everyone should read this book." -- James Martel * San Francisco State University *"It's been a long time since I've read something so acutely in tune with its political moment. Both wide-ranging and impressively concise, this book offers one of the most compelling critical analyses of neoliberalism I've yet encountered, understood holistically as an economic agenda, a moral vision, and a state mission." -- Peter Hallward * Kingston University London *"[An] important book....Useful to scholars and students in subfields ranging from philosophy of religion and theology to contingently grounded studies of the politics and law....Critical analysis here lays the grounds for constructive work, with Kotsko gesturing toward an as-yet-unknown eschatological future." -- Spencer Dew * Religious Studies Review *"Neoliberalism's Demons is a concise and persuasive account of the political, economic, and moral universe we inhabit, and is therefore essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand their own condition." -- Jonathan Megerian * New Books Network *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1The Political Theology of Late Capital chapter abstractThis chapter begins by recognizing that pairing neoliberalism and political theology is counterintuitive. On the one hand, most accounts of neoliberalism leave little room for the conventional themes of political theology. On the other hand, Schmitt's initial formulation of political theology denigrates the economic concerns that are ostensibly the sole concern of neoliberalism. Hence this chapter shows that the conventional themes of political theology emerge persistently in the existing accounts of neoliberalism and provides grounds in Schmitt's text for a broader vision of the field that could include a phenomenon like neoliberalism. This more general political theology would ask about attempts to answer the ultimately unanswerable question that is expressed theologically as the problem of evil and politically as the problem of legitimacy. The chapter concludes by sketching a political theology of neoliberalism centered on the core legitimating principle of freedom. 2The Political and the Economic chapter abstractThis chapter makes the case for overcoming political theology's traditional hostility toward the economic realm. Drawing on the work of Wendy Brown, Giorgio Agamben, and Dotan Leshem, it traces this binary opposition back to the work of Hannah Arendt, who famously opposes the two realms and privileges the political over the economic. It then argues that "Arendt's axiom" is false: there is no pregiven distinction between the political and the economic; in fact, each political theological paradigm—very much including neoliberalism—reconfigures that binary for its own ends. Along the way the chapter holds up a variety of examples of alternative approaches to the relation of the political and the economic, including those of Marie-José Mondzain, Mark C. Taylor, Philip Goodchild, Joshua Ramey, and Eric Santner. 3Neoliberalism's Demons chapter abstractThis chapter provides an account of neoliberalism as a political-theological paradigm that governs every sphere of social life—not just the state and the economy but religion, family structure, sexual practice, gender relations, and racialization—by means of a logic of demonization. Drawing a parallel between the shift to neoliberalism and the origins of capitalism, it argues that capitalist ideologues have tended to find common cause with reactionary Christians because both adhere to a worldview centered on divine providence, which is in turn inextricably intertwined with demonization as a logic of moral entrapment. The difference between neoliberalism and neoconservatism is more often one of degree than of kind, with the former leaving more room for redemption and the latter opting more often for total, irreversible demonization for subject populations. 4This Present Darkness chapter abstractThe political theological account of neoliberalism developed in the previous chapter serves as the basis for an investigation of the reactionary populist wave represented by the Brexit vote and the Trump presidency. Rather than attempt to directly answer the question of whether it makes sense to view these phenomena as betokening the "end" of neoliberalism, the chapter begins by asking what the advent of the reactionary wave tells us about the intrinsic vulnerabilities of neoliberalism, focusing on the areas of electoral legitimation, the politicization of expertise, and the vision of society as a perpetual competition. It concludes by arguing that reactionary populism is a "heretical" version of the political theology of neoliberalism, which pushes core neoliberal values to near-parodic extremes. Conclusion: After Neoliberalism chapter abstractThis chapter begins by consolidating the new concept of political theology developed in the preceding chapters. It then asks what the general shape of a true break with neoliberalism might look like, drawing clues from the collapse of the Fordist regime that preceded it. It argues that Fordism's downfall came from its decision to preserve and tame capitalist structures—including structures of race, gender relations, and family—which were intended to legitimate the Fordist regime but were ultimately instrumental in its downfall. Any attempt to rebuild Fordist welfare state structures or even state-run industries would be vulnerable to a similar overthrow as long as the market economy remained the foundation of society. Hence, the only way to create a durable alternative to neoliberalism will require abolishing the "invisible hand" and taking control of the process of production through conscious, collective deliberation and decision making.

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Book SynopsisThis book shows how early economic ideas structured Christian thought and society, giving crucial insight into why money holds such power in the West. Examining the religious and theological sources of money's power, it shows how early Christian thinkers borrowed ancient notions of money and economic exchange from the Roman Empire as a basis for their new theological arguments. Monetary metaphors and images, including the minting of coins and debt slavery, provided frameworks for theologians to explain what happens in salvation. God became an economic administrator, for instance, and Christ functioned as a currency to purchase humanity's freedom. Such ideas, in turn, provided models for pastors and Christian emperors as they oversaw both resources and people, which led to new economic conceptions of state administration of populations and conferred a godly aura on the use of money. Divine Currency argues that this longstanding association of money with divine activity has contributed over the centuries to money's ever increasing significance, justifying various forms of politics that manage citizens along the way. Devin Singh's account sheds unexpected light on why we live in a world where nothing seems immune from the price mechanism.Trade Review"Ground-breaking, erudite, and a pleasure to read, Devin Singh's book prompts us to view the history of Christianity in a new and wholly unexpected way, and in so doing sheds fresh light on the modern world and our contemporary situation. It is also scandalous in the best and most productive of ways."—Adam Kotsko, North Central CollegeDivine Currency offers an incisive contribution to the debate about neoliberalism's Christian origins. Devin Singh's bold reading of the sources challenges us to reconsider the relations between theology, politics, and economics."—Philip Goodchild, University of Nottingham"Devin Singh probes the true meaning of divine economy, revealing the centrality of economic thinking to the formation of Christian theology. His book is a welcome and timely addition to recent scholarship in religious as well as finance studies, and with far-reaching consequences."—Susanna Elm, University of California, Berkeley"Singh's illuminating study shows the power of economic discourse to shape theology, while also demonstrating that one of the reasons theology is able to alter economic practice is precisely that it does not stand outside economic thinking.Clearly written and modestly argued, Singh's work should be taken up by those who would seek to keep economics and theology at arm's length, and by those who would see theology as an artifice which simply hides the "real" power of money."—Myles Werntz, Reading Religion"Divine Currency is an intriguing work in religious and cultural studies that challenges much of the work done in theology and economics suggesting that it failed to attend to how the two central mysteries of the Christian faith, the Trinity and incarnation, are implicated both in ancient and modern Western economic dominance....The strength of Singh's work is his historical attention to the use of economic metaphors in the development of Christian doctrine."—Stephen Long, Marginalia: Los Angeles Review of Books"[To] read Devin Singh's Divine Currency is to be transported from our commonplace assumptions about the nexus between Christianity and economics into a world, that of late Antiquity, both wonderfully unfamiliar and uncannily resonant with our own....Whilst Divine Currency is a conceptually assured and sophisticated book, it is also grounded in the patient deployment of historical knowledge and philological method."—Alberto Toscano, Syndicate"Devin Singh's profoundly important book, Divine Currency, provides readers with invaluable tools to help us understand why it's so hard to talk about God without talking about money, and why it's so hard to talk about money without talking about God."—Roberto Sirvent, Syndicate"Singh performs the much-needed task of establishing a vocabulary for the conceptual-historical connections between Christian theology and monetary economy in the West....[The] theoretical blueprint Singh provides us with will no doubt become a guide for future scholarship on Christianity and monetary economy."—Danube Johnson, Syndicate"Singh offers a crucial critique of problems contained within Christian thought itself that prop up capitalist systems that undermine human dignity."—Nichole M. Flores, Modern Theology"Singh's very simple and yet forceful argument—that a ransom theory cannot but be about money—is compelling. I truly doubt that I will ever be able to think about or to teach [Gregory of Nyssa's] imagery again without taking Singh's explanation into account."—John E. Thiel, Modern Theology"Singh's work may enable us to rethink what Christian theology is....Far from accepting a pure theological origin for authorisation and legitimation of doctrine, practice and conduct, Singh charts the messy involvement of Patristic theology with the power practices and techniques of exploitation conducted by the Roman Empire."—Philip Goodchild, Modern Theology"Devin Singh presents his readers with a thought-provoking close reading of the deep homology between the concept of oikonomia as it developed in ancient Greek philosophy and early Christian articulations of God's immanence and transcendence....One of the most admirable traits of this book is that it avoids the trap of simplistic or predictable deconstructive critique. Instead, it enacts intellectual humility in light of historical complexity and is satisfied with providing a rich reconstruction of conceptual evolution."—Alex Holznienkemper, Journal of the American Academy of ReligionTable of ContentsIntroduction One: Incarnation and Imperial Economy Two: The Divine Economist Three: The Emperor's Righteous Money Four: The Coin of God Five: Redemptive Commerce Six: Of Payment, Debt, and Conquest Conclusion: Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThe environmental crisis, one of the great challenges of our time, tends to disenfranchise those who come after us. Arguing that as temporary inhabitants of the earth, we cannot be indifferent to future generations, this book draws on the resources of phenomenology and poststructuralism to help us conceive of moral relations in connection with human temporality. Demonstrating that moral and political normativity emerge with generational time, the time of birth and death, this book proposes two related models of intergenerational and environmental justice. The first entails a form of indirect reciprocity, in which we owe future people both because of their needs and interests and because we ourselves have been the beneficiaries of peoples past; the second posits a generational taking of turns that Matthias Fritsch applies to both our institutions and our natural environment, in other words, to the earth as a whole. Offering new readings of key philosophers, and emphasizing the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in particular, Taking Turns with the Earth disrupts human-centered notions of terrestrial appropriation and sharing to give us a new continental philosophical account of future-oriented justice.Trade Review"Matthias Fritsch brings clarity and depth to issues of environmental justice and responsibility for future generations through a close engagement with the work of Derrida, Levinas, and Arendt. This book is an indispensable resource for both continental and analytic philosophers seeking to understand what it means to live and die ethically on the earth." -- Lisa Guenther * Queen's University *"With characteristic precision and rigor, Matthias Fritsch has produced an original contribution to thinking about intergenerational justice and our relationship to the planet. Taking Turns with the Earth is an exemplary model for how to theorize pressing ethical and political issues through a creative inheritance of the philosophical tradition." -- Samir Haddad * Fordham University *"Intergenerational ethics is at the heart of many of the biggest problems facing humanity today, yet our theories, institutions, and practices remain inadequate to the challenge. This admirable book offers us an ontological approach that is distinctive, innovative, and an important contribution to our ethical self-understanding." -- Stephen M. Gardiner * University of Washington *"Fritsch makes a convincing case for thinking of intergenerational and ecological relationships not as additional features or theoretical extensions of intragenerational and humanistic models of justice, but as constitutive features of justice...[His] style of cogent argumentation appears quite prudent, as it makes phenomenology and deconstruction directly relevant and applicable to those discourses and accessible to other scholars and professionals who are interested in justice and the future of the humanly habitable earth." -- Sam Mickey * Environmental Philosophy *"Fritsch argues that our moral obligation to tackle and respond to climate change is grounded in intergenerational justice...The key notion here is asymmetrical intergenerational reciprocity; the author's explication of this notion, and his discussion of potential objections to it, is especially useful and thought provoking...Recommended." -- M. A. Michael * CHOICE *"Taking Turns With the Earthoffers to the reader a rich and incisive analysis of intergenerational justice, especially as it relates to issues pertaining to the environment. With intergenerational ethics being relevant to so many issues that we face today, this book offers a timely theoretical analysis of the nature of our obligations to non-contemporary others." -- Christopher Black * Phenomenological Reviews *"Matthias Fritsch has written a supremely challenging and timely book about the ontological-normative dimensions of our intergenerational being....[I am] fully on board with the notion that we require ontological thinking in this area, and as far as I know, nobody has attempted this on the same scale or with as much boldness of philosophical vision as Fritsch. His book is a major contribution to our thinking about the philosophical foundations of our intergenerational being. I predict that it will have a profound effect on environmental philosophy, in both analytic and continental circles, for decades to come." -- Byron Williston * Environmental Ethics *"Taking Turns with the Earth is a model of scholarship in continental philosophy. Written in a clear argumentative style that never sacrifices depth or complexity, it shows how central ideas found in Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida—ideas often dismissed as obtuse—can be put to work to help us rethink some of the most pressing ethical issues of our times." -- Marie-Eve Morin * Research in Phenomenology *"Matthias Fritsch's Taking Turns with the Earth is a significant, illuminating, and timely—just in time, perhaps—phenomenological and deconstructive ontology and 'hauntology' of the problem of intergenerational justice. To my mind, it is the widest ranging and most profound work on this problem that I have so far encountered." -- Jason M. Wirth * Ethics & Politics *"[How] is one to respond in a meaningful and responsible way to a book that is this meticulously researched, this powerfully argued, this broad in its scope and implications, and, of course, this urgent not just for philosophy but for all of us who have inherited the earth and who have some responsibility for passing it on?[A] uniquely powerful work." -- Michael Naas * Ethics & Politics *"The cogency of [Fritsch's] proposals and, notwithstanding the complexity of the philosophical arguments supporting of them, the impressive clarity of their presentation, make the book a significant contribution to the field of environmental ethics." -- Scott Marratto * Ethics & Politics *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Ontological Problems and Methods in Intergenerational Justice chapter abstractThis chapter begins by reviewing the so-called ontological problems that affect relations with future people, from the nonexistence challenge and poor epistemic access to problems affecting interaction and world constitution. It is then argued that ontological problems call for ontological solutions—here, investigations of moral agents' being in relation to time and world. Drawing on phenomenological sources, the chapter provides a first sketch of the book's overarching claim that justice becomes an issue for human beings to the extent we are generational beings who are noncontingently subject to birth and death. Birth and death, the argument continues, link us to previous and subsequent generations in ways that are socially and morally relevant. If we take this into account, the dead and the unborn will appear less absent and more (albeit "spectrally") present. The chapter ends by outlining possible responses to many of the ontological problems. 2Levinas's "Being-for-Beyond-My-Death" chapter abstractThe second chapter elaborates the constitutive role of natality and mortality, sketched in the previous chapter, in much greater detail, with particular focus on Levinas. In the wake of Heidegger and others, Levinas argues that, in accessing the finite time that is co-disclosive of agency, I necessarily encounter the mortal, vulnerable other whose face demands that I let the other live. Agency is co-constituted by a futural demand to let others have possibilities for life beyond my death. Thus, the demand from actual future people on the living comes to be seen as exemplary of moral normativity. However, Levinas insufficiently links this futural responsibility to debts to previous others (including mothers), drawing legitimate feminist and Derridean critiques of his "fecundity" and "paternity." The chapter concludes that the moral demand cannot just be futural but must also be related to gifts from predecessors. 3Asymmetrical Reciprocity and the Gift in Mauss and Derrida chapter abstractTaking off from the insight offered at the end of the previous chapter, this chapter elaborates indirect, asymmetrical reciprocity as a model of intergenerational justice. This notion is meant to capture the idea that indebtedness to preceding others plays a role in giving to future others, no matter how asymmetrical and altruistic the gift to future people is taken to be. With this goal in view, the chapter connects Derrida's critical reading of Levinas to economic literature on intergenerational transfers, specifically economists who draw on the premodern, indigenous notion of the gift, as famously elaborated by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss. The chapter distinguishes four (ideal) types of intergenerational three-party reciprocities and concludes that the notion of the gift points to the enabling conditions of economic activity. Both gifts of nature and benefits from nonpresent generations belong to these conditions, conditions that are too often "externalized" by market economies. 4Double Turn-Taking among Generations and with Earth chapter abstractWith this topic of collectively shared goods in mind, the fourth chapter presents turn-taking as the second model of intergenerational justice that elaborates the "spectral" presence of nonpresent generations. Taking turns is more appropriate than reciprocity when the "object" of intergenerational sharing, in particular the natural environment and democratic institutions, is quasi-holistic and organically interrelated, such that it cannot easily be divided into parts nor can parts be substituted for one another. Drawing on Derrida's work on time and democracy, this model's distinct advantages are discussed in view of answering the question as to what a fair turn with earth and future people might be. The chapter concludes by showing that quasi-holistic objects such as earth and climate necessarily precede and outlive generations, and thus are not indifferent to, but co-constitutive of, the very being of generations, the subjects of sharing by turn-taking. 5Interment chapter abstractTo avoid the humanism that takes the earth to be an indifferent object of intergenerational sharing, the final chapter complicates taking turns by arguing that the earth, understood as the history and habitat of life, for its part turns human beings about. We do not only have human generations taking turns with the earth, but individuals being born of the earth into a generation, while returning to the earth upon death. Humans are both "interred'" (agonistically belonging to a larger time and space here called the earth) and "interring" (responsible for returning others to the earth, as in burial).

