Series: Theory Redux

Solar Politics is a philosophical essay on the sun. It draws on Georges Bataille’s theories of the solar economy and solar violence, demonstrating their relevance to a world affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. The sun, which has played an essential role in our utopian imaginations since Antiquity, is the ultimate source of energy, both productive and destructive....

Psychocinema reexamines the connection between psychoanalysis and film, arguing for a return to the universalist core of both cinema and subjectivity. It traces the history of the influence of psychoanalysis on cinema and illustrates how the detour into ideologies of identity and difference eclipses the premise of the first and the emancipatory power of the second. The book argues that...

This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupančič contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the...

Modern history is a history of aesthetisations – and every aesthetisation raises a claim of protection. We aestheticise and want to protect almost everything, including Earth, oceans, the atmosphere, rare animal species, and exotic plants. Humans are no exception. They also present themselves as objects of contemplation that deserve admiration and care. For some time, artists and intellectuals struggled for...

What position does America occupy in the recent history of Western philosophy? At once the destination for a series of fantasies and the place from which a new relationship to thought originated, America incarnates a dark continent whose strangeness and singularity has driven thinkers outside of their own philosophical comfort zone—often forcing them to show anger, anxiety, or desire towards...

The many mass protests that have taken place since 2011 have been characterised by an unmistakable need to challenge, overthrow, and destroy the prevailing political representations without proposing new ones. The protests are not concerned with replacing the current government or leader with others, and thus getting a better version of what we already have. Instead, they refuse all leaders,...

This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupančič contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the...

The triumph of technological rationality and of the sciences as a whole has by no means provided answers to humanity’s great questions. Instead, it has raised new and old questions and problems. To orient ourselves in the twenty-first century, we must take a new look at the central categories of philosophy that, often unbeknownst to us, continue to shape our...

This is a book about justice, but not as we know it. Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos argues that justice is always hydrojustice – that is, always defined in relation to water, the element that constitutes and unites all bodies, human and nonhuman. Hence justice is not an ideal state reached through merely human procedures (legal, political, economic, etc.) but also a planetary...

In this poetical-philosophical manifesto, Gerald Raunig develops a materialist philosophy of multiplicity. On the basis of seventeen conceptual innovations – from windy kin to transversal intellect, from dissemblage to technecologies, from minor masculinity to condividual revolution – Raunig reformulates the question of revolutionary multiplicity. Always staying close to contemporary social struggles and movements, the book starts from the contention that...

What if the most joyful act was not to transgress a norm but to erect it? What if creativity consisted in enunciating a law under the pretext of violating it? And what if it turned out that you, who claim to prefer exceptions, only talk about them because they allow you to imagine the rules? Nomography proposes a provocative interpretation...

The Dark Forest Theory of the Internet investigates how intelligence—human and artificial—manifests under conditions of secrecy, hostility, and concealment. Departing from Chinese science fiction writer Liu Cixin’s dark forest theory, which frames the universe as a hostile terrain filled with predators where transparent communication is foolish and dangerous, the book portrays the internet as a cosmic war machine, teeming with...

Prompt Thinking explores how artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the nature of thought. In the age of generative AI, prompting becomes more than a technical instruction: it emerges as a philosophical practice. This book arises from an experiment with AI in which the fictional philosopher Jianwei Xun sparked global debate by publishing a book about power and perception in the...

There is a link between finance and paranoia, and that link may well be inescapable. At the core of financial imagination lies a notion of value – of ‘value creation’ – that is loaded with trouble. This is the trouble of a fragile metaphor: a metaphor of fecund money and future return, of true value and false value, of true...

When Socrates was standing before the Athenian tribunal in 399 BC, he said in his defence that the opponents he feared most were the invisible ones, those who had been spreading rumours against him for years but none of whom were being brought to court – it was like fighting shadows. The moment was iconic: Socrates, the harbinger of logos...

What do cinematic “universes,” cloud archiving, and voice cloning have in common? They’re in the business of foreverizing – the process of revitalizing things that have degraded, failed, or disappeared so that they can remain active in the present. To foreverize something is to reanimate it, to enclose and protect it from time and the elements, and to eradicate the...

The global crisis of our time involves a complex of ecological, economic, technological, and migratory challenges that no state is able to control. The result is a provincialisation of our democracies with respect to the new planetary powers confronting humanity. It is from this that our increasingly impotent and rabid politics stems. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is precisely...

In this short book, the leading German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen puts forward a fresh and original account of pop music. He argues that pop music is not so much a form of music as a constellation of different media channels, social spaces, and behavioural systems, of which music is only a part. Its own logic of attraction is based...

Cryptocurrencies are often associated with right-wing political movements, or even with the alt-right. They are the preserve of libertarians and fans of Ayn Rand and Friedrich Hayek. With their promotion of anonymity and individualism, there’s no doubt that they seamlessly slot into the prevailing anti-State ideology. But in this book, Mark Alizart argues that the significance of cryptocurrencies goes well...

What if fascism didn't disappear at the end of WWII with the defeat of Hitler and Mussolini? Even more troubling, what if fascism can no longer be confined to political parties or ultra-nationalist politicians but has become something much more diffuse that is spread across our societies as cultural expressions and psychological states? This is the disturbing thesis developed by...

Not so long ago, comedy and laughter were a shared experience of relief, as Freud famously argued. At their best, ribbing, roasting, piss-taking and insulting were the foundation of a kind of universal culture from which friendship, camaraderie and solidarity could emerge. Now, comedy is characterised by edgy humour and misplaced jokes that provoke personal and social anxiety, causing divisive...

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on. This transformation signals a major shift in how capitalist firms operate and how they interact with the rest of the...

Self-Sabotage contends that an unconscious impulse to undermine our own interests plays a dominant role in our lives. The idea of a primary drive to self-destruction is at odds with the prevailing common sense in a world where almost everyone believes that we strive to flourish. Yet often we fail to flourish not because some people are wicked but because...