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Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty was profoundly influential for critical theory as it grappled with issues of security and state violence in the wake of September 11 2001. Yet his work was criticised for its lack of attention to capitalism and liberal governmentality, and it was argued that he ignored the problem of political action. Issues of economy and political praxis have become even more urgent for critical theory over the past decade as it has confronted the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and an increasingly turbulent and populist politics. Agamben and Radical Politics suggests that Agamben’s work retains its urgency for understanding the issues that underpin the politics of our time. It does so by focusing on his recent work on the theological history of economy, his account of a non-sovereign politics, and his longstanding engagement with the revolutionary tradition. The book includes a newly translated essay by Agamben, entitled ‘Capitalism as Religion,’ and ten chapters that critically engage with him on issues including the genealogy of economy, the practices of monasticism and use, temporality and historical method, and his relationship to Marxism and anarchism. The volume sheds new light on Agamben’s work by focusing on his treatment of economy and poitical action and, through this, opens up new ways of thinking about politics and critical theory in an age of financial crisis and political revolts.

Drawing on a wide range of contemporary social and political thought, the book engages with a feminist dissident movement: namely, former Yugoslavia’s “Women in Black” (Žene u Crnom orŽuC) and its practices of performative mourning for the abjected other. This agonistic mourning involves standing still in public, wearing black, and holding vigils to acknowledge the victims of the “other side.” In performatively occupying the position of the internal enemy, these political actors respond to those estranged as external enemies. By re-positioning their political bodies at the centre of the polis as a means of embodying their own and others’ ambivalent and precarious belonging vis-à-vis its demarcation lines, the activists bring intolerable memories into public view. Hence, they actualize the multilayered modalities of stasis as standing still but also taking the stand as embodied traces of those who had been stripped of their capacity to testify within the nationalist and militarist banality that led to ethno-nationalist violence in what has become the former Yugoslavia. In commemorating those socially instituted as impossible to commemorate, and in upsetting the grounds of mourning as a founding scene of maternal properness in nationalism, these dissident political subjects contest the idealized mourning inscribed in the genealogies of biopolitical normalization and ethno-national militarism. The book addresses agonistic mourning as a critical practice of contesting the power assemblage of sovereignty, biopolitics and nationalism.

What are the legacies of the Cold War? This interdisciplinary collection explores how, in a number of fundamental ways, contemporary life and thought continue to be shaped by theories, technologies and attitudes that were forged during World War II and developed into organisational structures during the long Cold War. From futures research, pattern recognition algorithms, nuclear waste disposal and surveillance technologies, to smart weapons systems, contemporary fiction and art, this book shows that we live in a world imagined and engineered during the Cold War.

This volume is the world’s first exploration of a series of encounters between ancient philosophical texts and contemporary continental metaphysics. The ancient texts under consideration originated in the greater Mediterranean, and in particular the Greek and Roman worlds, from the 6th-century B.C.E. to the end of antiquity, around the 4th-century C.E. More specifically, our volume is organized by three sites of engagement with the ancient world: (1) Plato and the Academy, (2) Aristotle and the Lyceum, and (3) and the schools of the Epicureans, Skeptics, Stoics, and Neo-Platonists. On the other side of the engagement, the tradition of contemporary continental metaphysics stretches from Deleuze’s self-nomination as a “pur métaphysicien,” through the renewed attention to ontology in thinkers such as Agamben and Badiou, up to the various New Materialisms and Speculative Realisms that populate the 21st-century continental landscape.   Through this collection of resonating voices and interlocking ideas, this volume expresses the profusion of new continental approaches to classic problems of metaphysics. These essays do not merely rehearse overlooked contemporary interpretations of the ancients, but do something entirely original: to reconsider what it means to think, with the ancients, about the nature of things. At their most ambitious, these essays even “do metaphysics,” using ancient philosophers as collaborators to make new contributions to contemporary problems. The questions of metaphysics persist through changing cultural tastes, and they remain because they constantly demand our response. This volume confronts this demand and responds with a new collection of classically-informed yet progressive-minded philosophical encounters.

Human-animal studies and the age of the anthropocene are prevalent across many disciplines at this time and this book is among the first to explore the usefulness of Deleuze for extensions and debates in these fields which only Deleuzian understandings of human subjectivity can provide. While Deleuzian studies has always been critical of the structure and status of human subjectivity, utilizing Deleuze in discussions of the contentious and unstable concept of the animal underlines the utility of his work for altering both theories and practices from art to philosophy to everyday activism. This book collects essays by established scholars in the field of Deleuze studies, and new scholars, to show not only the diversity of Deleuze’s applicability to human-animal studies but to call into question what we mean by the seemingly simple idea of ‘the animal’. Through 16 chapters Deleuze’s entire oeuvre is used in analysing television, film, music, art, drunkenness, mourning, virtual technology, protest, activism, animal rights and abolition. Each chapter questions the premise of the animal as a discrete, easily understood concept and thereby simultaneously places the human as animal and critiques the centrality of the human. The book aims to create new questions in reference to what the age of the anthropocene means by ‘animal’ as much as to analyse and explore examples of the unclear boundaries between human and animal.

