Books in the Experiments/On the Political series

This book studies the tension between arts and politics in four contemporary artists from different countries, working with different media. The film directors Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne film parts of their natal city to refer to specific political problems in interpersonal relations. The novelist Arundhati Roy uses her poetic language to make room for people's desires; her fiction is utterly political and her political essays make place for the role of narratives and poetic language. Ai Weiwei uses references to Chinese history to give consistency to its ';economic miracle'. Finally, Burial's electronic music is firmly rooted in a living, breathing London; built to create a sound that is entirely new, and yet hauntingly familiar. These artists create in their own way a space for politics in their works and their oeuvre but their singularity comes together as a desire to reconstruct the political space within art from its ruins. These ruins were brought by the disenchantment of 1970s: the end of art, postmodernism, and the rise of design, marketing and communication. Each artwork bears the mark of the resistance against the depoliticisation of society and the arts, at once rejecting cynicism and idealism, referring to themes and political concepts that are larger than their own domain. This book focuses on these productive tensions.

The politics of everyday life is to be found, time and again, in meandering movements, in making connections across and between things in the rough and tumble of the seemingly banal, fragmentary and quotidian experiences that make up our day-to-day existence. The key point of the book, ideally as well as practically, is to realize that there may be something potentially significant, and politically significant, in the very act of making such connections, of understanding the supposedly trite and trivial world of the everyday against a broader political backcloth. There is merit in sifting the fragments, the fragmentary experiences, of everyday life in order to see how they imply a broader political totality in which they are situated and, at times, cleverly made to function. This intuition, broadly inspired by Henri Lefebvre, is reflected in and through the various and varying ways Porter puts to work the ideas and provocations of thinkers such as Raoul Vaneigem, Gilles Deleuze, and Soren Kierkegaard.

This book traces the genealogy of the Western political subject in major literary, philosophical, juridical and political texts.

First volume to reflect on both the comedy within critical theory and the role of comedians aspractitioners of critique.

First volume to reflect on both the comedy within critical theory and the role of comedians aspractitioners of critique.

A Materialist Theory of Justice offers an innovative (re)reading of justice that draws from diverse theoretical currents, tracing in the process an age-old tradition of critical thought.

This collection explores the politics, protest and resistance of recent popular culture in relation to Brexit Britain and the Trump-era United States.

This collection explores the politics, protest and resistance of recent popular culture in relation to Brexit Britain and the Trump-era United States.

The collection comprises contributions from leading artist-theorists in the fields of necropolitics and tactical media, and from increasingly influential scholars of biomediality and urban performativity

The collection comprises contributions from leading artist-theorists in the fields of necropolitics and tactical media, and from increasingly influential scholars of biomediality and urban performativity

A Materialist Theory of Justice offers an innovative (re)reading of justice that draws from diverse theoretical currents, tracing in the process an age-old tradition of critical thought.

This interdisciplinary collection reassesses the impact of the protests of 1968, as viewed from this contemporary moment.