You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
This book is an attempt to save “the sexual” from the oblivion to which certain strands in queer theory tend to condemn it, and at the same time to limit the risks of anti-politics and solipsism contained in what has been termed antisocial queer theory. It takes a journey from Sigmund Freud to Mario Mieli and Guy Hocquenghem, from Michel Foucault and Judith Butler to Teresa de Lauretis, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, and Tim Dean, and from all of these thinkers back to Immanuel Kant and Thomas Hobbes. At the end, through readings of Bruce LaBruce’s movies on gay zombies, the elitism of antisocial queer theory is brought into contact with popular culture. The living dead come to represent a dispossessed form of subjectivity, whose monstrous drives are counterposed to predatory desires of liberal individuals. The reader is thus lead into the interstitial spaces of the Queer Apocalypses, where the past and the future collapse onto the present, and sexual minorities resurrect to the chance of a non-heroic political agency.
Giulio Douhet is generally considered the world's most important air-power theorist and this book offers the first comprehensive account of his air-power concepts. It ranges from 1884 when an air service was first implemented within the Italian military to the outbreak of the Second World War, and explores the evolution and dissemination of Douhet's ideas in an international context. It examines the impact of the Libyan war, the First World War and Ethiopian war on the development of Italian air-power strategy. It also addresses the issue of Douhet's advocacy of strategic bombing, exploring why it was that Douhet became an advocate of city bombing; the meaning and the limits of his core concept of 'command of the air'; and the mutual impact of air power, military and naval thought. It also takes into account alternatives to Douhetism such as the theories developed by Amedeo Mecozzi and others.
In this new work, political theorist Michael J. Thompson argues that modern societies are witnessing a decline in one of the core building blocks of modernity: the autonomous self. Far from being an illusion of the Enlightenment, Thompson contends that the individual is a defining feature of the project to build a modern democratic culture and polity. One of the central reasons for its demise in recent decades has been the emergence of what he calls the "cybernetic society," a cohesive totalization of the social logics of the institutional spheres of economy, culture and polity. These logics have been progressively defined by the imperatives of economic growth and technical-administrative ma...
Central to Genevieve Lloyd's approach is a fresh look at Spinoza's critique of what he regards as Descartes' flawed way of imagining the nature and status of human thought in relation to the rest of Nature. Lloyd argues that the influence of the Cartesian model lingers in the contemporary collective imagination. She challenges a common way of reading the Ethics, which reflects and reinforces the figure of Spinoza as a 'rationalist' - committed to the superiority and dominance of Reason within human minds. By offering a more nuanced account of Spinoza's version of Reason, Lloyd brings his philosophy to bear on a range of familiar, but largely unexamined attitudes, which connect the supposed supremacy of Reason within the human mind to humanity's supposed supremacy within Nature.
The history of the war from the past one hundred years is a history of bombing “Tripoli, 1 November 1911: I decided that today I would try to drop bombs from the aeroplane … if I succeed I shall be happy to have been the first.” —Italian Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti At its inception, aerial bombardment was a weapon of empire deployed to subdue colonial populations. Soon, during the Second World War, civilians in Europe and Japan came into the bomber’s crosshairs, and ever since non-combatant targets have been at the heart of military strategy. It was a seismic shift in the relations of power: as the state justified the mass murder of civilians, individual combatants, flying high above...
Published in France in 2018, Henri Atlan's book Cours de philosophie biologique et cognitiviste: Spinoza et la biologie actuelle (Odile Jacob, 2018) represents a turning point in Spinoza's interpretations of contemporary life sciences. Henri Atlan is the first in this field of research, of applied epistemology and ontology, to effectively address contemporary questions in biology and cognitive sciences. Atlan presents us with a genuine understanding of Spinoza's monism, which is neither materialistic nor idealistic, and with an expertise in contemporary life sciences that will open an entire new field of research in Spinoza scholarship as well as in philosophy of sciences. Readers will better understand the connection between Spinoza's Ethics, his ontology and epistemology, and modern life sciences, allowing us to rethink the relationship between ethics and modern sciences.
Disembodiment examines self-destruction, self-injury, and radical self-endangerment as unconventional performances of resistance and refusal. Banu Bargu troubles the dominant approach that treats these acts as individual pathologies, cries for help, and signs of despair, taking the reader on an unsettling journey that passes through the suicides of enslaved Africans, the hunger strikes of woman suffragists, Gandhian fasting practices, Bouazizi's self-incineration, and the lip-sewing practices of migrants and asylum seekers to chart a bleak repertoire of contention performed by the oppressed. As a work in global critical theory whose normative compass is the suffering body, Disembodiment offers a bold materialist theory of corporeal agency that upholds the fundamental rebelliousness of the body.
With figures such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx, Engels, and Nietzsche, the nineteenth century was a dynamic time of philosophical development. The period made lasting contributions to several fields of philosophy. Moreover, it paved the way for the development of the social sciences at the turn of the twentieth century. This volume is dedicated to exploring the rich tradition of nineteenth-century Continental philosophy in its different areas with the main purpose of highlighting the importance of this tradition in the development of the leading streams of thought of the twentieth and twenty-first century.
The Sexual/Political engages with contemporary political issues in sexuality through a survey of modern philosophy, psychoanalytic thought, 20th-century political theory, and more recent queer philosophies. The book investigates how the sexual has perturbed philosophical, political, and psychoanalytic thought and how this has fed into discrimination against the LGBTQI community. It analyses the social stigmas applied to public and private sexual acts and the psychopolitical processes leading to the prevalence of neo-fascist populism in Italy and the world. Tracing the history of sexuality through Freud, Marx, Fanon, and Foucault, among many others, Bernini considers why the sexual has always...
The research background of this book is the rich and complex history of French sociology, characterized by rigorous intellectual inquiry and diverse theoretical perspectives that have profoundly impacted global sociology. The driving idea behind the book "Unlock the Legacy of French Sociology" is to provide a comprehensive exploration of the rich and influential history of French sociology. The book aims to detail the development of French sociological thought, examining the contributions of key figures like Émile Durkheim, Pierre Bourdieu, and others. It also seeks to highlight both well-known and lesser-known aspects of French sociological theory, as well as contemporary trends and practi...