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Book SynopsisThis book shows how early economic ideas structured Christian thought and society, giving crucial insight into why money holds such power in the West. Examining the religious and theological sources of money's power, it shows how early Christian thinkers borrowed ancient notions of money and economic exchange from the Roman Empire as a basis for their new theological arguments. Monetary metaphors and images, including the minting of coins and debt slavery, provided frameworks for theologians to explain what happens in salvation. God became an economic administrator, for instance, and Christ functioned as a currency to purchase humanity's freedom. Such ideas, in turn, provided models for pastors and Christian emperors as they oversaw both resources and people, which led to new economic conceptions of state administration of populations and conferred a godly aura on the use of money. Divine Currency argues that this longstanding association of money with divine activity has contributed over the centuries to money's ever increasing significance, justifying various forms of politics that manage citizens along the way. Devin Singh's account sheds unexpected light on why we live in a world where nothing seems immune from the price mechanism.Trade Review"Ground-breaking, erudite, and a pleasure to read, Devin Singh's book prompts us to view the history of Christianity in a new and wholly unexpected way, and in so doing sheds fresh light on the modern world and our contemporary situation. It is also scandalous in the best and most productive of ways."—Adam Kotsko, North Central CollegeDivine Currency offers an incisive contribution to the debate about neoliberalism's Christian origins. Devin Singh's bold reading of the sources challenges us to reconsider the relations between theology, politics, and economics."—Philip Goodchild, University of Nottingham"Devin Singh probes the true meaning of divine economy, revealing the centrality of economic thinking to the formation of Christian theology. His book is a welcome and timely addition to recent scholarship in religious as well as finance studies, and with far-reaching consequences."—Susanna Elm, University of California, Berkeley"Singh's illuminating study shows the power of economic discourse to shape theology, while also demonstrating that one of the reasons theology is able to alter economic practice is precisely that it does not stand outside economic thinking.Clearly written and modestly argued, Singh's work should be taken up by those who would seek to keep economics and theology at arm's length, and by those who would see theology as an artifice which simply hides the "real" power of money."—Myles Werntz, Reading Religion"Divine Currency is an intriguing work in religious and cultural studies that challenges much of the work done in theology and economics suggesting that it failed to attend to how the two central mysteries of the Christian faith, the Trinity and incarnation, are implicated both in ancient and modern Western economic dominance....The strength of Singh's work is his historical attention to the use of economic metaphors in the development of Christian doctrine."—Stephen Long, Marginalia: Los Angeles Review of Books"[To] read Devin Singh's Divine Currency is to be transported from our commonplace assumptions about the nexus between Christianity and economics into a world, that of late Antiquity, both wonderfully unfamiliar and uncannily resonant with our own....Whilst Divine Currency is a conceptually assured and sophisticated book, it is also grounded in the patient deployment of historical knowledge and philological method."—Alberto Toscano, Syndicate"Devin Singh's profoundly important book, Divine Currency, provides readers with invaluable tools to help us understand why it's so hard to talk about God without talking about money, and why it's so hard to talk about money without talking about God."—Roberto Sirvent, Syndicate"Singh performs the much-needed task of establishing a vocabulary for the conceptual-historical connections between Christian theology and monetary economy in the West....[The] theoretical blueprint Singh provides us with will no doubt become a guide for future scholarship on Christianity and monetary economy."—Danube Johnson, Syndicate"Singh offers a crucial critique of problems contained within Christian thought itself that prop up capitalist systems that undermine human dignity."—Nichole M. Flores, Modern Theology"Singh's very simple and yet forceful argument—that a ransom theory cannot but be about money—is compelling. I truly doubt that I will ever be able to think about or to teach [Gregory of Nyssa's] imagery again without taking Singh's explanation into account."—John E. Thiel, Modern Theology"Singh's work may enable us to rethink what Christian theology is....Far from accepting a pure theological origin for authorisation and legitimation of doctrine, practice and conduct, Singh charts the messy involvement of Patristic theology with the power practices and techniques of exploitation conducted by the Roman Empire."—Philip Goodchild, Modern Theology"Devin Singh presents his readers with a thought-provoking close reading of the deep homology between the concept of oikonomia as it developed in ancient Greek philosophy and early Christian articulations of God's immanence and transcendence....One of the most admirable traits of this book is that it avoids the trap of simplistic or predictable deconstructive critique. Instead, it enacts intellectual humility in light of historical complexity and is satisfied with providing a rich reconstruction of conceptual evolution."—Alex Holznienkemper, Journal of the American Academy of ReligionTable of ContentsIntroduction One: Incarnation and Imperial Economy Two: The Divine Economist Three: The Emperor's Righteous Money Four: The Coin of God Five: Redemptive Commerce Six: Of Payment, Debt, and Conquest Conclusion: Conclusion

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Book SynopsisIdentity has become a central feature of national conversations: identity politics and identity crises are the order of the day. We celebrate identity when it comes to personal freedom and group membership, and we fear the power of identity when it comes to discrimination, bias, and hate crimes. Drawing on Isaiah Berlin's famous distinction between positive and negative liberty, Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative Identity argues for the necessity of acknowledging a dialectic within the identity concept. Exploring the intellectual history of identity as a social idea, Eric Oberle shows the philosophical importance of identity's origins in American exile from Hitler's fascism. Positive identity was first proposed by Frankfurt School member Erich Fromm, while negative identity was almost immediately put forth as a counter-concept by Fromm's colleague, Theodor Adorno. Oberle explains why, in the context of the racism, authoritarianism, and the hard-right agitation of the 1940s, the invention of a positive concept of identity required a theory of negative identity. This history in turn reveals how autonomy and objectivity can be recovered within a modern identity structured by domination, alterity, ontologized conflict, and victim blaming.Trade Review"An indispensable contribution to the history and theory of the concept of identity in the twentieth century, Eric Oberle's book has convinced me that Adorno's wrestling with this question not only permits but requires a reinterpretation of the whole body of his work." -- Gerald Izenberg, Professor Emeritus * Washington University in St. Louis *"The historical and philosophical literature on Adorno is abundant, and the bar is high for new work. With a mix of persuasive analysis, meticulous research, and astute commentary, Eric Oberle's book clears it." -- Warren Breckman * University of Pennsylvania *"In a work of boundless ambition and comparable achievement, which combines close reading of familiar texts and synoptic intellectual histories that bring together unfamiliar texts, The Century of Negative Identity shows just how indebted the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno and Horkheimer, was to its time in America." -- Corey Robin * crookedtimber.org *"Oberle's book is full of pathbreaking insights rendered in a dense, fast-paced but crystalline prose. Written for an audience of intellectual historians, it nevertheless speaks directly to all of us as we grapple with the contemporary 'interconnections among racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of prejudice.'" -- James Loeffler * Marginalia, Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1"Jazz , the Wound": Negative Identity, Culture, and the Shadow of Race chapter abstractChapter 1 offers a revised interpretation of the infamous jazz controversy and Adorno's first confrontation with the idea of race and the American concept of culture. Chronicling Adorno's missteps in applying a theory of the commodification of musical universalism developed in Weimar Germany to the substantially different conditions of American society of the 1930s, this chapter reconstructs the political and cultural situations in which these essays were written and published. By examining the history of critical theory through the story of Adorno's understanding—and misunderstandings—of jazz and through Adorno's postwar consideration of his own Jewish heritage and that of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, this chapter explores Adorno's intellectual development in relation to the historical trajectory of twentieth-century attitudes toward culture between the worlds of ethnicity and the avant-garde. 2America; or, the Stranger chapter abstractChapter 2 looks at how Adorno's early experiences in America shaped his commitment to a Kantian vision of science, ethics, and universalism that would also accommodate individual expression, observation, and resistance. The chapter's central focus is an important 1940 lecture at Columbia. It explores how Adorno used Simmel's model of the sociological Stranger to understand America and American academic sociology's emphasis on assimilation and adaptation as the essence of truth and progress and also how, for an émigré scientist, personal alienation might lead to theoretical innovation. Considering what it meant for Adorno to be a Kantian Marxist and Nietzschean universalist, this chapter argues that during these years Adorno engaged with the problem of the relation between universalism and particularity in a way that laid the grounds for his turn toward the social dynamics of subjective identity in relation to racism and authoritarian politics. 3Negative Identities of the Subject in Wartime America chapter abstractChapter 3 introduces a long argument developed across Chapters 3 through 6. Examining Adorno's most famous, or notorious, philosophical work, Dialectic of Enlightenment (cowritten with Max Horkheimer), it challenges several persistent scholarly assumptions about Adorno's intellectual biography: that the war years marked a "retreat" from empirical research to theory; that the esoteric philosophical speculation of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia represented the "true" Adorno; that Adorno and Horkheimer were "pessimists" or "nihilists" during this period; and that the empirical study of The Authoritarian Personality was a distraction from Adorno's real concerns. Countering this narrative, these chapters argue that this period can all be read in terms of an ongoing attempt, when Adorno had become Horkheimer's closest intellectual interlocutor, to realize the work envisioned by the 1931 programmatic essay "Traditional and Critical Theory": creating a social-psychological model of interdisciplinary inquiry that devolved into neither positivism nor social Darwinism. 4Critical Theory Goes to War: The Critique of Positive Identity and Positive Science chapter abstractChapter 4 explores how Adorno's work and that of the Institute for Social Research were shaped by a schism over the introduction of the term identity by its then most prominent theorist, Erich Fromm, in his 1941 Escape from Freedom. Showing how he articulated the language of identity as nonalienated subjectivity, which was almost immediately rejected by other members as Romantic and uncritical, this chapter argues that the struggle over the identity concept made the problem of subjective rationality a central concern for the institute; that it reshaped intellectual relationships within the institute, leading Adorno to become Horkheimer's chief collaborator; and that it set the institute on the path to developing a different understanding of its interdisciplinary project. It further challenges a long-standing misconception of the relationship between theory and practice in the institute, arguing for a dynamic interplay between private theorization and publicly engaged practical science. 5Negative Modeling: Objectivity, Normativity, and the Refusal of the Universal chapter abstractChapter 5 offers a reexamination of The Authoritarian Personality, the massive, multiauthored empirical study that constituted the capstone of Adorno's collaboration with American social scientists and the beginning of discussion on the study of prejudice, racism, and authoritarian politics. The standard account of Adorno's career suggests that the time Adorno spent on empirical psychological research was time lost for work on critical theory; it emphasizes tensions between Adorno and his American colleagues and implies that Adorno was ineffective at social-scientific collaboration. This chapter contests these myths by showing how Adorno's critical, multidisciplinary intelligence was important to this groundbreaking study's construction of Weberian ideal types for the study of racism: Adorno became a key architect of the way The Authoritarian Personality studied how irrational projection shaped society and politics while critiquing the false essentialism of race. 6Subject/Object and Disciplinarity chapter abstractChapter 6 concludes the story of how the confrontation with identity transformed the institute's theoretical concerns and shaped its career in America by showing how Adorno and Horkheimer arrived at a quite different understanding of the institute's interdisciplinary project than they had started with. This allowed them to articulate a new notion of social objectivity, reason, and legitimate authority that was explicitly understood as a negation of theories of subjective identity. In pure theoretical terms, it argues that Horkheimer and Adorno came to see themselves as defending an "orthodox" Freudianism and Marxism and a "heterodox" Kantianism and Weberianism. Politically speaking, the critical attitude toward the sciences of man contained in these orthodoxies and heterodoxies positioned Adorno particularly well to contribute to the reconstruction of postwar German culture. 7Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion summarizes the philosophical value of exile, negative identity and non-identity. It considers why critical theory's invention of the concept of identity, and its subsequent philosophical negation, emerged out of the experience of exile and racism, and it reflects on this history and ideas should remain part of the problem of identity, the critique of science, and the notion of interdisciplinary analysis. Finally, the conclusion discusses the politics of Adorno and Horkheimer's return to Germany and the precariousness of their position within both the German academy and German society. Introduction chapter abstractThe Introduction narrates the rise of the identity concept in the twentieth century, arguing for a distinction between two types of identity. Just as Isaiah Berlin, following Erich Fromm, suggested the terms "positive" and "negative" liberty are necessary to understanding the double-sided logic of freedom in the modern world, the concept of identity must be approached through the tension between its "positive" and "negative" dimensions. Positive identity is familiar: the expressive, creative, and emancipatory language of what the self might become. Negative identity is its shadow: unwanted or imposed, rupturing the universal, expressing injuries inflicted on the self or imposed on others. Arguing that Adorno sharply criticized a one-sided, implicitly positive notion of identity, the Introduction establishes positive and negative identity's intertwinement from its origin, showing how Adorno's approach to this new language of selfhood offers an overlooked resource for understanding identity's complexity in the twenty-first century.

