Philosophy

During the last two decades, sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has become a dominant force in cultural activity ranging from taste in music and art to choices in food and lifestyles.

The Field of Cultural Production brings together Bourdieu's major essays on art and literature and provides the first introduction to Bourdieu's writings and theory of a cultural field that situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption.

Bourdieu develops a highly original approach to the study of literary and artistic works, addressing many of the key issues that have preoccupied literary art and cultural criticism in the last twentieth century: aesthetic value and canonicity, intertextuality, the institutional frameworks of cultural practice, the social role of intellectuals and artists, and structures of literary and artistic authority.

Bourdieu elaborates a theory of the cultural field which situates artistic works within the social conditions of their production, circulation, and consumption. He examines the individuals and institutions involved in making cultural products what they are: not only the writers and artists, but also the publishers, critics, dealers, galleries, and academies. He analyzes the structure of the cultural field itself as well as its position within the broader social structures of power.

The essays in his volume examine such diverse topics as Flaubert's point of view, Manet's aesthetic revolution, the historical creation of the pure gaze, and the relationship between art and power.

The Field of Cultural Porduction will be of interest to students and scholars from a wide range of disciplines: sociology and social theory, literature, art, and cultural studies.

In 1993, an astonishing discovery was made at a tomb in Guodian in Hubei province (east central China). Written on strips of bamboo that have miraculously survived intact since 300 B.C., the "Guodian Laozi," is by far the earliest version of the Tao Te Ching ever unearthed. Students of ancient Chinese civilization proclaimed the text a decisive breakthrough in the understanding of this famous text: it provides the most conclusive evidence to date that the text was the work of multiple authors and editors over hundreds of years, rather than the achievement of a single individual writing during the time of Confucius.

Robert Henricks now presents the first English translation of the "bamboo slip Laozi." Differing substantially from other versions we have of the text, the Guodian Laozi provides us with clues on how and when the text came into being. As Henricks's translation shows, many chapters are missing in this form of the text, and some chapters remain incomplete. All of this seems to suggest that the Tao Te Ching was not yet "complete" when these slips were copied.

In his translation, Henricks focuses attention on lines in each of the chapters that vary from readings in other editions. In addition, he shows how the sequence of chapters in this form of the text is totally unrelated to the sequence readers commonly see in the "standard" form of the text, i.e., in other translations.

Here are just a few of the noteworthy features of this new Tao Te Ching:

• A lucid introduction to the Guodian Laozi, offering background on the archaeological interpretation of the discovery

• Line-by-line comparisons of the Guodian Laozi against the Mawangdui and Wang Bi editions

• Extensive notes on each chapter describing the unique elements of the Guodian Laozi in comparison with other versions

• Transcriptions for each chapter, noting both the ancient and modern form of the characters in the chapter

• An appendix featuring the official biography of Laozi written by Sima Qian, the Grand Historian of China, as well as Henricks's commentary and notes on this biography

This groundbreaking work will lead to a reassessment of the history and significance of this well-known and critical work as well as a reevaluation of the role it played in the development of Taoism in early China.

The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the Cold War but also the rise of a melancholic vision of history as a series of losses. For the political left, the cause lost was communism, and this trauma determined how leftists wrote the next chapter in their political struggle and how they have thought about their past since. Throughout the twentieth century, argues Left-Wing Melancholia, from classical Marxism to psychoanalysis to the advent of critical theory, a culture of defeat and its emotional overlay of melancholy have characterized the leftist understanding of the political in history and in theoretical critique.

Drawing on a vast and diverse archive in theory, testimony, and image and on such thinkers as Karl Marx, Walter Benjamin, Theodor W. Adorno, and others, the intellectual historian Enzo Traverso explores the varying nature of left melancholy as it has manifested in a feeling of guilt for not sufficiently challenging authority, in a fear of surrendering in disarray and resignation, in mourning the human costs of the past, and in a sense of failure for not realizing utopian aspirations. Yet hidden within this melancholic tradition are the resources for a renewed challenge to prevailing regimes of historicity, a passion that has the power to reignite the dialectic of revolutionary thought.

Islamic scriptural sources offer potentially radical notions of equality. Yet medieval Islamic philosophers chose to establish a hierarchical, male-centered virtue ethics. In Gendered Morality, Zahra Ayubi rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition.

Developing a lens for a feminist philosophy of Islam, Ayubi analyzes constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in classic works of philosophical ethics. In close readings of foundational texts by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Nasir-ad Din Tusi, and Jalal ad-Din Davani, she interrogates how these thinkers conceive of the ethical human being as an elite male within a hierarchical cosmology built on the exclusion of women and nonelites. Yet in the course of prescribing ethical behavior, the ethicists speak of complex gendered and human relations that contradict their hierarchies. Their metaphysical premises about the nature of the divine, humanity, and moral responsibility indicate a potential egalitarian core. Gendered Morality offers a vital and disruptive new perspective on patriarchal Islamic ethics and metaphysics, showing the ways in which the philosophical tradition can support the aims of gender justice and human flourishing.

Islamic scriptural sources offer potentially radical notions of equality. Yet medieval Islamic philosophers chose to establish a hierarchical, male-centered virtue ethics. In Gendered Morality, Zahra Ayubi rethinks the tradition of Islamic philosophical ethics from a feminist critical perspective. She calls for a philosophical turn in the study of gender in Islam based on resources for gender equality that are unlocked by feminist engagement with the Islamic ethical tradition.

Developing a lens for a feminist philosophy of Islam, Ayubi analyzes constructions of masculinity, femininity, and gender relations in classic works of philosophical ethics. In close readings of foundational texts by Abu Hamid Muhammad al-Ghazali, Nasir-ad Din Tusi, and Jalal ad-Din Davani, she interrogates how these thinkers conceive of the ethical human being as an elite male within a hierarchical cosmology built on the exclusion of women and nonelites. Yet in the course of prescribing ethical behavior, the ethicists speak of complex gendered and human relations that contradict their hierarchies. Their metaphysical premises about the nature of the divine, humanity, and moral responsibility indicate a potential egalitarian core. Gendered Morality offers a vital and disruptive new perspective on patriarchal Islamic ethics and metaphysics, showing the ways in which the philosophical tradition can support the aims of gender justice and human flourishing.

Friends and Other Strangers argues for expanding the field of religious ethics to address the normative dimensions of culture, interpersonal desires, friendships and family, and institutional and political relationships. Richard B. Miller urges religious ethicists to turn to cultural studies to broaden the range of the issues they address and to examine matters of cultural practice and cultural difference in critical and self-reflexive ways.

Friends and Other Strangers critically discusses the ethics of ethnography; ethnocentrism, relativism, and moral criticism; empathy and the ethics of self-other attunement; indignation, empathy, and solidarity; the meaning of moral responsibility in relation to children and friends; civic virtue, war, and alterity; the normative and psychological dimensions of memory; and religion and democratic public life. Miller challenges distinctions between psyche and culture, self and other, and uses the concepts of intimacy and alterity as dialectical touchstones for examining the normative dimensions of self-other relationships. A wholly contemporary, global, and interdisciplinary work, Friends and Other Strangers illuminates aspects of moral life ethicists have otherwise overlooked.

Friends and Other Strangers argues for expanding the field of religious ethics to address the normative dimensions of culture, interpersonal desires, friendships and family, and institutional and political relationships. Richard B. Miller urges religious ethicists to turn to cultural studies to broaden the range of the issues they address and to examine matters of cultural practice and cultural difference in critical and self-reflexive ways.

Friends and Other Strangers critically discusses the ethics of ethnography; ethnocentrism, relativism, and moral criticism; empathy and the ethics of self-other attunement; indignation, empathy, and solidarity; the meaning of moral responsibility in relation to children and friends; civic virtue, war, and alterity; the normative and psychological dimensions of memory; and religion and democratic public life. Miller challenges distinctions between psyche and culture, self and other, and uses the concepts of intimacy and alterity as dialectical touchstones for examining the normative dimensions of self-other relationships. A wholly contemporary, global, and interdisciplinary work, Friends and Other Strangers illuminates aspects of moral life ethicists have otherwise overlooked.

There is a standard narrative that recurs throughout popular writings on yoga and tantra, from South Asian texts to Western esoteric thought: Kuṇḍalinī is the Serpent Power. She rests coiled at the base of the spine. If awakened, this divine feminine energy rises toward the crown of the head. Some are apprehensive of Kuṇḍalinī’s intense power, fearing physical and psychological turmoil. Others seek it out, hungry for experiences, both spiritual and sensual. But what does this story leave out? What are its cultural and historical roots? What do the many ways of experiencing Kuṇḍalinī tell us about this elusive phenomenon?

The Serpent’s Tale traces the intricate global histories of Kuṇḍalinī, from its Sanskrit origins to its popularity in the West. Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen explore its symbolic link with the serpent, its fraught connections to sexuality, and its commercialization in the form of Kuṇḍalinī yoga. Ranging from esoteric texts to global gurus, from the cliffs of California to the charnel grounds of Assam, they show that there has never been one single “authentic” model of Kuṇḍalinī but a multiplicity of visions. Bridging the gaps between textual and historical analysis and the complexities of embodied practice, Borkataky-Varma and Foxen reflect on the narration and transmission of experiences, including their own. Lively, accessible, and nuanced, The Serpent’s Tale offers rich insights for scholars, practitioners, and all readers drawn to Kuṇḍalinī.

There is a standard narrative that recurs throughout popular writings on yoga and tantra, from South Asian texts to Western esoteric thought: Kuṇḍalinī is the Serpent Power. She rests coiled at the base of the spine. If awakened, this divine feminine energy rises toward the crown of the head. Some are apprehensive of Kuṇḍalinī’s intense power, fearing physical and psychological turmoil. Others seek it out, hungry for experiences, both spiritual and sensual. But what does this story leave out? What are its cultural and historical roots? What do the many ways of experiencing Kuṇḍalinī tell us about this elusive phenomenon?

The Serpent’s Tale traces the intricate global histories of Kuṇḍalinī, from its Sanskrit origins to its popularity in the West. Sravana Borkataky-Varma and Anya Foxen explore its symbolic link with the serpent, its fraught connections to sexuality, and its commercialization in the form of Kuṇḍalinī yoga. Ranging from esoteric texts to global gurus, from the cliffs of California to the charnel grounds of Assam, they show that there has never been one single “authentic” model of Kuṇḍalinī but a multiplicity of visions. Bridging the gaps between textual and historical analysis and the complexities of embodied practice, Borkataky-Varma and Foxen reflect on the narration and transmission of experiences, including their own. Lively, accessible, and nuanced, The Serpent’s Tale offers rich insights for scholars, practitioners, and all readers drawn to Kuṇḍalinī.

We are constantly being warned, but we seldom heed warnings. Cautioned about authoritarian leaders, climate change, technological dystopias, or other catastrophes, we fail to take action or even take them seriously. Too often warnings are dismissed—much like the artists, scientists, environmentalists, and intellectuals who deliver them. Why don’t we listen?

Santiago Zabala asks us to think of philosophy as a warning, a call to heed ominous “signs from the future.” He argues that warnings—as distinct from predictions—invite us to see the possibility of a radical break from the present. Predictions tell us to submit to the inevitable, but warnings ask us to take part in shaping a different future. A philosophy of warnings offers an alternative horizon of understanding beyond “the real” and “the normal,” and a politics of warnings helps us confront hidden emergencies through collective interpretation, listening, and action.

Signs from the Future places thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, and Arendt into conversation with present-day politics, art, and culture, drawing our attention to unheeded warnings. This timely and engaging book shows why unresolved crises from the past must be interpreted anew today if we are to imagine an equitable future—or a future at all.

We are constantly being warned, but we seldom heed warnings. Cautioned about authoritarian leaders, climate change, technological dystopias, or other catastrophes, we fail to take action or even take them seriously. Too often warnings are dismissed—much like the artists, scientists, environmentalists, and intellectuals who deliver them. Why don’t we listen?

Santiago Zabala asks us to think of philosophy as a warning, a call to heed ominous “signs from the future.” He argues that warnings—as distinct from predictions—invite us to see the possibility of a radical break from the present. Predictions tell us to submit to the inevitable, but warnings ask us to take part in shaping a different future. A philosophy of warnings offers an alternative horizon of understanding beyond “the real” and “the normal,” and a politics of warnings helps us confront hidden emergencies through collective interpretation, listening, and action.

