In 1971, a wealthy libertarian real estate developer named Michael Oliver decided that the only way to escape taxes and government overreach was to build a brand new country from scratch. His plan was audacious: dump barges of sand onto the Minerva Reefs, a shallow, submerged coral atoll in the South Pacific, and declare the birth of the Republic of Minerva. Reef of Rebels tells the bizarre, true story of this utopian micro-nation. Oliver actually succeeded in raising land above sea level,...

Critical social theory has long been marked by a deep, creative, and productive relationship with psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud and Fromm were important cornerstones for the early Frankfurt School, recent thinkers have drawn on the object-relations school of psychoanalysis. Transitional Subjects is the first book-length collection devoted to the engagement of critical theory with the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and other members of this school. Featuring contributions...

This thoroughly revised edition has been updated to incorporate recent case studies, biographies, syntheses, journal articles and scholarly conferences that appeared in conjunction with the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War in 2014.The original version of this work, published by James Joll in 1984, quickly became established as the authoritative introduction to the subject of the war’s origins. Significantly expanded by Gordon Martel in 2007, this volume continues to...

In Anarchist Prophets James R. Martel juxtaposes anarchism with what he calls archism in order to theorize the potential for a radical democratic politics. He shows how archism—a centralized and hierarchical political form that is a secularization of ancient Greek and Hebrew prophetic traditions—dominates contemporary politics through a prophet’s promises of peace and prosperity or the threat of violence. Archism is met by anarchism, in which a community shares a collective form o...

Critical social theory has long been marked by a deep, creative, and productive relationship with psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud and Fromm were important cornerstones for the early Frankfurt School, recent thinkers have drawn on the object-relations school of psychoanalysis. Transitional Subjects is the first book-length collection devoted to the engagement of critical theory with the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and other members of this school. Featuring contributions...

Uncannily similar projects, Beckett's and Derrida's oeuvres have been linked by literary and philosophy scholars since the 1990s. Taking into consideration their shared historical and personal contexts as writers whose main language of expression was 'adopted' or 'imposed', this Element proposes a systematic reading of their main points of connection. Focusing on their engagement with the intricacies of beginnings and origins, on genetic grounds or surfaces analogous to the Platonic khôra,...

Focusing on their conception and use of the notion of the mother,Modernism, Self-Creation, and the Maternal proposes a new interpretation of literature by modernist authors like Rousseau, Baudelaire, Poe, Rimbaud, Rilke, Joyce, and Beckett. Seen through this maternal relation, their writing appears as the product of an "anxiety" rising not from paternal influence, but from the violence done to their mother in their attempts at self-creation through writing. In order to bring to li...

New analyses on the insightful ways in which Beckett's work actively engages with contested notions of Nature and the natural, developing a radical version of modernism's main questions and insights.Beckett and Nature takes its cue from contemporary developments in Beckett scholarship focused on ecocriticism, posthumanism, and the Anthropocene, going beyond them into a questioning of the very concepts of “Nature” and “the natural.” It examines one of the m...

A general introduction to the social and legal issues involved in acts of violence against Native women, this book's contributors are lawyers, social workers, social scientists, writers, poets, and victims. In the U.S. Native women are more likely than women from any other group to suffer violence, from rape and battery to more subtle forms of abuse, and Sharing Our Stories of Survival explores the causes and consequences of such behavior. The stories and case-studies presented he...

Notions of love intersect with ideas on personal liberty, obligation, individuality, self, and difference in this study. James Martel contends that theorists' inattention to the subject has impoverished our explorations of political discourse.

Trans(in)fusion and Contemporary Thought: Thinking in Migration engages with Ranjan Ghosh’s concept of trans(in)fusion and critical theory. Trans(in)fusion reexamines critical thinking and considers how thinking across traditions and systems of thought can generate distinct interpretive experiences. The chapters not only analyze Ghosh’s work but provide insight into the authors’ individual positions and critical approaches.

Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity.Nothing Absolute...