Through the use of a poststructuralist perspective, Antony O'Loughlin challenges the most basic tenets of International Relations Theory and deploys Rawlsian ideas of public reason in conjunction with Kratochwil's conceptions of practical reason in order to put forward a theory that overcomes the challenges posed by poststructuralism.

Through the use of a poststructuralist perspective, Antony O'Loughlin challenges the most basic tenets of International Relations Theory and deploys Rawlsian ideas of public reason in conjunction with Kratochwil's conceptions of practical reason in order to put forward a theory that overcomes the challenges posed by poststructuralism.

Written by experts in their field, this Companion surveys the challenges and provocations raised by the major voices of poststructuralism: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Guattari, Kristeva, Irigaray, Barthes and Baudrillard. Thematically organised and clearly written, it will guide students and researchers in philosophy, literature, art, geography, politics, sociology, law, film, and cultural studies around the nature and contemporary relevance of poststructuralism.

Transcending Postmodernism: Performatism 2.0 is an ambitious attempt to expand and deepen the theory of performatism. Its main thesis is that, beginning in the mid-1990s, the strategies and norms of postmodernism have been displaced by ones that force readers or viewers to experience effects of aesthetically mediated transcendence. These effects include specific temporal strategies (“chunking”), stylizing separated subjectivity (the genius and the fool being its two main poles) and orienting ethics toward actions taken by centered agents bearing a sacral charge. The book provides a critical overview of other theories of post-postmodernism, and suggests that among five text-oriented theories there is basic agreement on its techniques and strategies.

In Beckett and Poststructuralism, Anthony Uhlmann offers a reading of Beckett in relation to French philosophy, particularly the work of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas, and Derrida. Uhlmann offers a work of literary criticism that is also a piece of intellectual history, emphasizing how Beckett develops a kind of critical thinking which differs from yet is just as powerful as that of philosophers who, along with Beckett, found themselves faced with sets of ethical problems which were thrown into sharp relief in post-war France. Uhlmann explores the links between ethics and physical existence in Beckett, Foucault and Deleuze and Guattari, and between ethics and language in Beckett, Derrida and Levinas, showing how post-war French philosophy was powerfully affected by Beckett's work. Literature is not reduced to philosophy or vice versa; rather Uhlmann considers how they interrelate and overlap, informing and deforming one another, and how both encounter history.

Critical Approaches to International Relations: Philosophical Foundations and Current Debates covers the most influential approaches within critical IR scholarship with a particular focus on historical heritage and philosophical roots they built upon and current directions of research they propose.

Gavin Rae shows that the problematic status of agency caused by the poststructuralist decentring of the subject is a central concern for poststructuralist thinkers. First, Rae shows how this plays out in the thinking of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault. He then demonstrates that it is with those poststructuralists associated with and influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis that this issue most clearly comes to the fore. He goes on to reveal that the conceptual schema of Cornelius Castoriadis best explains how the founded subject is capable of agency.