Signs from the Future places thinkers such as Nietzsche, Heidegger, de Beauvoir, and Arendt into conversation with present-day politics, art, and culture, drawing our attention to unheeded warnings. This timely and engaging book shows why unresolved crises from the past must be interpreted anew today if we are to imagine an equitable future—or a future at all.

Does being in motion change how we think? Tracing the connections between thinking and transit—including walking, being transported by a vehicle, and many other modes—this innovative book shows how embodiment and movement deepen, expand, and transform creative thought.

Megan Craig and Edward S. Casey provide a collaborative phenomenological exploration of thought in motion, interspersing lively first-person accounts with broader philosophical inquiry. Their investigation, structured around the four ancient elements—water, air, earth, and fire—ranges across swimming, boats, balloons, planes, cars, trains, and other modes of transport. Craig and Casey invite readers to recall their own experiences of travel and how thinking changes in tandem with shifting environments and whatever conveys a person from place to place. They also consider how changing climates and evolving technologies, with new rhythms and materialities, have shaped human thinking in its many varieties.

Thinking in Transit celebrates forms of movement and motion that carry the body and mind out of their habituated routines. This book urges a change in how philosophers have traditionally framed the setting for serious thought: from the austere, solitary space of a study to populated places of interaction and passage.

Does being in motion change how we think? Tracing the connections between thinking and transit—including walking, being transported by a vehicle, and many other modes—this innovative book shows how embodiment and movement deepen, expand, and transform creative thought.

Megan Craig and Edward S. Casey provide a collaborative phenomenological exploration of thought in motion, interspersing lively first-person accounts with broader philosophical inquiry. Their investigation, structured around the four ancient elements—water, air, earth, and fire—ranges across swimming, boats, balloons, planes, cars, trains, and other modes of transport. Craig and Casey invite readers to recall their own experiences of travel and how thinking changes in tandem with shifting environments and whatever conveys a person from place to place. They also consider how changing climates and evolving technologies, with new rhythms and materialities, have shaped human thinking in its many varieties.

Thinking in Transit celebrates forms of movement and motion that carry the body and mind out of their habituated routines. This book urges a change in how philosophers have traditionally framed the setting for serious thought: from the austere, solitary space of a study to populated places of interaction and passage.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, existence is perpetual transformation. Humans and gods become plants and animals, stones and stars—or something in between. No rigid distinctions remain untroubled. In his own time and in ours, Ovid’s work challenges fundamental assumptions about the universe and humans’ place in it.

Metamorphoses Reimagined offers a twenty-first-century retelling of Ovid’s masterpiece that decenters the human. Michael Marder reinvents the text in new genres—letters, essays, confessions, prayers, poetic fragments, and dramatic dialogues, among others—some picking up where the original left off, others reconceiving the narrative in alternative forms. Marder’s metamorphoses invert protagonists’ relationships and reinterpret their transformations, playing with stylistic adaptations and foregrounding nonanthropocentric points of view. Above all, they explore the metamorphosis of language itself and ask in what, if any, sense the notion and the figure of the human are worth holding onto today.

Providing fresh perspective on Ovid’s classic in light of contemporary concerns, Metamorphoses Reimagined is a work of breathtaking philosophical, literary, and linguistic experimentation, proposing creative ways to write and think, to be and become.

In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, existence is perpetual transformation. Humans and gods become plants and animals, stones and stars—or something in between. No rigid distinctions remain untroubled. In his own time and in ours, Ovid’s work challenges fundamental assumptions about the universe and humans’ place in it.

Metamorphoses Reimagined offers a twenty-first-century retelling of Ovid’s masterpiece that decenters the human. Michael Marder reinvents the text in new genres—letters, essays, confessions, prayers, poetic fragments, and dramatic dialogues, among others—some picking up where the original left off, others reconceiving the narrative in alternative forms. Marder’s metamorphoses invert protagonists’ relationships and reinterpret their transformations, playing with stylistic adaptations and foregrounding nonanthropocentric points of view. Above all, they explore the metamorphosis of language itself and ask in what, if any, sense the notion and the figure of the human are worth holding onto today.

Providing fresh perspective on Ovid’s classic in light of contemporary concerns, Metamorphoses Reimagined is a work of breathtaking philosophical, literary, and linguistic experimentation, proposing creative ways to write and think, to be and become.

Underlying Julia Kristeva’s Nations Without Nationalism is the idea that otherness—whether it be ethnic, religious, social, or political—needs to be understood and accepted in order to guarantee social harmony. This book is an impassioned plea for tolerance and for commonality, aimed at a world brimming over with racism and xenophobia. Responding to the rise of neo-Nazi groups in Germany and Eastern Europe and the popularity of the National Front in France, Kristeva turns to the origins of the nation-state to illustrate the problematic nature of nationalism and its complex configurations in subsequent centuries. For Kristeva, the key to commonality can be found in Montesquieu’s esprit general—his notion of the social body as a guaranteed hierarchy of private rights.

Nations Without Nationalism also contains Kristeva’s thoughts on Harlem Desir, the founder of the antiracist organization SOS Racisme; the links between psychoanalysis and nationalism; the historical nature of French national identity; the relationship between esprit general and Volksgeist; Charles de Gaulle’s complex ideas involving the “nation” and his dream of a unified Europe. Nations Without Nationalism reflects a passionate commitment to enlightenment and social justice. As ethnic strife persists in Europe and the United States, Kristeva’s humanistic message carries with it a special resonance and urgency.

What is beauty, and what is its political function? In what ways might it help undermine white supremacy and cultivate a more democratic political culture? Democracy and Beauty shines a light on W. E. B. Du Bois’s attempts to answer these questions during the decade surrounding the First World War and, in so doing, offers a groundbreaking account of the philosopher’s aesthetics.

Robert Gooding-Williams reconstructs Du Bois’s defense of the political potential of beauty to challenge oppressive systems and foster an inclusive democracy. White supremacy is a powerful force that defies rational revision, Du Bois argued, because it is rooted in the entrenched routines of its adherents. Beauty, however, has a distinctive role to play in the struggle against white supremacy. It can strengthen resolve and ward off despair by showing the oppressed that they can alter their social world, and it can unsettle and even transform the pernicious habits that perpetuate white supremacy. Gooding-Williams also explores Du Bois’s account of the interplay among white supremacy, Christianity, capitalism, and imperialism as well as key tensions in his work. A rich engagement with Du Bois’s philosophy of beauty, this book demonstrates the relevance of his social thought and aesthetics to present-day arguments about Black pessimism, Black optimism, and the aesthetic turn in Black studies.

What is beauty, and what is its political function? In what ways might it help undermine white supremacy and cultivate a more democratic political culture? Democracy and Beauty shines a light on W. E. B. Du Bois’s attempts to answer these questions during the decade surrounding the First World War and, in so doing, offers a groundbreaking account of the philosopher’s aesthetics.

Robert Gooding-Williams reconstructs Du Bois’s defense of the political potential of beauty to challenge oppressive systems and foster an inclusive democracy. White supremacy is a powerful force that defies rational revision, Du Bois argued, because it is rooted in the entrenched routines of its adherents. Beauty, however, has a distinctive role to play in the struggle against white supremacy. It can strengthen resolve and ward off despair by showing the oppressed that they can alter their social world, and it can unsettle and even transform the pernicious habits that perpetuate white supremacy. Gooding-Williams also explores Du Bois’s account of the interplay among white supremacy, Christianity, capitalism, and imperialism as well as key tensions in his work. A rich engagement with Du Bois’s philosophy of beauty, this book demonstrates the relevance of his social thought and aesthetics to present-day arguments about Black pessimism, Black optimism, and the aesthetic turn in Black studies.

In the early 1950s, the young Michel Foucault took a keen interest in the method of existential analysis—Daseinsanalyse—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. He gave a lecture course on this topic at the University of Lille in the spring of 1953 and wrote a detailed introduction to the 1954 French translation of Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (1930), in which he promised a forthcoming book that would “situate existential analysis within the development of contemporary reflection on man.” This book presents Foucault’s unpublished manuscript on Binswanger and existential analysis for the first time in English, offering crucial insight into his intellectual development.

Foucault carries out a systematic examination of Daseinsanalyse, contrasting it with psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology and championing its ambition to understand mental illness. In his critique of existential analysis, Foucault began his turn toward emphasizing the primacy of experience, which would lead to the radically new perspective and genealogical methods of The History of Madness and The History of Sexuality. Revealing a little-known influence on Foucault’s historicist approach, Binswanger and Existential Analysis reminds us of his unparalleled ability to destabilize our conceptions of self.

In the early 1950s, the young Michel Foucault took a keen interest in the method of existential analysis—Daseinsanalyse—developed by the Swiss psychiatrist Ludwig Binswanger. He gave a lecture course on this topic at the University of Lille in the spring of 1953 and wrote a detailed introduction to the 1954 French translation of Binswanger’s Dream and Existence (1930), in which he promised a forthcoming book that would “situate existential analysis within the development of contemporary reflection on man.” This book presents Foucault’s unpublished manuscript on Binswanger and existential analysis for the first time in English, offering crucial insight into his intellectual development.

Foucault carries out a systematic examination of Daseinsanalyse, contrasting it with psychiatry, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology and championing its ambition to understand mental illness. In his critique of existential analysis, Foucault began his turn toward emphasizing the primacy of experience, which would lead to the radically new perspective and genealogical methods of The History of Madness and The History of Sexuality. Revealing a little-known influence on Foucault’s historicist approach, Binswanger and Existential Analysis reminds us of his unparalleled ability to destabilize our conceptions of self.

Under the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE), a self-described recluse wrote a series of essays denouncing the evils of his time. Assailing corruption, misrule, and neglect of the common people, Wang Fu’s Essays of a Recluse (Qianfulun) offers a rare outsider view of culture, society, and government during this period. This book presents the first full English translation of the Qianfulun, one of the most significant works to survive from the Eastern Han period.

Wang’s essays range across moral philosophy, cosmology, education, military affairs, and conflict in the borderlands. The essays decry governmental corruption and rampant litigiousness, as well as the callous neglect of the poor and the exploitation of women. To remedy these failures, Wang Fu calls for heeding the wisdom of the classics and implementing procedures for recruiting worthy officials. His focused interest in the common people and sensitivity to their travails make Essays of a Recluse a rich source of information about daily life during the Eastern Han period, providing insights into folk religion, divination, marriage practices, and the legal system. Widely admired in his lifetime, Wang’s essays were later singled out by Han Yu (768–824 CE) as one of the three great works of the period. Anne Behnke Kinney and John S. Major’s expert translation makes an important but notoriously complex and difficult work accessible to a range of English-language readers.

What does it mean to love? Does love complete us, giving us purpose and meaning? Or does it tie us down and even harm us? Is erotic desire complicit in oppression, or could it deliver liberation? Are our desires extricable from the wrongs of our societies? And in today’s world, is love still worth the trouble?

This book develops a critical theory of sexual love and friendship, offering profound new ways to understand the troublesome nature of eros. Federica Gregoratto explores the ambivalence of erotic love, which is at once intimately interwoven with heterosexism, racism, and neoliberal capitalism yet entices us with the tantalizing possibility of transformation. Drawing on a rich array of sources—from Frankfurt School critical theory to feminist thought and contemporary philosophies of emotions and affects, as well as poetry, novels, films, and music—she argues that love provides unexpected resources for political agency, resistance, and emancipation. Gregoratto makes a passionate defense of erotic freedom as an adventurous process through which we understand, together with others, who we are and who we want to become, both in our individual existences and in our social lives. Wide-ranging and daring, Love Troubles invites us to reflect on our fraught amorous experiences, showing why we should cherish and learn from them.

Under the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 CE), a self-described recluse wrote a series of essays denouncing the evils of his time. Assailing corruption, misrule, and neglect of the common people, Wang Fu’s Essays of a Recluse (Qianfulun) offers a rare outsider view of culture, society, and government during this period. This book presents the first full English translation of the Qianfulun, one of the most significant works to survive from the Eastern Han period.

Wang’s essays range across moral philosophy, cosmology, education, military affairs, and conflict in the borderlands. The essays decry governmental corruption and rampant litigiousness, as well as the callous neglect of the poor and the exploitation of women. To remedy these failures, Wang Fu calls for heeding the wisdom of the classics and implementing procedures for recruiting worthy officials. His focused interest in the common people and sensitivity to their travails make Essays of a Recluse a rich source of information about daily life during the Eastern Han period, providing insights into folk religion, divination, marriage practices, and the legal system. Widely admired in his lifetime, Wang’s essays were later singled out by Han Yu (768–824 CE) as one of the three great works of the period. Anne Behnke Kinney and John S. Major’s expert translation makes an important but notoriously complex and difficult work accessible to a range of English-language readers.

