Bücher der Reihe Critical Climate Change

Deterritorializing the Future places concepts of heritage at the centre of the Anthropocene - not as nostalgic longing for how things were, but to think critically and speculatively about alternative futures.

The term Occupy represents a belief in the transformation of the capitalist system through a new heterogenic world of protest and activism that cannot be conceived in terms of liberal democracy, parliamentary systems, class war or vanguard politics. These conceptualisations do not articulate where power is held, nor from where transformation may issue. This collection of essays by world-leading scholars of Deleuze and Guattari examines how capitalism can be understood as a global abstract machine whose effects pervade all of life and how Occupy can be framed as a response to this as a heterogenic movement based on new tactics, revitalised democratic processes and nomadic systems of organisation. Seeing the question as a political tactic aimed at delegitimizing their protest, Occupiers refused to answer the question 'what do you want?', produce manifestos, elect leaders or act as a vanguard. Occupy: A People Yet to Come goes some considerable way towards providing the terms upon which this refusal can be understood within a changed landscape of political activism and the rewriting of the conventions of political protest.With essays by Claire Colebrook, Giuseppina Mecchia, John Protevi, Rodrigo Nunes, Verena Andermatt Conley, Nicholas Thoburn, Ian Buchanan, David Burrows, Eugene Holland and Andrew Conio, the volume examines the economic predicates of capitalist economics: liberal democracy and its alternatives, the conjugation of protest and aesthetics, how occupy experiments with different types of leadership and how power, hierarchies and resistance might be understood using Deleuze and Guattari's radical conceptualizations of debt; subjectivity, the minor and the molecular, occupation, dispersed leadership, territory, smooth space and the war machine.

Through the interpretative lens of today's leading thinkers, The Philosophical Salon illuminates the persistent intellectual queries and the most disquieting concerns of our actuality. Across its three main divisions - Speculations, Reflections, and Interventions - the volume constructs a complex mirror, in which our age might be able to recognize itself with all its imperfections, shadowy spots, even threatening abysses and latent promises. On the cutting edge of philosophy, political and literary theory, and aesthetics, this book courageously tackles a wide array of topics, including climate change, the role of technology, reproductive rights, the problem of refugees, the task of the university, political extremism, embodiment, utopia, food ethics, and sexual identity. It is an enduring record of an ongoing conversation, as well as a building block for any attempt to make sense of our world's multifaceted realities.Contributors: Robert Albritton, Linda Martín Alcoff, Claudia Baracchi, Geoffrey Bennington, Jay M. Bernstein, Costica Bradatan, Jill Casid, David Castillo, Antonio Cerella, Anna Charlton, Claire Colebrook, Sarah Conly, Nikita Dhawan, William Egginton, Roberto Esposito, Mihail Evans, Gary Francione, Luis Garagalza, Michael Gillespie, Michael Hauskeller, Ágnes Heller, Daniel Innerarity, Jacob Kiernan, Julia Kristeva, Daniel Kunitz, Susanna Lindberg, Jeff Love, Michael Marder, Todd May, Michael Meng, John Milbank, Warren Montag, T. M. Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, Kelly Oliver, Adrian Pabst, Martha Patterson, Richard Polt, Gabriel Rockhill, Hasana Sharp, Doris Sommer, Gayatri Spivak, Kara Thompson, Patrícia Vieira, Slavoj ¿i¿ek.

In Practicing Relativism in the Anthropocene, Barbara Herrnstein Smith addresses a set of contemporary issues involving knowledge and science from a constructivist-pragmatist perspective often labeled "relativism." Practicing that relativism, she argues, does not mean refusing judgment or asserting absurdities but being conscious of the existence and significance of contingency, complexity, and multiplicity. Rejecting classic and neorealist views of knowledge and human cognition, Smith describes important alternative accounts in cognitive theory, science studies, and contemporary philosophy of mind. The "relativism" commonly associated with these alternative accounts, she maintains, is a chimera-part straw man, part red herring. Objections to the position so named typically involve crucially improper paraphrase of empirical observations of variability and contingency or dismaying inferences improperly drawn from such observations. In an extended examination of recent writings by Bruno Latour, Smith indicates the increasing centrality of theological investments in his work and both the interest of those writings but also their limits for humanities scholars seeking to appropriate them. Discussing computational methods in literary studies, she describes how the idea of "close reading" has operated historically in the Anglo-American literary academy and how it figures now in the discourses of the digital humanities. Efforts to make the aims and methods of the humanities more scientific, she suggests, typically involve ill-informed or otherwise dubious conceptions of science. What distinguishes the humanities and the natural sciences, she argues, are neither subject areas nor methods as such but fundamental epistemic orientations. Declining calls to reaffirm or rehabilitate philosophical realism in the face of denials of climate change, Smith maintains that the most illuminating perspectives for conceptualization and practice in the Anthropocene are precisely those labeled, but commonly mischaracterized as, "relativist."