Outspoken – serie

Although we tend to associate social transformation with major events, historical turning points, or revolutionary upheaval, Revolutionary Routines argues that seemingly minor everyday habits are the key to meaningful change.Through its account of influential socio-political processes – such as the resurgence of fascism and white supremacy, the crafting of new technologies of governance, and the operation of digital media and algorithms – this book rethinks not only how change works, but also what counts as change. Drawing examples from the affective politics of Trumpism and Brexit, nudge theory and behaviour change, social media and the international refugee crisis, and the networked activism of Occupy and Black Lives Matter, Carolyn Pedwell argues that minor gestures may be as significant as major happenings, revealing the powerful potential in our ability to remake shared habits and imaginatively reinhabit everyday life.Revolutionary Routines offers a new understanding of the logics of habit and the nature of social change, power, and progressive politics, illustrating diverse forms of consciousness and co-operation through which political solidarities might take shape.

Disenchanted by indirect forms of protest designed to work within existing systems of corporate and state power, animal and earth liberation activists have turned instead to direct action. In this detailed ethnographic account Jennifer Grubbs takes the reader inside the complicated, intricate world of these powerful and controversial interventions, nuancing the harrowing realities of political repression with the inspiring, clever ways that activists resist.Grubbs draws on her personal experiences within the movement to offer a thoughtful and intersectional analysis. Tracing the strategies of liberationist activists as they grapple with doing activism under extreme repression, Ecoliberation challenges ubiquitous frameworks that position protestors as either good or bad by showing how activists playfully and confrontationally enact radical social change. Nearly a decade in the making, the book looks back at the notorious period of repression called the Green Scare and draws contemporary connections to the creep of fascism under President Donald Trump.In stories that are simultaneously heartbreaking, riddled with tension and contradiction, and inspiring, Grubbs proves that whether or not the revolution is televised, it will be spectacular.

We are living in a time of acute vulnerability. From climate change to drone warfare, terrorist attacks to mass shootings, safe spaces to trigger warnings, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, homo vulnerabilis is once again coming to terms with the fact that it can be wounded, or even killed.Against such finitude, sovereignty is now reasserting itself as a political power that might save us from our ontological state. The irony is, of course, that such sovereignty – for example through camps, walls, police violence, or drones – is also the underlying, historical cause of many of our most intense contemporary experiences of vulnerabilization. Interrupting the dialectic by which sovereignty manages to be both the cause of our vulnerabilization and the phantasmatic tool of its prevention, in Being Vulnerable Arne De Boever explores how today’s experiences of vulnerabilization can be translated into a collective human power that dismantles the form of sovereignty that is producing this state of affairs. Focused on theories, paradigms, and alternative formations of sovereignty, Being Vulnerable reconsiders the tradition of thinking through a political concept in order to approach it anew.

We are living in a time of acute vulnerability. From climate change to drone warfare, terrorist attacks to mass shootings, safe spaces to trigger warnings, not to mention the COVID-19 pandemic, homo vulnerabilis is once again coming to terms with the fact that it can be wounded, or even killed.Against such finitude, sovereignty is now reasserting itself as a political power that might save us from our ontological state. The irony is, of course, that such sovereignty – for example through camps, walls, police violence, or drones – is also the underlying, historical cause of many of our most intense contemporary experiences of vulnerabilization. Interrupting the dialectic by which sovereignty manages to be both the cause of our vulnerabilization and the phantasmatic tool of its prevention, in Being Vulnerable Arne De Boever explores how today's experiences of vulnerabilization can be translated into a collective human power that dismantles the form of sovereignty that is producing this state of affairs. Focused on theories, paradigms, and alternative formations of sovereignty, Being Vulnerable reconsiders the tradition of thinking through a political concept in order to approach it anew.

In a world of increasing right-wing populism, global capitalism, and a climate emergency, leading thinkers come together to interrogate the meaning and practice of being outspoken. The violence, nativism, persecution, and social hostilities of the twenty-first century demand a call to order: philosophical and theoretical communities must commit their intellectual resources to confronting and articulating the structures, desires, and resentment driving the dismantling of democratic values. Action in the absence of understanding and political vision devoid of inclusive ideas are all the more vulnerable to taking a reactionary turn. Contributors to this volume challenge the return of fascism, dehumanization of immigrants, distrust of science, intolerance of fair and equitable economic models, and suspicion of inclusive political platforms. All, in their own way, tackle the burning question of how we might reimagine twenty-first-century life in the face of divisive forces. Outspoken includes essays by some of the world’s most radical thinkers – Rosi Braidotti, Henry A. Giroux, Amelia Jones, and Slavoj Žižek, among others – who together chart multiple progressive courses for political antagonism and social intervention.

In a world of increasing right-wing populism, global capitalism, and a climate emergency, leading thinkers come together to interrogate the meaning and practice of being outspoken. The violence, nativism, persecution, and social hostilities of the twenty-first century demand a call to order: philosophical and theoretical communities must commit their intellectual resources to confronting and articulating the structures, desires, and resentment driving the dismantling of democratic values. Action in the absence of understanding and political vision devoid of inclusive ideas are all the more vulnerable to taking a reactionary turn. Contributors to this volume challenge the return of fascism, dehumanization of immigrants, distrust of science, intolerance of fair and equitable economic models, and suspicion of inclusive political platforms. All, in their own way, tackle the burning question of how we might reimagine twenty-first-century life in the face of divisive forces. Outspoken includes essays by some of the world's most radical thinkers – Rosi Braidotti, Henry A. Giroux, Amelia Jones, and Slavoj Žižek, among others – who together chart multiple progressive courses for political antagonism and social intervention.