What is the relationship between the ethical transformation of the self and the political transformation of the world? This book explores the ways several twentieth-century thinkers can help us relate the “care of the self” to the “care of the other,” tracing their accounts of how and why practices intended to change an individual can help spur social and political change, just as collective political action can produce a transformation of the self.

Daniel Louis Wyche examines the political implications of what he calls practices of ethical self-change. These include Pierre Hadot’s notion of “spiritual exercises”; what the French sociologist of labor Georges Friedmann calls the “interior effort”; Michel Foucault’s ethics of the “care of the self”; what Martin Luther King Jr. refers to as the work of “self-purification” integral to direct action; and Audre Lorde’s claim that caring for herself constitutes a form of “political warfare.” Wyche argues that these concepts can collectively provide an understanding that effaces distinctions between the care of the self, the other, and the community in a way that avoids reducing the political to the ethical. Ambitious and nuanced, The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other offers a framework for unifying individual moral action and collective political life.

What is the relationship between the ethical transformation of the self and the political transformation of the world? This book explores the ways several twentieth-century thinkers can help us relate the “care of the self” to the “care of the other,” tracing their accounts of how and why practices intended to change an individual can help spur social and political change, just as collective political action can produce a transformation of the self.

Daniel Louis Wyche examines the political implications of what he calls practices of ethical self-change. These include Pierre Hadot’s notion of “spiritual exercises”; what the French sociologist of labor Georges Friedmann calls the “interior effort”; Michel Foucault’s ethics of the “care of the self”; what Martin Luther King Jr. refers to as the work of “self-purification” integral to direct action; and Audre Lorde’s claim that caring for herself constitutes a form of “political warfare.” Wyche argues that these concepts can collectively provide an understanding that effaces distinctions between the care of the self, the other, and the community in a way that avoids reducing the political to the ethical. Ambitious and nuanced, The Care of the Self and the Care of the Other offers a framework for unifying individual moral action and collective political life.

Alain Badiou’s 1985 seminar on Parmenides initiated his ongoing dialogue with the pre-Socratic philosopher and set out some of the foundational ideas of his own major philosophical works, including Being and Event. The seminar provides both a new understanding of the importance of Parmenides in establishing the fundamental terms of philosophy and a vital account of the intimate relationship between philosophy and mathematics.

For Badiou, Parmenides inaugurates the history of philosophy by linking being, thinking, and nonbeing in a “Borromean knot”—a linkage in which the relationship between any two terms requires the mediation of a third. Badiou traces the permutations of this connection among fundamental concepts as it was transmitted to later thinkers, including Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Hegel, and Heidegger. He also argues that Parmenides’s account of philosophy establishes a new kind of formal reasoning that, like mathematics, breaks with the Greek mythic and poetic traditions and their assumption that truth derives from sensory experience. This seminar demonstrates Badiou’s unparalleled ability to recast the fundamental questions of philosophy.

Just Awakening uncovers a forgotten philosophy of social democracy inspired by Yogācāra, an ancient, nondualistic Buddhist philosophy that claims everything in the perceptible cosmos is mere consciousness and consists of multiple karmically connected yet bounded lifeworlds. This Yogācāra social philosophy emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among Chinese intellectuals who struggled against the violent Social Darwinist logic of the survival of the fittest. Its proponents were convinced that the root cause of crisis in both China and the West was epistemic—an unexamined faith in one common, objective world and a subject-object divide. This dualistic paradigm, in their view, had dire consequences, including moral egoism, competition for material wealth, and racial war. Yogācāra insights about plurality, interdependence, and intersubjectivity, however, had the capacity to awaken the world from these deadly dreams.

Jessica X. Zu reconstructs this account of modern Yogācāra philosophy, arguing that it offers new vocabularies with which to reconceptualize equality and freedom. Yogācāra thinking, she shows, diffracts the illusions of individual identity, social categories, and material wealth into aggregated, recurring karmic processes. It then guides the reassembly of a complex society through nonhierarchical, noncoercive, and collaborative actions, sustained by new behavior patterns and modes of thought. Demonstrating why Chinese Buddhist social philosophy offers powerful resources for social justice and liberation today, Just Awakening invites readers to think with modern Yogācāra philosophers about other ways of building egalitarian futures.

Just Awakening uncovers a forgotten philosophy of social democracy inspired by Yogācāra, an ancient, nondualistic Buddhist philosophy that claims everything in the perceptible cosmos is mere consciousness and consists of multiple karmically connected yet bounded lifeworlds. This Yogācāra social philosophy emerged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries among Chinese intellectuals who struggled against the violent Social Darwinist logic of the survival of the fittest. Its proponents were convinced that the root cause of crisis in both China and the West was epistemic—an unexamined faith in one common, objective world and a subject-object divide. This dualistic paradigm, in their view, had dire consequences, including moral egoism, competition for material wealth, and racial war. Yogācāra insights about plurality, interdependence, and intersubjectivity, however, had the capacity to awaken the world from these deadly dreams.

Jessica X. Zu reconstructs this account of modern Yogācāra philosophy, arguing that it offers new vocabularies with which to reconceptualize equality and freedom. Yogācāra thinking, she shows, diffracts the illusions of individual identity, social categories, and material wealth into aggregated, recurring karmic processes. It then guides the reassembly of a complex society through nonhierarchical, noncoercive, and collaborative actions, sustained by new behavior patterns and modes of thought. Demonstrating why Chinese Buddhist social philosophy offers powerful resources for social justice and liberation today, Just Awakening invites readers to think with modern Yogācāra philosophers about other ways of building egalitarian futures.

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich (1342–after 1416) is the first known woman to author a book in the English language, recognized today for her strikingly optimistic claim that “all shall be well.” Her visionary text Revelations of Divine Love is the product of many years of contemplation, written and revised after a life-changing event of near-fatal illness and divine revelation.

Hannah Lucas explores the entanglement of illness and revelation in Julian’s writings, illuminating the unexpected commonalities between the medical and the mystical and their significance for philosophies of health. Framed by an original application of post-Heideggerian philosophy, Impossible Recovery offers a vivid new interpretation of the medieval mystic as crafting a proto-phenomenological theology of well-being. Lucas’s careful readings pay close attention to Julian’s mystical language and poetics, revealing the surprising resonances of her writings with modern and postmodern thought. Refracted through Julian’s Revelations, this book advances a powerful existential query about the possibilities of recovery—of well-being, and of medieval history.

What does it mean to love? Does love complete us, giving us purpose and meaning? Or does it tie us down and even harm us? Is erotic desire complicit in oppression, or could it deliver liberation? Are our desires extricable from the wrongs of our societies? And in today’s world, is love still worth the trouble?

This book develops a critical theory of sexual love and friendship, offering profound new ways to understand the troublesome nature of eros. Federica Gregoratto explores the ambivalence of erotic love, which is at once intimately interwoven with heterosexism, racism, and neoliberal capitalism yet entices us with the tantalizing possibility of transformation. Drawing on a rich array of sources—from Frankfurt School critical theory to feminist thought and contemporary philosophies of emotions and affects, as well as poetry, novels, films, and music—she argues that love provides unexpected resources for political agency, resistance, and emancipation. Gregoratto makes a passionate defense of erotic freedom as an adventurous process through which we understand, together with others, who we are and who we want to become, both in our individual existences and in our social lives. Wide-ranging and daring, Love Troubles invites us to reflect on our fraught amorous experiences, showing why we should cherish and learn from them.

The medieval mystic Julian of Norwich (1342–after 1416) is the first known woman to author a book in the English language, recognized today for her strikingly optimistic claim that “all shall be well.” Her visionary text Revelations of Divine Love is the product of many years of contemplation, written and revised after a life-changing event of near-fatal illness and divine revelation.

Hannah Lucas explores the entanglement of illness and revelation in Julian’s writings, illuminating the unexpected commonalities between the medical and the mystical and their significance for philosophies of health. Framed by an original application of post-Heideggerian philosophy, Impossible Recovery offers a vivid new interpretation of the medieval mystic as crafting a proto-phenomenological theology of well-being. Lucas’s careful readings pay close attention to Julian’s mystical language and poetics, revealing the surprising resonances of her writings with modern and postmodern thought. Refracted through Julian’s Revelations, this book advances a powerful existential query about the possibilities of recovery—of well-being, and of medieval history.

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns her famed critical eye to a study of the head as symbol and metaphor, as religious object and physical fact, further developing a critical theme in her work—the power of horror—and the potential for the face to provide an experience of the sacred.

Kristeva considers the head as icon, artifact, and locus of thought, seeking a keener understanding of the violence and desire that drives us to sever, and in some cases keep, such a potent object. Her study stretches all the way back to 6,000 B.C.E., with humans' early decoration and worship of skulls, and follows with the Medusa myth; the mandylion of Laon (a holy relic in which the face of a saint appears on a piece of cloth); the biblical story of John the Baptist and his counterpart, Salome; tales of the guillotine; modern murder mysteries; and even the rhetoric surrounding the fight for and against capital punishment. Kristeva interprets these "capital visions" through the lens of psychoanalysis, drawing infinite connections between their manifestation and sacred experience and very much affirming the possibility of the sacred, even in an era of "faceless" interaction.

Julia Kristeva refracts the impulse to hate (and our attempts to subvert, sublimate, and otherwise process it) through psychoanalysis and text, exploring worlds, women, religion, portraits, and the act of writing. Her inquiry spans themes, topics, and figures central to her writing, and her paths of discovery advance the theoretical innovations that are so characteristic of her thought.

Kristeva rearticulates and extends her analysis of language, abjection, idealization, female sexuality, love, and forgiveness. She examines the "maladies of the soul," utilizing examples from her practice and the ailments of her patients, such as fatigue, irritability, and general malaise. She sources the Bible and texts by Marguerite Duras, St. Teresa of Ávila, Roland Barthes, Simone de Beauvoir, and Georgia O'Keefe. Balancing political calamity and individual pathology, she addresses internal and external catastrophes and global and personal injuries, confronting the nature of depression, obliviousness, fear, and the agony of being and nothingness.

Throughout Kristeva develops the notion that psychoanalysis is the key to serenity, with its processes of turning back, looking back, investigating the self, and refashioning psychical damage into something useful and beautiful. Constant questioning, Kristeva contends, is essential to achieving the coming to terms we all seek at the core of forgiveness.

Alain Badiou’s 1983–1984 lecture series on “the One” is the earliest of his seminars that he has chosen to publish. It focuses on the philosophical concept of oneness in the works of Descartes, Plato, and Kant—a crucial foil for his signature metaphysical concept, the multiple. Badiou declares that there is no “One”: there is no fundamental unit of being; being is inherently multiple.

What is novel in Badiou’s view of multiplicity is his reliance on mathematics, and set theory in particular. A set is a collection of things—yet, as he observes, it often is taken to “count as one” operationally for the purposes of mathematical transformations. In this seminar, distinguishing between “the One” and “counting as one” emerges as essential to Badiou’s ontological project. His analysis of reflections on oneness in Descartes, Plato, and Kant prefigures core arguments of his defining work, Being and Event.

Showcasing the seeds of Badiou’s key ideas and later thought, The One features singular readings, breathtaking theorizations, and frequently astonishing offhand remarks.

Most Indian and Tibetan religious traditions have some theory of yogic perception—a profound type of sentience afforded by meditative practice. And most consider it the bedrock of their religious authority, the primary means by which one gains spiritual insight. Disagreements about what yogis perceive abound, however, spanning many philosophical topics, including epistemology, ontology, phenomenology, and language.

Out of Sight, Into Mind is a groundbreaking exploration of debates over yogic perception, revealing their contemporary relevance as a catalyst for comparative philosophy. Jed Forman examines intellectual and philosophical developments over a millennium in India and Tibet, offering rich analyses of many previously untranslated texts. He traces divergences and confluences between thinkers within and across traditions, demonstrating that accounts of yogic perception shifted from theories based on vision to ones based on the mind. Drawing on this investigation, Forman calls for broadening philosophical discourse, arguing that subjects like yogic perception have often been deemed “religious” and thus neglected. He contends that these Indian and Tibetan debates hold important lessons for present-day topics such as hermeneutics and exegesis, the relationship between conception and perception, representationalism versus phenomenalism, and the limits of language. Shedding new light on the intellectual history of yogic perception, this book models how a comparative approach can yield novel philosophical insights.

