What is happening to the Left? It seems to be dying a slow death. While many commentors have predicted its demise, the Left has always defied these bleak prognoses and risen from the ashes in the most unexpected ways. Nevertheless, we are witnessing today a global decline in organized movements on the Left, and while social struggles and rebellious citizens continue to challenge dominant political regimes, these efforts do not translate into support for traditional left parties or into the creation of dynamic movements on the left. Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to engage in collective action.  Sand retraces the evolution of this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes the Diggers and Levellers of seventeenth-century England, the French Revolution, the birth of anarchism and Marxism, the decolonial, feminist and civil rights revolts, and the left populism of our time. In piecing together the thinkers and movements that built the Left over centuries, Sand illuminates the global and transnational dynamics which pushed them forward, often picking up the gauntlets their predecessors had laid down. He outlines how they shaped the notion of equality, while also analysing how they were confronted by its material reality, and the lessons that they did – or did not – draw from this.  This concise and magisterial history of the Left will be of interest to anyone interested in the idea of equality and the fate of one of the most important movements that has shaped the modern world.

A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history, The Brain-Eye presents a series of interlinked 'case studies' in which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations unleashed by 'painter-researchers.' Rather than outlining a new 'philosophy of art,' The Brain-Eye details the singular problems pursued by each of its protagonists. Striking readings of the oeuvres of Delacroix, Seurat, Manet, Gauguin, and Cezanne recount the plural histories of artists who worked to free the differential forces of colour, discovered by Goethe in his Colour Theory, in the name of a "true hallucination" and of a logic proper to the Visual. A rigorous renewal of the philosophical thinking of visual art, The Brain-Eye explores the complex relations between concept and sensation, theory and practice, the discursive and the visual, and draws out the political and philosophical stakes of the aesthetic revolution in modern painting.

What is happening to the Left? It seems to be dying a slow death. While many commentors have predicted its demise, the Left has always defied these bleak prognoses and risen from the ashes in the most unexpected ways. Nevertheless, we are witnessing today a global decline in organized movements on the Left, and while social struggles and rebellious citizens continue to challenge dominant political regimes, these efforts do not translate into support for traditional left parties or into the creation of dynamic movements on the left. Bestselling historian Shlomo Sand argues that the global decline of the Left is linked to the waning of the idea of equality that has united citizens in the past and inspired them to engage in collective action.  Sand retraces the evolution of this idea in a wide-ranging account that includes the Diggers and Levellers of seventeenth-century England, the French Revolution, the birth of anarchism and Marxism, the decolonial, feminist and civil rights revolts, and the left populism of our time. In piecing together the thinkers and movements that built the Left over centuries, Sand illuminates the global and transnational dynamics which pushed them forward, often picking up the gauntlets their predecessors had laid down. He outlines how they shaped the notion of equality, while also analysing how they were confronted by its material reality, and the lessons that they did – or did not – draw from this.  This concise and magisterial history of the Left will be of interest to anyone interested in the idea of equality and the fate of one of the most important movements that has shaped the modern world.

Francois Laruelle's lifelong project of "nonphilosophy," or "nonstandard philosophy," thinks past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations between religion, science, politics, and art. In Christo-Fiction Laruelle targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and the radical potential of Christ, whose "crossing" disrupts their circular discourse. Laruelle's Christ is not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the Apostles, or the Catholic Church. He is the embodiment of generic man, founder of a science of humans, and the herald of a gnostic messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. Explicitly inserting quantum science into religion, Laruelle recasts the temporality of the cross, the entombment, and the resurrection, arguing that it is God who is sacrificed on the cross so equals in faith may be born. Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism alike, Christo-Fiction is a daring, heretical experiment that ties religion to the human experience and the lived world.

A dizzying trip through the mind(s) of the provocative and influential thinker Nick Land. During the 1990s British philosopher Nick Land's unique work, variously described as "rabid nihilism," "mad black deleuzianism," and "cybergothic," developed perhaps the only rigorous and culturally-engaged escape route out of the malaise of "continental philosophy" -a route that was implacably blocked by the academy. However, Land's work has continued to exert an influence, both through the British "speculative realist" philosophers who studied with him, and through the many cultural producers-writers, artists, musicians, filmmakers-who have been invigorated by his uncompromising and abrasive philosophical vision. Beginning with Land's early radical rereadings of Heidegger, Nietzsche, Kant and Bataille, the volume collects together the papers, talks and articles of the mid-90s-long the subject of rumour and vague legend (including some work which has never previously appeared in print)-in which Land developed his futuristic theory-fiction of cybercapitalism gone amok; and ends with his enigmatic later writings in which Ballardian fictions, poetics, cryptography, anthropology, grammatology and the occult are smeared into unrecognisable hybrids. Fanged Noumena gives a dizzying perspective on the entire trajectory of this provocative and influential thinker's work, and has introduced his unique voice to a new generation of readers.

