To what degree can the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis help analyze and evaluate our current social reality in relation to the project of autonomy? How meaningful is his political proposition for direct democracy in the 21st century? What significance do the concepts of social time and social space have in the determination of political freedom? Castoriadis and Autonomy in the 21st Century presents basic concepts of Castoriadian philosophy, including the social-historical plane, ontological creativity, and social and individual time that provide the theoretical tools to evaluate the historical phenomena of our era. Drawing from Greece's own turbulent past and the current global crisis to reveal new significances of social freedom, global solidarity and movements of direct democracy, this book explores social autonomy and human freedom today through critical dialogue with Castoriadis' ideas.

To what degree can the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis help analyze and evaluate our current social reality in relation to the project of autonomy? How meaningful is his political proposition for direct democracy in the 21st century? What significance do the concepts of social time and social space have in the determination of political freedom? Castoriadis and Autonomy in the 21st Century presents basic concepts of Castoriadian philosophy, including the social-historical plane, ontological creativity, and social and individual time that provide the theoretical tools to evaluate the historical phenomena of our era. Drawing from Greece's own turbulent past and the current global crisis to reveal new significances of social freedom, global solidarity and movements of direct democracy, this book explores social autonomy and human freedom today through critical dialogue with Castoriadis' ideas.

To commemorate the recent centennial of Henry James’s death and to help readers understand the depth and scope of the author’s influence both today and during the previous century, thirty leading Jamesian scholars from twelve different countries and five continents were asked to explore ways in which the notions of ‘heritage’ and ‘transmission’ currently come into play when reading James. The resulting chapters of this volume are divided into three main sections, each focusing on different ways in which James’s legacy is being re-evaluated today—from his influence on key authors, playwrights and film-makers over the past century (Part One), to new discoveries regarding European authors and artists who influenced James (Part Two), to recent approaches more radically re-evaluating James for the twenty-first century, including contemporary poetics, political and sociological dimensions, cognitive science, and queer studies (Part Three). This collection will be of great interest to scholars and general readers of James, and is a useful guide to tracing the writer’s ever-elusive ‘figure in the carpet’ and understanding the power of his continued impact today.

Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) was a Greek-French thinker best known for his work on 'autonomy' and 'human creation'. He was a political activist, psychoanalyst, philosopher, political and social thinker and economist. Recognised as a significant and original thinker of the twentieth century, his work is receiving increased scholarly attention. Notwithstanding the richness of his work, Castoriadis's terminology can prove challenging to understand. Cornelius Castoriadis: Key Concepts is the first book of its kind, providing readers with a road map to the fundamentals of his thought. International specialists in Castoriadis's works introduce and clarify the complexity of his thought through the elucidation of nineteen key concepts that are fundamental to understanding - and grappling with - his ideas. Comprehensive and accessible, the entries have been carefully selected to cover the most central aspects - psychoanalysis, sociology, philosophy, politics - and periods of his thought.

Understanding the University constitutes the final volume in a trilogy – the first two books having been Being a University (2010) and Imagining the University (2012) – and represents the trilogy’s ultimate aims and endeavours. The three volumes together offer a unique attempt at a fairly systematic and exhaustive level to map out just what it might be seriously to understand the extraordinarily complex entity that is known across the world as ‘the university’. Through examination of the conditions and possibilities underlying and affecting universities, this work offers an understanding of specific ideas of the university which can inform policies, strategies and practices in relation to the university. This book is a must read for leaders and senior managers in universities , as well as those undertaking postgraduate studies in the policy and practice of higher education.

This work covers not only philosophy, but also all the other major disciplines, including literary theory, sociology, linguistics, political thought, theology, and more. The 240 analytical entries examine individuals such as Bergson, Durkheim, Mauss, Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, Levi-Strauss, Lacan, Kristeva, and Derrida; specific disciplines such as the arts, anthropology, historiography, psychology, and sociology; key beliefs and methodologies such as Catholicism, deconstruction, feminism, Marxism, and phenomenology; themes and concepts such as freedom, language, media, and sexuality; and istorical, political, social, and intellectual context. --From publisher's decription.

Times of the Technoculture explores the social and cultural impact of new technologies, tracing the origins of the information society from the coming of the machine with the industrial revolution to the development of mass production techniques in the early twentieth century. The authors look at how the military has controlled the development of the information society, and consider the centrality of education in government attempts to create a knowledge society. Engaging in contemporary debates surrounding the internet, Robins and Webster question whether it can really offer us a new world of virtual communities, and suggest more radical alternatives to the corporate agenda of contemporary technologies.

In his pioneering study The Philosophical Baroque: On Autopoietic Modernities, Erik S. Roraback argues that modern culture, contemplated over its four-century history, resembles nothing so much as the pearl famously described, by periodizers of old, as irregular, barroco. Reframing modernity as a multi-century baroque, Roraback steeps texts by Shakespeare, Henry James, Joyce, and Pynchon in systems theory and the ideas of philosophers of language and culture from Leibniz to such dynamic contemporaries as Luhmann, Benjamin, Blanchot, Deleuze and Guattari, Lacan, and Žižek. The resulting brew, high in intellectual caffeine, will be of value to all who take an interest in cultural modernity—indeed, all who recognize that “modernity” was (and remains) a congeries of competing aesthetic, economic, historical, ideological, philosophical, and political energies

In Hollywood, the goals of art and business are entangled. Directors, writers, actors, and idealistic producers aspire to make the best films possible. These aspirations often interact with the dominant firms that control Hollywood film distribution. This control of distribution is crucial as it enables the firms and other large businesses involved, such as banks that offer financing, to effectively stand between film production and the market. This book analyses the power structure of the Hollywood film business and its general modes of behaviour. More specifically, the work analyses how the largest Hollywood firms attempt to control social creativity such that they can mitigate the financial risks inherent in the art of filmmaking. Controlling the ways people make or watch films, the book argues, is a key element of Hollywood’s capitalist power. Capitalist power—the ability to control, modify, and, sometimes, limit social creation through the rights of ownership—is the foundation of capital accumulation. For the Hollywood film business, capitalist power is about the ability of business concerns to set the terms that will shape the future of cinema. For the major film distributors of Hollywood, these terms include the types of films that will be distributed, the number of films that will be distributed, and the cinematic alternatives that will be made available to the individual moviegoer. Combining theoretical analysis with detailed empirical research on the financial performance of the major Hollywood film companies, the book details how Hollywood’s capitalist goals have clashed with the aesthetic potentials of cinema and ultimately stymied creativity in the pursuit of limiting risk. This sharp critique of the Hollywood machine provides vital reading for students and scholars of political economy, political theory, film studies, and cinema.

In our turbulent world of global flows and digital transformations pervasive identity crises and self-reinvention have become increasingly central to everyday life. In this fascinating book, Anthony Elliott shows how global transformations – the new electronic economy, digital worlds, biotechnologies and artificial intelligence - generatesa metamorphosis across the force-field of identities today. Identity Troubles documents various contemporary mutations of identity – from robotics to biomedicine, from cosmetic surgery to digital lives – and considers their broader social, cultural and political consequences. Elliott offers a synthesis of the key conceptual innovations in identity studies in the context of recent social theory. He critically examines accounts of "individualization", "reflexivity", "liquidization" and "new maladies of the soul" – situating these in wider social and historical contexts, and drawing out critical themes. He follows with a series of chapters looking at how what is truly new in contemporary life is having profound consequences for identities, both private and public. This book will be essential reading for undergraduate students in sociology, cultural studies, political science, and human geography. It offers the first comprehensive overview of identity studies in the interdisciplinary field of social theory.