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Book SynopsisSpeculation is often associated with financial practices, but The Time of Money makes the case that it not be restricted to the financial sphere. It argues that the expansion of finance has created a distinctive social world, one that demands a speculative stance toward life in general. Replacing a logic of extraction, speculation changes our relationship to time and organizes our social worlds to maximize the productive capacities of populations around flows of money for finance capital. Speculative practices have become a matter of survival, and defining features of our age are hardwired to their operations—stagnant wages, indebtedness, the centrality of women's earnings to the household, workfarism, and more. Examining five features of our contemporary economy, Lisa Adkins reveals the operations of this speculative rationality. Moving beyond claims that indebtedness is intrinsic to contemporary life and vague declarations that the social world has become financialized, Adkins delivers a precise examination of the relation between finance and society, one that is rich in empirical and analytical detail.Trade Review"As more women worldwide fall under the sway of monetary relations, the impact of 'financialization' on their lives has become an increasingly urgent question. A major contribution to this discussion, The Time of Money advances the development of a feminist perspective on finance as a force that is shaping women's social condition even as it shapes the economy." -- Silvia Federici * Professor Emerita, Hofstra University, and author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation *"As you open this book, you will find that its pages unfold on many levels. On one level, The Time of Money tells a gripping story about money and its place in today's Anglo-American capitalism. On another level, it is also a book about time itself and the multiple temporalities of our financialized lives. But perhaps most significantly, it is a sustained and compelling analysis of the logic of speculation that subtends so much of contemporary capitalism, one that is bound to compel the interest of readers across disciplines. Adkins's book also has the merit of attending to the distinctly political and gendered dimensions of financialization, which is but one of its many virtues." -- Ivan Ascher * University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and author of The Portfolio Society *"The Time of Money offers a powerful account of the damage created by the time of money, not least by making visible the emerging temporal experiences we miss when we limit our attention to the passing of the old." -- Jane Elliot * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter sets out how, rather than being simply associated with finance and financial trading, a logic of speculation is at the heart of contemporary capitalist accumulation strategies and guides and directs the dynamics of social formation. It suggests that a logic of speculation has replaced a logic of extraction and operates as a rationality that defines the telos of action. It is argued that what unites speculation as a mode of accumulation and a mode of social organization, that is, what precisely constitutes the logic of speculation as a rationality, is time. 1Money on the Move chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the logic of speculation operative in post<->Bretton Woods agreement finance markets. It addresses the claim that at the heart of the 2007-8 financial crisis lay unregulated and excessive speculation on the part of finance traders, especially to the claim that at the heart of this activity was a trading of the future at the expense of the present. Through a focus not on the actions of traders but on movements and flows of money in financial markets, this chapter lays out how in regard to finance markets the issue is not a trade on the future but a shifting relationship between time and money. It argues that speculation concerns a particular form of time. 2Austere Times chapter abstractThis chapter engages with the contemporary politics of austerity. It outlines how austerity must be understood not as a fiscal response to the global financial crisis but as a political strategy through which the economy of debt is being extended. It shows how this extension enrolls the productivity of populations into the generation of surplus via the movements and flows of everyday money. This chapter also discusses how transformations to everyday money, especially transformations to what money can do, must be center stage if we are to understand this enrollment. These transformations turn on the emergence of money as a value. 3The Speculative Time of Debt chapter abstractThis chapter is concerned with mass debt and indebtedness. Against the view that debt is destructive of time, it outlines how securitized household and personal debt involves a specific time universe and the binding of populations to this time, a binding to a nonchronological time, or speculative time. It lays out how central to this time and to this binding is the operation of the calculus of securitized debt, a calculus concerned not with working lives of repayment but with lifetimes of payment. This chapter elaborates how this calculus opens up specific modes of practice that expand the productive potential of populations in regard to the generation of surplus from everyday payments from households. 4Wages and the Problem of Value chapter abstractThis chapter is concerned with wages in the era of financial expansion. Existing accounts of wages in this era point to endemic wage stagnation and outline strategies to reconnect labor with value as a remedy to this problem. This chapter outlines how such accounts bracket a broad-scale restructuring of wages. It points to and maps a reworking of the relationship between labor and money. This reworking concerns the emergence of wages that are not a measure of external things but an in-motion surface. It also concerns the replacement of the free laborer, who must exchange her or his labor for a wage, by the speculative subject, who must speculate on their (stagnant) wages and their whole lives and lifetimes to ensure survival. 5Out of Work chapter abstractThis chapter explores how a restructuring of labor in the era of financial expansion has taken place on the ground of unemployment through a set of coordinated policies and programs. It shows how this restructuring has eroded the distinction between unemployment and employment by positioning both the in-work and out-of-work as in need of adapting to events that have not yet and might never happen. It outlines how the in-work and out-of-work must constantly adapt to the indeterminate movements of time. It argues that the policy regimes governing unemployed populations should be designed as analogues to the creation of surplus via the indeterminate movements and flows of money. Conclusion chapter abstractThis chapter outlines how understanding the finance-society relationship requires a focus on the productivity of money, finance, and debt in regard to the social. It sets out how such a focus challenges prevailing understandings of the finance-society relation, including those that locate money, debt, and finance as immaterial and/or superstructural phenomena. It also reflects on the relationship between the expansion of finance and the political project of neoliberalism. It suggests that the policies of the postnational neoliberal state work to maximize the productive capacities of populations in regard to the generation of surplus from money.

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Book SynopsisThe environmental crisis, one of the great challenges of our time, tends to disenfranchise those who come after us. Arguing that as temporary inhabitants of the earth, we cannot be indifferent to future generations, this book draws on the resources of phenomenology and poststructuralism to help us conceive of moral relations in connection with human temporality. Demonstrating that moral and political normativity emerge with generational time, the time of birth and death, this book proposes two related models of intergenerational and environmental justice. The first entails a form of indirect reciprocity, in which we owe future people both because of their needs and interests and because we ourselves have been the beneficiaries of peoples past; the second posits a generational taking of turns that Matthias Fritsch applies to both our institutions and our natural environment, in other words, to the earth as a whole. Offering new readings of key philosophers, and emphasizing the work of Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in particular, Taking Turns with the Earth disrupts human-centered notions of terrestrial appropriation and sharing to give us a new continental philosophical account of future-oriented justice.Trade Review"Matthias Fritsch brings clarity and depth to issues of environmental justice and responsibility for future generations through a close engagement with the work of Derrida, Levinas, and Arendt. This book is an indispensable resource for both continental and analytic philosophers seeking to understand what it means to live and die ethically on the earth." -- Lisa Guenther * Queen's University *"With characteristic precision and rigor, Matthias Fritsch has produced an original contribution to thinking about intergenerational justice and our relationship to the planet. Taking Turns with the Earth is an exemplary model for how to theorize pressing ethical and political issues through a creative inheritance of the philosophical tradition." -- Samir Haddad * Fordham University *"Intergenerational ethics is at the heart of many of the biggest problems facing humanity today, yet our theories, institutions, and practices remain inadequate to the challenge. This admirable book offers us an ontological approach that is distinctive, innovative, and an important contribution to our ethical self-understanding." -- Stephen M. Gardiner * University of Washington *"Fritsch makes a convincing case for thinking of intergenerational and ecological relationships not as additional features or theoretical extensions of intragenerational and humanistic models of justice, but as constitutive features of justice...[His] style of cogent argumentation appears quite prudent, as it makes phenomenology and deconstruction directly relevant and applicable to those discourses and accessible to other scholars and professionals who are interested in justice and the future of the humanly habitable earth." -- Sam Mickey * Environmental Philosophy *"Fritsch argues that our moral obligation to tackle and respond to climate change is grounded in intergenerational justice...The key notion here is asymmetrical intergenerational reciprocity; the author's explication of this notion, and his discussion of potential objections to it, is especially useful and thought provoking...Recommended." -- M. A. Michael * CHOICE *"Taking Turns With the Earthoffers to the reader a rich and incisive analysis of intergenerational justice, especially as it relates to issues pertaining to the environment. With intergenerational ethics being relevant to so many issues that we face today, this book offers a timely theoretical analysis of the nature of our obligations to non-contemporary others." -- Christopher Black * Phenomenological Reviews *"Matthias Fritsch has written a supremely challenging and timely book about the ontological-normative dimensions of our intergenerational being....[I am] fully on board with the notion that we require ontological thinking in this area, and as far as I know, nobody has attempted this on the same scale or with as much boldness of philosophical vision as Fritsch. His book is a major contribution to our thinking about the philosophical foundations of our intergenerational being. I predict that it will have a profound effect on environmental philosophy, in both analytic and continental circles, for decades to come." -- Byron Williston * Environmental Ethics *"Taking Turns with the Earth is a model of scholarship in continental philosophy. Written in a clear argumentative style that never sacrifices depth or complexity, it shows how central ideas found in Heidegger, Levinas and Derrida—ideas often dismissed as obtuse—can be put to work to help us rethink some of the most pressing ethical issues of our times." -- Marie-Eve Morin * Research in Phenomenology *"Matthias Fritsch's Taking Turns with the Earth is a significant, illuminating, and timely—just in time, perhaps—phenomenological and deconstructive ontology and 'hauntology' of the problem of intergenerational justice. To my mind, it is the widest ranging and most profound work on this problem that I have so far encountered." -- Jason M. Wirth * Ethics & Politics *"[How] is one to respond in a meaningful and responsible way to a book that is this meticulously researched, this powerfully argued, this broad in its scope and implications, and, of course, this urgent not just for philosophy but for all of us who have inherited the earth and who have some responsibility for passing it on?[A] uniquely powerful work." -- Michael Naas * Ethics & Politics *"The cogency of [Fritsch's] proposals and, notwithstanding the complexity of the philosophical arguments supporting of them, the impressive clarity of their presentation, make the book a significant contribution to the field of environmental ethics." -- Scott Marratto * Ethics & Politics *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1Ontological Problems and Methods in Intergenerational Justice chapter abstractThis chapter begins by reviewing the so-called ontological problems that affect relations with future people, from the nonexistence challenge and poor epistemic access to problems affecting interaction and world constitution. It is then argued that ontological problems call for ontological solutions—here, investigations of moral agents' being in relation to time and world. Drawing on phenomenological sources, the chapter provides a first sketch of the book's overarching claim that justice becomes an issue for human beings to the extent we are generational beings who are noncontingently subject to birth and death. Birth and death, the argument continues, link us to previous and subsequent generations in ways that are socially and morally relevant. If we take this into account, the dead and the unborn will appear less absent and more (albeit "spectrally") present. The chapter ends by outlining possible responses to many of the ontological problems. 2Levinas's "Being-for-Beyond-My-Death" chapter abstractThe second chapter elaborates the constitutive role of natality and mortality, sketched in the previous chapter, in much greater detail, with particular focus on Levinas. In the wake of Heidegger and others, Levinas argues that, in accessing the finite time that is co-disclosive of agency, I necessarily encounter the mortal, vulnerable other whose face demands that I let the other live. Agency is co-constituted by a futural demand to let others have possibilities for life beyond my death. Thus, the demand from actual future people on the living comes to be seen as exemplary of moral normativity. However, Levinas insufficiently links this futural responsibility to debts to previous others (including mothers), drawing legitimate feminist and Derridean critiques of his "fecundity" and "paternity." The chapter concludes that the moral demand cannot just be futural but must also be related to gifts from predecessors. 3Asymmetrical Reciprocity and the Gift in Mauss and Derrida chapter abstractTaking off from the insight offered at the end of the previous chapter, this chapter elaborates indirect, asymmetrical reciprocity as a model of intergenerational justice. This notion is meant to capture the idea that indebtedness to preceding others plays a role in giving to future others, no matter how asymmetrical and altruistic the gift to future people is taken to be. With this goal in view, the chapter connects Derrida's critical reading of Levinas to economic literature on intergenerational transfers, specifically economists who draw on the premodern, indigenous notion of the gift, as famously elaborated by the anthropologist Marcel Mauss. The chapter distinguishes four (ideal) types of intergenerational three-party reciprocities and concludes that the notion of the gift points to the enabling conditions of economic activity. Both gifts of nature and benefits from nonpresent generations belong to these conditions, conditions that are too often "externalized" by market economies. 4Double Turn-Taking among Generations and with Earth chapter abstractWith this topic of collectively shared goods in mind, the fourth chapter presents turn-taking as the second model of intergenerational justice that elaborates the "spectral" presence of nonpresent generations. Taking turns is more appropriate than reciprocity when the "object" of intergenerational sharing, in particular the natural environment and democratic institutions, is quasi-holistic and organically interrelated, such that it cannot easily be divided into parts nor can parts be substituted for one another. Drawing on Derrida's work on time and democracy, this model's distinct advantages are discussed in view of answering the question as to what a fair turn with earth and future people might be. The chapter concludes by showing that quasi-holistic objects such as earth and climate necessarily precede and outlive generations, and thus are not indifferent to, but co-constitutive of, the very being of generations, the subjects of sharing by turn-taking. 5Interment chapter abstractTo avoid the humanism that takes the earth to be an indifferent object of intergenerational sharing, the final chapter complicates taking turns by arguing that the earth, understood as the history and habitat of life, for its part turns human beings about. We do not only have human generations taking turns with the earth, but individuals being born of the earth into a generation, while returning to the earth upon death. Humans are both "interred'" (agonistically belonging to a larger time and space here called the earth) and "interring" (responsible for returning others to the earth, as in burial).

