Why has the zombie become such a pervasive figure in twenty-first-century popular culture? John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro and Filip Miscevic seek to answer this question by arguing that particular aspects of the zombie, common to a variety of media forms, reflect a crisis in modern Western culture.The authors examine the essential features of the zombie, including mindlessness, ugliness and homelessness, and argue that these reflect the outlook of the contemporary West and ...

Anderson reveals the reality of postmodernism in politics, popular culture, religion, literary criticism, art, and philosophy -- making sense of everything from deconstructionism to punk.

In Ecclesiastes, Solomon states that "all is vapor" and describes humans as trying to "shepherd the wind." In Solomon among the Postmoderns, author Peter J. Leithart uses these claims, as well as the entire book of Ecclesiastes, to show how Solomon resonated with postmodernism.Exploring the strengths and weaknesses of postmodernism, Leithart shows how the theory reflects an important biblical theme: the elusiveness and instability of the world. But he goes on to show that ...

French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is known as a thinker of creation, joyous affirmation, and rhizomatic assemblages. In this short book, Andrew Culp polemically argues that this once-radical canon of joy has lost its resistance to the present. Concepts created to defeat capitalism have been recycled into business mantras that joyously affirm “Power is vertical; potential is horizontal!”Culp recovers the Deleuze’s forgotten negativity. He unsettles the prevailing interpretation thro...

Zombies in the Academy taps into the current popular fascination with zombies and brings together scholars from a range of fields, including cultural and communications studies, sociology, film studies and education, to give a critical account of the political, cultural and pedagogical state of the university through the metaphor of zombiedom. The contributions to this volume argue that the increasing corporatization of the academy – an environment emphasizing publication, narrow ...

The "happy meat" position does not challenge our large-scale mistreatment of non-human beings, but rather serves to support it. That is among the core claims of this essay, which argues that the rejection of the "happy meat" position is critical if we are to end the extreme horrors that humanity inflicts upon other animals."Magnus Vinding argues powerfully against eating 'happy meat'." — Peter Singer, Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University, author of Why Vegan?

This astonishing book presents a distinctive approach to the politics of everyday life. Ranging across a variety of spaces in which politics and the political unfold, it questions what is meant by perception, representation and practice, with the aim of valuing the fugitive practices that exist on the margins of the known. It revolves around three key functions. It:introduces the rather dispersed discussion of non-representational theory to a wider audienceprovides ...

Alexander Dugin's Fourth Political Theory (2012) initiated a quest for a new conceptual structure to replace the three political theories of liberalism, communism and fascism. His title struck my eye because my mission is "to imagine the fourth age of understanding, the age of semiotics". So I responded.This work summarizes, comments on, and re-articulates Dugin's unfolding ideas. The category-based nested form serves as a template for re-displaying his points in a semiotic framewor...

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault's biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche. In the course of discussing all the facets of neoliberal psychopolitics fueling our contemporary crisis of freedom, Han elaborates an analytical framework that provides an original theory of Big Data and a lucid phenomenology of emotion. But th...

We live in an age of impotence. Stuck between global war and global finance, between identity and capital, we seem to be incapable of producing that radical change that is so desperately needed. Is there still a way to disentangle ourselves from a global order that shapes our politics as well as our imagination?In his most systematic book to date, renowned Italian theorist Franco Berardi Bifo tackles this question through a solid yet visionary analysis of the three fundamental conce...

At a stage of major change in the world of television (the coming of digital TV, multiple channels, mobile TV on cellphones) this book seeks to take stock of the impact of the advent and presence of television on daily life over the past fifty years, or slightly longer. The author takes as her standpoint, or rather places at the centre of her analysis and considerations, the human experience and the way in which the medium of television has radically changed it. Connection; mobility; plura...

Through compelling examples, Brian Edmiston presents the case for why and how adults should play with young children to create with them a 'workshop for life'.In a chapter on 'mythic play' Edmiston confronts adult discomfort over children's play with pretend weapons, as he encourages adults both to support children's desires to experience in imagination the limits of life and death, and to travel with children on their transformational journeys into unknown territory.This b...