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This book critically revisits the reassessment of philosophical Marxism that took place in the middle of the twentieth century. It explores the efforts that were made to reconcile a radical and democratic political agenda with a politics that did not privilege materialist understandings of the social. It describes how Marxism's collapse in the twentieth century profoundly altered the style and substance of Western European radical thought. It explains how, in order to build a more robust form of democratic theory and action, prominent theorists moved to reject revolution, abandon class for more fragmented models of social action, and elevate the political over the social. Acknowledging the “constructedness” of society and politics, these theorists chose the “symbolic” as a concept powerful enough to reinvent leftist thought outside a Marxist framework. The book goes on to explain how the post-Marxist idea of the symbolic is dynamic and complex, and that it uncannily echoes the early German Romantics, who first advanced a modern conception of symbolism and the symbolic. It explains how post-Marxist thinkers appreciated the rich potential of the ambiguities and paradoxes that the Romantics first recognized. Mapping different ideas of the symbolic among contemporary thinkers, the book engages with the work of important theorists such as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Cornelius Castoriadis, and Claude Lefort and uniquely situates them within two hundred years of European thought, showing their profound relevance to today's political activism.

This book argues that the concept of “afterness” is a key figure in the thought and aesthetics of modernity. It pursues questions such as: What does it mean for something to “follow” something else? Does that which follows mark a clear break with what came before it, or does it in fact tacitly perpetuate its predecessor as a consequence of its inevitable indebtedness to the terms and conditions of that from which it claims to have departed? Indeed, is not the very act of breaking with, and then following upon, a way of retroactively constructing and fortifying that from which the break that set the movement of following into motion had occurred? The book explores the concept and movement of afterness as a privileged yet uncanny category through close readings of writers such as Immanuel Kant, Franz Kafka, Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Bertolt Brecht, Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. It shows how the vexed concepts of afterness, following, and coming after shed new light on a constellation of modern preoccupations, including personal and cultural memory, translation, photography, hope, and the historical and conceptual specificity of what has been termed “after Auschwitz.” The book’s various analyses illuminate Lyotard’s apodictic statement that “after philosophy comes philosophy. But it has been altered by the after.” The book demonstrates, that much hinges on our interpretation of the “after”.

This book reconceives alienation as the absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and others, something that manifests itself in feelings of helplessness and the despondent acceptance of ossified social roles and expectations. It draws on the Hegelian philosophical tradition, phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency and recent work in the analytical tradition. It notes that the Hegelian–Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor after the post-metaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views of human nature. It shows how a revived approach to alienation helps critical social theory engage with phenomena such as meaninglessness, isolation, and indifference. By severing alienation's link to a problematic conception of human essence while retaining its social-philosophical content, the book provides resources for a renewed critique of social pathologies, which is a much-neglected concern in contemporary liberal political philosophy. The work revisits the arguments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger, placing them in dialogue with Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, and Charles Taylor.

This book puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject and argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. It concentrates on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson. It argues that biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and what is judged as animal. It contends that biopower generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity and explains that the renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. It highlights how, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state.

Philosophy and anthropology have long debated questions of difference: rationality versus irrationality, abstraction versus concreteness, modern versus premodern. What if these disciplines instead focused on the commonalities of human experience? Would this effort bring philosophers and anthropologists closer together? Would it lead to greater insights across historical and cultural divides? In As Wide as the World Is Wise, Michael Jackson encourages philosophers and anthropologists to mine the space between localized and globalized perspectives, to resolve empirically the distinctions between the one and the many and between life and specific forms of life. His project balances abstract epistemological practice with immanent reflection, promoting a more situated, embodied, and sensuous approach to the world and its in-between spaces. Drawing on a lifetime of ethnographic fieldwork in West Africa and Aboriginal Australia, Jackson resets the language and logic of academic thought from the standpoint of other lifeworlds. He extends Kant’s cosmopolitan ideal to include all human societies, achieving a radical break with elite ideas of the subjective and a more expansive conception of truth.