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Book SynopsisSpeculation is often associated with financial practices, but The Time of Money makes the case that it not be restricted to the financial sphere. It argues that the expansion of finance has created a distinctive social world, one that demands a speculative stance toward life in general. Replacing a logic of extraction, speculation changes our relationship to time and organizes our social worlds to maximize the productive capacities of populations around flows of money for finance capital. Speculative practices have become a matter of survival, and defining features of our age are hardwired to their operations—stagnant wages, indebtedness, the centrality of women's earnings to the household, workfarism, and more. Examining five features of our contemporary economy, Lisa Adkins reveals the operations of this speculative rationality. Moving beyond claims that indebtedness is intrinsic to contemporary life and vague declarations that the social world has become financialized, Adkins delivers a precise examination of the relation between finance and society, one that is rich in empirical and analytical detail.Trade Review"As more women worldwide fall under the sway of monetary relations, the impact of 'financialization' on their lives has become an increasingly urgent question. A major contribution to this discussion, The Time of Money advances the development of a feminist perspective on finance as a force that is shaping women's social condition even as it shapes the economy." -- Silvia Federici * Professor Emerita, Hofstra University, and author of Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation *"As you open this book, you will find that its pages unfold on many levels. On one level, The Time of Money tells a gripping story about money and its place in today's Anglo-American capitalism. On another level, it is also a book about time itself and the multiple temporalities of our financialized lives. But perhaps most significantly, it is a sustained and compelling analysis of the logic of speculation that subtends so much of contemporary capitalism, one that is bound to compel the interest of readers across disciplines. Adkins's book also has the merit of attending to the distinctly political and gendered dimensions of financialization, which is but one of its many virtues." -- Ivan Ascher * University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, and author of The Portfolio Society *"The Time of Money offers a powerful account of the damage created by the time of money, not least by making visible the emerging temporal experiences we miss when we limit our attention to the passing of the old." -- Jane Elliot * Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThis chapter sets out how, rather than being simply associated with finance and financial trading, a logic of speculation is at the heart of contemporary capitalist accumulation strategies and guides and directs the dynamics of social formation. It suggests that a logic of speculation has replaced a logic of extraction and operates as a rationality that defines the telos of action. It is argued that what unites speculation as a mode of accumulation and a mode of social organization, that is, what precisely constitutes the logic of speculation as a rationality, is time. 1Money on the Move chapter abstractThis chapter investigates the logic of speculation operative in post<->Bretton Woods agreement finance markets. It addresses the claim that at the heart of the 2007-8 financial crisis lay unregulated and excessive speculation on the part of finance traders, especially to the claim that at the heart of this activity was a trading of the future at the expense of the present. Through a focus not on the actions of traders but on movements and flows of money in financial markets, this chapter lays out how in regard to finance markets the issue is not a trade on the future but a shifting relationship between time and money. It argues that speculation concerns a particular form of time. 2Austere Times chapter abstractThis chapter engages with the contemporary politics of austerity. It outlines how austerity must be understood not as a fiscal response to the global financial crisis but as a political strategy through which the economy of debt is being extended. It shows how this extension enrolls the productivity of populations into the generation of surplus via the movements and flows of everyday money. This chapter also discusses how transformations to everyday money, especially transformations to what money can do, must be center stage if we are to understand this enrollment. These transformations turn on the emergence of money as a value. 3The Speculative Time of Debt chapter abstractThis chapter is concerned with mass debt and indebtedness. Against the view that debt is destructive of time, it outlines how securitized household and personal debt involves a specific time universe and the binding of populations to this time, a binding to a nonchronological time, or speculative time. It lays out how central to this time and to this binding is the operation of the calculus of securitized debt, a calculus concerned not with working lives of repayment but with lifetimes of payment. This chapter elaborates how this calculus opens up specific modes of practice that expand the productive potential of populations in regard to the generation of surplus from everyday payments from households. 4Wages and the Problem of Value chapter abstractThis chapter is concerned with wages in the era of financial expansion. Existing accounts of wages in this era point to endemic wage stagnation and outline strategies to reconnect labor with value as a remedy to this problem. This chapter outlines how such accounts bracket a broad-scale restructuring of wages. It points to and maps a reworking of the relationship between labor and money. This reworking concerns the emergence of wages that are not a measure of external things but an in-motion surface. It also concerns the replacement of the free laborer, who must exchange her or his labor for a wage, by the speculative subject, who must speculate on their (stagnant) wages and their whole lives and lifetimes to ensure survival. 5Out of Work chapter abstractThis chapter explores how a restructuring of labor in the era of financial expansion has taken place on the ground of unemployment through a set of coordinated policies and programs. It shows how this restructuring has eroded the distinction between unemployment and employment by positioning both the in-work and out-of-work as in need of adapting to events that have not yet and might never happen. It outlines how the in-work and out-of-work must constantly adapt to the indeterminate movements of time. It argues that the policy regimes governing unemployed populations should be designed as analogues to the creation of surplus via the indeterminate movements and flows of money. Conclusion chapter abstractThis chapter outlines how understanding the finance-society relationship requires a focus on the productivity of money, finance, and debt in regard to the social. It sets out how such a focus challenges prevailing understandings of the finance-society relation, including those that locate money, debt, and finance as immaterial and/or superstructural phenomena. It also reflects on the relationship between the expansion of finance and the political project of neoliberalism. It suggests that the policies of the postnational neoliberal state work to maximize the productive capacities of populations in regard to the generation of surplus from money.

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Book SynopsisNeoliberalism has become a dirty word. In political discourse, it stigmatizes a political opponent as a market fundamentalist; in academia, the concept is also mainly wielded by its critics, while those who might be seen as actual neoliberals deny its very existence. Yet the term remains necessary for understanding the varieties of capitalism across space and time. Arguing that neoliberalism is widely misunderstood when reduced to a doctrine of markets and economics alone, this book shows that it has a political dimension that we can reconstruct and critique. Recognizing the heterogeneities within and between both neoliberal theory and practice, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism looks to distinguish between the two as well as to theorize their relationship. By examining the views of state, democracy, science, and politics in the work of six major figures—Eucken, Röpke, Rüstow, Hayek, Friedman, and Buchanan—it offers the first comprehensive account of the varieties of neoliberal political thought. Ordoliberal perspectives, in particular, emerge in a new light. Turning from abstract to concrete, the book also interprets recent neoliberal reforms of the European Union to offer a diagnosis of contemporary capitalism more generally. The latest economic crises hardly brought the neoliberal era to an end. Instead, as Thomas Biebricher shows, we are witnessing an authoritarian liberalism whose reign has only just begun. Trade Review"This book makes a timely and formidable intervention in current political theory, combining a meticulous analysis of the history of neoliberal thought with a compelling critique of elitist, technocratic, and undemocratic modes of economic governance in this age of austerity." -- Yves Winter * McGill University *"A concise, nuanced, and wide-ranging introduction to the leading theorists of neoliberalism and to the role their ideas have played in recent economic crises.Thomas Biebricher looks beyond familiar critiques of neoliberal ideology and its proponents to ask provocative, insightful questions that are rooted in deep engagement." -- Angus Burgin * Johns Hopkins University *"Thomas Biebricher carefully demonstrates that what unites the many varieties of neoliberalism is not a unified 'theory of politics,' but rather that neoliberalisms share a distinctly political theory. A powerful corrective to the existing scholarship, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism shows readers that within the sweeping generalizations so often made about neoliberalism, the devil truly is in the details." -- Andrew Dilts * Loyola Marymount University *"This is a brilliant book—one of the most illuminating I have read in a long time. Biebricher provides an original account of the emergence of neoliberalism, tracing its development from the 1930s into the present. At once deeply scholarly and profoundly relevant, it is a model of what political theory should be." -- Margaret Kohn * University of Toronto *"At once addressing...skeptics and guiding newcomers to the concept, The Political Theory of Neoliberalism provides one of the most perceptive and analytic treatments of neoliberal thought to date....Going beneath and beyond its usual associations with "mere" economic theory and economic policy, Biebricher offers a compelling reading of neoliberalism as a distinct and internally diverse tradition of political thought." -- William Callison * Contemporary Political Theory *

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Book SynopsisCreation and the giving of orders are closely entwined in Western culture, where God commands the world into existence and later issues the injunctions known as the Ten Commandments. The arche, or origin, is always also a command, and a beginning is always the first principle that governs and decrees. This is as true for theology, where God not only creates the world but governs and continues to govern through continuous creation, as it is for the philosophical and political tradition according to which beginning and creation, command and will, together form a strategic apparatus without which our society would fall apart. The five essays collected here aim to deactivate this apparatus through a patient archaeological inquiry into the concepts of work, creation, and command. Giorgio Agamben explores every nuance of the arche in search of an an-archic exit strategy. By the book's final chapter, anarchy appears as the secret center of power, brought to light so as to make possible a philosophical thought that might overthrow both the principle and its command.Trade Review"Adam Kotsko's lucid translation has continued his service to the field in making Agamben's texts accessible to a wider readership."—Devin Singh, Reading Religion

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Book SynopsisCritical theorists of economy tend to understand the history of market society as a succession of distinct stages. This vision of history rests on a chronological conception of time whereby each present slips into the past so that a future might take its place. This book argues that the linear mode of thinking misses something crucial about the dynamics of contemporary capitalism. Rather than each present leaving a set past behind it, the past continually circulates through and shapes the present, such that historical change emerges through a shifting panorama of historical associations, names, and dates. The result is a strange feedback loop between now and then, real and imaginary. Demonstrating how this idea can give us a better purchase on financial capitalism in the post-crisis era, History in Financial Times traces the diverse modes of history production at work in the spheres of financial journalism, policymaking, and popular culture. Paying particular attention to narrative and to notions of crisis, recurrence, and revelation, Amin Samman gives us a novel take on the relation between historical thinking and critique. Trade Review"In History in Financial Times, Amin Samman brilliantly exposes the intricate workings of the historical imagination in our present financialized times. Effortlessly weaving together political economy, philosophy, historiography, and cultural studies, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding financial life today."—Jacqueline Best, University of Ottawa"Amin Samman has written a strikingly original book that brings the theory of history to issues of finance and economics in ways that I have not seen. His approach pushes both disciplines into new and productive territory. It is exciting, fresh, and strange in the most provocative and productive way."—Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University"Samman argues that the inescapable recursiveness of historical reasoning requires a new politics that eschews metahistorical cul-de-sacs for a more honest and flexible reckoning with the conditions of life. An interesting and provocative application of poststructural theory to a field that is normally the province of materialists, this book is best suited to scholars of historiography and theory. Recommended."—S. P. Harshner, CHOICE"History in Financial Times draws on and synthesizes an impressive array of concepts, theories, and disciplines only gestured at here. The book shows a great deal of range in its method....[The] insistence on history in financial times serves as a necessary corrective to narrow-minded theories of economic or financial subjectivity and the self-serving significations of economic elites."—John Macintosh, Los Angeles Review of Books"[History in Financial Times] offers means to analyse the minutiae of how historical narratives (for instance, analogies between the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Depression) become a shorthand to help explain what is happening in the present....Samman's emphasis on narrative throughout the book is hugely important at a moment of widespread narrative dysfunctionality in which the distinction between fact and fiction comes to be widely contested."—Emily Rosamond, Finance and Society"History in Financial Timesis a deeply original and impressive contribution to critical studies of finance, the history of capitalism, and historical theory."—Joel Isaac, The American Historical Review"In its many luminous moments, Samman's text pushes the reader to rethink history itself (as a field, as a discourse, as an imaginary) as embedded in and impacting the dynamics of late financial capitalism. In particular, he helps us see the intricate interweaving of immaterial financial operations and the factual and fictional representations of those phenomena."—C. N. Biltoft, History & TheoryTable of ContentsIntroduction: "We Live in Financial Times" 1. Crisis Thinking 2. Historical Imagination 3. Return and Recurrence 4. Repetition and Revelation 5. Names of History Afterword: Exits to the Future

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Book SynopsisIn a world that promotes assertion, agency, and empowerment, this book challenges us to revalue a range of actions and attitudes that have come to be disregarded or dismissed as merely passive. Mercy, resignation, politeness, restraint, gratitude, abstinence, losing well, apologizing, taking care: today, such behaviors are associated with negativity or lack. But the capacity to give way is better understood as positive action, at once intricate and demanding. Moving from intra-human common courtesies, to human-animal relations, to the global civility of human-inhuman ecological awareness, the book's argument unfolds on progressively larger scales. In reminding us of the existential threat our drives pose to our own survival, Steven Connor does not merely champion a family of behaviors; he shows that we are more adept practitioners of them than we realize. At a time when it is on the wane, Giving Way offers a powerful defense of civility, the versatile human capacity to deflect aggression into sociability and to exercise power over power itself.Trade Review"Can one be effusively enthusiastic or unreservedly supportive of a book that asks its audience to exercise restraint? Connor helped me see why civility might be one of the most radical things we can aspire to in the contemporary world. Giving Way gets to the root of what it means to be an ethical human being."—David Kishik, Emerson College"If anyone can persuade us of the merits of abstaining and refraining, holding back and backing down, it is Steven Connor, one of the most consistently interesting critics writing today. Displaying the author's characteristic blend of learnedness and verve, Giving Way is a bold, wide-ranging, and highly original work—a dazzling exercise in what he dubs cultural phenomenology."—Rita Felski, University of Virginia"Steven Connor once again demonstrates his ability to produce an erudite study that reveals the historical, literary, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of a seemingly mundane topic, examining human interaction and 'civility' from different, and often delightfully surprising, points of view."—Benet Davetian, University of Prince Edward Island"Connor's book, in my opinion, would be spellbinding for scholars working in performance studies as a field that endlessly frames, reframes and unframes its scope and dispositions by finding and giving way....Giving Way serves as a beacon of hope in the harsh competitiveness of a neoliberal world in which people cannot not do."—Mohammad Mehdi Kimagari, Critical Inquiry"This book is, at its core, about acting with reserve and within limits, and it has the rare distinction of being appropriate for readers of all stripes....An invaluable resource, particularly for those interested in moral philosophy and psychology. Essential."—S. E. Forschler, CHOICETable of Contents1. Modulating 2. Minding Your Tongue 3. Backing Down 4. Refraining 5. Apologizing 6. Losing Well 7. Taking Care Conclusion: Ministering

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Book SynopsisIn a world that promotes assertion, agency, and empowerment, this book challenges us to revalue a range of actions and attitudes that have come to be disregarded or dismissed as merely passive. Mercy, resignation, politeness, restraint, gratitude, abstinence, losing well, apologizing, taking care: today, such behaviors are associated with negativity or lack. But the capacity to give way is better understood as positive action, at once intricate and demanding. Moving from intra-human common courtesies, to human-animal relations, to the global civility of human-inhuman ecological awareness, the book's argument unfolds on progressively larger scales. In reminding us of the existential threat our drives pose to our own survival, Steven Connor does not merely champion a family of behaviors; he shows that we are more adept practitioners of them than we realize. At a time when it is on the wane, Giving Way offers a powerful defense of civility, the versatile human capacity to deflect aggression into sociability and to exercise power over power itself.Trade Review"Can one be effusively enthusiastic or unreservedly supportive of a book that asks its audience to exercise restraint? Connor helped me see why civility might be one of the most radical things we can aspire to in the contemporary world. Giving Way gets to the root of what it means to be an ethical human being."—David Kishik, Emerson College"If anyone can persuade us of the merits of abstaining and refraining, holding back and backing down, it is Steven Connor, one of the most consistently interesting critics writing today. Displaying the author's characteristic blend of learnedness and verve, Giving Way is a bold, wide-ranging, and highly original work—a dazzling exercise in what he dubs cultural phenomenology."—Rita Felski, University of Virginia"Steven Connor once again demonstrates his ability to produce an erudite study that reveals the historical, literary, cultural, and philosophical dimensions of a seemingly mundane topic, examining human interaction and 'civility' from different, and often delightfully surprising, points of view."—Benet Davetian, University of Prince Edward Island"Connor's book, in my opinion, would be spellbinding for scholars working in performance studies as a field that endlessly frames, reframes and unframes its scope and dispositions by finding and giving way....Giving Way serves as a beacon of hope in the harsh competitiveness of a neoliberal world in which people cannot not do."—Mohammad Mehdi Kimagari, Critical Inquiry"This book is, at its core, about acting with reserve and within limits, and it has the rare distinction of being appropriate for readers of all stripes....An invaluable resource, particularly for those interested in moral philosophy and psychology. Essential."—S. E. Forschler, CHOICETable of Contents1. Modulating 2. Minding Your Tongue 3. Backing Down 4. Refraining 5. Apologizing 6. Losing Well 7. Taking Care Conclusion: Ministering