Most Indian and Tibetan religious traditions have some theory of yogic perception—a profound type of sentience afforded by meditative practice. And most consider it the bedrock of their religious authority, the primary means by which one gains spiritual insight. Disagreements about what yogis perceive abound, however, spanning many philosophical topics, including epistemology, ontology, phenomenology, and language.

Out of Sight, Into Mind is a groundbreaking exploration of debates over yogic perception, revealing their contemporary relevance as a catalyst for comparative philosophy. Jed Forman examines intellectual and philosophical developments over a millennium in India and Tibet, offering rich analyses of many previously untranslated texts. He traces divergences and confluences between thinkers within and across traditions, demonstrating that accounts of yogic perception shifted from theories based on vision to ones based on the mind. Drawing on this investigation, Forman calls for broadening philosophical discourse, arguing that subjects like yogic perception have often been deemed “religious” and thus neglected. He contends that these Indian and Tibetan debates hold important lessons for present-day topics such as hermeneutics and exegesis, the relationship between conception and perception, representationalism versus phenomenalism, and the limits of language. Shedding new light on the intellectual history of yogic perception, this book models how a comparative approach can yield novel philosophical insights.

Liberalism holds that individual freedom can be realized under capitalism. “Classical liberalism” tends to focus on excessive state interference as the primary threat to freedom. More recent theorists, however, recognize that capitalism, left to itself, would be characterized by mass social ills and argue that state intervention is necessary to guarantee individual freedom.

This book is a Marxist critique of liberalism. Prabhat Patnaik demonstrates that liberalism and Marxism provide vastly differing accounts of individual freedom and the forces that restrict it. In the Marxist view, people, contrary to appearances, lack real agency under capitalism. Competition coerces individuals to act according to the impersonal logic of capitalism, making them mere instruments of the system. In this way, capitalism creates universal alienation, and true individual freedom is possible only through overcoming it.

Patnaik argues that socialism can secure individual agency in both economic and political spheres, though actually existing socialism has failed in this respect. He also considers what a socialist society should look like: not a planned economy but a highly decentralized system in which citizens are directly involved in taking decisions affecting their lives and enjoy fundamental economic rights as well as political ones. Readable yet rigorous, Beyond Liberalism brings together political philosophy and political economy to offer a renewed vision of socialism.

Liberalism holds that individual freedom can be realized under capitalism. “Classical liberalism” tends to focus on excessive state interference as the primary threat to freedom. More recent theorists, however, recognize that capitalism, left to itself, would be characterized by mass social ills and argue that state intervention is necessary to guarantee individual freedom.

This book is a Marxist critique of liberalism. Prabhat Patnaik demonstrates that liberalism and Marxism provide vastly differing accounts of individual freedom and the forces that restrict it. In the Marxist view, people, contrary to appearances, lack real agency under capitalism. Competition coerces individuals to act according to the impersonal logic of capitalism, making them mere instruments of the system. In this way, capitalism creates universal alienation, and true individual freedom is possible only through overcoming it.

Patnaik argues that socialism can secure individual agency in both economic and political spheres, though actually existing socialism has failed in this respect. He also considers what a socialist society should look like: not a planned economy but a highly decentralized system in which citizens are directly involved in taking decisions affecting their lives and enjoy fundamental economic rights as well as political ones. Readable yet rigorous, Beyond Liberalism brings together political philosophy and political economy to offer a renewed vision of socialism.

The notion of landscape typically seems innocuous, associated with leisure and contemplation. Likewise, aesthetics is often seen as apolitical, a matter of subjective tastes and preferences. This book challenges the common understanding of these categories as disengaged and demonstrates how uniting landscape studies and philosophical aesthetics opens new ways of addressing both the environmental crisis and the crisis of the humanities.

Alberto L. Siani argues that the concept of landscape helps us overcome deeply ingrained oppositions, such as nature and culture, spirit and flesh, or the environment and the human. Landscape represents the intersection of these categories and therefore provides a helpful vantage point on contemporary predicaments that cannot be understood within dualistic frameworks. An engaged aesthetics shows that landscapes are not simply ways of seeing the world but ways of being in the world, offering practical guidance for inhabiting places ethically. Landscape Aesthetics sheds new light on issues spanning art and its interpretation, environmentalism, temporality, lived spaces, justice, education, and interdisciplinarity. Bringing together a wide range of sources across philosophy and other disciplines as well as personal experience, Siani reveals the key role of landscape and aesthetics in responding to the pressing crises we face today.

The notion of landscape typically seems innocuous, associated with leisure and contemplation. Likewise, aesthetics is often seen as apolitical, a matter of subjective tastes and preferences. This book challenges the common understanding of these categories as disengaged and demonstrates how uniting landscape studies and philosophical aesthetics opens new ways of addressing both the environmental crisis and the crisis of the humanities.

Alberto L. Siani argues that the concept of landscape helps us overcome deeply ingrained oppositions, such as nature and culture, spirit and flesh, or the environment and the human. Landscape represents the intersection of these categories and therefore provides a helpful vantage point on contemporary predicaments that cannot be understood within dualistic frameworks. An engaged aesthetics shows that landscapes are not simply ways of seeing the world but ways of being in the world, offering practical guidance for inhabiting places ethically. Landscape Aesthetics sheds new light on issues spanning art and its interpretation, environmentalism, temporality, lived spaces, justice, education, and interdisciplinarity. Bringing together a wide range of sources across philosophy and other disciplines as well as personal experience, Siani reveals the key role of landscape and aesthetics in responding to the pressing crises we face today.

In The Beauty of Choice, the renowned cultural critic Wendy Steiner offers a dazzling new account of aesthetics grounded in female agency. Through a series of linked meditations on canonical and contemporary literature and art, she casts women’s taste as the engine of liberal values.

Steiner reframes long-standing questions surrounding desire, art, sexual assault, and beauty in light of #MeToo. Beginning with an opera she wrote based on Chaucer’s “The Wife of Bath’s Tale,” she presents women’s sexual choices as fundamentally aesthetic in nature—expressions of their taste—and artworks as stagings of choice in courtship, coquetry, consent, marriage, and liberation. A merger of art criticism, evolutionary theory, political history, and aesthetics, this book paints the struggle between female autonomy and patriarchal violence and extremism as the essence of art.

The Beauty of Choice pursues its claims through a striking diversity of examples: Sei Shōnagon’s defense of pleasure in the Pillow Book; Picasso’s and Balthus’s sexualization of their models; the redefinition of “waste” in postmodern fiction; and interactivity and empathy in the works of contemporary artists such as Marlene Dumas, Barbara MacCallum, Kristin Beeler, and Hannah Gadsby. It offers the first critical study of Heroines, a memorial to the twenty thousand women raped in Kosovo during the Serbian genocide. This deeply original book gives taste, beauty, and pleasure central roles in a passionate defense of women’s freedom.

Nothing Sacred makes a bold call for reconceptualizing the projects of humanism and democracy as creative sources of emancipatory meaning, from the immediate political sphere to the farthest reaches of planetary ways of living.

Restaging Aristotle’s classic notion of the “political animal” in broad historical and geographical frames, Stathis Gourgouris explores the autopoietic capacities of human-being in society, while developing new frameworks of anticolonial humanism and radical democracy as the only worthy adversaries of neoliberal capitalism.

This reconfigured anthropological horizon enables us to imagine new ways of living by learning to pursue a radical politics of autonomy and a planetary vision that upholds life-affirming coexistence and equal sharing against the fetishism of hierarchy and servitude, money and technologic, sovereignty and endless growth.

Written with daring, erudition, and anarchic contestation, this book seeks the political through a poetic perspective. Nothing Sacred rejects niche thinking in the academy and engages a vast domain of reflections on the problem of human-being in today’s dismal world.

What is it like to experience rapture? For philosopher Christopher Hamilton, it is a loss of self that is also a return to self—an overflowing and emptying out of the self that also nourishes and fills the self. In this inviting book, he reflects on the nature of rapture and its crucial yet unacknowledged place in our lives.

Hamilton explores moments of rapture in everyday existence and aesthetic experience, tracing its disruptive power and illuminating its philosophical significance. Rapture is found in sexual love and other forms of intense physical experience, such as Philippe Petit’s nerve-defying wire walk between the Twin Towers. Hamilton also locates it in quieter but equally joyous moments, such as contemplating a work of art or the natural world. He considers a range of examples in philosophy and culture—Nietzsche and Weil, Woolf and Chekhov, the extremes of experience in Werner Herzog’s films—as well as aspects of ordinary life, from illness to gardening. Conversational and evocative, this book calls on us to ask how we might make ourselves more open to experiences of rapturous joy and freedom.

What is it like to experience rapture? For philosopher Christopher Hamilton, it is a loss of self that is also a return to self—an overflowing and emptying out of the self that also nourishes and fills the self. In this inviting book, he reflects on the nature of rapture and its crucial yet unacknowledged place in our lives.

Hamilton explores moments of rapture in everyday existence and aesthetic experience, tracing its disruptive power and illuminating its philosophical significance. Rapture is found in sexual love and other forms of intense physical experience, such as Philippe Petit’s nerve-defying wire walk between the Twin Towers. Hamilton also locates it in quieter but equally joyous moments, such as contemplating a work of art or the natural world. He considers a range of examples in philosophy and culture—Nietzsche and Weil, Woolf and Chekhov, the extremes of experience in Werner Herzog’s films—as well as aspects of ordinary life, from illness to gardening. Conversational and evocative, this book calls on us to ask how we might make ourselves more open to experiences of rapturous joy and freedom.

In the early twentieth century, André Colomer was perhaps the best-known figure in the anarchist movement. A poet, philosopher, activist, and public speaker, he was enmeshed in the Parisian political and artistic scene at a time of political and cultural revolution. Amid the avant-garde explosions of Cubism, futurism, and surrealism and the ferment of radical politics on left and right, Colomer became anarchism’s leading advocate. He galvanized the Parisian public through his agitational writing and organizing, as well as his involvement in a sensational murder case, while developing a distinctive philosophical account of anarchist individualism. Yet Colomer died in obscurity in Moscow, abandoned by his friends and comrades, and is scarcely known in the English-speaking world today.

Lyrical Individualism presents a selection of Colomer’s crucial writings, with a focus on anarchist theory and the philosophy of Henri Bergson. It reveals the richness of Colomer’s philosophical work, particularly his creative engagement with Bergson, Max Stirner, and Friedrich Nietzsche to forge a novel anarchist ideology. Colomer’s writings not only offer valuable insights into interwar anarchism, they also present a distinctive philosophical vision that in many ways anticipates theories and debates animating radical political movements today. This book also showcases his acerbic and pugnacious political commentary on the turbulent events of the 1910s and 1920s. The first translation and publication of Colomer’s work since his untimely death in 1931, Lyrical Individualism allows a range of readers to discover this vital thinker.

In the early twentieth century, André Colomer was perhaps the best-known figure in the anarchist movement. A poet, philosopher, activist, and public speaker, he was enmeshed in the Parisian political and artistic scene at a time of political and cultural revolution. Amid the avant-garde explosions of Cubism, futurism, and surrealism and the ferment of radical politics on left and right, Colomer became anarchism’s leading advocate. He galvanized the Parisian public through his agitational writing and organizing, as well as his involvement in a sensational murder case, while developing a distinctive philosophical account of anarchist individualism. Yet Colomer died in obscurity in Moscow, abandoned by his friends and comrades, and is scarcely known in the English-speaking world today.

Lyrical Individualism presents a selection of Colomer’s crucial writings, with a focus on anarchist theory and the philosophy of Henri Bergson. It reveals the richness of Colomer’s philosophical work, particularly his creative engagement with Bergson, Max Stirner, and Friedrich Nietzsche to forge a novel anarchist ideology. Colomer’s writings not only offer valuable insights into interwar anarchism, they also present a distinctive philosophical vision that in many ways anticipates theories and debates animating radical political movements today. This book also showcases his acerbic and pugnacious political commentary on the turbulent events of the 1910s and 1920s. The first translation and publication of Colomer’s work since his untimely death in 1931, Lyrical Individualism allows a range of readers to discover this vital thinker.

Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift.

