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Ambivalent Recognition - The Harmful Social Consequences Of An Ethical Good

by Kristina Lepold

~~33,80€~~ 30,42€ 10% OFF

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 In this ambitious and compelling book, Kristina Lepold challenges the common assumption that recognition is positive, emphasizing its ambivalent role in social life.
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Left-Wing Melancholia - Marxism, History, And Memory

by Enzo (Susan And Barton Winokur Professor In The Humanities, Cornell University) Traverso e Enzo Traverso

33,80€ + 10% CARD

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 Uncovering the melancholic tradition of the global left.
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Ambivalent Recognition - The Harmful Social Consequences Of An Ethical Good

by Kristina Lepold

~~135,19€~~ 121,67€ 10% OFF

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 In this ambitious and compelling book, Kristina Lepold challenges the common assumption that recognition is positive, emphasizing its ambivalent role in social life.
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Jurgen Habermas - Public Intellectual And Engaged Critical Theorist

by Peter J. Verovsek

~~47,32€~~ 42,59€ 10% OFF

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 This book provides a new understanding of JuÂ¨rgen Habermas by focusing on his work as a public intellectual, showing how he has shaped debates far beyond the ivory tower.
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Jürgen Habermas - Public Intellectual And Engaged Critical Theorist

by Peter J. Verov¨Ek e Peter J. Verov¨Ek

~~38,40€~~ 34,56€ 10% OFF

 Jurgen Habermas is Germanys most important postwar philosopher, the leading figure of the Frankfurt School in this period. He is best known for the concept of the public sphere, which forms the basis of his communicative understanding of democratic politics. Habermas has not only theorized the public spherehe has also taken part in it through frequent commentary on current social, political, and cultural issues. Yet since Habermass extensive public-facing writings have been overlooked, his philosophy has often been criticized as apolitical. This book transforms our understanding of Habermas by focusing on his work as a public intellectual, showing how he has shaped debates far beyond the ivory tower. Peter J. Verov¨ek argues that while Habermas maintains a strict separation between his academic and his public-facing writings, he has also ensured that these two aspects of his work are part of a consistent whole. The book highlights the development of Habermass views over time and the changing nature of his public interventions. His early political writings focused on questions tied to the particular situation of postwar West Germany, but since 1989 he has increasingly turned his attention to the future of Europe and global politics more broadly. Verov¨ek sheds light on the interrelationship between Habermass participation in the public sphere and his theoretical work, demonstrating that his political engagement is crucial to understanding his philosophy. In a moment when public debate is under threat, this book offers timely new insight into Habermass lifelong project of defending the public sphereboth in theory and in practice.
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Hierarchies At Work - Race, World-Systems, And Legal Distribution

~~52,99€~~ 47,69€ 10% OFF

 This book challenges dominant understandings of both economic inequality and the future of work. Leading scholars in law, social sciences, and the humanities consider the production and reproduction of global hierarchies by revisiting and deploying three critical approaches that emerged in the late twentieth century: racial capitalism, world-systems theory, and critical legal distributional analysis. They demonstrate that these methods—especially when brought together—offer new insights into the forces that entrench the asymmetries of power and wealth that are too often shorthanded as inequality. They also uncover elisions and erasures of the past and present in prevailing technological-determinist narratives about the future of work. Hierarchies at Work features powerful, grounded studies of the dynamics of work and livelihood in sites ranging from garment factories in Jordan and palm oil fields in Colombia to dairy farms in the United States. These studies underscore the necessity of thinking about the future of work and livelihoods through their racialized past and present and recognizing the systemic role of law in unequal distribution. Highlighting alternative imaginaries that contest systems of domination and subordination, this timely book offers resources to spur more just futures across local and global levels.
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Love Troubles - A Philosophy Of Eros

by Federica Gregoratto

~~46,36€~~ 41,72€ 10% OFF

 What does it mean to love? Does love complete us, giving us purpose and meaning? Or does it tie us down and even harm us? Is erotic desire complicit in oppression, or could it deliver liberation? Are our desires extricable from the wrongs of our societies? And in today’s world, is love still worth the trouble? This book develops a critical theory of sexual love and friendship, offering profound new ways to understand the troublesome nature of eros. Federica Gregoratto explores the ambivalence of erotic love, which is at once intimately interwoven with heterosexism, racism, and neoliberal capitalism yet entices us with the tantalizing possibility of transformation. Drawing on a rich array of sources—from Frankfurt School critical theory to feminist thought and contemporary philosophies of emotions and affects, as well as poetry, novels, films, and music—she argues that love provides unexpected resources for political agency, resistance, and emancipation. Gregoratto makes a passionate defense of erotic freedom as an adventurous process through which we understand, together with others, who we are and who we want to become, both in our individual existences and in our social lives. Wide-ranging and daring, Love Troubles invites us to reflect on our fraught amorous experiences, showing why we should cherish and learn from them.
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Regenerative Politics

