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Central to Genevieve Lloyd’s approach is a fresh look at Spinoza’s critique of what he regards as Descartes’ flawed way of imagining the nature and status of human thought in relation to the rest of Nature. Lloyd argues that the influence of the Cartesian model lingers in the contemporary collective imagination. She challenges a common way of reading the Ethics, which reflects and reinforces the figure of Spinoza as a ‘rationalist’ — committed to the superiority and dominance of Reason within human minds. By offering a more nuanced account of Spinoza’s version of Reason, Lloyd brings his philosophy to bear on a range of familiar, but largely unexamined attitudes, which connect the supposed supremacy of Reason within the human mind to humanity’s supposed supremacy within Nature.

Timothy Deane-Freeman traces Deleuze’s remarks about the digital to reveal both their origins and implications. In so doing, we encounter a position which is fundamentally ambiguous. On the one hand, digital techniques are intimately related to what Deleuze calls ‘societies of control’, which deploy them in order to close down potential spaces of creativity and resistance. On the other, digital images take up the mantle of cinema, displacing habitual forms of cognition and forcing us to think in new ways. Deane-Freeman traces these dual impulses through the images of cinema, television and social media, as well as explicating key Deleuzian concepts, including virtuality, immanence and the outside.

Bill Ross demonstrates the relation between Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of difference and the conceptual foundations of contemporary physics through careful engagements with the theory of relativity, quantum physics and chaos and complexity theory. Ross shows that recent work in cosmology by figures such as Lee Smolin and David Bohm calls into question the assumption that the laws of physics are universal and unchanging, a view that Deleuze anticipates. The second law of thermodynamics tells us that order in the universe as a whole is destined to break down. Against this, Ross demonstrates that, given Deleuze’s conception of the event as an expression of non-locality, and his emphasis on dissymmetry over symmetry, at the cosmological scale the universe is not destined towards disorder: evolution outruns entropy.

This book concerns the ways in which the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, the Hajj, is embedded in Moroccan society. Approaching pilgrimage from the perspective of lived religion, the book seeks to answer the question: How does Hajj feature in the everyday lives of Moroccans and how are Moroccan views on Hajj negotiated in pilgrims’ micro-practices? The red thread that runs through this book is the argument that although the Hajj is performed in a place far away from Morocco, taking Moroccans out of their daily life worlds, the practices, experiences and the meanings that they attach to Hajj are shaped by, and in turn go on to shape, their life and world upon return. The chapters demonstrate - - from different perspectives - how the everyday Moroccan context shapes pilgrims’ perceptions of their experience in Mecca and, in return, how after having completed Hajj they position themselves and are positioned as members of their community. Particularly important are the myriad ways in which the experience of being a ?ajj/ ?ajja shapes their everyday life.

This book uses 'The Innocence of Muslims' controversy as an entry point into the study of relations between Christians and Muslims in Egypt, Lebanon and Jordan. Instead of dismissing the condemnations and joint reactions as shallow and ritualised displays of solidarity, Anna Hager argues that they offer insights into the mechanisms of Christian–Muslim relations. Christians and Muslims, including Islamist figures, channelled the potential violence – turning it into an occasion to strengthen inter-communal relations and, crucially, their own positions.

This book presents a thought-provoking challenge to the commonly held belief that Islamists uniformly reject the Western-dominated world order. In the wake of George W. Bush's declaration of a 'global war on terror' in 2001, Islamists have often been associated with violence, opposition to liberal values and the disruption of order. However, a closer examination reveals that only a fraction of the groups categorised as 'Islamist' genuinely combat the global order. Through an in-depth analysis of the discourses of Tunisian Ennahda and Lebanese Hezbollah, this book demonstrates that Islamist stances toward the world order involve a delicate balance between resistance to certain aspects of the Western-dominated order and recognition of others.

Settler Military Politics provides a thorough investigation of the relationship between settler colonialism and militarisation drawing from the Australian experience. In this book, Caso develops the concept of settler military politics to identify the relationship between settler colonialism and militarisation. The book argues that militarisation is a rationality for governing the settler polity and consolidates the settler colonial project. It investigates settler military politics through an in-depth analysis of the under explored aesthetics of war commemoration in Australia and the role of the Australian War Memorial.

This book studies the responses of the founders of twentieth-century Arab philosophical schools to the question of (primarily Western) modernisation in the Arab world, particularly to its relationship with Arab heritage. For some intellectuals, there are calls for a new Nahda or Renaissance, for the Arabs to modernise on their own terms within their own heritage, in various forms. Others are more interested in choosing Western modernisation and accepting the inevitable consequences of secularisation.

Rather than individualising mental health, Conor Heaney takes seriously the notion of a shared mental environment and the importance of theorising everyday life in our endeavours to grasp and transform our everyday experience. Drawing particularly on the work of Felix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Bernard Stiegler and Henri Lefebvre, Heaney develops the idea of rhythmanalysis as an original and interdisciplinary approach to the politics of mental health. He offers both a renewed methodological and philosophical approach to rhythmanalysis (scaping) and deploys it with respect to the relationship between contemporary capitalism and mental health.

