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Authoritarianism operates on a visceral level rather than relying on arguments. How can we counter authoritarian affects? This publication brings together more than 50 first-hand accounts of anti-authoritarian movements, activists, artists, and scholars from around the world, focusing on the sensuous and emotional dimension of their strategies. From the collective art and aesthetics of feminist movements in India, Iran, Mexico, and Poland, to sewing collectives, subversive internet art in Hong Kong, and even anti-authoritarian board games, the contributions open new perspectives on moments of resistance, subversion, and creation. Indeed, the handbook itself is a work of anti-authoritarian art.

The editors behind the »International Research Group on Authoritarianism and Counter-Strategies« and »kollektiv orangotango« are: Aurel Eschmann, Börries Nehe, Nico Baumgarten, Paul Schweizer, Severin Halder, Ailynn Torres Santana, Inés Duràn Matute, and Julieta Mira.

30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, we live in a time of globalization and free trade. Nevertheless, 70 new border walls have been built in this period – put together, they would cover the total circumference of the Earth. While governments offer manifold justifications for building these separation barriers, they invariably attract the attention of artists. Is it merely the lure of transgression, however, that attracts them – or is there a deeper significance in the artistic encounter with border walls? And which artistic strategies do these artists employ to approach them?
In order to address these questions, Élisa Ganivet revisits the history of border wall aesthetics and compares more recent border-related works by 100 artists, including Joseph Beuys (Berlin), Banksy (Israel-Palestine), and Frida Kahlo (Mexico-US). Through art and thus beyond art, we understand the flaws and shortcomings of supposedly well-oiled systems.
With a preface by Élisabeth Vallet.

Occupy, Commons and other social experiments show: New collectivities are invented and tested. Gesa Ziemer enriches this debate through the insight that in the process, the reinterpretation of old forms of joint action can play an essential role. By looking at complicities in art, science and economy, ongoing collectivization is exposed.
Complicity means the committing of an act together, so the definition of criminal law. But for a long time now the concept has also been targeted at legal collective actions – mainly in innovative environments. Individuals act jointly in an intensely affective way – albeit only temporarily, bindingly in common – but still individually, inventively – and at the same time in a goal-oriented manner.

Michael Lent asks what role art has in colonisation and subsequent dissolution. He proposes a practice informed by the fatal strategies and 'raw' phenomenology of Jean Baudrillard as a challenge to a system of disappearance. Focusing on the otherness of space to prevent its ultimate dissolution, Lent promotes a spatial practice of radical alterity. Examining ideas of disappearance put forth by Baudrillard and Paul Virilio, he utilises art as a means for investigating loss of potentiality and experience through the representation of space, shifting their ideas – originally ascribed to objects – into a new emphasis.
This book ultimately attempts to break a cyclical system that causes everything to disappear into representation and equivalency.

The Marxist conception of the division between mental and manual labor is a critical yet unrecognized aspect of contemporary political struggles.
Departing from this novel argument, Michael Bray traces the conceptual and socio-political history of this labor division and emphasizes how the forms of control and organization articulated by that division in practices of production, democracy, racialization, and financialization are becoming increasingly important. Critiquing the left for its tendency to side implicitly with the powers of mental labor, Michael Bray shows that comprehending and challenging those powers is a pivotal task for anti-capitalist politics today.

The human capacity for speech is forever celebrated as evidence of its innate civility. Why, then, is public discourse often – and today more than ever, it would seem – so uncivil, even delusional? The reason, argues James Martin in this timely book, lies in the way speech works to organise desire. More than knowledge or rational interests, public speech services an unconscious urge for a lost enjoyment, stimulating an excess in subjectivity that moves us in body and mind.
James Martin draws upon the work of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan as well as other Continental thinkers to set out a new approach to the analysis of rhetoric and answer the troubling question of whether civil discourse can ever hope to escape its obscene underside.

The belief that »Nature« exists as a blank, stable stage upon which humans act out tragic performances of international relations is no longer tenable. In a world defined by human action, we must reorient our understanding of ourselves, of our environment, and our security.
This book considers how decentred and reflexive approaches to security are required to cope with the Anthropocene – the Human Age. Drawing from various disciplines, this bold reinterpretation explores the possibilities for understanding and preparing a future that will look vastly different than the past. The book asks to dig deeper into what it means to be human and secure in an age of ecological exception.

"In a growing field of interdisciplinary work on the Anthropocene, ›Security in the Anthropocene‹ sets itself apart. It blends ideas from criminology, international security studies and the environmental humanities to provide unique interdisciplinary insight into the challenges of living on an increasingly turbulent earth."
– Audra Mitchell, Balsillie School of International Affairs/Wilfrid Laurier University

"This essential, groundbreaking book offers a new conceptual framework that recalibrates what security means in the Anthropocene. Not content on simply highlighting the state of crisis fostered by existential risks in this new era, Cameron Harrington and Clifford Shearing invite us to imagine a more positive and caring form of security."
– Benoit Dupont, University of Montreal

"Harrington and Shearing's fine book explores evocatively how humans might cope with a world that is fundamentally changed through a critical appraisal of how new impacts on the Earth system shift the conditions of security. This is a tour de force of how our concepts of security create the world that afflicts us. The authors argue, convincingly, that there can be no security in the Anthropocene without an expanded vision of care."
– John Braithwaite, Australian National University

Who wins and who loses in urban regeneration? What are the mechanisms at play?
Francesca Weber-Newth looks at two neighbourhoods that are adjacent to large-scale regeneration schemes: the 2012 Olympic park in London and the Mediaspree waterside development in Berlin. By analysing how urban regeneration is experienced on the ground, her study counters the notion that Olympic-led regeneration is any different from other forms of neoliberal urban development. Adopting Pierre Bourdieu's view of the social world as made up of competitive ›games‹, an analysis of the two neighbourhoods reveals how the concepts of ›culture‹ and ›community‹ are strategically employed in the ›game‹ of urban regeneration – to the benefit of some and the detriment of others.

What exactly is rape? And how is it embedded in society?
Hilkje Charlotte Hänel offers a philosophical exploration of the often misrepresented concept of rape in everyday life, systematically mapping out and elucidating this atrocious phenomenon. Hänel proposes a theory of rape as a social practice facilitated by ubiquitous sexist ideologies. Arguing for a normative cluster model for the concept of rape, this timely intervention improves our understanding of lived experiences of sexual violence and social relations within sexist ideologies.