by Emma Planinc

~~46,36€~~ 41,72€ 10% OFF

 Critics of liberal democracy from both the left and right view rights not as protectors of freedom but as impediments to self-determination and call for radically regenerative political alternatives. Liberals respond to these challenges by reasserting that universal rights are self-evident, intentionally foreclosing the possibility of remaking the political order. Regenerative Politics makes a bold intervention into this fraught landscape, arguing that the survival of rights depends on abandoning their claims to self-evidence. Emma Planinc argues that liberal democracies must open themselves up to a regenerative politics that accepts all claims against political convention as self-determinative—including those that desire the rejection of rights or the overturning of liberal democracies themselves. Bringing together scholarship on race, democracy, liberalism, fascism, and the far right with an intellectual history of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution and a novel account of human nature, Regenerative Politics offers a new political theory for the revitalization of politics. Planinc shows that liberal democracies can arm themselves against extreme challenges by remaining perpetually open to the reconstitution of rights, restoring the capacity for human beings to determine themselves in the world.
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Critical Theories Of Anti-Semitism

by Jonathan Judaken

~~46,36€~~ 41,72€ 10% OFF

 Despite its persistence and viciousness, anti-Semitism remains undertheorized in comparison with other forms of racism and discrimination. How should anti-Semitism be defined? What are its underlying causes? Why do anti-Semites target Jews? In what ways has Judeophobia changed over time? What are the continuities and disconnects between medieval anti-Judaism and the Holocaust? How does criticism of the state of Israel relate to anti-Semitism? And how can social theory illuminate the upsurge in attacks on Jews today? Considering these questions and many more, this book is at once a philosophical reflection on key problems in the analysis of anti-Semitism and a history of its leading theories and theorists. Jonathan Judaken explores the methodological and conceptual issues that have vexed the study of Judeophobia and calls for a reconsideration of the definitions, categories, and narratives that underpin overarching explanations. He traces how a range of thinkers have wrestled with these challenges, examining the theories of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Frankfurt School, Hannah Arendt, and Jean-François Lyotard, alongside the works of sociologists Talcott Parsons and Zygmunt Bauman and historians Léon Poliakov and George Mosse. Judaken argues against claims about the uniqueness of Judeophobia, demonstrating how it is entangled with other racisms: Islamophobia, Negrophobia, and xenophobia. Critical Theories of Anti-Semitism not only urges readers to question how they think about Judeophobia but also draws them into conversation with a range of leading thinkers whose insights are sorely needed in this perilous moment.
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Political Clinic - Psychoanalysis And Social Change In The Twentieth Century

by Carolyn Laubender

~~46,36€~~ 41,72€ 10% OFF

 Winner, 2025 Book Prize of the American Psychoanalytic Association For decades, psychoanalysis has provided essential concepts and methodologies for critical theory and the humanities and social sciences. But it is also, inseparably, a clinical practice and technique for treatment. In what ways is clinical practice significant for critical thought? What conceptual resources does the clinic hold for us today? Carolyn Laubender examines cases from Britain and its former colonies to show that clinical psychoanalytic practice constitutes a productive site for novel political thought, theorization, and action. She delves into the clinical work of some of the British Psychoanalytic Society’s most influential practitioners—including Anna Freud, Melanie Klein, Wulf Sachs, D. W. Winnicott, Thomas Main, and John Bowlby—exploring how they developed distinctive and politically salient practices. Laubender argues that these figures transformed the clinic into a laboratory for reimagining race, gender, sexuality, childhood, nation, and democracy. By taking up the clinic as both a site of inquiry and realm of theoretical innovation, she traces how political concepts such as authority, reparation, colonialism, decolonization, communalism, and security at once informed and were reformed by each analyst’s work. While psychoanalytic scholarship has typically focused on its intellectual, social, and political effects outside of the clinic, this interdisciplinary book combines history with feminist and decolonial social theory to recast the clinic as a necessarily politicized space. Challenging common assumptions that psychoanalytic practice is or should be neutral, apolitical, and objective, The Political Clinic also considers what progressive clinical praxis can offer today.
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Contesting The Far Right - A Psychoanalytic And Feminist Critical Theory Approach

