Books in the Theory Redux series

What unites Google and Facebook, Apple and Microsoft, Siemens and GE, Uber and Airbnb? Across a wide range of sectors, these firms are transforming themselves into platforms: businesses that provide the hardware and software foundation for others to operate on.

"This book is an attempt at restating the importance of the great metaphysical categories of substance and accident, form and matter, life and death for the present: how our contemporary predicament forces us both to reclaim them and to give them a radically new twist"--

"In this book, Franco Berardi guides the reader through a wry, dark, disconcerting but also brilliant and invigorating journey through the recent upheavals that we have witnessed. He argues that if our world is dead, then the space is open for another to appear - a world where apocalypse can shake us out of our contemporary zombie-like existence"--

From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is to borrow a phrase from Slavoj i ek the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis.

* This is the latest work by one of the leading figures of the cutting-edge philosophical orientation known as speculative realism. Harman develops his 'object-orientated philosophy' by extending it into the realm of social theory.

It is often argued that contemporary media homogenize our thoughts and actions, without us being fully aware of the restrictions they impose.

What is the relationship between persons and things? And how does the body transform this relationship? In this book, the author - one of Italy's leading political philosophers - considers these questions and shows that starting from the body, rather than from the thing or the person, can help us to reconsider the status of both.