How can someone who condemns hunting, animal farming, and animal experimentation also favor legal abortion, which is the deliberate destruction of a human fetus? The authors of Beating Hearts aim to reconcile this apparent conflict and examine the surprisingly similar strategic and tactical questions faced by activists in the pro-life and animal rights movements. Beating Hearts maintains that sentience, or the ability to have subjective experiences, grounds a being’s entitlement to moral concern. The authors argue that nearly all human exploitation of animals is unjustified. Early abortions do not contradict the sentience principle because they precede fetal sentience, and Beating Hearts explains why the mere potential for sentience does not create moral entitlements. Late abortions do raise serious moral questions, but forcing a woman to carry a child to term is problematic as a form of gender-based exploitation. These ethical explorations lead to a wider discussion of the strategies deployed by the pro-life and animal rights movements. Should legal reforms precede or follow attitudinal changes? Do gory images win over or alienate supporters? Is violence ever principled? By probing the connections between debates about abortion and animal rights, Beating Hearts uses each highly contested set of questions to shed light on the other.

Beyond Biofatalism is a response to the idea that evolutionary psychology reveals human beings to be incapable of building a more inclusive, cooperative, and egalitarian society. Considering the pressures of climate change, unsustainable population growth, increasing income inequality, and religious extremism, this attitude promises to stifle the creative action we require before we even try to meet these threats. Beyond Biofatalism provides the perspective we need to understand that better societies are not only possible but actively enabled by human nature. Gillian Barker appreciates the methods and findings of evolutionary psychologists, but she considers their work against a broader background to show human nature is surprisingly open to social change. Like other organisms, we possess an active plasticity that allows us to respond dramatically to certain kinds of environmental variation, and we engage in niche construction, modifying our environment to affect others and ourselves. Barker uses related research in social psychology, developmental biology, ecology, and economics to reinforce this view of evolved human nature, and philosophical exploration to reveal its broader implications. The result is an encouraging foundation on which to build better approaches to social, political, and other institutional changes that could enhance our well-being and chances for survival.

In many places around the world, relations between ethnic and religious groups that for long periods coexisted more or less amicably are now fraught with aggression and violence. This trend has profound international implications, threatening efforts to narrow the gap between rich and poor. Underscoring the need for sustained action, George Rupp urges the secular West to reckon with the continuing power of religious conviction and embrace the full extent of the world’s diversity. While individualism is a powerful force in Western cultures and a cornerstone of Western foreign policy, it elicits strong resistance in traditional communities. Drawing on decades of research and experience, Rupp pushes modern individualism beyond its foundational beliefs to recognize the place of communal practice in our world. Affirming the value of communities and the productive role religion plays in many lives, he advocates new solutions to such global challenges as conflicts in the developing world, income inequality, climate change, and mass migration.

Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of philosophy, articulating this placement through religion and literature. Chronicling the interactions between these thinkers, Sarah Hammerschlag argues that the stakes in their respective positions were more than philosophical. They were also political. Levinas’s investments were born out in his writings on Judaism and ultimately in an evolving conviction that the young state of Israel held the best possibility for achieving such an ideal. For Derrida, the Jewish question was literary. The stakes of Jewish survival could only be approached through reflections on modern literature’s religious legacy, a line of thinking that provided him the means to reconceive democracy. Hammerschlag’s reexamination of Derrida and Levinas’s textual exchange not only produces a new account of this friendship but also has significant ramifications for debates within Continental philosophy, the study of religion, and political theology.

How can Daoism, China's indigenous religion, give us the aesthetic, ethical, political, and spiritual tools to address the root causes of our ecological crisis and construct a sustainable future? In China's Green Religion, James Miller shows how Daoism orients individuals toward a holistic understanding of religion and nature. Explicitly connecting human flourishing to the thriving of nature, Daoism fosters a "green" subjectivity and agency that transforms what it means to live a flourishing life on earth. Through a groundbreaking reconstruction of Daoist philosophy and religion, Miller argues for four key, green insights: a vision of nature as a subjective power that informs human life; an anthropological idea of the porous body based on a sense of qi flowing through landscapes and human beings; a tradition of knowing founded on the experience of transformative power in specific landscapes and topographies; and an aesthetic and moral sensibility based on an affective sensitivity to how the world pervades the body and the body pervades the world. Environmentalists struggle to raise consciousness for their cause, Miller argues, because their activism relies on a quasi-Christian concept of "saving the earth." Instead, environmentalists should integrate nature and culture more seamlessly, cultivating through a contemporary intellectual vocabulary a compelling vision of how the earth materially and spiritually supports human flourishing.

