An impassioned philosophical celebration of the multiple dimensions of contemporary cuteness.

Involuntarily sucked into the forcefield of Cute, Amy Ireland and Maya B. Kronic decided to let go, give in, let the demon ride them, and make an accelerationism out of it--only to realize that Cute opens a microcosmic gate onto the transcendental process of acceleration itself.

Joining the swarming e-girls, t-girls, NEETS, anons, and otaku who rescued accelerationism from the double pincers of media panic and academic buzzkill by introducing it to big eyes, fluffy ears, programming socks, and silly memes, they discover that the objects of cute culture are just spinoffs of an accelerative process booping us from the future, rendering us all submissive, breedable, helpless, and cute in our turn. Cute comes tomorrow, and only anastrophe can make sense of what it will have been doing to us.

Evading all discipline, sliding across all possible surfaces, Cute Accelerationism embraces every detail of the symptomatology, aetiology, epidemiology, history, biology, etymology, topology, and even embryology of Cute, joyfully burrowing down into its natural, cultural, sensory, sexual, subjective, erotic, and semiotic dimensions in order to sound out the latent spaces of this Thing that has soft-soaped its way into human culture.

Traversing tangents on natural and unnatural selection, runaway supernormalisation, the collective self-transformation of genderswarming cuties, the hyperstitional cultures of shojo and otaku, denpa and 2D love, and the cute subworlds of aegyo and meng, moé and flatmaxxing, catboys and dogon eggs, bobbles and gummies, vore machines and partial objects, BwOs and UwUs...glomping, snuggling, smooshing and squeeeeing their way toward the event horizon of Cute, donning cat ears and popping bubbles as they go, in this untimely philosophical intensification of an omnipresent phenomenon, having surrendered to the squishiest demonic possession, like, ever, two bffs set out in search of the transcendental shape of cuteness only to realize that, even though it is all around us, we do not yet know what Cute can do.

Seriously superficial and bafflingly coherent, half erudite philosophical treatise, half dariacore mashup, 100 percent cutagion, this compact lil' textual machine is a meltdown and a glow up, as well as a twizzled homage to Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus. Welcome to the kawaiizome: nothing uncute makes it out of the near future, and the cute will very soon no longer be even remotely human.

What position does America occupy in the recent history of Western philosophy? At once the destination for a series of fantasies and the place from which a new relationship to thought originated, America incarnates a dark continent whose strangeness and singularity has driven thinkers outside of their own philosophical comfort zone - often forcing them to show anger, anxiety or desire towards what they considered a challenge or a threat.

This book provides a mapping of this complex relationship between America and philosophy through a series of examples drawn from a wide range of authors, from Freud and Heidegger to Adorno, Derrida and many others. It also examines the way American thinkers themselves have imported, used and abused philosophical views coming from Europe, often transforming them into something other than what they were. Is then philosophy an anti-American discourse, or America an anti-philosophical country? Or is it, rather, that America provokes philosophy from a place where its own history affirms the impossibilities, paradoxes and contradictions of philosophy itself?

At a time when the syntagm America has come to crystallize a certain understanding of the world order, interrogating the place that it occupies in our intellectual tradition is also a way to engage critically with the violence attached to it. America is a syntagm for violence, but this violence might very well be different than we thought.

The Ruse of Techne offers a reappraisal of Heidegger's entire work by focusing on the forms of activity he regards as separate from instrumentality. Non-instrumental activities like authenticity, poetry, and thinking--in short, the ineffectual--are critical for Heidegger as they offer the only path to the truth of being throughout his work.

By unearthing the source of the conception of non-instrumental action in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle, Vardoulakis elaborates how it forms part of Heidegger's response to an old problem, namely, how to account for difference after positing a single and unified being that is not amenable to change. He further demonstrates that an action without ends and effects leads to an ethics and politics rife with difficulties and contradictions that only become starker when compared to other responses to the same problem that we find in the philosophical tradition and which rely on instrumentality.

Heidegger's conception of an action without ends or effect forgets the role of instrumentality in the tradition that posits a single, unified being. And yet, the ineffectual has had a profound influence in how continental philosophy determines the ethical and the political since World War II. The critique of the ineffectual in Heidegger is thus effectively a critique of the conception of praxis in continental philosophy. Vardoulakis proposes that it is urgent to undo the forgetting of instrumentality if we are to conceive of a democratic politics and an ethics fit to respond to the challenges of high capitalism.