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Book SynopsisThe division between analytic and continental political theory remains as sharp as it is wide, rendering basic problems seemingly intractable. Across the Great Divide offers an accessible and compelling account of how this split has shaped the field of political philosophy and suggests means of addressing it. Rather than advocating a synthesis of these philosophical modes, author Jeremy Arnold argues for aporetic cross-tradition theorizing: bringing together both traditions in order to show how each is at once necessary and limited. Across the Great Divide engages with a range of fundamental political concepts and theorists—from state legitimacy and violence in the work of Stanley Cavell, to personal freedom and its civic institutionalization in Philip Pettit and Hannah Arendt, and justice in John Rawls and Jacques Derrida—not only illustrating the shortcomings of theoretical synthesis but also demonstrating a productive alternative. By outlining the failings of "political realism" as a synthetic cross-tradition approach to political theory and by modeling an aporetic mode of engagement, Arnold shows how we can better understand and address the pressing political issues of civil freedom and state justice today.Trade Review"This outstanding and original contribution to the growing literature on analytic and continental approaches to political theory shows by examples the benefits and limits of cross-tradition theorizing. Jeremy Arnold proposes a novel way to think about the purpose and the methods of political theory and a new attitude to enable different and even incommensurable approaches to old problems." -- Paul Patton * author of Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics *"Political theorists often feel pushed to join the ranks of either analytic or continental political theory. But why must they choose? In his excellent Across the Great Divide, Jeremy Arnold's lucid prose lowers the entry barriers to either tradition and helps theorists see past the prejudices that can prevent them from trying to bridge the gap." -- Paulina Ochoa Espejo * author of The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State *"A lucidly argued book that sympathizes with both the analytical and continental traditions and has something new and exciting to say about them? It seems improbable. Yet Across the Great Divide has done it! Jeremy Arnold explores uncharted waters, and his defense of an aporetic form of cross-tradition theorizing will ignite debate for years to come." -- Thomas J. Donahue * author of Unfreedom for All: How the World's Injustices Harm You *"Arnold's argument is...admirable for the clarity of the position which it articulates....[Across the Great Divide] makes space for further discussion about how political theory navigates its own disciplinary divides, and for this it is a laudable intervention." -- Ben Turner * Phenomenological Reviews *"Across the Great Divide is an intelligent and innovative analysis of two traditions of thought typically deemed incommensurable to one another. It is a unique addition to recent works that explore the development of Anglo-American political theory in the postwar period; neither wholly polemical nor simply an intellectual history, the work is attentive to the 'how' of scholarly reading." -- Davide Panagia * The Review of Politics *

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Book SynopsisThe division between analytic and continental political theory remains as sharp as it is wide, rendering basic problems seemingly intractable. Across the Great Divide offers an accessible and compelling account of how this split has shaped the field of political philosophy and suggests means of addressing it. Rather than advocating a synthesis of these philosophical modes, author Jeremy Arnold argues for aporetic cross-tradition theorizing: bringing together both traditions in order to show how each is at once necessary and limited. Across the Great Divide engages with a range of fundamental political concepts and theorists—from state legitimacy and violence in the work of Stanley Cavell, to personal freedom and its civic institutionalization in Philip Pettit and Hannah Arendt, and justice in John Rawls and Jacques Derrida—not only illustrating the shortcomings of theoretical synthesis but also demonstrating a productive alternative. By outlining the failings of "political realism" as a synthetic cross-tradition approach to political theory and by modeling an aporetic mode of engagement, Arnold shows how we can better understand and address the pressing political issues of civil freedom and state justice today.Trade Review"This outstanding and original contribution to the growing literature on analytic and continental approaches to political theory shows by examples the benefits and limits of cross-tradition theorizing. Jeremy Arnold proposes a novel way to think about the purpose and the methods of political theory and a new attitude to enable different and even incommensurable approaches to old problems." -- Paul Patton * author of Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics *"Political theorists often feel pushed to join the ranks of either analytic or continental political theory. But why must they choose? In his excellent Across the Great Divide, Jeremy Arnold's lucid prose lowers the entry barriers to either tradition and helps theorists see past the prejudices that can prevent them from trying to bridge the gap." -- Paulina Ochoa Espejo * author of The Time of Popular Sovereignty: Process and the Democratic State *"A lucidly argued book that sympathizes with both the analytical and continental traditions and has something new and exciting to say about them? It seems improbable. Yet Across the Great Divide has done it! Jeremy Arnold explores uncharted waters, and his defense of an aporetic form of cross-tradition theorizing will ignite debate for years to come." -- Thomas J. Donahue * author of Unfreedom for All: How the World's Injustices Harm You *"Arnold's argument is...admirable for the clarity of the position which it articulates....[Across the Great Divide] makes space for further discussion about how political theory navigates its own disciplinary divides, and for this it is a laudable intervention." -- Ben Turner * Phenomenological Reviews *"Across the Great Divide is an intelligent and innovative analysis of two traditions of thought typically deemed incommensurable to one another. It is a unique addition to recent works that explore the development of Anglo-American political theory in the postwar period; neither wholly polemical nor simply an intellectual history, the work is attentive to the 'how' of scholarly reading." -- Davide Panagia * The Review of Politics *

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Book SynopsisThe Subject of Human Rights is the first book to systematically address the "human" part of "human rights." Drawing on the finest thinking in political theory, cultural studies, history, law, anthropology, and literary studies, this volume examines how human rights—as discourse, law, and practice—shape how we understand humanity and human beings. It asks how the humanness that the human rights idea seeks to protect and promote is experienced. The essays in this volume consider how human rights norms and practices affect the way we relate to ourselves, to other people, and to the nonhuman world. They investigate what kinds of institutions and actors are subjected to human rights and are charged with respecting their demands and realizing their aspirations. And they explore how human rights shape and even create the very subjects they seek to protect. Through critical reflection on these issues, The Subject of Human Rights suggests ways in which we might reimagine the relationship between human rights and subjectivity with a view to benefiting human rights and subjects alike.Trade Review"Returning the 'human' to human rights, The Subject of Human Rights is a path-breaking, multi-disciplinary exploration of selfhood and subjecthood. An indispensable rethinking of the field of contemporary human rights studies."—James Loeffler, University of Virginia"This book challenges familiar paradigms for theorizing and contesting the universality of the subject of human rights. The authors extend our critical gaze to the subjectivities shaped by human rights values, to those who implement them, and to us all as addressees of the call to live our lives accordingly."—Dianne Otto, Melbourne Law School"Celermajer and Lefebvre bring together an impressive interdisciplinary cast of cutting-edge thinkers to interrogate the subject of human rights. This thoughtful book offers refreshing perspectives on current human rights debates and points to numerous intriguing alternative futures for the human rights project."—William Paul Simmons, University of Arizona"In The Subject of Human Rights, a diverse group of outstanding scholars reflect on the meaning of the "human" in human rights, shedding light on the current status and direction of the field. An essential contribution to the literature."—Ruti Teitel, New York Law SchoolTable of ContentsIntroduction: Bringing the Subject of Human Rights into Focus —Danielle Celermajer and Alexandre Lefebvre 1. The Relational Self As the Subject of Human Rights —Jennifer Nedelsky 2. The Misbegotten Monad: Anthropology, Human Rights, Belonging —Mark Goodale 3. "Are Women Animals?": The Rise and Rise of (Animal) Rights —Joanna Bourke 4. Indigenous Peoples As the Subject of Human Rights —Danielle Celermajer and Michael Dodson 5. "Escaped": Gendered Precarity and Human Rights Recognition —Wendy S. Hesford 6. Training Subjects for Human Rights —Danielle Celermajer 7. Who Deserves Inalienable Rights?: The Subjectivity of Violent State Officials and the Implications for Human Rights Protection —Rachel Wahl 8. Human Rights As Therapy: The Healing Paradigms of Transitional Justice —Ronald Niezen 9. Cinematic Aesthetics and the Subjects of Human Rights: On Eliane Caffé's Era o Hotel Cambridge —Andrew C. Rajca 10. Human Rights As Spiritual Exercises —Alexandre Lefebvre 11. The Child Subject of Human Rights —Linde Lindkvist 12. The Secular Subject of Human Rights —Jenna Reinbold 13. The Subject of Human Rights: An Interview with Samuel Moyn —Samuel Moyn and Alexandre Lefebvre

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Book SynopsisDo we need to be a "people," populus, in order to embrace democracy and live together in peace? If so, what is a populus? Is it by definition a nation? What exactly do we mean by nationality? In this book, Davide Tarizzo takes up the problem of modern democratic, liberal peoples—how to define them, how to explain their invariance over time, and how to differentiate one people from another. Specifically, Tarizzo proposes that Jacques Lacan's theory of the subject enables us to clearly distinguish between the notion of personal identity and the notion of subjectivity, and that this very distinction is critical to understanding the nature of nations whose sense of nationhood does not rest on any self-evident identity or pre-existent cultural or ethnic homogeneity between individuals. Developing an argument about the birth and rise of modern peoples that draws on the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 as examples, Tarizzo introduces the concept of "political grammar"—a phrase that denotes the conditions of political subjectification that enable the enunciation of an emergent "we." Democracy, Tarizzo argues, flourishes when the opening between subjectivity and identity is maintained. And in fact, as he compellingly demonstrates, depending on the political grammar at work, democracy can be productively perceived as a process of never-ending recovery from a lack of clear national identity. Trade Review"A brilliant psychoanalytic exploration of the unconscious communities that undergird the nationalist democracies of our contemporary world." -- John P. McCormick * University of Chicago *"Braving the barricades of theory and vaulting the ramparts of abstraction, Davide Tarizzo battles the inner frontiers that separate beings and subjugate collectivities. A leviathan of a book." -- Peter Goodrich * Cardozo Law *"Reading Lacan extensively, in detail and with a deep commitment to psychoanalysis, inspired Davide Tarizzo to renovate political theory. The resulting opus provides asharp andstrikingly original conceptualization of 'collective subjectivities' that should have an important impact." -- Jacques-Alain Miller * World Association of Psychoanalysis *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Cartesian Connection 1. The Clinical Approach to Political History 2. Emancipative Grammars: Laclau, Heller, and the People We Are 3. Human Properties; Villey, Macpherson, and Our Right to Be 4. Political Subjects: Lacan and Ordinary Ontologies 5. The Freudian Paradigm of Critical Theory 6. The Two Paths to Modern Democracy 7. From Democracy to Fascism 8. Old and New Fascisms Conclusion: The Politics of Infinite Sets

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Book SynopsisDo we need to be a "people," populus, in order to embrace democracy and live together in peace? If so, what is a populus? Is it by definition a nation? What exactly do we mean by nationality? In this book, Davide Tarizzo takes up the problem of modern democratic, liberal peoples—how to define them, how to explain their invariance over time, and how to differentiate one people from another. Specifically, Tarizzo proposes that Jacques Lacan's theory of the subject enables us to clearly distinguish between the notion of personal identity and the notion of subjectivity, and that this very distinction is critical to understanding the nature of nations whose sense of nationhood does not rest on any self-evident identity or pre-existent cultural or ethnic homogeneity between individuals. Developing an argument about the birth and rise of modern peoples that draws on the American Declaration of Independence of 1776 and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen of 1789 as examples, Tarizzo introduces the concept of "political grammar"—a phrase that denotes the conditions of political subjectification that enable the enunciation of an emergent "we." Democracy, Tarizzo argues, flourishes when the opening between subjectivity and identity is maintained. And in fact, as he compellingly demonstrates, depending on the political grammar at work, democracy can be productively perceived as a process of never-ending recovery from a lack of clear national identity. Trade Review"A brilliant psychoanalytic exploration of the unconscious communities that undergird the nationalist democracies of our contemporary world." -- John P. McCormick * University of Chicago *"Braving the barricades of theory and vaulting the ramparts of abstraction, Davide Tarizzo battles the inner frontiers that separate beings and subjugate collectivities. A leviathan of a book." -- Peter Goodrich * Cardozo Law *"Reading Lacan extensively, in detail and with a deep commitment to psychoanalysis, inspired Davide Tarizzo to renovate political theory. The resulting opus provides asharp andstrikingly original conceptualization of 'collective subjectivities' that should have an important impact." -- Jacques-Alain Miller * World Association of Psychoanalysis *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Cartesian Connection 1. The Clinical Approach to Political History 2. Emancipative Grammars: Laclau, Heller, and the People We Are 3. Human Properties; Villey, Macpherson, and Our Right to Be 4. Political Subjects: Lacan and Ordinary Ontologies 5. The Freudian Paradigm of Critical Theory 6. The Two Paths to Modern Democracy 7. From Democracy to Fascism 8. Old and New Fascisms Conclusion: The Politics of Infinite Sets

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Book SynopsisWhat does a truly democratic experience of political action look like today? In this provocative new work, Adriana Cavarero weighs in on contemporary debates about the relationship between democracy, happiness, and dissent. Drawing on Arendt's understanding of politics as a participatory experience, but also discussing texts by Émile Zola, Elias Canetti, Boris Pasternak, and Roland Barthes, along with engaging Judith Butler, Cavarero proposes a new view of democracy, based not on violence, but rather on the spontaneous experience of a plurality of bodies coming together in public. Expanding on the themes explored in previous works, Cavarero offers a timely intervention into current thinking about the nature of democracy, suggesting that its emergence thrives on the nonviolent creativity of a widespread, participatory, and relational power that is shared horizontally rather than vertically. From digital democracy to selfies to contemporary protest movements, Cavarero argues that we need to rethink our focus on individual happiness and turn toward rediscovering the joyful emotions of birth through plural interaction. Yes, let us be happy, she urges, but let us do so publicly, politically, together.Trade Review"Adriana Cavarero's characteristically provocative new work is once again central to debates about the nature of democracy. As always, her writing is striking for its clarity and economy." -- Barbara Spackman * author of Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy *"Adriana Cavarero gives us an inspiring vision of what democracy might mean if we stay true to the Arendtian spirit of identifying a space where individualities can flourish in their togetherness—ultimately, a space of public happiness." -- Silvia Benso * author of Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers *

