Usually, understanding of the world has been divided between objective and subjective. Phenomenology and Philosophy of language also included the intersubjective in this comprehension. Some researchers have detected needing to go further and study a broader concept. The study of trans-subjectivity seeks to fill that gap and delve into a novel concept.

"On Transits and Transitions: Mobility, Displacement, and Trans Subjectivity in the United States" maps how relations of im/mobility and displacement position trans subjects in relation to constructions of U.S. citizenship and national subjectivity in the contemporary United States. Drawing on the insights of transnational feminist cultural studies, queer and trans theory, and critical legal studies, the dissertation looks to the law as a site for the production of the category of "transgender" and examines how different areas of the law manage trans migrants as populations to be included or excluded from the U.S. nation-state. I focus on three key areas of law and policy - asylum law, marriage law, and immigration detention policies - to show how these areas collaborate to define, regulate, and distribute conditional and limited forms of recognition for trans migrants, while also attending to the transnational circuits of neoliberal capital and knowledge that constitute trans subjects. I engage the question of mobility by interrogating the ways that the state institutions regulate not just trans bodies and identities but also the processes of transition. This approach allows me to map the unevenness of recognition for trans subjects across social, cultural, and legal determinations and to show how freedom for some trans subjects is founded on the unfreedom of other trans subjects. I argue that the recognition of trans migrants as legible and illegible in these areas of the law is specific but not exceptional to trans subjects. That is, the management of trans migrants is integral to how U.S. state institutions manage gender, sexuality, and racialized populations simultaneously, and therefore illustrates how citizenship and national belonging in the United States are premised on narrow and restrictive categories that affect all subjects, not just those who are transgender. In the process, my project challenges juridical understandings of citizenship by showing how the law depends on and perpetrates normative cultural categories of sex, gender, race, and nation.

This short textbook provides an introduction to queer theory, exploring its key genealogies and terms as well as its application across various academic disciplines and to contemporary life more generally. The authors engage with a wide range of developments in queer theory thinking including discussions of identity politics, transgender theory, intersectionality, post-colonial theory, Indigenous studies, disability studies, affect theory, and more. In offering an updated reflection on the present tensions that queer theory must negotiate, as well as its unfolding future(s), Queer Theory Now is an ideal resource for anyone starting out on their queer theory journey; for students who want to get a grasp of the basic concepts, for teachers looking for a textbook for their queer theory course, or for scholars who want a quick go-to resource for key queer theory ideas and terms.

Ever since climate change has been identified as one of the most significant challenges of humanity, climate change deniers have repeatedly tried to discredit the work of scientists. To show how these processes work, Maria M. Sojka examines three ideals about how science should operate. These ideals concern the understanding of uncertainties, the relationship between models and data, and the role of values in science. Their widespread presence in the public understanding of science makes it easy for political and industrial stakeholders to undermine inconvenient research. To address this issue, Sojka analyses the importance of tacit knowledge in scientific practice and the question of what defines an expert.

Recent methodological debates have shown that practice theory can either be developed by combining and slightly extending established theoretical concepts of inter-subjectivity, social normativity, collective behavior, interaction between agents and environment, habits, learning, collective intentionality, and human agency; or by following a strategy that promotes the quest for completely autonomous concepts. In the latter case, one defends a thesis of irreducibility. Toward a Hermeneutic Theory of Social Practices advocates this thesis by approaching the interrelational dynamic of social practices in terms of existential analytic. Indeed, this insightful volume outlines a methodology of the double hermeneutics that allows the study of the entanglement of agential plans, beliefs, and intentions with configured practices; while also demonstrating how interrelated social practices with which agency is entangled articulate cultural forms of life. Suggesting a framework for studying the cultural forms of life within the scope of practice theory, this book will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Social Theory, Philosophy of Social Science, and Research Methods for Social and Behavioral Sciences.

This book puts forward the concept of “subjective anthropology” and outlines a theoretical system that will allow subjective anthropology to qualify as a new academic discipline in its own right. In an effort to respond to the field’s proper role as the science of humanity, subjective analysis has been introduced into the study of anthropology. The book fills two distinct gaps in our knowledge and understanding of modern man, offering detailed descriptions of personality and of groups, while also advancing the theory of “structure and choice.” The book formulates seven basic principles of subjective anthropology and divides anthropology into three major branches: subjective anthropology, cultural anthropology, and biological (or physical) anthropology, which can be further divided into sub-branches. The book pursues three key goals: advancing and developing the theoretical system of subjective anthropology, reconstructing the discipline of anthropology, and establishing a Chinese anthropology with Chinese characteristics, Chinese visions, and Chinese styles.