Against the backdrop of a series of recent political events (the Snowden Affair, the Manning Affair, Wikileaks, Clinton’s private email account, and so forth), this book argues that secrecy is a condition, rather than a negation, of the social bond – that we can only relate to one another insofar as, at the same moment, we separate from one another as well. It pursues this argument via a close consideration of Derrida’s thought, and especially his discussion of the concepts of perjury, testimony, and oath in his later work. It shows that, for Derrida, precisely because the other, or some crucial aspect of the other, remains absolutely other (unknown, opaque, a secret), every interaction presupposes an oath to say what one means and believe what the other says. Put differently, and paradoxically, our capacity for deception that compels us to trust or have faith in one another. This is an aspect of Derrida’s work that is often confused with a ‘religious’ or ‘theological turn’ in his later writings.

Tristan Garcia holds that what makes something some thing is its resistance to reductionism, the attempt to explain it in terms of its constituents and relations to other things. For Garcia, something just is the differentiation between those things that constitute it and the things that it helps constitute. Tristan Garcia and the Dialectics of Persistence situates Garcia’s systematic unfolding of this idea via both classical thinkers such as Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger, and Kant as well as modern and contemporary luminaries in analytic and continental philosophy such as A.J. Ayer, Alain Badiou, Jacque Derrida, Graham Harman, Paul Livingston, John McDowell, W.V.O. Quine, and Graham Priest. The metaphysics, differential ontology, and militant anti-reductionism from Book I of Form and Object are first charitably evaluated by the way Garcia dialectically moves through a series of seemingly incompatible oppositions concerning: substance and process, analysis and dialectic, simple and whole, and discovery and creation. After explicating Garcia’s general ontology, some of the regional ontologies of Book II, those involving intensity (events, time, life, goodness, truth, and beauty) and Garcia’s own tragic aporetic dialectics (gender, adolescence, and death), are presented. Tristan Garcia and the Dialectics of Persistence bridges analytic and continental philosophy and is moreover accessible to devotes of both traditions. The marriage of analytic and continental philosophy gives rise to original argumentation, including a new understanding of the process philosophical route to metaphysical holism, a new enclosure paradox concerning metaphysical explanation, and a new argument for the existence of an empty set.

Subjectivity is itself an event that philosophy has tried to situate in an evanescent present as a dominating self-awareness equipped with common sense. But Deleuze insists that it requires a lifetime of effort to extract out of a multitude of potential a particular biography one can call one’s own. Empiricism’s disconnected bits and pieces cannot be arbitrarily separated into subject and object by transcendent laws and logic to assure a single fixed and truthful world running with a dialectical motor. Deleuze suggests a univocity based in difference. Being must be said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. The plane of immanence coexists with the nomadic, unblocked distribution of things.

Interpassivity is a widespread, but mostly unacknowledged form of cultural behavior. It consists in letting others (other people, or animals, machines etc.) not work, but consume in one’s place. When certain people, for example, take care that others drink their beer for them, fotocopy or print texts out instead of reading them, let recording devices watch TV programmes in their place, use ritual machines that pray or believe for them vicariously, or are happy that certain TV-comedies already laugh about themselves, we have to speak of interpassivity. These actions are based on certain subjects’ preference to delegate their enjoyment instead of having it themselves. This, obviously, raises a number of quite uncanny, fundamental questions: Why do certain people do not want to have their enjoyment? And why do they, if the do not want to enjoy, go to such great pains in order to ensure that somebody else enjoys in their place? The theory of interpassivity has had considerable impacts on several disciplines such as philosophy, art theory, psychoanalysis, media theory, political theory, anthropology, theory of religion etc. This volume assembles essays that reach from the fundamental philosophical questions, concerning the paradoxical pleasure gained from delegated enjoyment, to their most current consequences: for example concerning interactivity and participation in the arts and in politics, generosity in culture, the status of belief, ritual and magic, cultural capitalism, civilized urban role-play etc.

With the aim of rethinking the state and stakes of contemporary theory, Gabriel Rockhill critically works through some of the most important recent philosophical writings on the intertwined topics of history, politics and art. He offers guidance to some of the complex debates in these areas, as well as a commanding overview of the key issues and some of the central figures, including Foucault, Derrida, Castoriadis, Badiou and Rancière. By resituating theoretical work in a broader force field of culture and power, he advances an innovative and nuanced description of recent intellectual developments that calls into question the now standard but rather stereotypical accounts of prominent thinkers and philosophical movements. Far from hiding behind the towering figures with whom he engages, Rockhill stakes out positions in relationship to them and formulates precise arguments in favour of a novel understanding of the historical relationship between art and politics, arguing that there is a need for a deep shift in the tectonic plates that undergird these debates. The result is an invitation not only to retool extant methodological paradigms but also to ultimately reinvent the practice of theory itself.