Hatred of Sex links Jacques Rancière’s political philosophy of the constitutive disorder of democracy with Jean Laplanche’s identification of a fundamental perturbation at the heart of human sexuality. Sex is hated as well as desired, Oliver Davis and Tim Dean contend, because sexual intensity impedes coherent selfhood and undermines identity, rendering us all a little more deplorable than we might wish. Davis and Dean explore the consequences of this conflicted dynamic across a r...

While sexually explicit writing and art have been around for millennia, pornography—as an aesthetic, moral, and juridical category—is a modern invention. The contributors to Porn Archives explore how the production and proliferation of pornography has been intertwined with the emergence of the archive as a conceptual and physical site for preserving, cataloguing, and transmitting documents and artifacts. By segregating and regulating access to sexually explicit material, archives ...

This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit i...

RAW addresses the question of sex without condoms, or barebacking, in the age of PrEP, a drug that virtually eliminates the transmission of HIV.Writing out of the history of the AIDS crisis, the authors in RAW expand the study of barebacking into new areas, such as its appearance within lesbian, heterosexual, and BDSM communities and its implications for teaching critical sexology.

Anthony Giddens has been in the forefront of developments in social theory for the past decade. In The Constitution of Society he outlines the distinctive position he has evolved during that period and offers a full statement of a major new perspective in social thought, a synthesis and elaboration of ideas touched on in previous works but described here for the first time in an integrated and comprehensive form. A particular feature is Giddens's concern to connect abstract proble...

In Žižek's long-awaited magnum opus, he theorizes the "parallax gap" in the ontological, the scientific, and the political—and rehabilitates dialectical materialism.The Parallax View is Slavoj Žižek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Žižek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Žižek is interested in the "parallax gap...

Undoing Gender constitutes Judith Butler's recent reflections on gender and sexuality, focusing on new kinship, psychoanalysis and the incest taboo, transgender, intersex, diagnostic categories, social violence, and the tasks of social transformation. In terms that draw from feminist and queer theory, Butler considers the norms that govern--and fail to govern--gender and sexuality as they relate to the constraints on recognizable personhood. The book constitutes a reconsideration ...

With a new introduction by the authorIn this deliciously polemical work, a giant of cultural theory immerses himself in the ideas of a giant of French thought. In his inimical style, Zizek links Deleuze's work with both Oedipus and Hegel, figures from whom the French philosopher distanced himself. Zizek turns some Deleuzian concepts around in order to explore the 'organs without bodies' in such films as Fight Club and the works of Hitchcock. Finally, he attacks what he sees as the ...

'Queer: A Graphic History Could Totally Change the Way You Think About Sex and Gender' ViceActivist-academic Meg-John Barker and cartoonist Jules Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ+ action in this groundbreaking non-fiction graphic novel.From identity politics and gender roles to privilege and exclusion, Queer explores how we came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangled up with ...

It sounds daunting: all those '-isms', long technical words, weird French thinkers and incomprehensible Germans. You can't read a book nowadays, it seems, without being required to refer to them. From university students to the average intelligent reader, everyone is expected to justify their 'theoretical perspective'. The problem is that defining what you mean by 'theory', let alone what you mean by 'literary', causes most people, including the theorists themselves, to mumble incoherently...

"A groundbreaking exploration of bisexual politics by a revolutionary thinker" (Publishers Weekly) provides the missing piece of the puzzle for readers who identify as bisexualDepicted as duplicitous, traitorous, and promiscuous, bisexuality has long been suspected, marginalized, and rejected by both straight and gay communities alike.Bi takes a long overdue, comprehensive look at bisexual politics, from the issues surrounding biphobia/mon...

Many educational practices are based upon ideas about what it means to be human. Thus education is conceived as the production of particular subjectivities and identities such as the rational person, the autonomous individual, or the democratic citizen. Beyond Learning asks what might happen to the ways in which we educate if we treat the question as to what it means to be human as a radically open question; a question that can only be answered by engaging in education rather than as a que...