Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of 'pure' immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of 'the political'; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or 'micropolitical' life of desire. He argues that here, in this 'life', is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately comes to outline and justify the conceptual importance and necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of 'pure' immanence are either apolitical and/or politically incoherent.

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of 'pure' immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of 'the political'; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or 'micropolitical' life of desire. He argues that here, in this 'life', is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately comes to outline and justify the conceptual importance and necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of 'pure' immanence are either apolitical and/or politically incoherent.

Christian Gilliam maps the context and development of immanence and micropolitics, from Sartre to Deleuze. He argues that a philosophy of 'pure' immanence is integral to an alternative understanding of 'the political'; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or 'micropolitical' life of desire.

The Anthropocene marks the age of significant human impact on the Earth’s ecosystems, dramatically underscoring the reality that human life is not separate from nature but an integral part of it. Culturally, ecologically, and socially destructive practices such as resource extraction have led to this moment of peril. These practices, however, implicate more than industrial and economic systems: they are built into the political theology of American exceptionalism, compelling us to reimagine human social and political life on Earth. American Immanence seeks to replace the dominant American political tradition, which has resulted in global social, economic, and environmental injustices, with a new form of political theology, its dominant feature a radical democratic politics. Michael S. Hogue explores the potential of a dissenting immanental tradition in American religion based on philosophical traditions of naturalism, process thought, and pragmatism. By integrating systems theory and concepts of vulnerability and resilience into the lineages of American immanence, he articulates a political theology committed to democracy as an emancipatory and equitable way of life. Rather than seeking to redeem or be redeemed, Hogue argues that the vulnerability of life in the Anthropocene calls us to build radically democratic communities of responsibility, resistance, and resilience. American Immanence integrates an immanental theology of, by, and for the planet with a radical democratic politics of, by, and for the people.

At the end of the second millennium BC, the Late Shang state (ca. 1250-1046 BC) was one of the most powerful polities in the ancient world, exerting substantial influence throughout early China from their capital at Anyang (Yinxu). Through the transition from the Late Shang to the Western Zhou, the political landscape experienced a deep rupture and a profound realignment through the turn of the first millennium BC. This significant shift from the Shang state at Anyang to the Zhou (ca. 1046-221 BC) centered in the Guanzhong and Luoyang Basins held immense implications for trajectories of social change in early China. Systematic investigations into the Shang-Zhou transition remain limited in anthropological archaeology. The nature of the impact of this transition on communities caught within a collapsing Shang state and an expanding Zhou state, moreover, is poorly understood.Through the development and application of an archaeology of immanence, the objective of this dissertation is to map the constellations of power that were integral to the processes underlying the Shang-Zhou transition. I engage in a wide-ranging archaeological synthesis of published materials on the social, political, and economic dynamics of early China supplemented by pottery analyses of utilitarian pottery vessels. I argue that the transition is an ongoing accumulation of interrelated events and encounters emerging throughout early China during the late second and early first millennia BC. In elucidating sociopolitical dynamics in the Shang and Zhou periods, I put forward the concept of an affective state. In this model, a state is a political form always in process, incessantly changing and, critically, a historically contingent form that is beholden to the myriad of human and non-human beings that occupy the landscape, their becomings, and their embodied potentialities. I also contend that the complex, overlapping social and economic networks interwoven in what would become the Zhou ancestral landscape provided fertile grounds for the rise of the Western Zhou state. Through a framework focusing on trauma, I also demonstrate how the rise of the Western Zhou society was contingent on the becomings of the Shang people in the wake of conquest.

This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Félix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as Fight Club and Schindler's List) and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing ("in transition") in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given.

This book aims to re-think the way in which the subject is inscribed in the modern political, and does so by exploring the potentiality of Lacano-Deleuzian theoretical framework. It concerns a different ontology and a non-dualist understanding of political and legal existence, by focusing on questions such as how to think alternative notions of political existence and what kind of political, social and legal order do these come to create. This investigation into political appearance of subjects through concepts of law, body and life is led and influenced by the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, as well as Alain Badiou, Antonio Negri and Slavoj Žižek. The book takes on various conceptualisations of life, explores the relationship between law and life and develops an alternative notion of legal and political existence in particular in the context of rights. On the back of Guantánamo’s legal and political discourses this work aims to show why and how the problems of world politics or the limitations of (human) rights discourse require an engagement with questions such as what it means to exist as a human being, what forms of life are politically recognised, which are not, and why this distinction. By pointing to a different ontology for thinking and understanding global politics and demonstrating how a trans-disciplinary and philosophical approaches can foster the debates in world politics, this book will be of interest to postgraduates and scholars working on critical normative ideas in international politics, critical security studies and critical legal studies.