Addressing Merleau-Ponty's work Phenomenology of Perception, in dialogue with The Visible and the Invisible, his lectures at the College de France, and his reading of Proust, this book argues that at play in his thought is a philosophy of "ontological lateness". This describes the manner in which philosophical reflection is fated to lag behind its objects; therefore an absolute grasp on being remains beyond its reach. Merleau-Ponty articulates this philosophy against the backdrop of what he calls "cruel thought", a style of reflecting that seeks resolution by limiting, circumscribing, and arresting its object. By contrast, the philosophy of ontological lateness seeks no such finality-no apocalypsis or unveiling-but is characterized by its ability to accept the veiling of being and its own constitutive lack of punctuality. To this extent, his thinking inaugurates a new relation to the becoming of sense that overcomes cruel thought. Merleau-Ponty's work gives voice to a wisdom of dispossession that allows for the withdrawal of being. Never before has anyone engaged with the theme of Merleau-Ponty's own understanding of philosophy in such a sustained way as Whitmoyer does in this volume.

Revisiting Guy Debord's seminal work, The Society of the Spectacle (1967), Eric-John Russell breathes new life into a text which directly preceded and informed the revolutionary fervour of May 1968. Deepening the analysis between Debord and Marx by revealing the centrality of Hegel's speculative logic to both, he traces Debord's intellectual debt to Hegel in a way that treads new ground for critical theory. Drawing extensively from The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) and Science of Logic (1812), this book illustrates the lasting impact of Debord's critical theory of 20th-century capitalism and reveals new possibilities for the critique of capitalism.

Marx's early work is well known and widely available, but it usually interpreted as at best a kind of stepping-stone to the Marx of Capital. This book offers something completely different; it reconstructs, from his first writings spanning from 1835 to 1846, a coherent and well-rounded political philosophy. The influence of Engels upon the development of that philosophy is discussed. This, it is argued, was a philosophy that Marx could have presented had he put the ideas together, as he hinted was his eventual intention. Had he done so, this first Marx would have made an even greater contribution to social and political philosophy than is generally acknowledged today. Arguments regarding revolutionary change, contradiction and other topics such as production, alienation and emancipation contribute to a powerful analysis in the early works of Marx, one which is worthy of discussion on its own merits. This analysis is distributed among a range of books, papers, letters and other writings, and is gathered here for the first time. Marx's work of the period was driven by his commitment to emancipation. Moreover, as is discussed in the conclusion to this book, his emancipatory philosophy continues to have resonance today. This new book presents Marx in a unique, new light and will be indispensable reading for all studying and following his work.

The question of humanness requires a philosophical anthropology and we need a revision of what philosophical anthropology means in light of contemporary efforts in speculative realism and object-oriented ontology. This is the main claim of the book which expands into the smaller supporting claims that 1) contemporary work in speculative realism indicates that Heidegger's analytic of Dasein needs to be rethought in consideration of certain Kantian values 2) recent philosophical anthropology offers an incomplete look at the central concern of philosophical anthropology, namely, the question of humanness 3) current ontological models do not account adequately for humanness, because they do not begin with humanness. From these considerations, a new ontological model better suited to account for humanness is proposed, spectral ontology. Under spectral ontology, Being is treated as a spectrum consisting of beings, nonbeings, and hyperbeings. Nonbeings, or nonrelational entities, and hyper-beings, are spectral insofar as they are like a specter which haunts the being that manifests in the world. Thus, spectral in this sense refers to both the nonrelational status of nonbeings and to an ontology which reflects such a spectrum of Being.