This book targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and explores the radical potential of Christ, whose “crossing” disrupts their circular discourse. It is built upon the idea of “nonphilosophy,” or “nonstandard philosophy.” This is a way of thinking that goes past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations among religion, science, politics, and art. The book describes a Christ who is not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the Apostles or the Catholic Church. Instead He is the embodiment of generic man, founder of a science of humans and the herald of a gnostic messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. The book inserts quantum science into religion and recasts the temporality of the cross, the entombment and the resurrection, arguing that it is God who is sacrificed on the cross so that equals in faith may be born. Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism alike, the book is a heretical experiment that ties religion tightly to the human experience and the lived world.

We live in critical times. We face a global crisis in economics and finance, a global ecological crisis, and a constant barrage of international disputes. Perhaps most dishearteningly, there seems to be little faith in our ability to address such difficult problems. However, there is also a more positive sense in which these are critical times. The world's current state of flux gives us a unique window of opportunity for shaping a new international order that will allow us to cope with current and future global crises. In Critical Theory in Critical Times, eleven of the most distinguished critical theorists offer new perspectives on recent crises and transformations of the global political and economic order. Essays from Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, Cristina Lafont, Rainer Forst, Wendy Brown, Christoph Menke, Nancy Fraser, Rahel Jaeggi, Amy Allen, Penelope Deutscher, and Charles Mills address pressing issues including international human rights and democratic sovereignty, global neoliberalism, novel approaches to the critique of capitalism, critical theory's Eurocentric heritage, and new directions offered by critical race theory and postcolonial studies. Sharpening the conceptual tools of critical theory, the contributors to Critical Theory in Critical Times reveal new ways of expanding the diverse traditions of the Frankfurt School in response to some of the most urgent and important challenges of our times.

Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as “the masses” during a critical period of European history. It shows how, between 1918 and 1933, the masses became a decisive preoccupation of European culture, fuelling both modernist movements in art, literature, architecture, theatre, and cinema, as well as the rise of communism and fascism and experiments in radical democracy. It follows the evolution of the idea of the masses into a preferred conceptual tool for social scientists—the ideal slogan for politicians and the chosen image for artists and writers trying to capture a society in flux and a people in upheaval.

This book reclaims the relevance of categories traditionally rendered “unthinkable” by postmodern feminist philosophies, such as “the real,” “the one,” “the limit,” and “finality,” thus critically repositioning poststructuralist feminist philosophy and gender/queer studies. It follows François Laruelle's nonstandard philosophy and the work of Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Luce Irigaray, and Rosi Braidotti. It argues that poststructuralist (feminist) theory sees the subject as a purely linguistic category, as multiple, nonfixed, and fluctuating, as something for limitless discursivity and as constitutively detached from the instance of the real. It goes on to argue that this re-conceptualization is based on the exclusion of and dichotomous opposition to notions of the real, the one (unity and continuity) and the stable. It makes the case that the non-philosophical reading of postructuralist philosophy engenders new forms of universalisms for global debate and action, and that these can be expressed in a language the world can understand. It also liberates theory from ideological paralysis, recasting the real as an immediately experienced human condition determined by gender, race, and social and economic circumstances.

In this masterful and enlivening study of the ways in which the concepts of death and mastery have been elaborated in Freudian and post-Freudian social theory, Ben Fong has given us the means to think about human nature and human community now, under conditions of advanced capitalism, without succumbing to the scientism of the new neurobiology or to the social constructivism of recent historicist social and cultural theory. The argument turns on the ambiguity embedded in the notion of mastery: on the one hand, the capacity to engage creatively with the world, to master the tasks of living a historical form of life; on the other, the temptation to enslave, to compel others to exercise this competence in one's place. Fong is able to analyze with remarkable lucidity a complex array of individual and social phenomena by fleshing out the imbrications of these twinned responses to what Freud called the drives' demand for work. Fong makes abundantly clear that drive theory and social theory are strongest when thought together.

Philosophers debate the death of philosophy as much as they debate the death of God. Immanuel Kant claimed responsibility for both philosophy’s beginning and end, while Martin Heidegger argued it concluded with Friedrich Nietzsche. In the twentieth century, figures as diverse as John Austin and Richard Rorty have proclaimed philosophy’s end, with some even calling for the advent of “post-philosophy.” In an effort to make sense of these conflicting positions—which often say as much about the philosopher as his subject—this book undertakes the first systematic treatment of “the end of philosophy,” while also recasting the history of Western thought itself. The book begins with post-philosophical claims such as scientism, which it reveals to be self-refuting, for they subsume philosophy into the branches of the natural sciences. Similar issues are discovered in Rorty’s skepticism and strands of continental thought. Revisiting the work of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century philosophers, when the split between analytical and continental philosophy began, the book finds that both traditions followed the same path—the road of reference—which ultimately led to self-contradiction. This phenomenon, whether valorized or condemned, has been understood as the death of philosophy. Tracing this pattern from Willard Van Orman Quine to Rorty, from Heidegger to Emmanuel Levinas and Jürgen Habermas, the book reveals the self-contradiction at the core of their claims while also carving an alternative path through self-reference.