by Claudia Leeb

~~46,36€~~ 41,72€ 10% OFF

 Why have so many people responded to the insecurity, exploitation, alienation, and isolation of precarity capitalism by supporting the far right? In this timely book, Claudia Leeb argues that psychoanalytic and feminist critical theory illuminates how economic and psychological factors interact to produce this extreme political shift. Contesting the Far Right examines right-wing recruitment tactics in the United States and Austria, where people discontented with the status quo have turned to far-right parties and movements that further cement capitalism’s adverse effects. Leeb contends that Freudian psychoanalytic theory and early Frankfurt School Critical Theory provide analytical tools to explain this apparent contradiction in psychological terms. Living under precarity capitalism generates feelings of failure and anxiety, which people experience as non-wholeness, because it has become difficult if not impossible to live up to the fetish of economic, interpersonal, and bodily success, and the far right preys on such feelings. Its psychologically oriented propaganda tactics produce the illusion of wholeness and a positive sense of self while leaving the socioeconomic conditions that cause people’s suffering intact. At the same time, they remove the inhibitions that keep people’s repressed aggression and racist and sexist attitudes in check. To demonstrate the workings of this process, Leeb compares cases including Trump and the alt-right in the United States and the Freedom Party and the identitarian movement in Austria. At once theoretically rich and politically engaged, this book also offers ways to resist the far right and counter the psychological appeal of its propaganda techniques.
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Subaltern Silence - A Postcolonial Genealogy

by Kevin Olson

~~46,36€~~ 41,72€ 10% OFF

 Subordination did not simply fade away in the aftermath of colonialism. Instead, this illuminating book shows, a host of subtle new techniques have arisen that dominate vast categories of people by rendering them silent. Kevin Olson investigates how contemporary societies silence the subaltern: sometimes a literal silencing, often a metaphor for other ways of making people unheard. Such forms of silence make some people invisible, push others to the margins, and devalue the voices and actions of still others. Subaltern Silence traces the development of these techniques to the early years of European colonialism, focusing on Haiti’s revolution and postcolonial trajectory. Exploring rich archives from Europe and the postcolonial world, Olson critiques fundamental modern institutions and technologies, such as the public sphere, the free press, and even progressively minded democratic revolution, as sites of exclusion. With the emergence of postcoloniality, he argues, subordination has become increasingly abstract, virtual, and symbolic. Nonetheless, it lies at the heart of contemporary racial politics, divides Global South from Global North, and allocates privileges and burdens in ways that are often scarcely perceptible. Engaging deeply with the thought of Gayatri Spivak and Michel Foucault, Subaltern Silence offers a new genealogy of colonialism and postcoloniality that is both historically informed and theoretically rich.
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Another Universalism - Seyla Benhabib And The Future Of Critical Theory

~~52,99€~~ 47,69€ 10% OFF

 Seyla Benhabib’s ongoing work has expanded the range and scope of critical theory beyond its origins to address questions of gender, migration, and difference. This book brings together an ensemble of leading theorists and younger voices to explore new dimensions of Benhabib’s thought across critical theory, feminism, and democratic theory, foregrounding the intricate relationship between critique and universality. Another Universalism provides both a wide-ranging and comprehensive engagement with Benhabib’s path-breaking interventions and a panoramic tour of the cutting edge of critical theory today. Contributors take part in key debates about the field’s past and future, tackling subjects such as the relationship between democracy and cosmopolitanism, the role of law in emancipatory struggles, human domination of nature, the deprovincialization of critical theory concerning questions of race and empire, as well as Hannah Arendt’s continuing significance. Covering a wide range of debates and themes, Another Universalism is united by a core question: How can universal norms of human freedom, equality, and dignity be reconciled with particular contexts, especially ones of exclusion, difference, and adversity? Searching for universalisms that emerge from the concrete struggles of emancipatory movements, this book points toward an expansive, inclusive, and radical democratic vision.
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Pathologies Of Reason - On The Legacy Of Critical Theory

by Axel Honneth

27,04€ + 10% CARD

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 Axel Honneth has been instrumental in advancing the work of the Frankfurt School of critical theorists. His essays, collected here, address the possibilities of continuing this tradition through radically changed theoretical and social conditions.
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Praxis And Revolution - A Theory Of Social Transformation