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Book SynopsisIn the last decade, we have witnessed the return of one of the most controversial terms in the political lexicon: totalitarianism. What are we talking about when we define a totalitarian political and social situation? When did we start using the word as both adjective and noun? And, what totalitarian ghosts haunt the present? Philosopher Simona Forti seeks to answer these questions by reconstructing not only the genealogy of the concept, but also by clarifying its motives, misunderstandings, and the controversies that have animated its current resurgence. Taking into account political theories and historical discussions, Totalitarianism especially focuses on philosophical reflections, from the question of totalitarian biopolitics to the alleged totalitarian drifts of neoliberalism. The work invites the relentless formulation of a radical question about the democratic age: the possibilities it has opened up, the voids it leaves behind, the mechanisms it activates, and the "voluntary servitude" it produces. Forti argues that totalitarianism cannot be considered an external threat to democracy, but rather as one of the possible answers to those questions posed by modernity which democracies have not been able to solve. Her investigation of the uses and abuses of totalitarianism as one of the fundamental categories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries promises to provoke much-needed discussion and debate among those in philosophy, politics, ethics, and beyond.Trade Review"Forti's compact, philosophical discussion of the history of the concept of 'totalitarianism' is the best available in any language. With the ongoing rise of right-wing populists eager to leave 'behind' their totalitarian lineage, this book is more pertinent than ever."—Miguel Vatter, author of Divine Democracy"It takes a scholar of both exceptional learning and critical acuity to explain with precision the metamorphoses of an idea as multifaceted and elusive as totalitarianism. This gripping book has particularly urgent and disquieting implications for readers today."—Alessia Ricciardi, author of Finding Ferrante"Forti asks us a sharp question, the child of our ambiguous and confused times: why do we need the category of totalitarianism? This book is both beautiful and disturbing. It must be read in one go."—Nadia Urbinati, author of Me the PeopleTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. How the Concept "Totalitarianism" Came to Be 2. From the Construction of Models to the Practice of Dissent 3. Philosophy in the Face of Extremes 4. Specters of Totality Conclusion

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Book SynopsisWhat does a truly democratic experience of political action look like today? In this provocative new work, Adriana Cavarero weighs in on contemporary debates about the relationship between democracy, happiness, and dissent. Drawing on Arendt's understanding of politics as a participatory experience, but also discussing texts by Émile Zola, Elias Canetti, Boris Pasternak, and Roland Barthes, along with engaging Judith Butler, Cavarero proposes a new view of democracy, based not on violence, but rather on the spontaneous experience of a plurality of bodies coming together in public. Expanding on the themes explored in previous works, Cavarero offers a timely intervention into current thinking about the nature of democracy, suggesting that its emergence thrives on the nonviolent creativity of a widespread, participatory, and relational power that is shared horizontally rather than vertically. From digital democracy to selfies to contemporary protest movements, Cavarero argues that we need to rethink our focus on individual happiness and turn toward rediscovering the joyful emotions of birth through plural interaction. Yes, let us be happy, she urges, but let us do so publicly, politically, together.Trade Review"Adriana Cavarero's characteristically provocative new work is once again central to debates about the nature of democracy. As always, her writing is striking for its clarity and economy." -- Barbara Spackman * author of Fascist Virilities: Rhetoric, Ideology, and Social Fantasy in Italy *"Adriana Cavarero gives us an inspiring vision of what democracy might mean if we stay true to the Arendtian spirit of identifying a space where individualities can flourish in their togetherness—ultimately, a space of public happiness." -- Silvia Benso * author of Viva Voce: Conversations with Italian Philosophers *

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Book SynopsisDemocracy has become disentangled from our ordinary lives. Mere cooperation or ethical consumption now often stands in for a robust concept of solidarity that structures the entirety of sociality and forms the basis of democratic culture. How did democracy become something that is done only at ballot boxes and what role can solidarity play in reviving it? In Solidarity in Conflict, Rochelle DuFord presents a theory of solidarity fit for developing democratic life and a complementary theory of democracy that emerges from a society typified by solidarity. DuFord argues that solidarity is best understood as a set of relations, one agonistic and one antagonistic: the solidarity groups' internal organization and its interactions with the broader world. Such a picture of solidarity develops through careful consideration of the conflicts endemic to social relations and solidarity organizations. Examining men's rights groups, labor organizing's role in recognitional protections for LGBTQ members of society, and the debate over trans inclusion in feminist praxis, DuFord explores how conflict, in these contexts, becomes the locus of solidarity's democratic functions and thereby critiques democratic theorizing for having become either overly idealized or overly focused on building and maintaining stability. Working in the tradition of the Frankfurt School, DuFord makes a provocative case that the conflict generated by solidarity organizations can address a variety of forms of domination, oppression, and exploitation while building a democratic society.Trade Review"A rich, nuanced, and compelling approach to an important and timely topic. DuFord's insightful, well-developed, and original account of solidarity makes a distinctive contribution to critical social theory and to progressive political theory more broadly."—Amy Allen, author of Critique on the Couch"This outstanding book offers an original approach to an issue in social and political theory that is at once perennial and highly topical: solidarity. DuFord tackles topics classical and current judiciously and insightfully."—James Ingram, author of Radical Cosmopolitics"Clear and enjoyable to read, DuFord's book works through the steps and arguments about the purpose of solidarity in democratic theory and its place in the present moment...Solidarity in Conflict is a meaningful contribution in agonistic theories of democracy, how to think about the goals of solidary groups, and why the present prominence of authoritarianism should further attempts at building a nonexclusive vision of politics."—Michael Villanova, Contemporary Political Theory"DuFord offers a timely inquiry into democratic theory, arguing that the role of solidarity in democratic theory has been misunderstood.... Recommended."—A. R. Brunello, CHOICE"The value of the book is... as an invitation to think about how leftist organizing against neoliberal heteropatriarchal capitalism may be productive through conflict and how organizers can build networks. Seeing such networking, as well as the continual navigation of conflict within organizations, suggests, according to DuFord, that workers' associations might be the site for rebuilding the society upon which democracy ought to rest."—Sally J. Scholz, The Review of Politics"For anyone who has ever been part of an organizing meeting that fell apart due to internal tensions, this book is a refreshing reminder that those of us looking for more robust forms of solidarity should expect, and perhaps even embrace, disagreement as a lively part of democratic practice."—Benjamin P. Davis, Public BooksTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Solidarity in Neoliberal Times 2. Two Models of Nonexclusion: Solidarity in Feminist and Democratic Theory 3. Antisocial Solidarities: The Psychic Life of Domination 4. Burdened Action: The Social Formation of Solidarity 5. A More Perfect Union: The Ends of Conflict Conclusion: Solidarity Today

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Book SynopsisA pathbreaking exploration of the fate of utopia in our troubled times, this book shows how the historically intertwined endeavors of utopia and critique might be leveraged in response to humanity's looming existential challenges. Utopia in the Age of Survival makes the case that critical social theory needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth. At the same time the left must reassume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as something still possible. S. D. Chrostowska looks to the vibrant, visionary mid-century resurgence of embodied utopian longings and projections in Surrealism, the Situationist International, and critical theorists writing in their wake, reconstructing utopia's link to survival through to the earliest, most radical phase of the French environmental movement. Survival emerges as the organizing concept for a variety of democratic political forms that center the corporeality of desire in social movements contesting the expanding management of life by state institutions across the globe. Vigilant and timely, balancing fine-tuned analysis with broad historical overview to map the utopian impulse across contemporary cultural and political life, Chrostowska issues an urgent report on the vitality of utopia.Trade Review"This is an important book and an original and stimulating contribution to the political theory of utopias. Revisiting the utopian tradition from a critical theory perspective, Chrostowska argues that utopia is a hypothesis and an impetus for action rather than a blueprint ofthe future. It is neither an abstract ideal nor a local miniature but a universal politics ofdesire at a moment in history when human survival is at stake. There are many books on utopia, of course, but this one has a singular and original approach, which has no equivalent." -- Michael Löwy * author of Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" *"In this elegant and bold ode to utopian thinking in the shadow of climate change and pandemics, Chrostowska masterfully argues that critique and utopia should be inextricably linked as a double helix in the theoretical DNA of a global left politics. Laying bare both the seductions and the traps of utopianism, she makes the compelling case that a utopianism that begins from the body, its desires and imagination, is absolutely crucial for an ethical and political life beyond survival. Erudite and filled with brilliant insight, this forceful book is a candid invitation for the kind of thinking beyond that never leaves criticism behind." -- Banu Bargu * author of Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue chapter abstractThe opening offers a brief overview of the senses of the word utopia and historical attitudes toward utopian designs. It draws attention to the ways in which utopia functions these days less as a term of abuse than as a popular marketing label, which points to utopia's cultural relevance. I then move on to review different conceptions of utopia in order to set up the book's conceptual framework and argument, beginning with hope, despair, anxiety, and their relationship to desire and will. The conceptions defended in the book—utopia as myth and as hypothesis—are introduced. Turning to survival as also generative of utopian desire, I address the fate of utopian thinking in these our dark times. Retrieving the social imaginary of Cockaigne allows me to recast utopia in light of bodily desires and practices while delinking it from capital accumulation. The Utopian Hypothesis: From Radical Politics to Speculative Myth chapter abstractThe first chapter makes the case that critical social theory broadly understood needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth, told and retold in diverse and conflicting ways, attesting to its continued productivity and dynamism as it sidelines the "ideal city" blueprint tradition in utopianism. At the same time, to gain political purchase, the left must again assume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as something still possible. I begin by discussing the melancholy affecting left-wing intellectuals and proceed to lengthy engagements with T. J. Clark and Roland Barthes. In the first reading, I argue against the tragic conception of politics proposed by Clark. In the second, I analyze and critique Barthes's theory of myth. Armed with critical insights thus gleaned, I contrast the myth model of utopia, drawing principally on Georges Sorel, with the wager model. The Emancipation of Desire: Preludes and Postludes of May '68 chapter abstractThe second chapter turns to the visionary decades of the twentieth century, looking back at the resurgence of bodily utopian longings and projections in Surrealism, the Situationist International, and critical theorists writing in their wake. The first three sections are historical, focused on radical utopian projects and critiques between the 1930s and 1970s in France. The fourth teases out three theoretical questions arising from this historical material, while the fifth reconstructs the meaning of survival through the earliest and most radical phase of the French environmental movement, when ecology was inseparable from social emancipation and transformation. The eventual split in the movement on the question of survival ended in its embrace of the Situationist critique of survival. The work of Marc Pierret and Italian thinker Giorgio Cesarano from this period provides a little-known counterpoint and critique of these undialectical conceptions and libidinal liberation as antidote. The Utopia of Survival: Critical Theory against the State chapter abstractIn the third chapter, survival emerges as the organizing concept for an array of bodily democratic political forms in social movements across the globe contesting the expanding management of life by state institutions. The utopian dimension of such politics leads me to recast the experience or condition of survival as potentially political and productive of utopianizing practices, including gestures beyond the state form as well as claims made on democratic and authoritarian states by individuals or groups from the margins of normal politics and disruptive of it. For this purpose, I bring in the concepts of necropolitics (Achille Mbembe) and necroresistance (Banu Bargu), referring to desperate subversive acts of self-directed violence refusing survival and undermining in this way the biopoliticization of sovereignty or, as shown by Marc Abélès's politics of survivance, governmentality beyond the state. I conclude with responses to several anticipated objections. Epilogue: The Displaced Imagination chapter abstractThe epilogue takes up the centrality of bodies in utopian social dreaming and the constitution of community approximating the utopia to be universalized. I discuss the relationship of desires in the present to their idealized utopian form, and the configuration of the utopian imagination by bodily whereabouts, structured by displacement, physical or imaginary. I move on to say that utopianism's strength as a myth continues to lie in its "iconoclasm," its resistance to determinate content. Utopia's normative "deficit," for which first-generation critical theorists have been criticized, is also the dialectical guarantee of its truth. I briefly take up the body in Theodor W. Adorno's thought to highlight its importance as an ethical index. The final accent falls on the living conditions sufficient for utopia-inspired or utopianizing action and on what utopia might look like in our survival-centered age. Postscript chapter abstractThe postscript presents a balance sheet of the ongoing pandemic and climate change, revealing the failings in crisis management and the fragility of the global economic system as fertile ground for utopian dreaming.