This book provides a philosophical analysis of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice and connects the predicament of the novella's central character to Western thought's most compelling questions. The book explains that Mann's work is one of the most widely read novellas in any language. It considers both the novella and a number of other works of art that have been adapted from it, including Benjamin Britten's opera and Luchino Visconti successful film. It describes the main themes of Mann's story, in which the character Gustav von Aschenbach becomes captivated by an adolescent boy, first seen on the lido in Venice, the eventual site of Aschenbach's own death. It explains how Mann uses the story to work through central concerns about how to live, themes that had been explored by his German predecessors, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. The book considers how Mann's, Britten's, and Visconti's treatments illuminate the tension between social and ethical values and an artist's sensitivity to beauty. It shows how each work asks whether a life devoted to self-sacrifice in the pursuit of lasting achievements can be sustained and whether a breakdown of discipline undercuts its worth. The book also highlights that Aschenbach's story helps us reflect on whether it is possible to achieve anything in full awareness of our finitude and in knowing our successes are always incomplete.

Postmodern political critiques speak of the death of ideology, the end of history, and the postsecular return of religious attitudes, yet radical conservative theorists such as Mark Lilla argue religion and politics are inextricably intertwined. Returning much-needed uncertainty to debates over the political while revitalizing the very terms in which they are defined, the book explores the ambiguity of secularization and the theoretical potential of a structural break between politics and religion. Secularization means three things: the translation of religious semantics into politics; a transformation of religious notions into political ideas; and the reoccupation of a space left void by changing political actors that gives rise to new conceptions of political interaction. Conceptual innovation redefines politics as a horizontal relationship between governments and the governed and better enables societies (and individual political actors) to articulate meaning through action—that is, through the emergence of new concepts. The book shows that these actions radically transform our understanding of politics and the role of political agents and are further enhanced by challenging the structural dependence of politics on religious phenomena.

Cecilia Sjöholm reads Hannah Arendt as a philosopher of the senses, grappling with questions of vision, hearing, and touch even in her political work. Constructing an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopher’s fragmentary writings on art and perception, Sjöholm begins a vibrant new chapter in Arendt scholarship that expands her relevance for contemporary philosophers. Arendt wrote thoughtfully about the role of sensibility and aesthetic judgment in political life and on the power of art to enrich human experience. Sjöholm draws a clear line from Arendt’s consideration of these subjects to her reflections on aesthetic encounters and works of art mentioned in her published writings and stored among her memorabilia. This delicate effort allows Sjöholm to revisit Arendt’s political concepts of freedom, plurality, and judgment from an aesthetic point of view and incorporate Arendt’s insight into current discussions of literature, music, theater, and visual art. Though Arendt did not explicitly outline an aesthetics, Sjöholm’s work substantively incorporates her perspective into contemporary reckonings with radical politics and their relationship to art.

If we want to improve the treatment of animals, Dominique Lestel argues, we must acknowledge our evolutionary impulse to eat them and we must expand our worldview to see how others consume meat ethically and sustainably. The position of vegans and vegetarians is unrealistic and exclusionary. Eat This Book calls at once for a renewed and vigorous defense of animal rights and a more open approach to meat eating that turns us into responsible carnivores. Lestel skillfully synthesizes Western philosophical views on the moral status of animals and holistic cosmologies that recognize human-animal reciprocity. He shows that the carnivore’s position is more coherently ethical than vegetarianism, which isolates humans from the world by treating cruelty, violence, and conflicting interests as phenomena outside of life. Describing how meat eaters assume completely—which is to say, metabolically—their animal status, Lestel opens our eyes to the vital relation between carnivores and animals and carnivores’ genuine appreciation of animals’ life-sustaining flesh. He vehemently condemns factory farming and the terrible footprint of industrial meat eating. His goal is to recreate a kinship between humans and animals that reminds us of what it means to be tied to the world.