In this fascinating collection, Jacques Ranciere, one of the world's most important and influential living philosophers, explores the nature of consensus in contemporary politics. Consensus does not mean peace. Instead it refers to a map of operations of war, of a topography of the visible, of what is possible and what can be thought, in which war and peace live side-by-side. Lying at the heart of these consensual times are new forms of racism and ethnic cleansing, humanitarian wars and wars against terror. Consensus also implies using time in a way that sees in it a thousand devious turns. This is evident in the incessant diagnoses of the present and of amnesiac politics, in the farewells to the past, the commemorations, and the calls to remember. But all these twists and turns tend toward the same goal: to show that there is only one reality to which we are obliged to consent. What stands in the way of this undertaking is politics. These chronicles aim to re-open that space wherein politics once more becomes thinkable.

"In this fascinating collection, Jacques Rancière, one of the world's most important and influential living philosophers, explores the nature of consensus in contemporary politics. Consensus does not mean peace. Instead it refers to a map of operations of war, of a topography of the visible, of what is possible and what can be thought, in which war and peace live side-by-side. Lying at the heart of these consensual times are new forms of racism and ethnic cleansing, humanitarian wars and wars against terror. Consensus also implies using time in a way that sees in it a thousand devious turns. This is evident in the incessant diagnoses of the present and of amnesiac politics, in the farewells to the past, the commemorations, and the calls to remember. But all these twists and turns tend toward the same goal: to show that there is only one reality to which we are obliged to consent. What stands in the way of this undertaking is politics. These chronicles aim to re-open that space wherein politics once more becomes thinkable"--Abstract.

As an analyst, philosopher and militant, Félix Guattari anticipated decentralized forms of political activism that have become increasingly evident around the world since the events of Seattle in 1999. Lines of Flight offers an exciting introduction to the sometimes difficult and dense thinking of an increasingly important 20th century thinker. An editorial introduction by Andrew Goffey links the text to Guattari's long-standing involvement with institutional analysis, his writings with Deleuze, and his consistent emphasis on the importance of group practice - his work with CERFI in the early 1970s in particular. Considering CERFI's work on the 'genealogy of capital' it also points towards the ways in which Lines of Flight anticipates Guattari's later work on Integrated World Capitalism and on ecosophy. Providing a detailed and clearly documented account of his micropolitical critique of psychoanalytic, semiological and linguistic accounts of meaning and subjectivity, this work offers an astonishingly fresh set of conceptual tools for imaginative and engaged thinking about capitalism and effective forms of resistance to it.

This volume proposes the mobile Internet is best understood as a socio-technical "assemblage" of objects, practices, symbolic representations, experiences and affects. Authors from a variety of disciplines discuss practices mediated through mobile communication, including current phone and tablet devices. The converging concepts of Materialities (ranging from the political economy of communication to physical devices) and Imaginaries (including cultural values, desires and perceptions) are touchstones for each of the chapters in the book.

In 1980, at the end of the most intensely political period of his work and life, Louis Althusser penned Philosophy for Non-philosophers. Available here for the first time in English, Philosophy for Non-philosophers constitutes a rigorous and engaged attempt to address a wide reading public unfamiliar with Althusser's project. As such, the work is a concentration of the most fundamental theses of Althusser's own ideas, and presents a synthesis of his sprawling and disparate philosophical and political writings. Nowhere else does Althusser push the distinction between philosophy and other disciplines as far, or develop in such detail the concept of 'practice'. Rather than a work of 'popular philosophy', Philosophy for Non-philosophers is a continuation and conglomeration of Althusser's thought; a thought whose radicality is still perceptible in those that have followed since. Philosophy for Non-philosophers thus provides a vivid encapsulation of Althusser's seminal influence on the leading thinkers of today, including Ranciere, Badiou, Balibar, and Žižek.

Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics brings together some of Jacques Rancière's most recent writings on art and politics to show the critical potential of two of his most important concepts: the aesthetics of politics and the politics of aesthetics. In this fascinating collection, Rancière engages in a radical critique of some of his major contemporaries on questions of art and politics: Gilles Deleuze, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida. The essays show how Rancière's ideas can be used to analyse contemporary trends in both art and politics, including the events surrounding 9/11, war in the contemporary consensual age, and the ethical turn of aesthetics and politics. Rancière elaborates new directions for the concepts of politics and communism, as well as the notion of what a 'politics of art' might be. This important collection includes several essays that have never previously been published in English, as well as a brand new afterword. Together these essays serve as a superb introduction to the work of one of the world's most influential contemporary thinkers.

Must a philosophy of life be materialist, and if so, must it also be a philosophy of immanence? In the last twenty years or so there has been a growing trend in continental thought and philosophy and critical theory that has seen a return to the category of immanence. Through consideration of the work of thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, Francois Laruelle, Gilles Deleuze and others, this collection aims to examine the interplay between the concepts of immanence, materialism and life, particularly as this interplay can highlight new directions for political inquiry. Furthermore, critical reflection on this constellation of concepts could also be instructive for continental philosophy of religion, in which ideas about the divine, embodiment, sexual difference, desire, creation and incarnation are refigured in provocative new ways. The way of immanence, however, is not without its dangers. Indeed, it may be that with its affirmation something of importance is lost to material life. Could it be that the integrity of material things requires a transcendent origin? Precisely what are the metaphysical, political and theological consequences of pursuing a philosophy of immanence in relation to a philosophy of life? This book was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities.