Drawing on a career-long exploration of 1960s French philosophy, Leonard Lawlor seeks a solution to 'the problem of the worst violence'. The worst violence is the reaction of total apocalypse without remainder; it is the reaction of complete negation and death; it is nihilism. Lawlor argues that it is not just transcendental violence that must be minimised: all violence must itself be reduced to its lowest level. He offers new ways of speaking to best achieve the least violence, which he creatively appropriates from Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari as 'speaking-freely',...

Drawing on a career-long exploration of 1960s French philosophy, Leonard Lawlor seeks a solution to 'the problem of the worst violence'. The worst violence is the reaction of total apocalypse without remainder; it is the reaction of complete negation and death; it is nihilism. Lawlor argues that it is not just transcendental violence that must be minimised: all violence must itself be reduced to its lowest level. He offers new ways of speaking to best achieve the least violence, which he creatively appropriates from Foucault, Derrida and Deleuze and Guattari as 'speaking-freely',...

Dubreuil provocatively proposes an extremist rethinking of the limits of politics - toward a break from politics, the political and policies. He calls for a refusal of politics, suggesting a form of apolitics that would make our lives more liveable.

Through a sustained engagement with the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, and against the background of contemporary political phenomena, Arne De Boever explores what positive political possibilities the notion of sovereignty might still hold. Using the philosophy of Catherine Malabou, he argues that these possibilities reside in an aesthetic reconceptualisation of sovereignty as a plastic power that is able to give, receive and explode the forms of our political future.

Drawing on a range of philosophical, anthropological and political theories, Athena Athanasiou offers a new way of thinking about agonistic performativity with its critical connections to national and gender politics and alongside the political intricacies of affectivity, courage and justice. Through an ethnographic account of the urban feminist and antinationalist movement Women in Black of Belgrade during the Yugoslav wars she shows that we might understand their dissident politics of mourning as a means to refigure political life beyond sovereign accounts of subjectivity and agency.

The Snowden Affair, Wikileaks, the 'lone wolf' terrorist, Clinton's private email account - the secret is arguably the central element of our contemporary political experience. Now, Charles Barbour looks at the basic ontological question 'what is a secret?'

Organised as a reflection on Jacques Derrida's later writings on secrecy, four chapters each look at a separate problematic: society and the oath, literature and testimony, philosophy and deception, and time and death.

Barbour shows that secrecy is not a negation of our relations with others, but a necessary condition of those...

Why do people record TV programmes instead of watching them? Why are some recovering alcoholics pleased to let other people drink in their place? Why can ritual machines pray in place of believers?

Robert Pfaller advances the theory of 'interpassivity' as delegated consumption and enjoyment. Applicable to both art and everyday life, the concept allows him to tackle a vast range of phenomena: culture, art, sports and religion.

Pfaller criticises dominant assumptions, offers an escape from prevailing ideologies and exposes how cultural capitalism promotes commodities with the promise of...

As calls mount for resistance to recent political events, Simon Morgan Wortham explores the political implications and complexities of a psychoanalytic conception of resistance. Through close readings of a range of authors, both within and outwith the psychoanalytic tradition, the question of the politics of psychoanalysis itself is read back into the task of thinking resistance from a psychoanalytic point of view.

Morgan Wortham also reveals a new theory of phobic resistance at the centre of the politics of psychoanalysis, one that creates fresh possibilities for contemporary political...

As calls mount for resistance to recent political events, Simon Morgan Wortham explores the political implications and complexities of a psychoanalytic conception of resistance. Through close readings of a range of authors, both within and outwith the psychoanalytic tradition, the question of the politics of psychoanalysis itself is read back into the task of thinking resistance from a psychoanalytic point of view.

Morgan Wortham also reveals a new theory of phobic resistance at the centre of the politics of psychoanalysis, one that creates fresh possibilities for contemporary political...

Genevieve Lloyd illuminates and challenges some perplexing aspects of contemporary attitudes to wonder. She draws especially on Flaubert, who influenced the thought of Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida. She also reaches into contemporary debates on refugees, secularisation and climate change.