After the first use of nuclear weapons in 1945, Albert Einstein warned that 'we thus drift towards unparalleled catastrophe'. Today we are no longer drifting but racing toward catastrophe at breakneck speed. This book analyses recent events that have brought about a dangerous Third Nuclear Age. From the collapse of arms control treaties and the development of hypersonic missiles, to the pop culture that shapes how we think about nuclear weapons, via how nuclear weapons intersect with the global threats posed by pandemics, populism, climate change, corruption, militarism, and racism, this book explores the nuclear zeitgeist of today. It presents the case for critical nuclear studies, and provides an important intervention into debates about nuclear weapons and international security. Today, the planet stands on the brink of catastrophe. This book tells you why, and what we can do about it.

A collection of essays that outline the recent work on ecology, political theology, religion, and philosophy by one of the leading theologians of our age As we face relentless ecological destruction spiraling around a planet of unconstrained capitalism and democratic failure, what matters most? How do we get our bearings and direct our priorities in such a terrestrial scenario? Species, race, sex, politics, and economics will increasingly come tangled in the catastrophic trajectory of climate change. With a sense of urgency and of possibility, Catherine Keller’s No Matter What reflects multiple trajectories of planetary crisis. They converge from a point of view formed of the political ecologies of a transdisciplinary theological pluralism. In its work an ancient symbolism of apocalypse deconstructs end-of-the-world narratives, Christian and secular, even as any notion of an all-controlling and good God collapses under the force of internal contradiction. In the place of a once-for-all incarnation, the materiality of unbounded intercarnation, of fragile yet animating relations of mattering earth-bodies, comes into focus. The essays of No Matter What share the preoccupation with matter characteristic of the so-called new materialism. They also root in an older ecotheological tradition, one that has long struggled against the undead legacy of an earth-betraying theology that, with the aid of its white Christian right wing, invests the denigration of matter, its spirit of “no matter,” in limitless commodification. The fragile alternative Keller outlines here embraces—no matter what—the mattering of the life of the Earth and of all its spirited bodies. These essays, struggling against Christian and secular betrayals of the spirited matter of Earth, work to materialize the still possible planetary healing.

The Jamaican writer and cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter is best known for her diverse writings that pull together insights from theories in history, literature, science, and black studies, to explore race, the legacy of colonialism, and representations of humanness. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis is a critical genealogy of Wynter’s work, highlighting her insights on how race, location, and time together inform what it means to be human. The contributors explore Wynter’s stunning reconceptualization of the human in relation to concepts of blackness, modernity, urban space, the Caribbean, science studies, migratory politics, and the interconnectedness of creative and theoretical resistances. The collection includes an extensive conversation between Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick that delineates Wynter’s engagement with writers such as Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. DuBois, and Aimé Césaire, among others; the interview also reveals the ever-extending range and power of Wynter’s intellectual project, and elucidates her attempts to rehistoricize humanness as praxis.

A new intellectual portrait of a prominent twentieth-century philosopher

A major rethinking of twentieth-century abstract art mobilized by the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark What would it mean to treat an interval of space as a line, thus drawing an empty void into a constellation of art and meaning-laden things? In this book, Irene Small elucidates the signal discovery of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in 1954: a fissure of space between material elements that Clark called “the organic line.” For much of the history of art, Clark’s discovery, much like the organic line, has escaped legibility. Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge. A spatial cavity that binds discrepant entities together, the organic line transforms planes into flexible topologies, borders into membranes, and interstices into points of connection. As a paradigm, the organic line has profound historiographic implications as well, inviting us to set aside traditional notions of influence and origin in favor of what Small terms weak links and plagiotropic relations. These fragile, oblique, and transversal ties have their own efficacy, and Small’s innovative readings of canonical modernist works such as Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, John Cage’s 4’33”, and Le Corbusier’s machine-à-habiter, as well as contemporary works by such artists as Adam Pendleton, Ricardo Basbaum, and Mika Rottenberg, reveal the organic line’s remarkable potential as an analytic instrument. Mobilizing a rich repertoire of archival sources and moving across multiple chronologies, geographies, and disciplines, this book invites us to envision modernism not as a stable construct defined by centers and peripheries, inclusions and exclusions, but as a topological field of interactive, destabilizing tensions. More than a history of a little-known artistic device, The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism is a user’s guide and manifesto for reimagining modern and contemporary art for the present.

This volume traces the ways in which Heidegger’s philosophical thinking has been taken up, critically re-appropriated, and disseminated in literary and poetic writing since the middle of the 20th century.

This important new book argues that at the root of the contemporary crisis of climate, energy, food, inequality, and meaning is a certain core presupposition that structures the ways in which we live, think, act and design: the assumption of dualism, or the fundamental separateness of things. The authors contend that the key to constructing livable worlds lies in the cultivation of ways of knowing and acting based on a profound awareness of the fundamental interdependence of everything that exists – what they refer to as relationality. This shift in paradigm is necessary for healing our bodies, ecosystems, cities, and the planet at large. The book follows two interwoven threads of argumentation: on the one hand, it explains and exemplifies the modes of operation and the dire consequences of non-relational living; on the other, it elucidates the nature of relationality and explores how it is embodied in transformative practices in multiple spheres of life. The authors provide an instructive account of the philosophical, scientific, social, and political sources of relational theory and action, with the aim of illuminating the transition from living within seemingly ineluctable 'toxic loops' of unrelational living (based on ontological dualism), to living within 'relational weaves' which we might co-create with multiple human and nonhuman others.