Contesting the Far Right examines right-wing recruitment tactics in the United States and Austria, where people discontented with the status quo have turned to far-right parties and movements that further cement capitalism’s adverse effects. Leeb contends that Freudian psychoanalytic theory and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory provide analytical tools to explain this apparent contradiction in psychological terms. Living under precarity capitalism generates feelings of failure and anxiety, which people experience as non-wholeness, because it has become difficult if not impossible to live up to the fetish of economic, interpersonal, and bodily success, and the far right preys on such feelings. Its psychologically oriented propaganda tactics produce the illusion of wholeness and a positive sense of self while leaving the socioeconomic conditions that cause people’s suffering intact. At the same time, they remove the inhibitions that keep people’s repressed aggression and racist and sexist attitudes in check. To demonstrate the workings of this process, Leeb compares cases including Trump and the alt-right in the United States and the Freedom Party and the identitarian movement in Austria. At once theoretically rich and politically engaged, this book also offers ways to resist the far right and counter the psychological appeal of its propaganda techniques.

Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift.

Contesting the Far Right examines right-wing recruitment tactics in the United States and Austria, where people discontented with the status quo have turned to far-right parties and movements that further cement capitalism’s adverse effects. Leeb contends that Freudian psychoanalytic theory and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory provide analytical tools to explain this apparent contradiction in psychological terms. Living under precarity capitalism generates feelings of failure and anxiety, which people experience as non-wholeness, because it has become difficult if not impossible to live up to the fetish of economic, interpersonal, and bodily success, and the far right preys on such feelings. Its psychologically oriented propaganda tactics produce the illusion of wholeness and a positive sense of self while leaving the socioeconomic conditions that cause people’s suffering intact. At the same time, they remove the inhibitions that keep people’s repressed aggression and racist and sexist attitudes in check. To demonstrate the workings of this process, Leeb compares cases including Trump and the alt-right in the United States and the Freedom Party and the identitarian movement in Austria. At once theoretically rich and politically engaged, this book also offers ways to resist the far right and counter the psychological appeal of its propaganda techniques.

Nothing Sacred makes a bold call for reconceptualizing the projects of humanism and democracy as creative sources of emancipatory meaning, from the immediate political sphere to the farthest reaches of planetary ways of living.

Restaging Aristotle’s classic notion of the “political animal” in broad historical and geographical frames, Stathis Gourgouris explores the autopoietic capacities of human-being in society, while developing new frameworks of anticolonial humanism and radical democracy as the only worthy adversaries of neoliberal capitalism.

This reconfigured anthropological horizon enables us to imagine new ways of living by learning to pursue a radical politics of autonomy and a planetary vision that upholds life-affirming coexistence and equal sharing against the fetishism of hierarchy and servitude, money and technologic, sovereignty and endless growth.

Written with daring, erudition, and anarchic contestation, this book seeks the political through a poetic perspective. Nothing Sacred rejects niche thinking in the academy and engages a vast domain of reflections on the problem of human-being in today’s dismal world.

Hell on earth is real. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can fathom. Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.

Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings have a deep resonance with ecological thinking, and together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. They call for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and center. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Passionate, erudite, and playful, Hell takes readers on a full-color journey into the contemporary underworld—and offers a surprising vision of salvation.

Hell on earth is real. The toxic fusion of big oil, Evangelical Christianity, and white supremacy has ignited a worldwide inferno, more phantasmagoric than anything William Blake could dream up and more cataclysmic than we can fathom. Escaping global warming hell, this revelatory book shows, requires a radical, mystical marriage of Christianity and biology that awakens a future beyond white male savagery.

Timothy Morton argues that there is an unexpected yet profound relationship between religion and ecology that can guide a planet-scale response to the climate crisis. Spiritual and mystical feelings have a deep resonance with ecological thinking, and together they provide the resources environmentalism desperately needs in this time of climate emergency. Morton finds solutions in a radical revaluation of Christianity, furnishing ecological politics with a language of mercy and forgiveness that draws from Christian traditions without bringing along their baggage. They call for a global environmental movement that fuses ecology and mysticism and puts race and gender front and center. This nonviolent resistance can stage an all-out assault on the ultimate Satanic mill: the concept of master and slave, manifesting today in white supremacy, patriarchy, and environmental destruction. Passionate, erudite, and playful, Hell takes readers on a full-color journey into the contemporary underworld—and offers a surprising vision of salvation.

Finalist, 2024 Translation Prize - Nonfiction, French-American Foundation

Alain Badiou began the twenty-first century by considering the relationship between philosophy and notions of “the present.” In this period of his ongoing annual lecture series, the acclaimed philosopher took up the existential problem of how to be contemporary with one’s own time—that is, how to not simply inhabit a passing moment but bring a real present into existence.

Images of the Present Time presents nearly three years of Badiou’s seminars, held from 2001 to 2004, partly against the backdrop of the war in Iraq. Given while Badiou was writing Logics of Worlds, the second of the three volumes of Being and Event, these lectures address some of the same questions of existence in a particular world in a more personal and conversational tone, with reference to literature, philosophy, and contemporary politics and culture. He proposes a new concept of living in a real present as the twisting together of something from the past and something of the future.

Featuring some of the philosopher’s most inspiring and approachable work, Images of the Present Time is an important book for all readers interested in the practical as well as conceptual possibilities of Badiou’s thought.

What was distinctive about the evil of the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery? In what ways can the present seek to rectify such historical wrongs, even while recognizing that they lie beyond repair? Irreparable Evil explores the legacy of slavery and its moral and political implications, offering a nuanced intervention into debates over reparations.

David Scott reconsiders the story of New World slavery in a series of interconnected essays that focus on Jamaica and the Anglophone Caribbean. Slavery, he emphasizes, involved not only scarcely imaginable brutality on a mass scale but also the irreversible devastation of the ways of life and cultural worlds from which enslaved people were uprooted. Colonial extraction shaped modern capitalism; plantation slavery enriched colonial metropoles and simultaneously impoverished their peripheries. To account for this atrocity, Scott examines moral and reparatory modes of history and criticism, probing different conceptions of evil. He reflects on the paradoxes of seeking redress for the specific moral evil of slavery, criticizing the limitations of liberal rights-based arguments for reparations that pursue reconciliation with the past. Instead, this book argues, in making the urgent demand for reparations, we must acknowledge the fundamental irreparability of a wrong of such magnitude.

What was distinctive about the evil of the transatlantic slave trade and New World slavery? In what ways can the present seek to rectify such historical wrongs, even while recognizing that they lie beyond repair? Irreparable Evil explores the legacy of slavery and its moral and political implications, offering a nuanced intervention into debates over reparations.

David Scott reconsiders the story of New World slavery in a series of interconnected essays that focus on Jamaica and the Anglophone Caribbean. Slavery, he emphasizes, involved not only scarcely imaginable brutality on a mass scale but also the irreversible devastation of the ways of life and cultural worlds from which enslaved people were uprooted. Colonial extraction shaped modern capitalism; plantation slavery enriched colonial metropoles and simultaneously impoverished their peripheries. To account for this atrocity, Scott examines moral and reparatory modes of history and criticism, probing different conceptions of evil. He reflects on the paradoxes of seeking redress for the specific moral evil of slavery, criticizing the limitations of liberal rights-based arguments for reparations that pursue reconciliation with the past. Instead, this book argues, in making the urgent demand for reparations, we must acknowledge the fundamental irreparability of a wrong of such magnitude.

Plants are commonly considered immobile, in contrast to humans and other animals. But vegetal existence involves many place-based forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward, fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the surrounding world. How do plants as sessile, growing, decaying, and metamorphosing beings shape the places they inhabit, and how are they shaped by them? How do human places interact with those of plants—in lived experience; in landscape painting; in cultivation and contemplation; in forests, fields, gardens, and cities?

Examining these questions and many more, Plants in Place is a collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of Edward S. Casey’s phenomenology of place and Michael Marder’s plant-thinking. It focuses on both the microlevel of the dynamic constitution of plant edges or a child’s engagement with moss and the macrolevel of habitats that include the sociality of trees. This compelling portrait of plants and their places provides readers with new ways to appreciate the complexity and vitality of vegetal life. Eloquent, descriptively rich, and insightful, the book also shows how the worlds of plants can enhance our understanding and experience of place more broadly.

Plants are commonly considered immobile, in contrast to humans and other animals. But vegetal existence involves many place-based forms of change: stems growing upward, roots spreading outward, fronds unfurling in response to sunlight, seeds traveling across wide distances, and other intricate relationships with the surrounding world. How do plants as sessile, growing, decaying, and metamorphosing beings shape the places they inhabit, and how are they shaped by them? How do human places interact with those of plants—in lived experience; in landscape painting; in cultivation and contemplation; in forests, fields, gardens, and cities?

Examining these questions and many more, Plants in Place is a collaborative study of vegetal phenomenology at the intersection of Edward S. Casey’s phenomenology of place and Michael Marder’s plant-thinking. It focuses on both the microlevel of the dynamic constitution of plant edges or a child’s engagement with moss and the macrolevel of habitats that include the sociality of trees. This compelling portrait of plants and their places provides readers with new ways to appreciate the complexity and vitality of vegetal life. Eloquent, descriptively rich, and insightful, the book also shows how the worlds of plants can enhance our understanding and experience of place more broadly.

Five hundred years after his death, Niccolò Machiavelli still draws an astonishing range of contradictory characterizations. Was he a friend of tyrants? An ardent republican loyal to Florence’s free institutions? The father of political realism? A revolutionary populist? A calculating rationalist? A Renaissance humanist? A prophet of Italian unification? A theorist of mixed government? A forerunner to authoritarianism? The master of the dark arts of intrigue?

This book provides a vivid and engaging introduction to Machiavelli’s life and works that sheds new light on his originality and relevance. Gabriele Pedullà—a leading Italian expert and acclaimed writer—offers fresh readings of the Florentine thinker’s most famous writings, The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, as well as lesser-known texts. A new and often surprising Machiavelli emerges: one closer to his time but also better suited to inform our own. Pedullà’s portrait of Machiavelli highlights his close attention to social and emotional bonds, staunch opposition to oligarchy, keen awareness of the economic side of power dynamics, and strong preference for history over philosophy as a guide for leaders.

This book recovers the excitement Machiavelli roused in his first readers for a twenty-first-century audience, capturing his capacity to provoke, both then and now, with unconventional ideas and startling insights.

Five hundred years after his death, Niccolò Machiavelli still draws an astonishing range of contradictory characterizations. Was he a friend of tyrants? An ardent republican loyal to Florence’s free institutions? The father of political realism? A revolutionary populist? A calculating rationalist? A Renaissance humanist? A prophet of Italian unification? A theorist of mixed government? A forerunner to authoritarianism? The master of the dark arts of intrigue?

This book provides a vivid and engaging introduction to Machiavelli’s life and works that sheds new light on his originality and relevance. Gabriele Pedullà—a leading Italian expert and acclaimed writer—offers fresh readings of the Florentine thinker’s most famous writings, The Prince and the Discourses on Livy, as well as lesser-known texts. A new and often surprising Machiavelli emerges: one closer to his time but also better suited to inform our own. Pedullà’s portrait of Machiavelli highlights his close attention to social and emotional bonds, staunch opposition to oligarchy, keen awareness of the economic side of power dynamics, and strong preference for history over philosophy as a guide for leaders.

This book recovers the excitement Machiavelli roused in his first readers for a twenty-first-century audience, capturing his capacity to provoke, both then and now, with unconventional ideas and startling insights.

Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of attentiveness—to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the challenges it faces?

This book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter begins with a concrete scene whose protagonists are trying—and often failing—to attend. Authors examine key moments in the history of the study of attention; pose attention as a philosophical problem; explore the links between attention, culture, and technology; and consider the significance of attention for conceptualizations of human subjectivity. Readers encounter nineteenth-century experiments in boredom, ornithologists conveying sound through field notations, wearable attention-enhancing prosthetics, students using online learning platforms, and inquiries into attention as a cognitive state and moral virtue.

Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” and the commodification of attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make it possible.

Are we paying enough attention? At least since the nineteenth century, critics have alleged a widespread and profound failure of attentiveness—to others, to ourselves, to the world around us, to what is truly worthy of focus. Why is there such great anxiety over attention? What is at stake in understanding attention and the challenges it faces?

