Books in the Taking on the Political series

Shame proposes a new form of political action that shows how 19th century activists denaturalise conventional beliefs about sexuality and gender, and challenge strong asymmetries of power.

Mustafa Dikec reveals the aesthetic premises that underlie Hannah Arendt, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Ranciere's political thinking, and demonstrates how their politics depend on the construction and apprehension of worlds through spatial forms and distributions. Exploring these dimensions of the political, he argues that politics is about how perceive and relate to the world. Space is a form of appearance and a mode of actuality, and the disruption of such forms and modes is the sublime element in politics.

This book has two aims: to offer a series of investigations into aspects of contemporary politics such as race, nation and gender; and to articulate a critical philosophical perspective with politically disposed treatments of contemporary cinema.

This is a wide-ranging overview of the emergence of post-foundationalism and a survey of the work of its key contemporary exponents.

What would political thought look like without the foundation of ethics? Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy, Madeleine Fagan puts forward a radical and far-reaching refusal of foundational ethics. Instead, she proposes an account of the inseparability of ethics and politics.

The distinctive feature of this book is its ingenious argumentative strategy: it takes on the political by developing a practice and a thought the authors call 'polemicization'.

Challenging the linear view of history which confines or predetermines the outcome of politics, this book argues for an 'untimely' politics, rendering the past problematic and the future unpredictable.

Nathan Coombs demonstrates that the Marxist science of history has been reimagined by a strand of contemporary French theory after Louis Althusser. Taking a comparative approach, he explores the technical details of both traditions' historical sciences. He argues that their articulations of history and event affect how we approach political transformation and view the role of theoreticians in political practice. Coombs establishes the continuities and discontinuities between classical Marxism and Althusserian theory, bringing you new readings of Hegel, Marx, Lenin, Althusser, Badiou, Meillassoux and complexity theory.

This book examines the historical emergence of the council system in Russia and Germany by the end of the First World War, reconstructing the intellectual history of the council democracy in 20th century political theory.

Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Christian Gilliam shows that immanence is necessary understanding politics and resistance.