The Passionate Attachment

An examination of America's four-decade entanglement in Middle Eastern politics traces the sequence of events that brought the United States to the point where its policies are manipulated by an ally.

Essays discuss passion, sexual relationships, individualism, romance, femininity, and the relationship between sex and love.

Sexual Deceit is an extended ethical analysis of the phenomenon of sexual identity passing — i.e. socially presenting as X, when one understands oneself as Y, where the variables represent any contemporary sexual identity — alongside identity passing in the contexts of race, gender, and briefly, religion and class. The analysis of passing utilizes and challenges traditional moral understandings of identity falsification, complicating our understandings of moral obligations under systemic oppression. Tracing the intervention of social construction theory on contemporary political understandings of LGBT communities and activism, Sexual Deceit argues against social construction models of identity — notably performativity, promulgated by the work of Judith Butler and consumed and repeated by many scholars and theory educated queer people. A new model of identity is constructed, based on a phenomenological concept of style that provides for a socially adjustable yet rooted notion of sexual identity. The ethical implications of sexual identity passing are considered in the context of eschatological images of social justice and within practical matters such as military service, leadership, and sexual harassment law.

The papers featured in Attachment and Sexuality create a dense tapestry, each forming a separate narrative strand that elucidates different configurations of the relationship between attachment and sexuality. As a whole, the volume explores the areas of convergence and divergence, opposition, and integration between these two systems. It suggests that there is a bi-directional web of influences that weaves the attachment and sexual systems together in increasingly complex ways from infancy to adulthood. The volume’s unifying thread is the idea that the attachment system, and particularly the degree of felt security, or lack thereof in relation to early attachment figures, provides a paradigm of relatedness that forms a scaffold for the developmental unfolding of sexuality in all its manifestations. Such manifestations include infantile and adult, masturbatory and mutual, and normative and perverse. Also central to the papers is the idea that the development of secure attachment is predicated, in part, on the development of the capacity for mentalization, or the ability to envision and interpret the behavior of oneself and others in terms of intentional mental states, including desires, feelings, beliefs, and motivations. Topics discussed in the book will help to shape the direction and tenor of further dialogues in the arena of attachment and sexuality.

In everyday life we depend upon, interact with, influence are influenced by many people in situations that range from brief single encounters to the special relationships we form with family and close friends. Social interactions such as these are just a part of what make up social psychology, the study of human social behaviour and thought. In 'Social Psychology', the authors have incorporated the most recent theoretical developments and research findings and accounted for more than a decade of growth and expansion in the discipline since the publication of Pennington's 'Essential Social Psychology' (from which this book is descended). The result is a wholly fresh textbook that provides a clear and readable introduction to this empirical discipline. Assuming no prior knowledge, this book guides the reader through the main topic areas, providing insights into the key theories, concepts, research and debates that define the field. Particular attention is paid to how research is applied, with each chapter containing a section demonstrating the application of social psychological findings in the contexts of education, law, health and organisations. A summary of the main points and suggestions for further reading are included at the end of each chapter. There are figures, tables and photographs provided throughout to encourage visualisation and aid understanding.

From the groundbreaking author of The Second Sex comes a radical argument for ethical responsibility and freedom. In this classic introduction to existentialist thought, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with her French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms in existentialism carry with them certain ethical responsibilities. De Beauvoir outlines a series of “ways of being” (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual), each of which overcomes the former’s deficiencies, and therefore can live up to the responsibilities of freedom. Ultimately, de Beauvoir argues that in order to achieve true freedom, one must battle against the choices and activities of those who suppress it. The Ethics of Ambiguity is the book that launched Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist and existential philosophy. It remains a concise yet thorough examination of existence and what it means to be human.

The objective of this book is to outline how a radically democratic politics can be reinvigorated in theory and practice through the use of the internet. The author argues that politics in its proper sense can be distinguished from anti-politics by analyzing the configuration of public space, subjectivity, participation, and conflict. Each of these terrains can be configured in a more or less political manner, though the contemporary status quo heavily skews them towards anti-political configuration. Using this understanding of what exactly politics entails, this book considers how the internet can both help and hinder efforts to move each area in a more political direction. By explicitly interpreting contemporary theories of the political in terms of the internet, this analysis avoids the twin traps of both technological determinism and technological cynicism. Raising awareness of what the word ‘politics’ means, the author develops theoretical work by Arendt, Rancière, Žižek and Mouffe to present a clear and coherent view of how in theory, politics can be digitized and alternatively how the internet can be deployed in the service of trulydemocratic politics.