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Book SynopsisA pathbreaking exploration of the fate of utopia in our troubled times, this book shows how the historically intertwined endeavors of utopia and critique might be leveraged in response to humanity's looming existential challenges. Utopia in the Age of Survival makes the case that critical social theory needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth. At the same time the left must reassume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as something still possible. S. D. Chrostowska looks to the vibrant, visionary mid-century resurgence of embodied utopian longings and projections in Surrealism, the Situationist International, and critical theorists writing in their wake, reconstructing utopia's link to survival through to the earliest, most radical phase of the French environmental movement. Survival emerges as the organizing concept for a variety of democratic political forms that center the corporeality of desire in social movements contesting the expanding management of life by state institutions across the globe. Vigilant and timely, balancing fine-tuned analysis with broad historical overview to map the utopian impulse across contemporary cultural and political life, Chrostowska issues an urgent report on the vitality of utopia.Trade Review"This is an important book and an original and stimulating contribution to the political theory of utopias. Revisiting the utopian tradition from a critical theory perspective, Chrostowska argues that utopia is a hypothesis and an impetus for action rather than a blueprint ofthe future. It is neither an abstract ideal nor a local miniature but a universal politics ofdesire at a moment in history when human survival is at stake. There are many books on utopia, of course, but this one has a singular and original approach, which has no equivalent." -- Michael Löwy * author of Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin's "On the Concept of History" *"In this elegant and bold ode to utopian thinking in the shadow of climate change and pandemics, Chrostowska masterfully argues that critique and utopia should be inextricably linked as a double helix in the theoretical DNA of a global left politics. Laying bare both the seductions and the traps of utopianism, she makes the compelling case that a utopianism that begins from the body, its desires and imagination, is absolutely crucial for an ethical and political life beyond survival. Erudite and filled with brilliant insight, this forceful book is a candid invitation for the kind of thinking beyond that never leaves criticism behind." -- Banu Bargu * author of Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue chapter abstractThe opening offers a brief overview of the senses of the word utopia and historical attitudes toward utopian designs. It draws attention to the ways in which utopia functions these days less as a term of abuse than as a popular marketing label, which points to utopia's cultural relevance. I then move on to review different conceptions of utopia in order to set up the book's conceptual framework and argument, beginning with hope, despair, anxiety, and their relationship to desire and will. The conceptions defended in the book—utopia as myth and as hypothesis—are introduced. Turning to survival as also generative of utopian desire, I address the fate of utopian thinking in these our dark times. Retrieving the social imaginary of Cockaigne allows me to recast utopia in light of bodily desires and practices while delinking it from capital accumulation. The Utopian Hypothesis: From Radical Politics to Speculative Myth chapter abstractThe first chapter makes the case that critical social theory broadly understood needs to reinstate utopia as a speculative myth, told and retold in diverse and conflicting ways, attesting to its continued productivity and dynamism as it sidelines the "ideal city" blueprint tradition in utopianism. At the same time, to gain political purchase, the left must again assume utopia as an action-guiding hypothesis—that is, as something still possible. I begin by discussing the melancholy affecting left-wing intellectuals and proceed to lengthy engagements with T. J. Clark and Roland Barthes. In the first reading, I argue against the tragic conception of politics proposed by Clark. In the second, I analyze and critique Barthes's theory of myth. Armed with critical insights thus gleaned, I contrast the myth model of utopia, drawing principally on Georges Sorel, with the wager model. The Emancipation of Desire: Preludes and Postludes of May '68 chapter abstractThe second chapter turns to the visionary decades of the twentieth century, looking back at the resurgence of bodily utopian longings and projections in Surrealism, the Situationist International, and critical theorists writing in their wake. The first three sections are historical, focused on radical utopian projects and critiques between the 1930s and 1970s in France. The fourth teases out three theoretical questions arising from this historical material, while the fifth reconstructs the meaning of survival through the earliest and most radical phase of the French environmental movement, when ecology was inseparable from social emancipation and transformation. The eventual split in the movement on the question of survival ended in its embrace of the Situationist critique of survival. The work of Marc Pierret and Italian thinker Giorgio Cesarano from this period provides a little-known counterpoint and critique of these undialectical conceptions and libidinal liberation as antidote. The Utopia of Survival: Critical Theory against the State chapter abstractIn the third chapter, survival emerges as the organizing concept for an array of bodily democratic political forms in social movements across the globe contesting the expanding management of life by state institutions. The utopian dimension of such politics leads me to recast the experience or condition of survival as potentially political and productive of utopianizing practices, including gestures beyond the state form as well as claims made on democratic and authoritarian states by individuals or groups from the margins of normal politics and disruptive of it. For this purpose, I bring in the concepts of necropolitics (Achille Mbembe) and necroresistance (Banu Bargu), referring to desperate subversive acts of self-directed violence refusing survival and undermining in this way the biopoliticization of sovereignty or, as shown by Marc Abélès's politics of survivance, governmentality beyond the state. I conclude with responses to several anticipated objections. Epilogue: The Displaced Imagination chapter abstractThe epilogue takes up the centrality of bodies in utopian social dreaming and the constitution of community approximating the utopia to be universalized. I discuss the relationship of desires in the present to their idealized utopian form, and the configuration of the utopian imagination by bodily whereabouts, structured by displacement, physical or imaginary. I move on to say that utopianism's strength as a myth continues to lie in its "iconoclasm," its resistance to determinate content. Utopia's normative "deficit," for which first-generation critical theorists have been criticized, is also the dialectical guarantee of its truth. I briefly take up the body in Theodor W. Adorno's thought to highlight its importance as an ethical index. The final accent falls on the living conditions sufficient for utopia-inspired or utopianizing action and on what utopia might look like in our survival-centered age. Postscript chapter abstractThe postscript presents a balance sheet of the ongoing pandemic and climate change, revealing the failings in crisis management and the fragility of the global economic system as fertile ground for utopian dreaming.

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Book Synopsis

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Book SynopsisHow does Martin Luther King, Jr., understand race philosophically and how did this understanding lead him to develop an ontological conception of racist police violence? In this important new work, Mark Christian Thompson attempts to answer these questions, examining ontology in Martin Luther King, Jr.'s philosophy. Specifically, the book reads King through 1920s German academic debates between Martin Heidegger, Rudolf Bultmann, Hans Jonas, Carl Schmitt, Eric Voegelin, Hannah Arendt, and others on Being, gnosticism, existentialism, political theology, and sovereignty. It further examines King's dissertation about Tillich, as well other key texts from his speculative writings, sermons, and speeches, positing King's understanding of divine love as a form of Heideggerian ontology articulated in beloved community. Tracking the presence of twentieth-century German philosophy and theology in his thought, the book situates King's ontology conceptually and socially in nonviolent protest. In so doing, The Critique of Nonviolence reads King's "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" (1963) with Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" (1921) to reveal the depth of King's political-theological critique of police violence as the illegitimate appropriation of the racialized state of exception. As Thompson argues, it is in part through its appropriation of German philosophy and theology that King's ontology condemns the perpetual American state of racial exception that permits unlimited police violence against Black lives.Trade Review"Reading King with Heidegger and Benjamin, Thompson's study is a welcome and intellectually engaging contribution to the recent renaissance of scholarship devoted to King's philosophical thought."—Robert J Gooding-Williams, Columbia University"A tour de force! Essential for students of King, Black Power, and twentieth-century Africana and European philosophy. Thompson's King is an important counterweight to the simple, sanitized saint that haunts mainstream politics."—Paul C. Taylor, Vanderbilt University"Thompson invites us to rethink King's nonviolent strategy as a conceptually rigorous moral, philosophical, and racial commitment. Critical for scholars and students interested in King, peace studies, Black studies, history, religious studies, and philosophy."—James Haile III, University of Rhode IslandTable of ContentsIntroduction: Ontology and Nonviolence 1. Being and Nonviolence 2. Nonbeing and Nonviolence 3. Black Power as Nonviolence 4. Gnosticism and Nonviolence 5. Divine Nonviolence Conclusion: Eros as Nonviolence

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Book SynopsisIn this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the "cybernetic society," a cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization—such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego—in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community. Trade Review"Thompson ranges confidently over philosophy, psychoanalysis, and economics in this thoughtful and original study of the individual in a mass society."—Russell Jacoby, University of California, Los Angeles"Thompson is a preeminent scholar who has produced a controversial, interdisciplinary work that speaks to the future of the critical tradition. This is an innovative and important work that deserves to be read."—Stephen Eric Bronner, Rutgers University"In the tradition of the great diagnostic philosophers—from Marx and Nietzsche, Lukács and Foucault, to Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser, and Rahel Jaeggi—Michael J. Thompson's Twilight of the Self probes the central problems of contemporary social and political life. Like a 'doctor' for 'sick cultures,' this ambitious book seeks to identify the source of our ailment, theorize its origins, and prescribe a treatment."—Jeremy Kingston Cynamon, The Review of PoliticsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Rise of Cybernetic Society: The Patterned World and the Fate of the Individual 2. Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self 3. The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis 4. Alienation: From Autonomy to Moral Atrophy 5. Reconsidering False Consciousness: An Etiology of Defective Social Cognition 6. Cultivating Consent: Reification and the Web of Norms 7. The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego 8. Autonomy as Critical Agency: Reconstructing the Democratic Self

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Book SynopsisIn this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the "cybernetic society," a cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative management of labor and consumption, routinizing patterns of life, practices, and consciousness throughout the culture. Evolving out of the neoliberal transformation of economy and society since the 1980s, the cybernetic society has transformed how that the individual is articulated in contemporary society. Thompson examines the various pathologies of the self and consciousness that result from this form of socialization—such as hyper-reification, alienated moral cognition, false consciousness, and the withered ego—in new ways to demonstrate the extent of deformation of modern selfhood. Only with a more robust, more socially embedded concept of autonomy as critical agency can we begin to reconstruct the principles of democratic individuality and community. Trade Review"Thompson ranges confidently over philosophy, psychoanalysis, and economics in this thoughtful and original study of the individual in a mass society."—Russell Jacoby, University of California, Los Angeles"Thompson is a preeminent scholar who has produced a controversial, interdisciplinary work that speaks to the future of the critical tradition. This is an innovative and important work that deserves to be read."—Stephen Eric Bronner, Rutgers University"In the tradition of the great diagnostic philosophers—from Marx and Nietzsche, Lukács and Foucault, to Wendy Brown, Nancy Fraser, and Rahel Jaeggi—Michael J. Thompson's Twilight of the Self probes the central problems of contemporary social and political life. Like a 'doctor' for 'sick cultures,' this ambitious book seeks to identify the source of our ailment, theorize its origins, and prescribe a treatment."—Jeremy Kingston Cynamon, The Review of PoliticsTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. The Rise of Cybernetic Society: The Patterned World and the Fate of the Individual 2. Social Domination, Social Systems, and the Constitution of the Self 3. The Reification Problem and the Normative Entanglement Hypothesis 4. Alienation: From Autonomy to Moral Atrophy 5. Reconsidering False Consciousness: An Etiology of Defective Social Cognition 6. Cultivating Consent: Reification and the Web of Norms 7. The Withering of the Self and the Regression of the Ego 8. Autonomy as Critical Agency: Reconstructing the Democratic Self

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Book SynopsisRecent thinking has resuscitated civility as an important paradigm for engaging with a violence that must be deemed endemic to our lives. But, while it is widely acknowledged that civility works against violence, and that literature generates or accompanies civility and engenders tolerance, civility has also been understood as violence in disguise, and literature, which has only rarely sought to claim the power of violence, has often been accused of inciting it. This book sets out to describe the ways in which these words—violence, literature and civility—and the concepts they evoke are mutually entangled, and the uses to which these entanglements have been put. Simpson's argument follows a broadly historical trajectory through the long modern period from the Renaissance to the present, drawing on the work of historians, political scientists, literary scholars and philosophers. The result is a distinctly new argument about the complex and often mystified entanglements between literature, civility and violence in the anglophone Atlantic sphere. What now are our expectations of civility and literature, separately and together? How do these long-familiar but residually imprecise concepts stand up to the demands of the modern world? Simpson's argument is that, despite and perhaps because of their imperfect conceptualization, both persist as important protocols for the critique of violence.Trade Review"Among the most important literary historical considerations of violence and civility to emerge in recent decades, this remarkable, challenging book sustains the question of how—and at what cost—civility has been opposed to violence, and literature allied with civility."—Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley"This timely, erudite work is not polemical, not a defense, but reflective—essayistic rather than thesis-driven. In these ways and more, the book enacts a form of civility that it characterizes and appreciates without idealizing."—Jonathan Arac, University of Pittsburgh"Engaging Violence is dialectical criticism at its best. It follows the overlapping histories of civility and literary pedagogy over time as both engage with different forms of violence, and it renders the complex historical process by which each term shifts as it moves between contexts but never admits of monolithic conclusions."—Kevis Goodman, Critical InquiryTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Civility and Literature and Their Discontents 2. Civil Beginnings 3. Philosophy Polite and Politic 4. The Displacement of Civility: Violence in a Widening World 5. Civility after 1989: Romancing Small Groups 6. The Reach of Literature

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Book SynopsisThe Sociology of Literature is a pithy primer on the history, affordances, and potential futures of this growing field of study, which finds its origins in the French Enlightenment, and its most salient expression as a sociological pursuit in the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Addressing the epistemological premises of the field at present, the book also refutes the common criticism that the sociology of literature does not take the text to be the central object of study. From this rebuttal, Gisèle Sapiro, the field's leading theorist, is able to demonstrate convincingly one of the greatest affordances of the discipline: its in-built methods for accounting for the roles and behaviors of agents and institutions (publishing houses, prize committees, etc.) in the circulation and reception of texts. While Sapiro emphasizes the rich interdisciplinary nature of the approach on display, articulating the way in which it draws on literary history, sociology, postcolonial studies, book history, gender studies, and media studies, among others, the book also stands as a defense of the sociology of literature as a discipline in its own right.Trade Review"This erudite, yet accessible book has no equal. The quality and breadth of Sapiro's scholarship is excellent. We would have to go back to a thinker like Adorno for a scholar as proficient in both literary research and sociological theory."—Bridget Fowler, University of Glasgow"Sapiro's clear survey of the sociology of literature synthesizes Bourdieu's field theory with other approaches, adding subtle, provocative twists of her own. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of literary theory and the sociology of culture."—Andrew Goldstone, Rutgers University"The Sociology of Literature is distinguished by unusual breadth of scope, both international and interdisciplinary. This book will be of great interest not only to sociologists but to literary scholars, historians, and anyone else interested in the systematic study of written culture."—Ted Underwood, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign"a concise but comprehensive handbook... which showcases a wide range of approaches and research problems in literary sociology."—Lee Konstantinou, Chronicle of Higher EducationTable of ContentsIntroduction I: Sociological Theories and Approaches to Literature II: The Social Conditions for the Production of Literary Works III: The Sociology of Literary Works IV: Sociology of Reception Conclusion

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Book SynopsisFor Herman Melville, the instability of democracy held tremendous creative potential. Examining the centrality of political thought to Melville's oeuvre, Jennifer Greiman argues that Melville's densely figurative aesthetics give form to a radical reimagining of democratic foundations, relations, and ways of being—modeling how we can think democracy in political theory today. Across Melville's five decades of writing, from his early Pacific novels to his late poetry, Greiman identifies a literary formalism that is radically political and carries the project of democratic theory in new directions. Recovering Melville's readings in political philosophy and aesthetics, Greiman shows how he engaged with key problems in political theory—the paradox of foundations, the vicious circles of sovereign power, the fragility of the people—to produce a body of radical democratic art and thought. Scenes of green and growing life, circular structures, and images of a groundless world emerge as forms for understanding democracy as a collective project in flux. In Melville's experimental aesthetics, Greiman finds a significant precursor to the tradition of radical democratic theory in the US and France that emphasizes transience and creativity over the foundations and forms prized by liberalism. Such politics, she argues, are necessarily aesthetic: attuned to material and sensible distinctions, open to new forces of creativity.Trade Review"Greiman succeeds at the difficult task of saying something new about democracy in her original reading of Melville as a systematic thinker of it. This is an excellent book, wonderfully written and researched."—Branka Arsić, author of Bird Relics: Grief and Vitalism in Thoreau"Enthralling and fearless, Greiman's sensuous dive into Melville's poetics and political thinking excites and holds us tight in a world like no other. A brilliant breakthrough in close reading and political thinking. Democracy will never be the same."—Colin Dayan, author of With Dogs at the Edge of Life"In Greiman's dazzling analysis, Melville emerges as a political theorist in his own right whose 'figurative imagination' gives us new forms, new language, new narratives to explore what democracy is and what it should be."—Nathan Wolff, author of Not Quite Hope and Other Political Emotions in the Gilded Age"Greiman's Emersonian demonstration shows that however incomplete its figures, Melville's democracy is not formless. Both a regime and a process, Melville's democracy is held fluid by, and as, a practice of form that may be called aesthetics. Greiman needs to be thanked for making these complex geometrical entanglements beautifully clear."—Cécile Roudeau, Leviathan"Including a cogent, wide-ranging introduction and a useful overview of other approaches to Melville and democracy, this is a fascinating, valuable contribution to Melville studies. Essential."—J. W. Miller, CHOICETable of Contents1. Green Things and Verdant Recesses: Imperial History, State-of-Nature Theory, and the Color of Democracy (Typee) 2. Verdigris: Color, Tone, and Radical Democracy (Pierre) 3. Round Robins and Insphered Spheres: Revolution, Representation, and the Shape of Founding (Omoo and Mardi) 4. "Circles upon circles": Sovereignty, Equality, and the Shape of Democracy (Moby-Dick) 5. "And apoplexy has its fall": Slavery, Prophecy, and the Gravity of Democracy ("The Bell Tower" and Battle-Pieces) 6. Unplanted to the Last: Democratic Grass and Groundless Aesthetics (Israel Potter, Clarel and Billy Budd)