Disappearance is marked by a devastating absence. It constitutes a form of violence that rips open a wound in time, offering no viable recovery and no meaningful justice. It provides alibis to perpetrators while denying victims their humanity. For those who are left to live with its presence, the terror is infinite.State of Disappearance brings together the power of artistic testimony and witnessing with critical voices to ask deeper questions about extreme violence, the normalization of human vanishing, state and ideological complicity, and memorialization, along with wider concerns about what it means to be human in the twenty-first century. A gallery of dedicated artworks by Mexican abstract painter Chantal Meza inspires each chapter, bringing the aesthetic into critical conversation and leading to a multidisciplinary collection that charts a new path for recovering humanity in the face of its annihilation. Featuring contributions from theorists of violence who are concerned with the issue of forcibly removing humans from the surface of the earth, while also appreciative of the complex layers of appearance and disappearance in the contemporary world, the book attends to the many ways disappearance occurs and the ethical questions this raises.State of Disappearance traverses the difficult terrain of human denial to rethink some of the most devastating chapters in human history and their enduring relevance to our lives.

Our age – saturated with media images and ever-present political crises – traces back to the beginning of Christianity and its messianic vision of the world. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, our sense of time and history has become apocalyptic.In The Illegitimate Age Federico Vercellone explains contemporary affinities for both apocalypse and media imagery from the perspective of political theology, drawing from St Paul’s mysterious figure of the katechon – the withholding power that prevents the arrival of the Antichrist and the end of times while also delaying the Messiah, therefore containing the very evil it restrains. Vercellone highlights representation as a crucial aspect of the katechon myth, finding within it the roots of current political and aesthetic forms. In the context of contemporary populism, charismatic leaders build their power on presumed prestige, mimicry of sacred figures, and pandering invocations of kitsch, all recurrent aspects of the katechon and Antichrist trope in Western art and history. Political power, Vercellone argues, has been deeply aestheticized, and the path that led us here was laid long before mass media, mass consumption, and our society of the spectacle.A new interpretation of the political and aesthetic categories first suggested by Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Jean Baudrillard, The Illegitimate Age turns a fresh lens on the legitimacy of political power, the appeal of populism, and the role of the image in our society.

Are you bored of the endless scroll of your social media feed? Do you swipe left before considering the human being whose face you just summarily rejected? Do you skim articles on your screen in search of intellectual stimulation that never arrives? If so, this book is the philosophical lifeline you have been waiting for.Offering a timely meditation on the profound effects of constant immersion in technology, also known as the Interface, Wish I Were Here draws on philosophical analysis of boredom and happiness to examine the pressing issues of screen addiction and the lure of online outrage. Without moralizing, Mark Kingwell takes seriously the possibility that current conditions of life and connection are creating hollowed-out human selves, divorced from their own external world. While scrolling, swiping, and clicking suggest purposeful action, such as choosing and connecting with others, Kingwell argues that repeated flicks of the finger provide merely the shadow of meaning, by reducing us to scattered data fragments, Twitter feeds, Instagram posts, shopping preferences, and text trends captured by algorithms.Written in accessible language that references both classical philosophers and contemporary critics, Wish I Were Here turns to philosophy for a cure to the widespread unease that something is amiss in modern waking life.

Across liberal democracies, open society has become both a familiar slogan and a favoured target, invoked by politicians and philanthropists while denounced by populists. In this approachably written and incisive work Christof Royer asks what it truly means to value diversity without illusions in an age of polarization, conspiracy thinking, and democratic fatigue.Drawing on the charged history of open society in the writings of Henri Bergson and Karl Popper, and drawing on thinkers such as Hannah Arendt, Judith Shklar, or Stuart Hall, Royer reclaims the concept as both ethos and ideology: a fallible, argumentative stance that accepts conflict and tragedy and a partisan commitment to defending dissent against forces that would close it down. Through accessible case studies – from wokeness and culture wars to immigration, COVID-19, artificial intelligence, and free speech – Royer shows how a reimagined conception of open society can guide struggles without slipping into relativism or liberal self-congratulation. He advances a distinctive account of the way provocation forges character and explores the political role of reflective solitude. Openness, Royer argues, must be actively cultivated by education, institutions, and individuals; it will not simply flourish on its own.Blending contemporary commentary and political theory with an irreverent first-person voice, Why Open Society Matters offers a provocative look at a contested ideal that has never been more relevant.

We are in a world of proliferating border controls and intensifying territorial disputes – one in which, Nick Megoran argues, a radical rediagnosis of border violence is necessary. The problem is not the boundaries themselves but the way modern states treat them as inviolable, even when they divide communities, fuel conflict, harm migrants, and produce widespread human suffering. If we were to understand people, rather than borders, as sacred, new ways of thinking about coexistence, mobility, and political community would be possible.Putting Borders in Their Place shows that liberal, conservative, and abolitionist approaches all fail to get to grips with the problem of border violence because the modern international system views state boundaries as quasi-sacred and beyond negotiation. Exploring theological readings of anarchist thought as well as global case studies, Megoran imagines a more humane world where borders act as tools to facilitate human flourishing instead of being sacralized absolutes. He examines deadly enforcement regimes at frontiers in Europe and the United States, territorial conflicts and annexations, and the borders that cut through Indigenous lands such as those of the Tohono O’odham Nation. He also highlights the creative and practical ways in which governments, international organizations, Indigenous Peoples, religious communities, and social movements across the globe are reducing conflict through cooperation and flexibility, including shared sovereignty arrangements, cross-border regions, and Indigenous mobility practices such as the Haudenosaunee passport. Original, interdisciplinary, and hopeful, Putting Borders in Their Place opens up an important new conversation about the possibilities of a less violent world.