This book argues that, by virtue of his original and ongoing contribution to ontology and modal philosophy (from the texts gathered in Psychanalysis and Transversality to the unpublished manuscript notes for What Is Philosophy?), Guattari is to be acknowledged a philosopher in his own right, independently from Deleuze. Furthermore, it looks back and forth beyond Anti-Oedipus and contends that Guattari's major writings gradually supplement deterritorialization with determinability. Accordingly, it offers a new interpretation of the nuanced development of Guattari's philosophical thought, which it proposes to define as constructivist, rather than post-structuralist. Additionally, it explores the innovative responses that Guattari's philosophy supplies to various contemporary philosophical debates like those on accelerationism, indeterminacy, compossibility, and worlding. Finally, it examines the differences that, upon a careful cross-reading of their earliest texts (including The Anti-Oedipus Papers and Difference and Repetition), must be drawn between Guattari's constructivism and Deleuze's sacrificial philosophy.

What position does America occupy in the recent history of Western philosophy? At once the destination for a series of fantasies and the place from which a new relationship to thought originated, America incarnates a dark continent whose strangeness and singularity has driven thinkers outside of their own philosophical comfort zone - often forcing them to show anger, anxiety or desire towards what they considered a challenge or a threat.

This book provides a mapping of this complex relationship between America and philosophy through a series of examples drawn from a wide range of authors, from Freud and Heidegger to Adorno, Derrida and many others. It also examines the way American thinkers themselves have imported, used and abused philosophical views coming from Europe, often transforming them into something other than what they were. Is then philosophy an anti-American discourse, or America an anti-philosophical country? Or is it, rather, that America provokes philosophy from a place where its own history affirms the impossibilities, paradoxes and contradictions of philosophy itself?

At a time when the syntagm America has come to crystallize a certain understanding of the world order, interrogating the place that it occupies in our intellectual tradition is also a way to engage critically with the violence attached to it. America is a syntagm for violence, but this violence might very well be different than we thought.

Bringing together theorists and practitioners of psychoanalysis to interrogate Lacan's notion of extimité

In 1960, Jacques Lacan coined the neologism extimité (extimacy) to denote a structure of subjectivity in which the most intimate, internal core is already external, thus complicating the traditional philosophical dualisms and binaries that have informed traditional notions of subjectivity. This collection is the first sustained interrogation of the concept of extimacy, comprising contributions on various topics by leading and emerging philosophers and scholars of psychoanalytic theory from around the world. This international collection also includes key perspectives from practicing psychoanalysts and presents a variety of critical inquiries into the concept of extimacy for application in multiple disciplines beyond philosophy and in an array of methodological and thematic frameworks.

In The Ethics of Opting Out, Mari Ruti provides an accessible yet theoretically rigorous account of the ideological divisions that have animated queer theory during the last decade, paying particular attention to the field's rejection of dominant neoliberal narratives of success, cheerfulness, and self-actualization. More specifically, she focuses on queer negativity in the work of Lee Edelman, Jack Halberstam, and Lynne Huffer, and on the rhetoric of bad feelings found in the work of Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant, David Eng, Heather Love, and José Muñoz. Ruti highlights the ways in which queer theory's desire to opt out of normative society rewrites ethical theory and practice in genuinely innovative ways at the same time as she resists turning antinormativity into a new norm. This wide-ranging and thoughtful book maps the parameters of contemporary queer theory in order to rethink the foundational assumptions of the field.

Posthumanism synthesizes philosophical, literary, and artistic responses to technological advancements, globalization, and mass extinction in the Anthropocene. It asks what it can mean to be human in an increasingly more-than-human world that has lost faith in the ideal of humanism, the autonomous, rational subject, and it models generative alternatives cognizant of the demands of social and ecological justice. Amid rising social justice movements, collapsing economic structures, and the dwindling power of cultural institutions, posthumanism advances thinking on new and previously unenvisionable challenges.

Posthumanism in Art and Science is an anthology of indispensable statements and artworks that provide an unprecedented mapping of this intellectual and aesthetic development in a global context. It features groundbreaking theorists including Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti, Mel Y. Chen, Michael Marder, Alexander Weheliye, Anna Tsing, Timothy Morton, N. Katherine Hayles, Bruno Latour, Francesca Ferrando, and Cary Wolfe, as well as innovative, influential artists and curators such as Yvonne Rainer, Skawennati, Chus Martínez, William Wegman, Nandipha Mntambo, Cassils, Pauline Oliveros, and Doo-sung Yoo. These provocative and compelling works, including previously unpublished interviews and essays, speak to the ongoing conceptual and political challenge of posthumanist thinking in a time of unprecedented cultural and environmental crises.

An essential primer and reference for educators, students, artists, and art enthusiasts, this volume offers a powerful framework for rethinking anthropocentric certitudes and reenvisioning equitable and sustainable futures.