Civic Reformation and Religious Change in Sixteenth-Century Scottish Towns demonstrates the crucial role of Scotland’s townspeople in the dramatic Protestant Reformation of 1560. It shows that Scottish Protestants were much more successful than their counterparts in France and the Netherlands at introducing religious change because they had the acquiescence of urban populations. As town councils controlled critical aspects of civic religion, their explicit cooperation was vital to ensuring that the reforms introduced at the national level by the military and political victory of the Protestants were actually implemented. Focusing on the towns of Dundee, Stirling and Haddington, this book argues that the councillors and inhabitants gave this support because successive crises of plague, war and economic collapse shook their faith in the existing Catholic order and left them fearful of further conflict. As a result, the Protestants faced little popular opposition, and Scotland avoided the popular religious violence and division which occurred elsewhere in Europe.

Focusing on the intense aftermath of the Gezi park episode, this book scrutinises the ways in which activists pursued a rugged journey of radical democratic mobilisation in Istanbul, including public parks, neighbourhoods and squat houses. Synthesising the findings of field research carried out during 2014-2016 in Istanbul’s Yogurtçu Park Forum with archival documents and secondary literature, this book weaves the voices of the activists into the narrative. Kaan Agartan offers a critical analysis of the initial force of the Gezi uprising and its subsequent unravelling in reconstituting a more egalitarian society and democratic citizenship in Turkey.

In ancient and modern Western thought, the problem of the nature of categories has been inseparable from arguments about the nature of selfhood; about how knowledge is organised; about how power should be distributed; and about how history should be understood. For Plato, Forms belonging to a timeless order of being played the role of categories or fundamental concepts; for Aristotle categories were immanent in things; for Kant they were a priori logical structures of our consciousness; and for Hegel they were dynamic, dialectical inter-related ideas. In Categories, O’Sullivan shows how these answers have gone forward into the contemporary era, and identifies three key schools of thought that have developed since Hegel in particular. He explains modern thought as a tension between a desire for a single dominant perspective, whether scientific or phenomenological; a belief in irretrievable fragmentation; and an effort to find a middle ground.

Challenging received ideas about the British Poetry Revival, Luke Roberts presents a new account of experimental poetry and literary activism. Drawing on a wide range of contexts and traditions, Living in History begins by examining the legacies of empire and exile in the work of Kamau Brathwaite, J. H. Prynne, and poets associated with the Communist Party and the African National Congress. It then focuses on the work of Linton Kwesi Johnson, Denise Riley, Anna Mendelssohn and others, in the development of liberation struggles around gender, race and sexuality across the 1970s. Tracking the ambivalence between poetic ambition and political commitment, and how one sometimes interferes with the other, Luke Roberts troubles the exclusions of ‘British Poetry’ as a category and tests the claims made on behalf avant-garde and experimental poetics against the historical record. Bringing together both major and neglected authorships and offering extended close readings, fresh archival research and new contextual evidence, Living in History is an ambitious and exciting intervention in the field.

Tunisia?s Andalusians tells the captivating story of those Andalusians, descendants of Muslims expelled from Spain in the seventeenth century, who sought refuge in Tunisia. Rather than simply replicating Iberian traditions, Andalusian culture in Tunisia stands as a vibrant and evolving phenomenon, shaped by complex dynamics of interaction and adaptation over four centuries. The book dismantles the romanticised view of Andalusian culture as a mere transplantation of al-Andalus, analysing distinctive cultural features that distinguish Andalusians as an ethnic group within Tunisia?s diverse social fabric.Drawing on historical records and contemporary ethnographic data, including personal accounts and family archives, the book sheds light on how Andalusians navigate their unique cultural position amidst a Tunisian national narrative often focused on Arabo-Muslim homogeneity. By examining the complexities of cultural preservation and assimilation, the book offers a nuanced perspective on Andalusian identity, revealing its dynamism and resilience in the face of changing social, political, and economic circumstances.

Both Viola and Simondon prioritise a techno-aesthetic experience that reveals a consistent pattern of interdependence between form and matter, nature and culture, human and nonhuman. Inspired by Simondon’s ideas on individuation as process, and by other major figures of process philosophy such as Raymond Ruyer, Deleuze and Guattari, and Brian Massumi, Elena del Río delves deep into Viola’s art and finds a politics of nature that is also a politics of the affects. In taking full account of the interrelation between collective affects and living milieus, this politics exceeds the still anthropocentric project of a politics reductively focused on environmental degradation. The book works with a broad concept of ecology that encompasses a nature-culture continuum - from Simondon’s associated milieu to Guattari’s tripartite ecological praxis, from Deleuze and Guattari’s existential territories to Massumi’s affective events. Attending to this nature-culture continuum and activating our collective energies are prime strategies in tackling the overwhelming psycho-social and environmental crises we face.

Even before Boris Johnson’s rollercoaster ride (2019–22), and the ensuing “blink and you missed it” premiership of Liz Truss, the high wastage-rate among Britain’s prime ministers was becoming a cause for concern. Between 1979 and 2007 Britain had just three heads of government: Margaret Thatcher (1979–90), John Major (1990–97) and Tony Blair (1997–2007). Over the next 17 years six politicians followed them in and out of Downing Street. This book, which straddles more than 30 years of prime ministerial misadventures, poses questions about the underlying factors as well as the specific circumstances for individual departures. Is the role of prime minister just becoming too difficult to perform successfully? If so, why? Has there been a decline in calibre in the candidates holding office? In exploring how the famous entrance to number 10 Downing Street has become a revolving door, the book shines a fresh light on the nature of politics and political office in the UK today.