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Book SynopsisThe possibility of a nuclear war that could destroy civilization has influenced the course of international affairs since 1945, suspended like a sword of Damocles above the heads of the world's leaders. The fact that we have escaped a third world war involving strategic nuclear weapons—indeed, that no atomic weapon of limited power has yet been used under battlefield conditions—seems nothing short of a miracle. Revisiting debates on the effectiveness and ethics of nuclear deterrence, Jean-Pierre Dupuy is led to reformulate some of the most difficult questions in philosophy. He develops a counterintuitive but powerful theory of apocalyptic prophecy: once a major catastrophe appears to be possible, one must assume that it will in fact occur. Dupuy shows that the contradictions and paradoxes riddling discussions of deterrence arise from the tension between two opposite conceptions of time: one in which the future depends on decisions and strategy, and another in which every occurring event is one that could not have failed to occur. Considering the immense destructive power of nuclear warheads and the almost unimaginable ruin they are bound to cause, Dupuy reaches a provocative conclusion: whether they bring about good or evil does not depend on the present or future intentions of those who are in a position to use them. The mere possession of nuclear weapons is a moral abomination.Trade Review"A stimulating read, essential for understanding the remaining options afforded to our civilization, now that we live with the irreversibility of the nuclear bomb."—Diane Delaurens, Nonfiction"We all live under the shadow of a forthcoming catastrophe: pandemic, ecological disaster, nuclear war. Our reactions to such threats are often irrational, and Dupuy provides a superbly readable rational analysis of all these irrationalities: why the logic of nuclear MAD (mutually assured destruction) is really mad, why nuclear threats are never just rhetoric but can trigger an actual catastrophe, why sometimes to be taken seriously one has to act as if one is mad, why the only rational strategy is to accept that things can at any moment go wrong. Dupuy is our best theorist of catastrophes and his new book is a book for all of us—in a well-organized state, it would be massively printed and freely distributed to all families. So it is vulgar and trivial to say that this is an excellent book—it is rather a book that we all need like ordinary daily bread."—Slavoj Žižek, author of Surplus-Enjoyment"This is a provocative exploration of the paradoxes of nuclear deterrence. If we are to postpone nuclear catastrophe indefinitely, Dupuy argues, we must understand that nuclear war is not merely possible but bound to occur."—David Holloway, author of Stalin and the Bomb"Dupuy provides an extremely important service by bringing much-needed attention to the existential risk that society largely ignored prior to the war in Ukraine and, even now, does not take seriously enough. Highly recommended."—Martin E. Hellman, winner of the Turing Award"Dupuy, one of the most incisive thinkers of our times, allows us to rethink history while it is in the making. This book is mandatory reading for anyone who seeks to understand our present."—Frank Ruda, coauthor of Reading Hegel"Most of us navigate our private joys and woes without thinking about collective nuclear annihilation. This is not because the threat has vanished. It is because it is unthinkable. In this compelling work of rational doomsaying, Dupuy models how to think the unthinkable. The result is a challenging and urgent book."—Alison McQueen, author of Political Realism in Apocalyptic TimesTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. One Minute from Apocalypse and Why (Almost) No One Gives a Damn 2. MAD: The Birth of a Structure 3. The Pure Theory of MAD 4. Metaphysical MAD Appendix

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Book SynopsisIn this new book, Florian Klinger gives readers a basic action-theoretical account of the aesthetic. While normal action fulfills a determinate concept, Klinger argues, aesthetic action performs an indeterminacy by suspending the action's conceptual resolution. Taking as examples work by Tino Sehgal, Kara Walker, Mazen Kerbaj, Marina Abramović, Cy Twombly, and Franz Kafka, the book examines indeterminacy in such instances as a walk that is at once leisurely and purposeful, a sound piece that is at once joyous and mournful and mechanical, or a sculpture that at once draws one in and shuts one out. Because it has irresolution as its point, aesthetic action presents itself as an unsettling of ourselves, our ways, our very sense of who we are. As performers of such action, we don't recognize one another as bearers of a shared human form as we normally would, but find ourselves tasked anew with figuring out what sharing a form would mean. In conversation with philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Anscombe; political thinkers such as Marx and Lorde; and contemporary interlocutors such as Michael Thompson, Sebastian Rödl, and Thomas Khurana, Klinger's book makes a case for a conception of the human form that systematically includes the aesthetic: an actualization of the form that is indeterminate and nevertheless rational. The book gives the project of Western philosophical aesthetics a long-overdue formulation for our present that aims to do justice to contemporary aesthetic production as it actually exists. It will appeal to those working in philosophy, art, and political thought. Trade Review"With ingenious, stunning readings, Klinger breaks new ground in aesthetics. This is a philosophy of art with which thinkers and scholars will contend for years to come."—Henry W. Pickford, Duke University"Aesthetic Action offers a highly original and substantial outline of a new understanding of aesthetics. This is an important and rigorous contribution to emerging conversations in philosophy, of highest interest for readers interested in giving an account of contemporary art."—Rüdiger Campe, Yale University"Klinger gives us an entirely new way of understanding the indeterminacy of our encounters with art. In his incisive analyses he offers a truly fresh view of art, one that opens the fields of interaction each work creates."—Niklaus Largier, University of California, Berkeley"This book rethinks action through aesthetics and aesthetics through action, providing us with a new insight into the kind of unsettling that the aesthetic is and affords."—María del Rosario Acosta López, University of California, RiversideTable of ContentsPreface ONE. The Unsettling 1. The Thought of Aesthetic Distinction 2. Life Form and Settledness 3. Aesthetic Unsettling 4. The Use of Unsettling 5. The Account TWO. Accounting for Ourselves 1. Determinacy 2. The Original Scene of Self-Determination 3. Form as Answer: Hegel's Conception of the Aesthetic as Determinacy 4. Form as Question: A Conception of the Aesthetic as Indeterminacy 5. The Task of a Unified Accounting THREE. A Three-Way Capacity 1. Rationality and Indeterminacy 2. A Rational Capacity 3. Failed Attempts at Conceiving Indeterminacy 4. Indeterminacy as Part of Our Form 5. Indeterminacy as Such FOUR. Logical Account of Aesthetic Action: Aspectual Irresolution 1. The Concept of Aesthetic Action 2. Distinction through Aspectual Irresolution 3. Internal Unity in Crisis 4. Aesthetic Indeterminacy 5. External Unity with Action at Large FIVE. Material Account of Aesthetic Action: Bond without Terms 1. Logical and Material Accounting 2. Bond without Terms 3. Aesthetic Interaction 4. Life as Such 5. The Question of Who We Are SIX. Aesthetic Transformation 1. Aesthetic Action as Transformation 2. Performance without Resources 3. The Work of Aspectual Irresolution 4. Transformation That Includes Its Terms 5. The Aesthetic Self SEVEN. The Use of the Aesthetic 1. The Political as Example 2. Our Form as Political Task 3. Tino Sehgal: Genus Politics 4. Kara Walker: Politics of Difference 5. Mazen Kerbaj: Politics of Life as Such Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisIn the last decade, we have witnessed the return of one of the most controversial terms in the political lexicon: totalitarianism. What are we talking about when we define a totalitarian political and social situation? When did we start using the word as both adjective and noun? And, what totalitarian ghosts haunt the present? Philosopher Simona Forti seeks to answer these questions by reconstructing not only the genealogy of the concept, but also by clarifying its motives, misunderstandings, and the controversies that have animated its current resurgence. Taking into account political theories and historical discussions, Totalitarianism especially focuses on philosophical reflections, from the question of totalitarian biopolitics to the alleged totalitarian drifts of neoliberalism. The work invites the relentless formulation of a radical question about the democratic age: the possibilities it has opened up, the voids it leaves behind, the mechanisms it activates, and the "voluntary servitude" it produces. Forti argues that totalitarianism cannot be considered an external threat to democracy, but rather as one of the possible answers to those questions posed by modernity which democracies have not been able to solve. Her investigation of the uses and abuses of totalitarianism as one of the fundamental categories of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries promises to provoke much-needed discussion and debate among those in philosophy, politics, ethics, and beyond.Trade Review"Forti's compact, philosophical discussion of the history of the concept of 'totalitarianism' is the best available in any language. With the ongoing rise of right-wing populists eager to leave 'behind' their totalitarian lineage, this book is more pertinent than ever."—Miguel Vatter, author of Divine Democracy"It takes a scholar of both exceptional learning and critical acuity to explain with precision the metamorphoses of an idea as multifaceted and elusive as totalitarianism. This gripping book has particularly urgent and disquieting implications for readers today."—Alessia Ricciardi, author of Finding Ferrante"Forti asks us a sharp question, the child of our ambiguous and confused times: why do we need the category of totalitarianism? This book is both beautiful and disturbing. It must be read in one go."—Nadia Urbinati, author of Me the PeopleTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. How the Concept "Totalitarianism" Came to Be 2. From the Construction of Models to the Practice of Dissent 3. Philosophy in the Face of Extremes 4. Specters of Totality Conclusion

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Book SynopsisThe fall of the Berlin wall was seen by many as the final triumph of liberal democracy over communism. But now, in the wake of the great financial crisis of 2008 and its aftermath, things look a little different. New questions are arising about capitalism and democracy, new social movements are challenging established institutions and new political possibilities are emerging. Is democracy an inevitable hostage of capitalism, or can it reinvent itself to meet the challenge of globalization? In an exclusive, previously unpublished dialogue, Alain Badiou, a key figure of the radical left and a leading advocate of the communist idea, and Marcel Gauchet, a major exponent of anti-totalitarianism and a champion of liberal democracy, confront one another. Together, they take stock of history, interrogate one another�s views and defend their respective projects: on the one side, the revival of �the communist hypothesis,� and on the other, the radical reform of a contested democratic model.Table of Contents Foreword: The Future of an Alternative, by Martin Duru and Martin Legros 1. The encounter with communism 2. From Marx to Lenin 3. Totalitarianism 4. The return of the communist hypothesis? 5. What is the meaning of the crisis? 6. The end of imperial logic, or the continuation? 7. The deconstruction of capitalism 8. Why we�re not finished with politics Conclusion: In search of a lost deal? Appendix

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Book SynopsisThis the first of a new three-part series in which Antonio Negri, a leading political thinker of our time, explores key ideas that have animated radical thought and examines some of the social and economic forces that are shaping our world today. In this first volume Negri shows how the thinking of Marx and Foucault were brought together to create an original theoretical synthesis - particularly in the context of Italy from May ’68 onwards. At around that time, the structures of industry and production began to change radically, with the emergence of new producer-subjects and new fields of capitalist value creation. New concepts and theories were developed by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and others to help make sense of these and related developments - concepts such as biopower and biopolitics, subjectivation and subsumption, public and common, power and potentiality. These concepts and theories are examined by Negri within the broader context of the development of European philosophical discourse in the twentieth century. Marx and Foucault provides a unique account of the development of radical thought in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and will be a key text for anyone interested in radical politics today.Table of ContentsChapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 1. Why Marx? 2. Reflections on the use of dialectics 3. Thoughts regarding �critical foresight� in the unpublished Chapter VI of Marx�s Capital Vol. 1 4. Acting in common, and the limits of capital 5. Is it possible to be communists without Marx? Chapter 3 1. An Italian breakpoint: production versus development 2. On �Italian Theory� 3. The constitution of the common and the logics of the left 4. On the future of the European social democracies 5. Let�s start reading Gramsci again 6. Biopower / biopolitics Ð subjectivities in struggle Chapter 4 1. On the method of political critique 2. How and when I read Foucault 3. Gilles Felix Ð the how and when of Deleuze-Guattari 4. Observations on the �production of subjectivity�: on an intervention by Pierre Macherey 5. Marx after Foucault: the subject refound Origin of the Texts

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Book SynopsisThis the first of a new three-part series in which Antonio Negri, a leading political thinker of our time, explores key ideas that have animated radical thought and examines some of the social and economic forces that are shaping our world today. In this first volume Negri shows how the thinking of Marx and Foucault were brought together to create an original theoretical synthesis - particularly in the context of Italy from May ’68 onwards. At around that time, the structures of industry and production began to change radically, with the emergence of new producer-subjects and new fields of capitalist value creation. New concepts and theories were developed by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and others to help make sense of these and related developments - concepts such as biopower and biopolitics, subjectivation and subsumption, public and common, power and potentiality. These concepts and theories are examined by Negri within the broader context of the development of European philosophical discourse in the twentieth century. Marx and Foucault provides a unique account of the development of radical thought in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and will be a key text for anyone interested in radical politics today.Table of ContentsChapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 1. Why Marx? 2. Reflections on the use of dialectics 3. Thoughts regarding �critical foresight� in the unpublished Chapter VI of Marx�s Capital Vol. 1 4. Acting in common, and the limits of capital 5. Is it possible to be communists without Marx? Chapter 3 1. An Italian breakpoint: production versus development 2. On �Italian Theory� 3. The constitution of the common and the logics of the left 4. On the future of the European social democracies 5. Let�s start reading Gramsci again 6. Biopower / biopolitics Ð subjectivities in struggle Chapter 4 1. On the method of political critique 2. How and when I read Foucault 3. Gilles Felix Ð the how and when of Deleuze-Guattari 4. Observations on the �production of subjectivity�: on an intervention by Pierre Macherey 5. Marx after Foucault: the subject refound Origin of the Texts

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