Unstable Universalities

Explores the theory from political continental thinkers such as Badiou, Zizek, Hardt, Negri, Agamben and Laclau and applies it to real issues, drawing examples from the contemporary world such as the 'war on terror', the anti-globalization movement and transnational activism, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The universe is expanding, the world has gone global, and the US has launched a crusade to export the universal right to democracy to every part of the world. Under the circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the concept of universality is making a remarkable comeback in aesthetic and political theory. The meaning of the world, however, seems more contested than ever. Some denounce it as the ideological guise of particular interests, others as the conceptual equivalent of totalitarianism. But a growing number maintain that universality is an indispensable notion for any genuinely critical aesthetics and politics. Confronting Universalites consists of 12 contributors that examine how contemporary works of art in different media and genres influence, shape, or confront the political realm in both theory and practice by way of the universal. The topics of the essays include depictions of German unification, identity politics of aesthetic taste, contemporary uses of van Gogh, globalized photography, the infamous Danish cartoons, iconic architecture, cinematic representations of migration, the speeches of Nicolas Sarkozy and the interventions of contemporary art in the war in Afghanistan. From various theoretical points of departure, they all demonstrate the importance of the universal in the description of political aesthetic practice in a globalising world.

The turn of the Millennium demonstrated a fully-fledged revival and fusion of various left-wing social movements with differing agendas. Movements for women's, black, indigenous, LGTB and animal liberation as well as ecological, anti-nuclear and anti-war groups unified against the global capital. Considering the diverse emphases of these movements, is there a philosophical framework that could help us understand their nature and their modes of operation in the 21st century? This book provides a set of conceptual tools offering a theoretical model of 'slow' social transformation, a modality of social change that explicitly differs from the irruptive model of a revolution or a paradigm-changing event. Instead, it proposes the two concepts of mimetic contagion and solidarity with singularity which allow us to understand what is currently happening in the activist milieu. By bringing together some of today's most important thinkers, including Butler, Girard, Badiou, and Sloterdijk this book suggests a philosophical lens to look at the alternative living projects that contemporary left-wing activists undertake in practice. At the heart of their projects lie the pressing concerns that these contemporary philosophers currently debate. Breaking from the conceptual apparatus of the Marxian tradition, Theorizing Contemporary Anarchism instead takes Hegelian concepts and feeds them through the thought of contemporary theorists in order to form an original, productive, and inclusive scaffold with which to understand today's world of social and political movements.

This book aims to inscribe the prominent Soviet semiologist Yurii Lotman into the analysis of political forms and components of power as seen from the context of various Russian-European encounters.

What is political independence? As a political act, what was it sanctioned to accomplish? Is formal colonialism over, or a condition in the present, albeit mutated and evolved? In Critique of Political Decolonization, Bernard Forjwuor challenges what, in normative scholarship, has become a persistent conflation of two different concepts: political decolonization and political independence. This scholarly volume is an antinormative and critical refutation of the decolonial accomplishment of political independence or self-determination in Ghana. He argues that political independence is insufficiently a decolonial claim because it is framed within the context of a country, where a permanent colonial settlement was never deemed necessary for the consolidation of future colonial political obligations. So, while territorial dissolution was politically engineered by Ghanaians, the colonial merely reconstitutes itself in different legal and ideological forms. Forjwuor offers new methodological, theoretical, and conceptual approaches to engaging the questions of colonialism, political independence, political decolonization, justice, and freedom, and constructs multiple conceptual bridges between traditional disciplinary fields of inquiry including politics, history, law, African studies, economic history, critical theory, and philosophy and political theory. Using the Ghanaian experience as a rich case study, Forjwuor rethinks what colonialism and decolonization mean, and asserts that decolonization is primarily a question of justice.

Consciousness and the Neoliberal Subject outlines a theory of ideological function and a range of ideological positions according to which individuals rationalise and accept socio-economic conditions in advanced consumer capitalist societies. Through a critical examination of the social and psychoanalytic theories of Herbert Marcuse, Fredric Jameson, and Slavoj Žižek, the author extends the understanding of ideology to consider not only the unconscious attachment to social relations, but also the importance of conscious rationalisation in sustaining ideologies. In this way, the book defines different ideologies today in terms of the manner in which they conditionally internalise a dominant neoliberal rationality, and considers the possibility that entrenched social norms may be challenged directly, through conscious engagement. It will appeal to scholars of social and political theory with interests in ideology, neoliberalism, psychoanalytic thought and critical theory.

Cellular computing is a natural information processing paradigm, capable of modeling various biological, physical and social phenomena, as well as other kinds of complex adaptive systems. The programming of a cellular computer is in many respects similar to the genetic evolution in biology, the result being a proper cell design and a task-specific gene. How should one “program” the cell of a cellular computer such that a dynamic behavior with computational relevance will emerge? What are the “rules” for designing a computationally universal and efficient cell? The answers to those questions can be found in this book. It introduces the relatively new paradigm of the cellular neural network from an original perspective and provides the reader with the guidelines for understanding how such cellular computers can be “programmed” and designed optimally. The book contains numerous practical examples and software simulators, allowing readers to experiment with the various phases of designing cellular computers by themselves. Contents:Cellular Paradigms: Theory and SimulationUniversal CellsEmergence in Continuous-Time Systems: Reaction–Diffusion Cellular Neural NetworksEmergence in Discrete-Time Systems: Generalized Cellular AutomataUnconventional Applications: Biometric Authentication Readership: Graduate students, academics and researchers dealing with nonlinear signal processing, cellular computing systems, biological modeling & computing, neural networks, emergence & complexity, or complex adaptive systems. Keywords:Reviews:“Dogaru's book is a timely addition to the literature published in recent years … This book is highly recommendable to any one who wants to study nonlinear dynamics, circuits, devices and systems, and to the individuals who have interest in expanding their current expertise of mathematics to understand more about the complex nonlinear world.”IEEE Circuits and Systems Magazine “The book is written carefully in a simple and accessible way … this is a beautiful, well-rounded, stimulating, and timely book targeting a multidisciplinary audience. It certainly holds its promise of providing 'first steps towards a consistent theory of designing for emergence'.”International Journal of Robust Nonlinear Control

11 Ecstatic Vision, Blue Ravens, Wild Dreams: The Urgency of the Future in Gerald Vizenor's Art -- Contributors -- Index