This book investigates attention from a range of disciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, history, anthropology, art history, and comparative literature. Each chapter begins with a concrete scene whose protagonists are trying—and often failing—to attend. Authors examine key moments in the history of the study of attention; pose attention as a philosophical problem; explore the links between attention, culture, and technology; and consider the significance of attention for conceptualizations of human subjectivity. Readers encounter nineteenth-century experiments in boredom, ornithologists conveying sound through field notations, wearable attention-enhancing prosthetics, students using online learning platforms, and inquiries into attention as a cognitive state and moral virtue.

Amid mounting concern about digital mediation of experience, the rise of “surveillance capitalism,” and the commodification of attention, Scenes of Attention deepens the thinking that is needed to protect the freedom of attention and the forms of life that make it possible.

Peter Sloterdijk is among the most acclaimed and widely read philosophers of the past half-century. Called “Germany’s most controversial thinker” by the New Yorker, he has challenged and provoked readers worldwide with extraordinarily ambitious and wide-ranging works of philosophical and cultural critique. In The Terrible Children of Modernity, Sloterdijk offers a magisterial and profound investigation into the vicissitudes of historical change and the nature of modernity.

For Sloterdijk, modernity is defined by its need to break with the past. Moderns are perpetual rebels who seek to sever the ties of tradition and forms of inheritance that bind generations and eras together. With deep philosophical, historical, and literary range, he traces this antigenealogical experiment from the French Revolution onward, from Madame de Pompadour and Napoleon through Nietzsche, Marx, Wagner, the Dadaists, and Deleuze. Acutely aware of the destructive potential of cultural discontinuities, Sloterdijk is no less critical of the “fathers” who condemn change than the “terrible children” who seek a drastic rupture with their predecessors. Equally concerned with the grand sweep of history and our current predicaments, he instead calls for new ways to live together in the intersubjectivity of the human condition. Incisive and daring, breathtaking in its scope, this account of youthful rebellion against tradition asks us to reimagine the ethics of genealogy.

Axel Honneth has been instrumental in advancing the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists, rebuilding their effort to combine radical social and political analysis with rigorous philosophical inquiry. These eleven essays reclaim the relevant themes of the Frankfurt School, which counted Theodor W. Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Walter Benjamin, Jürgen Habermas, Franz Neumann, and Albrecht Wellmer as members. They also engage with Kant, Freud, Alexander Mitscherlich, and Michael Walzer, whose work on morality, history, democracy, and individuality intersects with the Frankfurt School's core concerns.

Collected here for the first time in English, Honneth's essays pursue the unifying themes and theses that support the methodologies and thematics of critical social theory, and they address the possibilities of continuing this tradition through radically changed theoretical and social conditions. According to Honneth, there is a unity that underlies critical theory's multiple approaches: the way in which reason is both distorted and furthered in contemporary capitalist society. And while much is dead in the social and psychological doctrines of critical social theory, its central inquiries remain vitally relevant.

Is social progress still possible after the horrors of the twentieth century? Does capitalism deform reason and, if so, in what respects? Can we justify the relationship between law and violence in secular terms, or is it inextricably bound to divine justice? How can we be free when we're subject to socialization in a highly complex and in many respects unfree society? For Honneth, suffering and moral struggle are departure points for a new "reconstructive" form of social criticism, one that is based solidly in the empirically grounded, interdisciplinary approach of the Frankfurt School.

Alain Badiou’s 1983–1984 lecture series on “the One” is the earliest of his seminars that he has chosen to publish. It focuses on the philosophical concept of oneness in the works of Descartes, Plato, and Kant—a crucial foil for his signature metaphysical concept, the multiple. Badiou declares that there is no “One”: there is no fundamental unit of being; being is inherently multiple.

What is novel in Badiou’s view of multiplicity is his reliance on mathematics, and set theory in particular. A set is a collection of things—yet, as he observes, it often is taken to “count as one” operationally for the purposes of mathematical transformations. In this seminar, distinguishing between “the One” and “counting as one” emerges as essential to Badiou’s ontological project. His analysis of reflections on oneness in Descartes, Plato, and Kant prefigures core arguments of his defining work, Being and Event.

Showcasing the seeds of Badiou’s key ideas and later thought, The One features singular readings, breathtaking theorizations, and frequently astonishing offhand remarks.

Why read Leibniz today? Can we still learn from him and not just about him? This book argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.

Richard Halpern recasts Leibniz as a great writer as well as a great philosopher, demonstrating that his philosophical project cannot be fully understood without taking its literary elements into account. He shows Leibniz to be a prescient thinker about art and beauty whose insights into the relationship between aesthetic experience and thought remain invaluable. Leibnizing asks readers to follow the dynamic movement of Leibniz’s writing instead of attempting to grasp a static philosophical system and to pay careful attention to the rhetorical and stylistic registers of Leibniz’s work as well as its conceptual and logical dimensions.

For philosophers, this book offers a novel approach to reading and interpreting Leibniz. For literary and other theorists, it showcases the relevance of Leibniz’s thought to areas from aesthetics to politics and from metaphysics to computer science. Written in a lucid and even witty style, Leibnizing provides readers with an accessible entryway into Leibniz’s sometimes forbidding but ultimately rewarding philosophical vision.

Why read Leibniz today? Can we still learn from him and not just about him? This book argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today.

Richard Halpern recasts Leibniz as a great writer as well as a great philosopher, demonstrating that his philosophical project cannot be fully understood without taking its literary elements into account. He shows Leibniz to be a prescient thinker about art and beauty whose insights into the relationship between aesthetic experience and thought remain invaluable. Leibnizing asks readers to follow the dynamic movement of Leibniz’s writing instead of attempting to grasp a static philosophical system and to pay careful attention to the rhetorical and stylistic registers of Leibniz’s work as well as its conceptual and logical dimensions.

For philosophers, this book offers a novel approach to reading and interpreting Leibniz. For literary and other theorists, it showcases the relevance of Leibniz’s thought to areas from aesthetics to politics and from metaphysics to computer science. Written in a lucid and even witty style, Leibnizing provides readers with an accessible entryway into Leibniz’s sometimes forbidding but ultimately rewarding philosophical vision.

Every time we think ahead, we are crafting a story. Every daily plan—and every political vision, social movement, scientific hypothesis, business proposal, and technological breakthrough—starts with “what if?” Linking causes to effects, considering hypotheticals and counterfactuals, asking how other people will react: these are the essence of narrative. So why do we keep overlooking story’s importance to intelligence in favor of logic?

This book explains how and why our brains think in stories. Angus Fletcher, an expert in neuroscientific approaches to narrative, identifies this capacity as “storythinking.” He demonstrates that storythinking is fundamental to what makes us human. Artificial intelligence can perform symbolic logic, rational deduction, and mathematical calculation, but it is incapable of deliberating in narrative. Drawing on new research in neuroscience and narrative theory, Fletcher explores the nature of imagination, innovation, and creativity. He provides concise answers to big questions: How does storythinking work? Why did it evolve? How can it misfire? What problems can it solve?

Revealing the significance of storythinking from science to business to philosophy, this book also provides ways for readers to harness its power to script better tomorrows.

Every time we think ahead, we are crafting a story. Every daily plan—and every political vision, social movement, scientific hypothesis, business proposal, and technological breakthrough—starts with “what if?” Linking causes to effects, considering hypotheticals and counterfactuals, asking how other people will react: these are the essence of narrative. So why do we keep overlooking story’s importance to intelligence in favor of logic?

This book explains how and why our brains think in stories. Angus Fletcher, an expert in neuroscientific approaches to narrative, identifies this capacity as “storythinking.” He demonstrates that storythinking is fundamental to what makes us human. Artificial intelligence can perform symbolic logic, rational deduction, and mathematical calculation, but it is incapable of deliberating in narrative. Drawing on new research in neuroscience and narrative theory, Fletcher explores the nature of imagination, innovation, and creativity. He provides concise answers to big questions: How does storythinking work? Why did it evolve? How can it misfire? What problems can it solve?

Revealing the significance of storythinking from science to business to philosophy, this book also provides ways for readers to harness its power to script better tomorrows.

The “happiness agenda” is a worldwide movement that claims that happiness is the highest good, happiness can be measured, and public policy should promote happiness. Against Happiness is a thorough and powerful critique of this program, revealing the flaws of its concept of happiness and advocating a renewed focus on equality and justice.

Written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, this book provides both theoretical and empirical analysis of the limitations of the happiness agenda. The authors emphasize that this movement draws on a parochial, Western-centric philosophical basis and demographic sample. They show that happiness defined as subjective satisfaction or a surplus of positive emotions bears little resemblance to the richer and more nuanced concepts of the good life found in many world traditions. Cross-cultural philosophy, comparative theology, and social and cultural psychology all teach that cultures and subcultures vary in how much value they place on life satisfaction or feeling happy. Furthermore, the ideas promoted by the happiness agenda can compete with rights, justice, sustainability, and equality—and even conceal racial and gender injustice.

Against Happiness argues that a better way forward requires integration of cross-cultural philosophical, ethical, and political thought with critical social science. Ultimately, the authors contend, happiness should be a secondary goal—worth pursuing only if it is contingent on the demands of justice.

The “happiness agenda” is a worldwide movement that claims that happiness is the highest good, happiness can be measured, and public policy should promote happiness. Against Happiness is a thorough and powerful critique of this program, revealing the flaws of its concept of happiness and advocating a renewed focus on equality and justice.

Written by an interdisciplinary team of authors, this book provides both theoretical and empirical analysis of the limitations of the happiness agenda. The authors emphasize that this movement draws on a parochial, Western-centric philosophical basis and demographic sample. They show that happiness defined as subjective satisfaction or a surplus of positive emotions bears little resemblance to the richer and more nuanced concepts of the good life found in many world traditions. Cross-cultural philosophy, comparative theology, and social and cultural psychology all teach that cultures and subcultures vary in how much value they place on life satisfaction or feeling happy. Furthermore, the ideas promoted by the happiness agenda can compete with rights, justice, sustainability, and equality—and even conceal racial and gender injustice.

Against Happiness argues that a better way forward requires integration of cross-cultural philosophical, ethical, and political thought with critical social science. Ultimately, the authors contend, happiness should be a secondary goal—worth pursuing only if it is contingent on the demands of justice.

Despite creating vast inequalities and propping up reactionary world regimes, capitalism has many passionate defenders—but not because of what it withholds from some and gives to others. Capitalism dominates, Todd McGowan argues, because it mimics the structure of our desire while hiding the trauma that the system inflicts upon it. People from all backgrounds enjoy what capitalism provides, but at the same time are told more and better is yet to come. Capitalism traps us through an incomplete satisfaction that compels us after the new, the better, and the more.

Capitalism's parasitic relationship to our desires gives it the illusion of corresponding to our natural impulses, which is how capitalism's defenders characterize it. By understanding this psychic strategy, McGowan hopes to divest us of our addiction to capitalist enrichment and help us rediscover enjoyment as we actually experienced it. By locating it in the present, McGowan frees us from our attachment to a better future and the belief that capitalism is an essential outgrowth of human nature. From this perspective, our economic, social, and political worlds open up to real political change. Eloquent and enlivened by examples from film, television, consumer culture, and everyday life, Capitalism and Desire brings a new, psychoanalytically grounded approach to political and social theory.

The apostle Paul deals extensively with gender, embodiment, and desire in his authentic letters, yet many of the contemporary philosophers interested in his work downplay these aspects of his thought. Christ Without Adam is the first book to examine the role of gender and sexuality in the turn to the apostle Paul in recent Continental philosophy. It builds a constructive proposal for embodied Christian theological anthropology in conversation with—and in contrast to—the "Paulinisms" of Stanislas Breton, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek.

Paul's letters bequeathed a crucial anthropological aporia to the history of Christian thought, insofar as the apostle sought to situate embodied human beings typologically with reference to Adam and Christ, but failed to work out the place of sexual difference within this classification. As a result, the space between Adam and Christ has functioned historically as a conceptual and temporal interval in which Christian anthropology poses and re-poses theological dilemmas of embodied difference. This study follows the ways in which the appropriations of Paul by Breton, Badiou, and Žižek have either sidestepped or collapsed this interval, a crucial component in their articulations of a universal Pauline subject. As a result, sexual difference fails to materialize in their readings as a problem with any explicit force. Against these readings, Dunning asserts the importance of the Pauline Adam–Christ typology, not as a straightforward resource but as a witness to a certain necessary failure—the failure of the Christian tradition to resolve embodied difference without remainder. This failure, he argues, is constructive in that it reveals the instability of sexual difference, both masculine and feminine, within an anthropological paradigm that claims to be universal yet is still predicated on male bodies.

