Building upon the idea that our current "environmental question" arises from the history of metaphysics—which privileged thought about Being (or ontology) over the conditions of life—this book reinterprets Heraclitus’s notion of physis as the fundamental, emergent potency of life, as the category to-be-thought by thinkers. In so doing, it deconstructs the interpretation offered by Heidegger and so stresses the struggle between the creative force of life and its subjection to the human Logos or "meaning". Physis, understood as the pre-ontological potentiality of life itself, thus becomes the cornerstone of a materialist philosophy of life. Following engagements with the work of Nietzsche, Foucault, and Janicaud to explore the significance of human intervention into the realm of life via the "will to power", "biopower" and the "power of rationality" respectively, the author explores twentieth-century rearticulations of the concept of physis through a range of developments in biothermodynamics, thus grounding a new philosophy of life and a new bioeconomics in a revisited biothermodynamics centered on the concept of negentropy. An extensive engagement with the history and development of thought about the generative force of life on Earth, Physis, Biopower, Biothermodynamics, and Bioeconomics: The Fire of Life will appeal to scholars of philosophy, social theory, and political theory with interests in environmental thought, political ecology, and questions of sustainability.

This volume engages with the work of Heidegger to argue that the modern environmental crisis is fundamentally a crisis of understanding Life, resulting from the symbolic codification of the world from the Logos of Greek philosophy to the rationality of the modern world and resulting in a metaphysics that privileges ontological thinking on the "question of being" over the environmental question and the concern for the conditions of life. Exploring the work of the three principal thinkers of the Lebensphilosophie— Bergson, Dilthey, and Husserl—it charts the itinerary of Heidegger’s work and exposes its conflicts with the work of Marx, Plessner, Haar, and Derrida. A critical argument against the colonization of the world by Eurocentric reason and for the deconstruction of Capital, Heidegger in the Face of the Environmental Question draws on Latin American environmental thought to re-think the conditions for life on Earth. It will therefore appeal to scholars of philosophy, political theory, and political sociology with interests in environmental philosophy, political ecology, and socioeconomic transformation.

Shifting from the idea that our current ‘environmental question’ arises from the history of metaphysics and its focus on ‘Being’ over ‘Life’—and the attendant explorations of the thought of Heidegger and Heraclitus—this book unfolds a philosophical and sociological proposal for transitioning toward the sustainability of life. With a focus on the imaginaries of life of indigenous peoples, it moves from political ecology to a political ontology, centered on the territorial, cultural, and existential rights of various peoples of the Earth. Arguing for an environmental rationality founded on three principles—the diversity of life, a politics of difference, and an ethics of otherness—it calls for a dialogue of knowledge in a world of manifold worlds, for an historical transition toward sustainability of life on our planet. It will therefore appeal to scholars of sociology, philosophy, and political theory working on questions of social and environmental justice, sustainability, and alternatives to capitalism.

Through a variety of studies in the emerging field of attentional studies, this book examines and seeks alternatives to the current attention economy. Bringing together the work of leading scholars of ‘critical attention studies’ to reflect on issues such as techno-politics, socio-politics, and the politics of distraction, it offers a new and multi-disciplinary conceptualization of attention that emphasizes the connections between attention and curiosity, distraction, decoloniality and care. Above all, The Politics of Curiosity asks us to consider the nature and ambivalence of the curious forms of politics that might be taking shape in the shadow of our current attention economy. The “attention economy” has become a household name: we all know our attention is being harvested, commodified and packaged to be sold to advertisers by capitalist platforms. We all complain about it; some of us dream of disconnection; others call to fight back. By focusing on attentional deficits, and by reducing attention to being focused, however, the common view may miss wider stakes, and more promising opportunities. This collective volume provides a new frame of analysis based on three displacements. First, it relocates attentional issues within a triangulation that explores a continuum between attention, distraction and curiosity. Second, it invites us to investigate into the mental infrastructures that socially condition our perceptions and understandings of the world. Third, it points towards emancipatory politics of curiosity to provide alternatives to the attention economy. Contributions range from pedagogy to media theory, via digital studies, epistemology, sociology, political philosophy, literary history, aesthetics, film and dance studies. They gather some of the leading scholars who shaped the study of attention, questioned the values of distraction and explored the potentials of curiosity over the recent years. They extend across nine countries, four continents and seven languages, to provide a multicultural approach to these debates. Together, they help us understand how our current mental infrastructures have taken shape, under specific regimes of power and authority, in a world dominated by capital, colonialism and patriarchy. But they also sketch what can be done to redeploy them around imperatives of respect and care – from a better awareness of our mental biases, online behaviors and bodily movements, to our collective capacity to restructure classroom interactions, to launch alternative digital platforms, to build democratic movements. The first platform for discussion of the politics of attention and curiosity – and an essential point of reference for future debate – this book will appeal to scholars of sociology, politics and psychology.

“Council democracy” is a particular form of democratic socialism that strives towards democratic self-governance on the basis of active, free, and associated individuals working cooperatively within a federated council system. Both in political practice and in social theory, “council democracy” has resurfaced periodically in the past, most notably in the interwar period, in the “long 1960s,” and since the turn of the 21st century. This book offers a novel theoretical and methodological approach to the study of “council democracy.” It focuses on the processes that led to the emergence of two of the foundational and most radical instances of “council democratic” movements in Germany during the German Revolution (1918-1919) and in Italy during the biennio rosso (1919-1920). With all their diversities, ambiguities, and shortcomings, these movements, in varying degrees, sought democratic alternatives to autocratic relations, from local to state levels, and to economic relations, from workplace to national levels. The book shows how the processes through which state-led war mobilization transformed the contours of class struggle laid the ground for the emergence of “council democratic” movements with specific characteristics in Germany and Italy and not in the United Kingdom and France.

This book analyzes contemporary dispossessions in Brazil, drawing on the Marxian concept of primitive accumulation to show how processes of proletarianization, capitalization, and commodification each relate in distinct ways to capitalist accumulation. With an emphasis on the processes by which immediate producers are turned into wage-dependent producers, and the means of subsistence are transformed into the means of capitalist production or commodities, the book presents studies of the movements of capital—as well as those aimed at defending the commons—showing how contemporary dispossession is related to capitalist accumulation. Ranging through the 1964–1985 military dictatorship, the transition to neoliberalism in the 1990s, the legislative coup that ousted the Workers Party from federal office in 2016, and the Bolsonaro government and its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, the book demonstrates the socioeconomic shifts that have occurred in Brazil in recent decades. This book will appeal to scholars of social and political theory with interests in political economy, dispossession, contemporary commons, and Latin America.

In an era of climate change, deforestation, melting ice caps, poisoned environments, and species loss, many people are turning to the power of the arts and humanities for sustainable solutions to global ecological problems. Introduction to the Environmental Humanities offers a practical and accessible guide to this dynamic and interdisciplinary field. This book provides an overview of the Environmental Humanities’ evolution from the activist movements of the early and mid-twentieth century to more recent debates over climate change, sustainability, energy policy, and habitat degradation in the Anthropocene era. The text introduces readers to seminal writings, artworks, campaigns, and movements while demystifying important terms such as the Anthropocene, environmental justice, nature, ecosystem, ecology, posthuman, and non-human. Emerging theoretical areas such as critical animal and plant studies, gender and queer studies, Indigenous studies, and energy studies are also presented. Organized by discipline, the book explores the role that the arts and humanities play in the future of the planet. Including case studies, discussion questions, annotated bibliographies, and links to online resources, this book offers a comprehensive and engaging overview of the Environmental Humanities for introductory readers. For more advanced readers, it serves as a foundation for future study, projects, or professional development.