A Psychoanalytic Approach to Sexual Difference analyzes the concepts of sex and gender, showing how sexual difference is characterized by ongoing transformations of spatiality and body, and of essentiality and normativity. In this book, Jennifer Yusin presents a psychoanalytic study that engages with clinical cases, philosophies of sex and gender, and psychoanalytic writings about sexual difference. She deftly and accessibly analyzes Freud’s and Lacan’s work on feminine sexuality, Winnicott’s notion of the transitional object, and theories of sexuality and gender developed by Judith Butler and Monique Wittig, among others. Yusin starts with the question of how the lack of any essential definition of sexual difference affects subjectivity. She places an emphasis on the psychoanalytic experience and its effects upon how a subject experiences the difference between being a body and having a body. Following Lacan’s discovery of the Borromean knot structure of the unconscious and the work of the psychoanalyst Jean-Gérard Bursztein, Yusin continues developing subjective topology as a methodology. She also introduces and shows how sexual difference is linked to transformations of sex and body. Through this, Yusin highlights how it is necessary to reformulate sex, gender, and sexual identities in psychoanalytic theories and in the practice of psychoanalysis. She also speaks to the necessity of generating a new lexicon to help analysts speak about sexual difference in ways that do not perpetuate any essentialism or normativity on the topic. This book is essential reading for clinicians in psychoanalysis, mental health practitioners in the trans field, and academics working in gender theory, queer and trans studies, and feminist philosophies.

Steven French suggests a radical new approach to the understanding of quantum physics, derived from Husserl's phenomenological philosophy. In 1939 two physicists, Fritz London and Edmund Bauer, published an account of measurement in quantum mechanics. Widely cited, their 'little book' featured centrally in an important debate over the role of consciousness in that process. However, it has been fundamentally misunderstood, both in that debate and beyond. Steven French argues that London, in particular, approached the measurement process from the perspective of Husserlian phenomenology, which he had studied as a student and which he retained an interest in throughout his career. This casts his work with Bauer in an entirely novel light and suggests a radical alternative understanding of quantum mechanics in which consciousness still plays a role but one that is fundamentally different than previously conceived. Most interpretations of the theory approach it on the basis of the so-called 'analytic' tradition in philosophy. However, there has recently been a surge of interest in 'continental' approaches and this book offers a significant new contribution to such developments. Intertwining history and philosophy, it presents London's background in physics and phenomenology, together with an outline of the latter as developed by Husserl, Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty, and others, as well as a detailed analysis of the work on measurement with Bauer. The book concludes by comparing the London and Bauer understanding with that afforded by Fuch's QBism, Everett's 'Many Worlds' interpretation, and Rovelli's Relational Quantum Mechanics. It is hoped that this exploratory work will open up new avenues of thought with regard to one of our most fundamental physical theories.

The last half of the twentieth century has seen the emergence of literary theory as a new discipline. As with any body of scholarship, various schools of thought exist, and sometimes conflict, within it. I.R. Makaryk has compiled a welcome guide to the field. Accessible and jargon-free, the Encyclopedia of Contemporary Literary Theory provides lucid, concise explanations of myriad approaches to literature that have arisen over the past forty years. Some 170 scholars from around the world have contributed their expertise to this volume. Their work is organized into three parts. In Part I, forty evaluative essays examine the historical and cultural context out of which new schools of and approaches to literature arose. The essays also discuss the uses and limitations of the various schools, and the key issues they address. Part II focuses on individual theorists. It provides a more detailed picture of the network of scholars not always easily pigeonholed into the categories of Part I. This second section analyses the individual achievements, as well as the influence, of specific scholars, and places them in a larger critical context. Part III deals with the vocabulary of literary theory. It identifies significant, complex terms, places them in context, and explains their origins and use. Accessibility is a key feature of the work. By avoiding jargon, providing mini-bibliographies, and cross-referencing throughout, Makaryk has provided an indispensable tool for literary theorists and historians and for all scholars and students of contemporary criticism and culture.

This book is the first of two volumes that, together, present for the first time a comprehensive collection of three decades of the theoretical writings of artist and theorist Bracha L Ettinger. Edited and introduced by Griselda Pollock they provide a systematic anthology of Ettinger’s path-breaking and influential concept of Matrixial subjectivity-as-encounter and jointness-in-difference, and chart her radical intervention in aesthetics, ethics and theories of subjectivity far beyond classical feminist and current gender/queer theory. This first volume includes the writings in which Ettinger elaborates her original concepts of Matrixial space-time and metramorphosis, fascinance, wit(h)nessing, resonance, transcryptum, com-passion, self-fragilization and resistance, co-emergence and copoiesis transform theories of the subject, Eros, alliance and love, sexual difference, alterity, relationality, trauma and violence. Her critical dialogue with theorists including Levinas, Lacan, Lyotard and Deleuze & Guattari, Butler, Cavarero and Irigaray is evident here. A leading authority on Matrixial theory, Griselda Pollock provides explanatory prefaces to each chapter and a lengthy introduction that situates Ettinger’s work in relation to socio-psychoanalytical theory and practice and current social and philosophical debates. Ettinger’s interlacing of psychoanalysis, ethics, and aesthetics can be seen here to address some of the deepest challenges of our social, cultural and political existence today.