What does it mean to be truly happy? In Philosophies of Happiness, Diana Lobel provides a rich spectrum of arguments for a theory of happiness as flourishing or well-being, offering a global, cross-cultural, and interdisciplinary perspective on how to create a vital, fulfilling, and significant life. Drawing upon perspectives from a broad range of philosophical traditions—Eastern and Western, ancient and contemporary—the book suggests that just as physical health is the well-being of the body, happiness is the healthy and flourishing condition of the whole human being, and we experience the most complete happiness when we realize our potential through creative engagement.

Lobel shows that while thick descriptions of happiness differ widely in texture and detail, certain themes resonate across texts from different traditions and historical contexts, suggesting core features of a happy life: attentive awareness; effortless action; relationship and connection to a larger, interconnected community; love or devotion; and creative engagement. Each feature adds meaning, significance, and value, so that we can craft lives of worth and purpose. These themes emerge from careful study of philosophical and religious texts and traditions: the Greek philosophers Aristotle and Epicurus; the Chinese traditions of Confucius, Laozi, and Zhuangzi; the Hindu Bhagavad Gītā; the Japanese Buddhist tradition of Soto Zen master Dōgen and his modern expositor Shunryu Suzuki; the Western religious traditions of Augustine and Maimonides; the Persian Sufi tale Conference of the Birds; and contemporary research on mindfulness and creativity. Written in a clear, accessible style, Philosophies of Happiness invites readers of all backgrounds to explore and engage with religious and philosophical conceptions of what makes life meaningful.

Visit https://cup.columbia.edu/extras/supplement/philosophies-of-happiness for additional appendixes and supplemental notes.

Luce Irigaray has written that “sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.” Spanning metaphysics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, her work examines how sexual difference structures being and subjectivity, organizes our experience of the world, and affects the images and discourses involved in knowledge production and practical action. No other philosopher has paid such careful attention to the consequences of the elision of sexual difference in philosophical thought. However, at a time when notions of sexual and gender difference are hotly contested, Irigaray’s thought has often been dismissed as essentialist or reductively binary.

This book brings together leading scholars to consider the philosophical implications of Irigaray’s writing on sexual difference, particularly for issues of gender and race. Their essays directly confront the charge of essentialism, exploring how Irigaray’s thought opens new possibilities for understanding the complexity of gender identities, including nonbinary and trans experiences as well as alternative configurations of masculinity and femininity. Though Irigaray is sometimes accused of a failure to appreciate racial difference, contributors show the productive role of her work in thinking race. This book also illuminates how Irigaray’s work provides creative practices that help realign human experience and our relations with nature and each other.

Luce Irigaray has written that “sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.” Spanning metaphysics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, her work examines how sexual difference structures being and subjectivity, organizes our experience of the world, and affects the images and discourses involved in knowledge production and practical action. No other philosopher has paid such careful attention to the consequences of the elision of sexual difference in philosophical thought. However, at a time when notions of sexual and gender difference are hotly contested, Irigaray’s thought has often been dismissed as essentialist or reductively binary.

This book brings together leading scholars to consider the philosophical implications of Irigaray’s writing on sexual difference, particularly for issues of gender and race. Their essays directly confront the charge of essentialism, exploring how Irigaray’s thought opens new possibilities for understanding the complexity of gender identities, including nonbinary and trans experiences as well as alternative configurations of masculinity and femininity. Though Irigaray is sometimes accused of a failure to appreciate racial difference, contributors show the productive role of her work in thinking race. This book also illuminates how Irigaray’s work provides creative practices that help realign human experience and our relations with nature and each other.

Peter Sloterdijk is among the most acclaimed and widely read philosophers of the past half-century. Called “Germany’s most controversial thinker” by the New Yorker, he has challenged and provoked readers worldwide with extraordinarily ambitious and wide-ranging works of philosophical and cultural critique. In The Terrible Children of Modernity, Sloterdijk offers a magisterial and profound investigation into the vicissitudes of historical change and the nature of modernity.

For Sloterdijk, modernity is defined by its need to break with the past. Moderns are perpetual rebels who seek to sever the ties of tradition and forms of inheritance that bind generations and eras together. With deep philosophical, historical, and literary range, he traces this antigenealogical experiment from the French Revolution onward, from Madame de Pompadour and Napoleon through Nietzsche, Marx, Wagner, the Dadaists, and Deleuze. Acutely aware of the destructive potential of cultural discontinuities, Sloterdijk is no less critical of the “fathers” who condemn change than the “terrible children” who seek a drastic rupture with their predecessors. Equally concerned with the grand sweep of history and our current predicaments, he instead calls for new ways to live together in the intersubjectivity of the human condition. Incisive and daring, breathtaking in its scope, this account of youthful rebellion against tradition asks us to reimagine the ethics of genealogy.

John Stuart Mill expressed many of the central tenets of liberalism with unsurpassed clarity and enduring influence. Yet Mill’s apparent victory in the marketplace of ideas has numbed us to the power of his arguments. To many readers today, his views can seem utterly familiar, even banal.

Sharing insights from teaching Mill for many years, the eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher makes a cogent case for why we should read this nineteenth-century thinker now. He portrays Mill as a conflicted humanist who wrestled with problems that are equally urgent in our own time. Kitcher reflects on Mill’s ideas in the context of contemporary ethical, social, and political issues such as COVID mandates, gun control, income inequality, gay rights, and climate change. More broadly, he shows, Mill’s writings help us cultivate our own capacities for critical thought and ethical decision making.

Inviting readers into a conversation with Mill, this book shows that he supplies tools for thinking that are as valuable today as they were in the nineteenth century.

John Stuart Mill expressed many of the central tenets of liberalism with unsurpassed clarity and enduring influence. Yet Mill’s apparent victory in the marketplace of ideas has numbed us to the power of his arguments. To many readers today, his views can seem utterly familiar, even banal.

Sharing insights from teaching Mill for many years, the eminent philosopher Philip Kitcher makes a cogent case for why we should read this nineteenth-century thinker now. He portrays Mill as a conflicted humanist who wrestled with problems that are equally urgent in our own time. Kitcher reflects on Mill’s ideas in the context of contemporary ethical, social, and political issues such as COVID mandates, gun control, income inequality, gay rights, and climate change. More broadly, he shows, Mill’s writings help us cultivate our own capacities for critical thought and ethical decision making.

Inviting readers into a conversation with Mill, this book shows that he supplies tools for thinking that are as valuable today as they were in the nineteenth century.

In the 1950s, long before his ascent to international renown, Michel Foucault published a scant few works. His early writings on psychology, psychopathology, and anthropology have been dismissed as immature. However, recently discovered manuscripts from the mid-1950s, when Foucault was a lecturer at the University of Lille, testify to the significance of the work that the philosopher produced in the years leading up to the “archaeological” project he launched with History of Madness.

Elisabetta Basso offers a groundbreaking and in-depth analysis of Foucault’s Lille manuscripts that sheds new light on the origins of his philosophical project. She considers the epistemological style and methodology of these writings as well as their philosophical context and the scholarly networks in which Foucault was active, foregrounding his relationship to existential psychiatry. Young Foucault blurs the boundaries between biography and theory, exploring the transformations—and, at times, contradictions—that characterize the intellectual trajectory of a philosopher who, as Foucault himself put it, “turned to psychology, and from psychology to history.” Retracing the first steps of the philosopher’s intellectual journey, Basso shows how Foucault’s early writings provide key insights into his archaeological work of the 1960s. Assembling a vast array of archival sources—including manuscripts, reading notes, notes for lectures and conferences, and correspondence—this book develops a new and deeper understanding of Foucault’s body of work.

The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind?

Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities.

Exposing and opposing forms of injustice that deny the essential interrelationship of living creatures, Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world.

The pandemic compels us to ask fundamental questions about our place in the world: the many ways humans rely on one another, how we vitally and sometimes fatally breathe the same air, share the surfaces of the earth, and exist in proximity to other porous creatures in order to live in a social world. What we require to live can also imperil our lives. How do we think from, and about, this common bind?

Judith Butler shows how COVID-19 and all its consequences—political, social, ecological, economic—have challenged us to reconsider the sense of the world that such disasters bring about. Drawing on the work of Max Scheler, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and critical feminist phenomenology, Butler illuminates the conditions in which we seek to make sense of our disorientation, precarity, and social bonds. What World Is This? offers a new account of interdependency in which touching and breathing, capacities that amid a viral outbreak can threaten life itself, challenge the boundaries of the body and selfhood. Criticizing notions of unlimited personal liberty and the killing forces of racism, sexism, and classism, this book suggests that the pandemic illuminates the potential of shared vulnerabilities as well as the injustice of pervasive inequalities.

Exposing and opposing forms of injustice that deny the essential interrelationship of living creatures, Butler argues for a radical social equality and advocates modes of resistance that seek to establish new conditions of livability and a new sense of a shared world.

Finalist, 2024 Translation Prize - Nonfiction, French-American Foundation

Alain Badiou began the twenty-first century by considering the relationship between philosophy and notions of “the present.” In this period of his ongoing annual lecture series, the acclaimed philosopher took up the existential problem of how to be contemporary with one’s own time—that is, how to not simply inhabit a passing moment but bring a real present into existence.

Images of the Present Time presents nearly three years of Badiou’s seminars, held from 2001 to 2004, partly against the backdrop of the war in Iraq. Given while Badiou was writing Logics of Worlds, the second of the three volumes of Being and Event, these lectures address some of the same questions of existence in a particular world in a more personal and conversational tone, with reference to literature, philosophy, and contemporary politics and culture. He proposes a new concept of living in a real present as the twisting together of something from the past and something of the future.

Featuring some of the philosopher’s most inspiring and approachable work, Images of the Present Time is an important book for all readers interested in the practical as well as conceptual possibilities of Badiou’s thought.

Since 1958 Sources of Indian Tradition has been one of the most important and widely used texts on civilization in South Asia (now the nation-sates of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, and Nepal). It has helped generations of students and lay readers understand how leading thinkers there have looked at life, the traditions of their ancestors, and the world they live in.

This second edition has been extensively revised, with much new material added. Introductory essays explain the particular settings in which these thinkers have expressed their ideas about religious, social, political, and economic questions. Brief summaries precede each passage from their writings or sayings.

The traditions represented include Brahmanism, Jainism, Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Sikhism. The book includes a chronology of Indian history from 3000 B.C. to A.D. 1858.

In the 1950s, long before his ascent to international renown, Michel Foucault published a scant few works. His early writings on psychology, psychopathology, and anthropology have been dismissed as immature. However, recently discovered manuscripts from the mid-1950s, when Foucault was a lecturer at the University of Lille, testify to the significance of the work that the philosopher produced in the years leading up to the “archaeological” project he launched with History of Madness.

Elisabetta Basso offers a groundbreaking and in-depth analysis of Foucault’s Lille manuscripts that sheds new light on the origins of his philosophical project. She considers the epistemological style and methodology of these writings as well as their philosophical context and the scholarly networks in which Foucault was active, foregrounding his relationship to existential psychiatry. Young Foucault blurs the boundaries between biography and theory, exploring the transformations—and, at times, contradictions—that characterize the intellectual trajectory of a philosopher who, as Foucault himself put it, “turned to psychology, and from psychology to history.” Retracing the first steps of the philosopher’s intellectual journey, Basso shows how Foucault’s early writings provide key insights into his archaeological work of the 1960s. Assembling a vast array of archival sources—including manuscripts, reading notes, notes for lectures and conferences, and correspondence—this book develops a new and deeper understanding of Foucault’s body of work.

As humanity continues to consume planetary resources at an unsustainable rate, we require not only new and renewable forms of energy but also new ways of understanding energy itself. Clayton Crockett offers an innovative philosophy of energy that cuts across a number of leading-edge disciplines. Drawing from contemporary philosophies of New Materialism, non-Western traditions, and the sciences, he develops a comprehensive vision of energy as a material process spanning physics, biology, politics, ecology, and religion.

Crockett argues that change is foundational to material reality, which is ceaselessly self-organizing. We can observe energy’s effects in the operations of natural selection as well as those at work in human societies. Matter and energy are not an oppositional binary; rather, they are expressions of how change functions in the universe. Ultimately, Crockett argues, we can conceive of God neither as a deity nor as a being but as the principle of change.

