Theory of the Alien: Astropolitics, Spacepower, and the Outside develops a political theory of the Space Age organized around the conceptual figure of the alien, arguing that the constitution of outer space as an economic and warfighting domain transforms the categories through which we think politics and the human.Staging critical encounters with Helmuth Plessner, Carl Schmitt, Hans Blumenberg, and Bernard Stiegler, the book defines the astropolitical as the condition in ...

In Noir Materialism: Freedom and Obligation in Political Ecology, Michael Uhall reengineers the conceptual relationship between nature and politics by crafting the terms of a new philosophy of nature and exploring its consequences for political theory. These consequences include major theoretical reformulations of indispensable political ideas, including freedom, obligation, and the subject. These ideas need to be retooled because the ecological crisis devastating our planet is, a...

In a world in which political opportunity and liberation seem far away, the genre of science fiction grows in cultural importance and popularity. The contributors to this collection are political and social theorists from a range of disciplines who use science fiction as inspiration for new theories and examples of speculative politics. In dystopian governments, they find locations and forms of resistance. Representations of Political Resistance and Emancipation in Science Fiction explores...

The question of what defines the human, and of what is human about the humanities, have been shaken up by the radical critiques of humanism and the displacement of anthropomorphism that have gained currency in recent years, propelled in part by rapid advances in our knowledge of living systems and of their genetic and algorithmic codes coupled with the global expansion of a knowledge-intensive capitalism.In Posthuman Knowledge, Rosi Braidotti takes a closer look at the imp...

An apparently contradictory yet radically urgent collection of texts tracing the genealogy of a controversial current in contemporary philosophy.Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or détourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies.#Accelerate presents a gen...

The end of the world is a seemingly interminable topic Ð at least, of course, until it happens. Environmental catastrophe and planetary apocalypse are subjects of enduring fascination and, as ethnographic studies show, human cultures have approached them in very different ways. Indeed, in the face of the growing perception of the dire effects of global warming, some of these visions have been given a new lease on life. Information and analyses concerning the human causes and the catastroph...

This major critical work from one of the preeminent voices in science fiction scholarship reframes the genre as a way of understanding today's world.As the application of technoscience increasingly transforms every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. Though the broad scope of science fiction may vary in artistic quality and sophistication, it shares a desire to imagine a collective future for the hum...

This "stimulating contribution to literary theory" reveals the deeply philosophical concerns and developments behind popular time travel sci-fi ( London Review of Books).In Time Travel, literary theorist David Wittenberg argues that time travel fiction is not mere escapism, but a narrative "laboratory" where theoretical questions about storytelling—and, by extension, about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity—are presented in s...

The new edition of this authoritative introduction to the philosophy of technology includes recent developments in the subject, while retaining the range and depth of its selection of seminal contributions and its much-admired editorial commentary.Remains the most comprehensive anthology on the philosophy of technology availableIncludes editors' insightful section introductions and critical summaries for each selectionRevised and updated t...

In this age of DNA computers and artificial intelligence, information is becoming disembodied even as the "bodies" that once carried it vanish into virtuality. While some marvel at these changes, envisioning consciousness downloaded into a computer or humans "beamed" Star Trek-style, others view them with horror, seeing monsters brooding in the machines. In How We Became Posthuman, N. Katherine Hayles separates hype from fact, investigating the fate of embodiment in an in...

The academic world has been plagued in recent years by scepticism about truth and knowledge. Paul Boghossian, in his long-awaited first book, sweeps away relativist claims that there is no such thing as objective truth or knowledge, but only truth or knowledge from a particular perspective. He demonstrates clearly that such claims don't even make sense. Boghossian focuses on three different ways of reading the claim that knowledge is socially constructed - one as a thesis about truth and t...

So the world didn’t end on 10 September 2008: but maybe it got you thinking…The world didn’t end on 10 September 2008, but the possibility may have got you thinking: was it worth the risk? What is the point of science actually? Geoffrey Gorham considers these questions and explores the social and ethical implications of science by linking them to issues facing scientists today: human extinction, extraterrestrial intelligence, space colonization, and more.