by Eva Von Redecker

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 Eva von Redecker reconsiders critical theoryâ€™s understanding of radical change in order to offer a bold new account of how revolution occurs. She argues that revolutions are not singular events but extended processes: beginning from the interstices of society, they succeed by gradually rearticulating social structures toward a new paradigm.
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Fear Of Breakdown - Politics And Psychoanalysis

by Noelle ((Home Address, Best Mailing Address)) Mcafee

33,80€ + 10% CARD

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 Noelle McAfee uses psychoanalytic theory to explore the subterranean anxieties behind current crises and the ways in which democratic practices can help work through seemingly intractable political conflicts. Fear of Breakdown contends that politics needs something that only psychoanalysis has been able to offer.
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Recognition And Ambivalence

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 This book brings together leading scholars in social and political philosophy to develop new perspectives on recognition and its role in social life. It begins with a debate between Axel Honneth and Judith Butler, the first sustained engagement between these two major thinkers on this subject.
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Transitional Subjects - Critical Theory And Object Relations

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 Transitional Subjects is the first book-length collection devoted to the engagement of critical theory with the work of the object-relations school of psychoanalysis. It provides a synoptic overview of current research at the intersection of these two theoretical traditions while also opening up space for further innovations.
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Fascist Mythologies - The History And Politics Of Unreason In Borges, Freud, And Schmitt

by Federico Finchelstein

37,09€ + 10% CARD

 For fascism, myth was reality—or was realer than the real. Fascist notions of the leader, the nation, power, and violence were steeped in mythic imagery and the fantasy of transcending history. A mythologized primordial past would inspire the heroic overthrow of a debased present to achieve a violently redeemed future. What is distinctive about fascist mythology, and how does this aspect of fascism help explain its perils in the past and present? Federico Finchelstein draws on a striking combination of thinkers—Jorge Luis Borges, Sigmund Freud, and Carl Schmitt—to consider fascism as a form of political mythmaking. He shows that Borges’s literary and critical work and Freud’s psychoanalytic writing both emphasize the mythical and unconscious dimensions of fascist politics. Finchelstein considers their ideas of the self, violence, and the sacred as well as the relationship between the victims of fascist violence and the ideological myths of its perpetrators. He draws on Freud and Borges to analyze the work of a variety of Latin American and European fascist intellectuals, with particular attention to Schmitt’s political theology. Contrasting their approaches to the logic of unreason, Finchelstein probes the limits of the dichotomy between myth and reason and shows the centrality of this opposition to understanding the ideology of fascism. At a moment when forces redolent of fascism cast a shadow over world affairs, this book provides a timely historical and critical analysis of the dangers of myth in modern politics.
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Selected Writings On Media, Propaganda, And Political Communication

by Siegfried Kracauer

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Siegfried Kracauer stands out as one of the most significant theorists and critics of the twentieth century, acclaimed for his analyses of film and popular culture. However, his writing on propaganda and politics has been overshadowed by the works of his contemporaries and colleagues associated with the Frankfurt School. This book brings together a broad selection of Kracauer’s work on media and political communication, much of it previously unavailable in English. It features writings spanning more than two decades, from studies of totalitarian propaganda written in the 1930s to wartime work on Nazi newsreels and anti-Semitism through to examinations of American and Soviet political messaging in the early Cold War period. These varied texts illuminate the interplay among politics, mass culture, and the media, and they encompass Kracauer’s core concerns: the individual and the masses, the conditions of cultural production, and the critique of modernity. The introduction and afterword explore the significance of Kracauer’s contributions to critical theory, film and media studies, and the analysis of political communication both in his era and the present day. At a time when demagoguery and bigotry loom over world politics, Kracauer’s inquiries into topics such as the widespread appeal of fascist propaganda and the relationship of new media forms and technologies to authoritarianism are strikingly relevant.
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Crisis Under Critique - How People Assess, Transform, And Respond To Critical Situations