Informed by cutting-edge theoretical discourses in thermodynamics, science studies, energy humanities, systems theory, continental philosophy, and radical theology, Energy and Change draws on theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Karen Barad, Bruno Latour, and Kojin Karatani as well as ideas about spirituality, society, and nature from Amerindian, Vodou, and Neo-Confucian traditions. A foundational work in New Materialist philosophy of religion, this book offers compelling new insights into the structure of the cosmos and our place in it.

As humanity continues to consume planetary resources at an unsustainable rate, we require not only new and renewable forms of energy but also new ways of understanding energy itself. Clayton Crockett offers an innovative philosophy of energy that cuts across a number of leading-edge disciplines. Drawing from contemporary philosophies of New Materialism, non-Western traditions, and the sciences, he develops a comprehensive vision of energy as a material process spanning physics, biology, politics, ecology, and religion.

Crockett argues that change is foundational to material reality, which is ceaselessly self-organizing. We can observe energy’s effects in the operations of natural selection as well as those at work in human societies. Matter and energy are not an oppositional binary; rather, they are expressions of how change functions in the universe. Ultimately, Crockett argues, we can conceive of God neither as a deity nor as a being but as the principle of change.

Informed by cutting-edge theoretical discourses in thermodynamics, science studies, energy humanities, systems theory, continental philosophy, and radical theology, Energy and Change draws on theorists such as Gilles Deleuze, Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Karen Barad, Bruno Latour, and Kojin Karatani as well as ideas about spirituality, society, and nature from Amerindian, Vodou, and Neo-Confucian traditions. A foundational work in New Materialist philosophy of religion, this book offers compelling new insights into the structure of the cosmos and our place in it.

We are obsessed with self-improvement; it’s a billion-dollar industry. But apps, workshops, speakers, retreats, and life hacks have not made us happier. Obsessed with the endless task of perfecting ourselves, we have become restless, anxious, and desperate. We are improving ourselves to death. The culture of self-improvement stems from philosophical classics, perfectionist religions, and a ruthless strain of capitalism—but today, new technologies shape what it means to improve the self. The old humanist culture has given way to artificial intelligence, social media, and big data: powerful tools that do not only inform us but also measure, compare, and perhaps change us forever.

This book shows how self-improvement culture became so toxic—and why we need both a new concept of the self and a mission of social change in order to escape it. Mark Coeckelbergh delves into the history of the ideas that shaped this culture, critically analyzes the role of technology, and explores surprising paths out of the self-improvement trap. Digital detox is no longer a viable option and advice based on ancient wisdom sounds like yet more self-help memes: The only way out is to transform our social and technological environment. Coeckelbergh advocates new “narrative technologies” that help us tell different and better stories about ourselves. However, he cautions, there is no shortcut that avoids the ancient philosophical quest to know yourself, or the obligation to cultivate the good life and the good society.

From the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Their discussions ranged widely over a vast range of topics, from American pop art and minimalism to abstraction and appropriationism. Yet they continually returned to the concepts at the core of Danto’s thinking—posthistory and the end of aesthetics—provocative notions that to this day shape questions about the meaning and future of contemporary art.

Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to the ongoing importance of Danto’s ideas. It offers readers the opportunity to experience the intellectual excitement of Danto in person, speculating in a freewheeling yet erudite style. Danto and Paparoni discuss figures such as Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kline, Sean Scully, Clement Greenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Wang Guangyi, offering both insightful comments on individual works and sweeping observations about wider issues. On occasion, the artist Mimmo Paladino and the philosopher Mario Perniola join the conversation, enlivening the discussion and adding their own perspectives.

The book also features an introductory essay by Paparoni that provides lucid analysis of Danto’s thinking, emphasizing where the two disagree as well as what they learned from each other.

Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of “small bites,” the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting.

Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment.

Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.

Taste is a lyric meditation on one of our five senses, which we often take for granted. Structured as a series of “small bites,” the book considers the ways that we ingest the world, how we come to know ourselves and others through the daily act of tasting.

Through flavorful explorations of the sweet, the sour, the salty, the bitter, and umami, Jehanne Dubrow reflects on the nature of taste. In a series of short, interdisciplinary essays, she blends personal experience with analysis of poetry, fiction, music, and the visual arts, as well as religious and philosophical texts. Dubrow considers the science of taste and how taste transforms from a physical sensation into a metaphor for discernment.

Taste is organized not so much as a linear dinner served in courses but as a meal consisting of meze, small plates of intensely flavored discourse.

We are obsessed with self-improvement; it’s a billion-dollar industry. But apps, workshops, speakers, retreats, and life hacks have not made us happier. Obsessed with the endless task of perfecting ourselves, we have become restless, anxious, and desperate. We are improving ourselves to death. The culture of self-improvement stems from philosophical classics, perfectionist religions, and a ruthless strain of capitalism—but today, new technologies shape what it means to improve the self. The old humanist culture has given way to artificial intelligence, social media, and big data: powerful tools that do not only inform us but also measure, compare, and perhaps change us forever.

This book shows how self-improvement culture became so toxic—and why we need both a new concept of the self and a mission of social change in order to escape it. Mark Coeckelbergh delves into the history of the ideas that shaped this culture, critically analyzes the role of technology, and explores surprising paths out of the self-improvement trap. Digital detox is no longer a viable option and advice based on ancient wisdom sounds like yet more self-help memes: The only way out is to transform our social and technological environment. Coeckelbergh advocates new “narrative technologies” that help us tell different and better stories about ourselves. However, he cautions, there is no shortcut that avoids the ancient philosophical quest to know yourself, or the obligation to cultivate the good life and the good society.

From the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Their discussions ranged widely over a vast range of topics, from American pop art and minimalism to abstraction and appropriationism. Yet they continually returned to the concepts at the core of Danto’s thinking—posthistory and the end of aesthetics—provocative notions that to this day shape questions about the meaning and future of contemporary art.

Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to the ongoing importance of Danto’s ideas. It offers readers the opportunity to experience the intellectual excitement of Danto in person, speculating in a freewheeling yet erudite style. Danto and Paparoni discuss figures such as Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kline, Sean Scully, Clement Greenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Wang Guangyi, offering both insightful comments on individual works and sweeping observations about wider issues. On occasion, the artist Mimmo Paladino and the philosopher Mario Perniola join the conversation, enlivening the discussion and adding their own perspectives.

The book also features an introductory essay by Paparoni that provides lucid analysis of Danto’s thinking, emphasizing where the two disagree as well as what they learned from each other.

Silver Medal, 2023 Nautilus Book Awards in the category of Ecology and Environment

Amid environmental catastrophe, it is vital to recall what unites all forms of life. We share characteristics and genetic material extending back billions of years. More than that, we all—from humans to plants to bacteria—share a planet. We are all Earthlings.

Adrian Parr calls on us to understand ourselves as existing with and among the many forms of Earthling life. She argues that human survival requires us to recognize our interdependent relationships with the other species and systems that make up life on Earth. In a series of meditations, Earthlings portrays the wonder and beauty of life with deep feeling, vivid detail, and an activist spirit. Parr invites readers to travel among the trees of the Amazonian rainforest; take flight with birds and butterflies migrating through the skies; and plunge into the oceans with whales and polar bears—as well as to encounter bodies infected with deadly viruses and maimed by the violence of global capitalism.

Combining poetic observation with philosophical contemplation and scientific evidence, Parr offers a moving vision of a world in upheaval and a potent manifesto for survival. Earthlings is both a joyful celebration of the magnificence of the biosphere and an urgent call for action to save it.

Silver Medal, 2023 Nautilus Book Awards in the category of Ecology and Environment

Amid environmental catastrophe, it is vital to recall what unites all forms of life. We share characteristics and genetic material extending back billions of years. More than that, we all—from humans to plants to bacteria—share a planet. We are all Earthlings.

Adrian Parr calls on us to understand ourselves as existing with and among the many forms of Earthling life. She argues that human survival requires us to recognize our interdependent relationships with the other species and systems that make up life on Earth. In a series of meditations, Earthlings portrays the wonder and beauty of life with deep feeling, vivid detail, and an activist spirit. Parr invites readers to travel among the trees of the Amazonian rainforest; take flight with birds and butterflies migrating through the skies; and plunge into the oceans with whales and polar bears—as well as to encounter bodies infected with deadly viruses and maimed by the violence of global capitalism.

Combining poetic observation with philosophical contemplation and scientific evidence, Parr offers a moving vision of a world in upheaval and a potent manifesto for survival. Earthlings is both a joyful celebration of the magnificence of the biosphere and an urgent call for action to save it.

In the Anthropocene, the fact that human activity is enmeshed with the existence and actions of every kind of other being is inescapable. As a result, the planetary ecological crisis has brought forth an urgent need to rethink understandings of human action. One response holds that the transformations necessary to tackle today’s crises will emerge from the distinctive capacity of human beings to transcend their environment. Another school of thought calls for seeing action as composite, produced by distributed networks of human and nonhuman agents. Yet the first of these is open to charges of human exceptionalism, while the second, according to its critics, lacks effective political traction.

Martin Crowley argues that a new conception of political agency is necessary to break this impasse. Engaging with thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, and Catherine Malabou, Crowley proposes an original account of agency as both distributed and decisive. Challenging the prevailing view of agency as exclusively human, he explores how a politics that incorporates nonhuman agency can intervene in the real world, examining timely issues such as climate-related migration and digital-algorithmic politics. A major intervention into ongoing debates in posthumanism, political ecology, and political theory, Accidental Agents reshapes our understanding of political agency in and for a more-than-human world.

In the Anthropocene, the fact that human activity is enmeshed with the existence and actions of every kind of other being is inescapable. As a result, the planetary ecological crisis has brought forth an urgent need to rethink understandings of human action. One response holds that the transformations necessary to tackle today’s crises will emerge from the distinctive capacity of human beings to transcend their environment. Another school of thought calls for seeing action as composite, produced by distributed networks of human and nonhuman agents. Yet the first of these is open to charges of human exceptionalism, while the second, according to its critics, lacks effective political traction.

Martin Crowley argues that a new conception of political agency is necessary to break this impasse. Engaging with thinkers such as Bruno Latour, Bernard Stiegler, and Catherine Malabou, Crowley proposes an original account of agency as both distributed and decisive. Challenging the prevailing view of agency as exclusively human, he explores how a politics that incorporates nonhuman agency can intervene in the real world, examining timely issues such as climate-related migration and digital-algorithmic politics. A major intervention into ongoing debates in posthumanism, political ecology, and political theory, Accidental Agents reshapes our understanding of political agency in and for a more-than-human world.

Most of the core concepts of the Western philosophical tradition originate in antiquity. Yet boredom is strikingly absent from classical thought. In this philosophical study, Dmitri Nikulin explores the concept’s genealogy to argue that boredom is the mark of modernity.

Nikulin contends that boredom is a specifically modern phenomenon. He provides a critical reconstruction of the concept of the modern subject as universal, rational, autonomous, and self-sufficient. Understanding itself in this way, this subject is at once the protagonist, playwright, director, and spectator of the staged drama of human existence. It is therefore inevitably monological, lonely, and alone, and can neither escape its own presence nor get rid of it. In other words, it is bored—and this boredom is the fundamental expression and symptom of the modern condition.

Considering such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Heidegger, and Benjamin, Critique of Bored Reason places boredom on center stage in the philosophical critique of modernity. Nikulin also considers the alternative to the notion of the autonomous subject in the—nonbored and nonboring—dialogic and comic subject capable of shared existence with others.

Most of the core concepts of the Western philosophical tradition originate in antiquity. Yet boredom is strikingly absent from classical thought. In this philosophical study, Dmitri Nikulin explores the concept’s genealogy to argue that boredom is the mark of modernity.

Nikulin contends that boredom is a specifically modern phenomenon. He provides a critical reconstruction of the concept of the modern subject as universal, rational, autonomous, and self-sufficient. Understanding itself in this way, this subject is at once the protagonist, playwright, director, and spectator of the staged drama of human existence. It is therefore inevitably monological, lonely, and alone, and can neither escape its own presence nor get rid of it. In other words, it is bored—and this boredom is the fundamental expression and symptom of the modern condition.

Considering such thinkers as Descartes, Pascal, Kant, Kierkegaard, Kracauer, Heidegger, and Benjamin, Critique of Bored Reason places boredom on center stage in the philosophical critique of modernity. Nikulin also considers the alternative to the notion of the autonomous subject in the—nonbored and nonboring—dialogic and comic subject capable of shared existence with others.