The persistence of war as a feature of modern life is examined through issues of identity and difference, that is, the construction of 'self' and 'other' as individual or community. Key texts relating specifically to identity and war are addressed, including those by Nietzsche, Heiddeger, Marcuse, Freud, Lacan, Honneth, Bataille, Simmel, Elshtain, Ruddick, Schmitt, Delanda, Hardt and Negri, Baudrillard, Virilio, Beck and Joas. Its theoretical approach sets this study apart from the traditional political science and IR approaches to the subject and makes a significant contribution within this...

In 1992 W. J. T. Mitchell argued for a "pictorial turn" in the humanities, registering a renewed interest in and prevalence of pictures and images in what had been understood as an age of simulation, or an increasingly extensive and diverse visual culture. However, in what is often characterized as a society of the "spectacle" we still do not know exactly what pictures or images are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them. In this seminal collection of essays, the first...

Sovereignty and superheroes marks a major new contribution to the emerging field of comics studies and the growing literature on superheroes. Using a range of critical theorists including Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Donna Haraway, Martin Heidegger, Hannah Arendt and Carl Schmitt, the book examines superheroes as sovereigns, addressing amongst other things the complex treatment of law and violence, legitimacy and authority, states of emergency, the distinction between friend and enemy and alternative structures of kinship. The book considers all the main characters...