Finalist, 2024 Translation Prize - Nonfiction, French-American Foundation

Alain Badiou began the twenty-first century by considering the relationship between philosophy and notions of the present. In this period of his ongoing annual lecture series, the acclaimed philosopher took up the existential problem of how to be contemporary with one's own time--that is, how to not simply inhabit a passing moment but bring a real present into existence.

Images of the Present Time presents nearly three years of Badiou's seminars, held from 2001 to 2004, partly against the backdrop of the war in Iraq. Given while Badiou was writing Logics of Worlds, the second of the three volumes of Being and Event, these lectures address some of the same questions of existence in a particular world in a more personal and conversational tone, with reference to literature, philosophy, and contemporary politics and culture. He proposes a new concept of living in a real present as the twisting together of something from the past and something of the future.

Featuring some of the philosopher's most inspiring and approachable work, Images of the Present Time is an important book for all readers interested in the practical as well as conceptual possibilities of Badiou's thought.

This study illuminates the complex interplay between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and architecture. Presenting their wide-ranging impact on late 20th- and 21st-century architecture, each chapter focuses on a core Deleuzian/Guattarian philosophical concept and one key work of architecture which evokes, contorts, or extends it.

Challenging the idea that a concept or theory defines and then produces the physical work and not vice versa, Chris L. Smith positions the relationship between Deleuze and Guattari's philosophy and the field of architecture as one that is mutually substantiating and constitutive. In this framework, modes of architectural production and experimentation become inextricable from the conceptual territories defined by these two key thinkers, producing a rigorous discussion of theoretical, practical, and experimental engagements with their ideas.

The Place of the Mosque probes a host of discursive formations--spaces of public assembly and social interaction, quotidian practices, disputed sites, and biopolitics--while critiquing their peculiar anomalies. It goes beyond architectural criticism to emphasize the interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study of place and space.

Having the past shattered into a present that is meaningless, the future becomes nothing at all.

The Chief of Birds is a memoir of addiction, incarceration, and return from the brink of destruction. Allowing quotations from Samuel Beckett, Maurice Blanchot, and others to speak where the author has been silenced, it charts the fragile re-emergence of a self that passes for recovery.

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Imagine Rousseau's Confessions written by a monster in chains. Templeton takes us on a harrowing inner journey from the depths of extreme addiction through a strange transformation, but his is not some simple, uplifting recovery or sobriety narrative. To hell with platitudes and magical thinking. From the haunting confines of suicidal alcoholism in The Room, through the long autopsy on his identity in The House, Templeton's metacognitive ordeal unfolds in kinship with Samuel Beckett's bleak minimalism. His sharp, courageous pursuit for authentic identity tears the thin membranes between social institutions, language, and one's narrativized self. Like Joker in Full-Metal Jacket, the narrator, a demon slipping and sneaking from word to word, guards at great risk the illusive, dim light of honesty of an authenticity while navigating the iron-clad principles of AA. A courageously relentless examination of the human condition, this memoir is as much a theory of mind as a story of breaking free from the deadly grip of addiction. -- Alex Johns, Associate Professor of English, University of North Georgia

As a frequent monster of the solitudes and former 12-Step reacher, regurgitator, wrestler, repudiator and reject, I feel gratitude for Mike Templeton's fresh approach to the Recovery industry gerbil wheel in his meta-memoir The Chief of Birds, a volume I find reminiscent, in ways, of Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, albeit from a further evolved 21st century American erstwhile cog-in-the-machine vantage point. Higher Power pshaw. Hop off the wheel. Get out from between the teeth. Read this book. Save yourself. -- John Burroughs, 2022-23 U.S. Beat Poet Laureate and author of The Wrest of the Worthwhile

Sentimental Empiricism reconsiders the legacy of eighteenth and nineteenth century empiricism and moral sentimentalism for the intellectual formation of the generation of postwar French thinkers whose work came to dominate Anglophone conversations across the humanities under the guise of French theory. Panagia's book first shows what was missed in the reception of this literature in the Anglophone academy by attending to how France's pedagogical milieu plays out church and state relations in the form of educational debates around reading practices, the aesthetics of mimesis, French imperialism, and republican universalism. Panagia then shows how such thinkers as Jean Wahl, Simone de Beauvoir, Gilbert Simondon, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault develop a sentimental empiricist critical philosophy that distances itself from dialectical critique and challenges the metaphysical premise of inherent relations, especially as it had been articulated in the tradition of Aristotelian scholasticism.