52,99€ + 10% CARD

 The word "crisis" denotes a break, a discontinuity, a rupture—a moment after which the normal order can continue no longer. Yet our political vocabulary today is suffused with the rhetoric of crisis, to the point that supposed abnormalities have been normalized. How can the notion of crisis be rethought in order to take stock of—and challenge—our understanding of the many predicaments in which we find ourselves? Instead of diagnosing emergencies, Didier Fassin, Axel Honneth, and an assembly of leading thinkers examine how people experience, interpret, and contribute to the making of and the response to critical situations. Contributors inquire into the social production of crisis, evaluating a wide range of cases on five continents through the lenses of philosophy, sociology, anthropology, political science, history, and economics. Considering social movements, intellectual engagements, affected communities, and reflexive perspectives, the book foregrounds the perspectives of those most closely involved, bringing out the immediacy of crisis. Featuring analysis from below as well as above, from the inside as well as the outside, Crisis Under Critique is a singular intervention that utterly recasts one of today’s most crucial—yet most ambiguous—concepts.
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Praxis And Revolution - A Theory Of Social Transformation

by Eva Von Redecker

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 The concept of revolution marks the ultimate horizon of modern politics. It is instantiated by sites of both hope and horror. Within progressive thought, "revolution" often perpetuates entrenched philosophical problems: a teleological philosophy of history, economic reductionism, and normative paternalism. At a time of resurgent uprisings, how can revolution be reconceptualized to grasp the dynamics of social transformation and disentangle revolutionary practice from authoritarian usurpation? Eva von Redecker reconsiders critical theory’s understanding of radical change in order to offer a bold new account of how revolution occurs. She argues that revolutions are not singular events but extended processes: beginning from the interstices of society, they succeed by gradually rearticulating social structures toward a new paradigm. Developing a theoretical account of social transformation, Praxis and Revolution incorporates a wide range of insights, from the Frankfurt School to queer theory and intersectionality. Its revised materialism furnishes prefigurative politics with their social conditions and performative critique with its collective force. Von Redecker revisits the French Revolution to show how change arises from struggle in everyday social practice. She illustrates the argument through rich literary examples—a ménage à trois inside a prison, a radical knitting circle, a queer affinity group, and petitioners pleading with the executioner—that forge a feminist, open-ended model of revolution. Praxis and Revolution urges readers not only to understand revolutions differently but also to situate them elsewhere: in collective contexts that aim to storm manifold Bastilles—but from within.
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Hermeneutics As Critique - Science, Politics, Race, And Culture

by Lorenzo C. Simpson

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 Hermeneutics has frequently been dismissed as useful only for literary and textual analysis. Some consider it to be Eurocentric or inherently relativistic and thus unsuited to social critique. Lorenzo C. Simpson offers a persuasive and powerful argument that hermeneutics is a valuable tool not only for critical theory but also for robustly addressing many of the urgent issues of today. Simpson demonstrates that hermeneutics exhibits significant interpretive advantages compared to competing explanatory modalities. While it shares with pragmatism a suspicion of essentialism, an understanding that disagreements are situated, and an insistence on the dialogical nature of understanding, it nevertheless resolutely rejects the relativistic accounts of rationality that are often associated with pragmatism. In the tradition of Gadamer, Simpson firmly establishes hermeneutics as a resource for both philosophy and the social sciences. He shows its utility for unpacking intractable issues in the philosophy of science, multiculturalism, social epistemology, and racial and social justice in the global arena. Simpson addresses fraught questions such as why recent claims that "race" has a biological basis lack grounding, whether female genital excision can be critically addressed without invidious ethnocentrism, and how to lay the foundations for meaningful cross-cultural dialogue and reparative justice. This book reveals how hermeneutics can be a worthy partner with critical theory in achieving emancipatory aims.
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Recognition And Ambivalence

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Recognition is one of the most debated concepts in contemporary social and political thought. Its proponents, such as Axel Honneth, hold that to be recognized by others is a basic human need that is central to forming an identity, and the denial of recognition deprives individuals and communities of something essential for their flourishing. Yet critics including Judith Butler have questioned whether recognition is implicated in structures of domination, arguing that the desire to be recognized can motivative individuals to accept their assigned place in the social order by conforming to oppressive norms or obeying repressive institutions. Is there a way to break this impasse? Recognition and Ambivalence brings together leading scholars in social and political philosophy to develop new perspectives on recognition and its role in social life. It begins with a debate between Honneth and Butler, the first sustained engagement between these two major thinkers on this subject. Contributions from both proponents and critics of theories of recognition further reflect upon and clarify the problems and challenges involved in theorizing the concept and its normative desirability. Together, they explore different routes toward a critical theory of recognition, departing from wholly positive or negative views to ask whether it is an essentially ambivalent phenomenon. Featuring original, systematic work in the philosophy of recognition, this book also provides a useful orientation to the key debates on this important topic.
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