The Great Recoil

What comes after neoliberalism? In these times of health emergency, economic collapse, populist anger and ecological threat, societies are forced to turn inward in search of protection. Neoliberalism, the ideology that presided over decades of market globalisation, is on trial, while state intervention is making a spectacular comeback amid lockdowns, mass vaccination programmes, deficit spending and climate planning. This is the Great Recoil, the era when the neo-statist endopolitics of national sovereignty, economic protection and democratic control overrides the neoliberal exopolitics of free markets, labour flexibility and business opportunity. Looking back to the role of the state in Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Hegel, Gramsci and Polanyi, and exploring the discourses, electoral programs and class blocs of the nationalist right and socialist left, Paolo Gerbaudo fleshes out the contours of the different statisms and populisms that inform contemporary politics. The central issue in dispute is what mission the post-pandemic state should pursue: whether it should protect native workers from immigration and the rich against redistributive demands, as proposed by the right’s authoritarian protectionism; or reassert social security and popular sovereignty against the rapacity of financial and tech elites, as advocated by the left’s social protectivism. Only by addressing the widespread sense of exposure and vulnerability may socialists turn the present phase of involution into an opportunity for social transformation.

Recuperating in Switzerland after a job that cost the life of one of his closest friends, ex-special forces soldier Nick Stone has only one thing on his mind: the girl who left his bed this morning without saying goodbye. And when she fails to reappear, Nick knows the honeymoon is over before it has even begun. Her trail leads him to Africa, and the deep end of a very dirty Congo war – where it isn’t long before the past comes knocking at his door, and Stone finds himself catapulted once more into the dark and brutal world he’d tried to leave behind. As one bloody twist leads to another, his apparently simple quest becomes a journey to the heart of a chilling conspiracy, to which he and his beautiful quarry unwittingly hold the key...

The Expanse meets Altered Carbon in this breakneck science fiction thriller where immortality is theoretically achievable, yet identity, gender and selfhood are very much in jeopardy... Carter Langston is murdered whilst salvaging a derelict vessel--a major inconvenience as he's downloaded into a brand-new body on the space station where he backed up, several weeks' journey away. But events quickly slip out of control when an assassin breaks into the medbay and tries to finish the job. Death no longer holds sway over a humanity that has spread across the solar system: consciousness can be placed in a new body, or coil, straight after death, giving people the potential for immortality. Yet Carter's backups--supposedly secure--have been damaged, his crew are missing, and everything points back to the derelict that should have been a simple salvage mission. With enemies in hot pursuit, Carter tracks down his last crewmate--re-coiled after death into a body she cannot stand--to delve deeper into a mystery that threatens humanity and identity as they have come to know it.

A contemporary philosophical masterwork from “one of the world’s best-known public intellectuals ” (New York Review of Books) Philosophical materialism in all its forms – from scientific naturalism to Deleuzian New Materialism – has failed to meet the key theoretical and political challenges of the modern world. This is the burden of philosopher Slavoj Žižek’s argument in this pathbreaking and eclectic new work. Recent history has seen developments such as quantum physics and Freudian psychoanalysis, not to speak of the failure of twentieth-century communism, shake our understanding of existence. In the process, the dominant tradition in Western philosophy lost its moorings. To bring materialism up to date, Žižek – himself a committed materialist and communist – proposes a radical revision of our intellectual heritage. He argues that dialectical materialism is the only true philosophical inheritor of what Hegel designated the “speculative” approach in thought. Absolute Recoil is a startling reformulation of the basis and possibilities of contemporary philosophy. While focusing on how to overcome the transcendental approach without regressing to naïve, pre-Kantian realism, Žižek offers a series of excursions into today’s political, artistic, and ideological landscape, from Arnold Schoenberg’s music to the films of Ernst Lubitsch.

The practical properties of many materials are dominated by surface and near-surface composition and structure. An understanding of how the surface region affects material properties starts with an understanding of the elemental composition of that region. Since the most common contaminants are light elements (for example, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, and hydrogen), there is a clear need for an analytic probe that simultaneously and quantitatively records elemental profiles of all light elements. Energy recoil detection using high-energy heavy ions is unique in its ability to provide quantitative profiles of light and medium mass elements. As such this method holds great promise for the study of a variety of problems in a wide range of fields. While energy recoil detection is one of the newest and most promising ion beam analytic techniques, it is also the oldest in terms of when it was first described. Before discussing recent developments in this field, perhaps it is worth reviewing the early days of this century when the first energy recoil detection experiments were reported.

A decade ago, a wave of mass mobilisations described as "horizontal" and "leaderless" swept the planet, holding the promise of real democracy and justice for the 99%. Many saw its subsequent ebb as proof of the need to go back to what was once called "the question of organisation". For something so often described as essential, however, political organisation remains a surprisingly under-theorised field. In this book, Rodrigo Nunes proposes to remedy that lack by starting again from scratch. Redefining the terms of the problem, he rejects the confusion between organisation and any of the forms it can take, such as the party, and argues that organisation must be understood as always supposing a diverse ecology of different initiatives and organisational forms. Drawing from a wide array of sources and traditions that include cybernetics, poststructuralism, network theory and Marxism, Nunes develops a grammar that eschews easy oppositions between "verticalism" and "horizontalism", centralisation and dispersion, and offers a fresh approach to enduring issues like spontaneity, leadership, democracy, strategy, populism, revolution, and the relationship between movements and parties.

A study of the decades leading up to World War II profiles the world leaders, politicians, business people, and others whose personal politics and ideologies provided an inevitable barrier to the peace process and whose actions led to the outbreak of war.

When a skilled gamer gets recruited as a sniper in the war against a terrorist-produced pandemic, she discovers there's more than one enemy and more than one war. Three years after a series of terrorist attacks flooded the US with a lethal plague, society has changed radically. Sixteen year-old Jinxy James spends her days trapped at home - immersed in virtual reality, worrying about the plague and longing for freedom. Then she wins a war simulation game and is recruited into a top-secret organisation where talented teenagers are trained to become agents in the war on terror. Eager to escape her mother's over-protectiveness and to serve her country, Jinxy enlists and becomes an expert sniper of infected mutant rats. She's immediately drawn to Quinn O'Riley, a charming and subversive intelligence analyst who knows more about the new order of government and society than he is telling. Then a shocking revelation forces Jinxy to make an impossible decision, and she risks losing everything. Recoil is the first book in a Young Adult dystopian romance trilogy, and makes great reading for lovers of Rick Yancey (The Fifth Wave), Suzanne Collins (Hunger Games), and Veronica Roth (Divergent). BONUS CONTENT! Chapter one of Refuse (book 2 in the Recoil series) included in this version!