Panagia develops the long disputed political legacy of French theory through an exploration of how these thinkers came to understand an aesthetic of mimesis as a credentialing standard for selection to political participation. Since, in France, the ability to imitate well is a state qualification necessary to access offices of elite power, the political, aesthetic, and philosophical critique of mimesis became one of the defining features of sentimental empiricist thought. By exploring the historical, intellectual, cultural, and philosophical complexities of this political aesthetic, Panagia shows how and why postwar French thinkers turned to a tradition of sentimental empiricism in order to develop a new form of criticism attentive to the dispositional powers of domination.

This book is available from the publisher on an open access basis.

In The Aesthetic Value of the World, Tom Cochrane defends Aestheticism, the claim that everything is aesthetically valuable and that a life lived in pursuit of aesthetic value can be a particularly good one. Furthermore, in distilling aesthetic qualities, artists have a special role to play in teaching us to recognize values; a critical component of virtue. Cochrane grounds his account upon an analysis of aesthetic value as 'objectified final value', which is underwritten by an original psychological claim that all aesthetic values are distal versions of practical values. This is followed by systematic accounts of beauty, sublimity, comedy, drama, and tragedy, as well as appendix entries on the cute, the cool, the kitsch, the uncanny, the horrific, the erotic, and the furious.

Gavin Rae shows that the problematic status of agency caused by the poststructuralist decentring of the subject is a central concern for poststructuralist thinkers. First, Rae shows how this plays out in the thinking of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. He then demonstrates that it is with those poststructuralists associated with and influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis that this issue most clearly comes to the fore. He goes on to reveal that the conceptual schema of Cornelius Castoriadis best explains how the founded subject is capable of agency.

Finalist, 2024 Translation Prize - Nonfiction, French-American Foundation

Alain Badiou began the twenty-first century by considering the relationship between philosophy and notions of the present. In this period of his ongoing annual lecture series, the acclaimed philosopher took up the existential problem of how to be contemporary with one's own time--that is, how to not simply inhabit a passing moment but bring a real present into existence.

Images of the Present Time presents nearly three years of Badiou's seminars, held from 2001 to 2004, partly against the backdrop of the war in Iraq. Given while Badiou was writing Logics of Worlds, the second of the three volumes of Being and Event, these lectures address some of the same questions of existence in a particular world in a more personal and conversational tone, with reference to literature, philosophy, and contemporary politics and culture. He proposes a new concept of living in a real present as the twisting together of something from the past and something of the future.

Featuring some of the philosopher's most inspiring and approachable work, Images of the Present Time is an important book for all readers interested in the practical as well as conceptual possibilities of Badiou's thought.

It is often asserted that postmodernism emerged from 'leftist' Nietzsche-interpretations, but this claim and its implications are rarely explored. Deconstructing Postmodernist Nietzscheanism investigates how Deleuze and Foucault read Nietzsche and apply a hermeneutics of innocence to his philosophy that erases the elitist, anti-democratic, and anti-socialist dimensions. In a clear and incisive analysis, Rehmann shows that this misreading also affects their own theory and impairs the ability to develop a radical critique from it. Thus the late Foucault's turn to self-care techniques merges a neo-Nietzschean approach with the ideologies of neoliberalism.

Rehmann's critique is not directed against the endeavor to take suggestions from some of Nietzsche's astute intuitions, but rather against the near universal tendency to use him as a symbolic capital without admitting his hierarchical obsession and other political flaws.

This book is an updated and extended version of Postmoderner Links-Nietzscheanismus: Deleuze and Foucault. Eine Dekonstruktion, originally published in German by Argument Verlag GmbH.

This volume brings together an international array of scholars to reconsider the meaning and place of poststructuralism historically and demonstrate some of the ways in which it continues to be relevant, especially for debates in aesthetics, ethics, and politics.

The book's chapters focus on the works of Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard--in combination with those of Agamben, Luhman, Nancy, and Nietzsche--and examine issues including biopolitics, culture, embodiment, epistemology, history, music, temporality, political resistance, psychoanalysis, revolt, and the visual arts. The contributors use poststructuralism as a hermeneutical strategy that rejects the traditional affirmation of unity, totality, transparency, and representation to instead focus on the foundational importance of open-ended becoming, difference, the unknowable, and expression. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of poststructuralism and helps demonstrate how it has contributed to debates across philosophy and other disciplines.

Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, aesthetics, feminist theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, psychoanalysis, and sociology.

The work of Michel Foucault has had a huge influence on contemporary philosophy, but one thing it lacks is a normative ethical framework. Seeking to construct an ethics consistent with Foucault's core postulates, this study advances the concept of 'life continuance', an approach it contrasts with a range of other, established systems.