Francois Laruelle's lifelong project of "nonphilosophy," or "nonstandard philosophy," thinks past the theoretical limits of Western philosophy to realize new relations between religion, science, politics, and art. In Christo-Fiction Laruelle targets the rigid, self-sustaining arguments of metaphysics, rooted in Judaic and Greek thought, and the radical potential of Christ, whose "crossing" disrupts their circular discourse. Laruelle's Christ is not the authoritative figure conjured by academic theology, the Apostles, or the Catholic Church. He is the embodiment of generic man, founder of a science of humans, and the herald of a gnostic messianism that calls forth an immanent faith. Explicitly inserting quantum science into religion, Laruelle recasts the temporality of the cross, the entombment, and the resurrection, arguing that it is God who is sacrificed on the cross so equals in faith may be born. Positioning itself against orthodox religion and naive atheism alike, Christo-Fiction is a daring, heretical experiment that ties religion to the human experience and the lived world.

Collection of interventions on the status of the moving image in an age of advanced simulation, exploring the contemporary links between power, simulation, and warfare. This collection of wide-ranging interventions and discussions on the status of the moving image in an age of advanced simulation explores the contemporary links between power, simulation, and warfare. Today, technological simulation has become an integral part of military training and operations; and at the same time, media spectacle-often enabled by the same technologies-has become integrated with military power. Trained in virtual environments, army personnel are increasingly enhanced by augmented reality technologies that bring combat into conformity with its simulation. Equally, the seductions of media and entertainment have become crucial weapons for "information dominance." At the same time as the infosphere demands that war takes on the properties of a game, hyper-realistic videogames evolved from military technology become a kind of virtual distributed training camp, as the lines between simulation and action, combatant and civilian, become blurred. Based on a round table discussion prompted by the work of artist John Gerrard, Simulation, Exercise, Operations assembles thinkers from philosophy, media, and military theory to examine the powers of simulation in the contemporary world.

A systematic historical survey of Chinese thought is followed by an investigation of the historical-metaphysical questions of modern technology, asking how Chinese thought might contribute to a renewed questioning of globalized technics. Heidegger's critique of modern technology and its relation to metaphysics has been widely accepted in the East. Yet the conception that there is only one-originally Greek-type of technics has been an obstacle to any original critical thinking of technology in modern Chinese thought. Yuk Hui argues for the urgency of imagining a specifically Chinese philosophy of technology capable of responding to Heidegger's challenge, while problematizing the affirmation of technics and technologies as anthropologically universal. This investigation of the historical-metaphysical question of technology, drawing on Lyotard, Simondon, and Stiegler, and introducing a history of modern Eastern philosophical thinking largely unknown to Western readers, including philosophers such as Feng Youlan, Mou Zongsan, and Keiji Nishitani, sheds new light on the obscurity of the question of technology in China. Why was technics never thematized in Chinese thought? Why has time never been a real question for Chinese philosophy? How was the traditional concept of Qi transformed in its relation to Dao as China welcomed technological modernity and westernization? In The Question Concerning Technology in China, a systematic historical survey of the major concepts of traditional Chinese thinking is followed by a startlingly original investigation of these questions, in order to ask how Chinese thought might today contribute to a renewed, cosmotechnical questioning of globalized technics.

The eminent French philosopher "dialecticizes" five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulene's objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy. In this unique essay, first delivered as a lecture during a panel discussion with the artist and philosopher Reza Negarestani, Alain Badiou identifies and "dialecticizes" five of the artist Jean-Luc Moulene's objects with five conceptual formations from the history of Western philosophy. Aristotle's complex of matter and form is called to mind to describe the inner logic of a hard foam sculpture. A bronze statue with holes activates Plato's notion of participation of the concrete world in the "injured Idea of the Beautiful." A small metallic and incomplete "angel" engages Leibniz's affirmation that "everything that exists is composed of an infinity of things." Badiou's musings go on to pair a broken and repaired plastic chair with Victor Hugo; a terrible hand made of concrete with the Freudian unconscious; and a large-scale "red and blue monster" with rudimentary mechanisms of the Cartesian cogito, the famous "I think, therefore I am," with unexpected inversions and variations. Badiou refrains, of course, from claiming that Moulene thinks about any of these philosophers when making his specific works. What he points to, however, in this richly illustrated bilingual volume, is that the artist and his art are "on the side of philosophy."

Explorations of Deleuze's work by pioneering thinkers from philosophy, aesthetics, music, and architecture. A collection of explorations of the work of Gilles Deleuze by pioneering thinkers in the fields of philosophy, aesthetics, music, and architecture. The volume also includes a previously untranslated early text by Deleuze and a short interview, along with a fascinating piece of vintage science fiction from one of his more obscure influences. The contributors to this volume aim to clarify, from a variety of perspectives, Deleuze's contribution to philosophy: in what does his philosophical originality lie; what does he appropriate from other philosophers and how does he transform it? And how can the apparently disparate threads of his work to be "integrated"-What is the precise nature of the constellation of the aesthetic, the conceptual and the political proposed by Gilles Deleuze, and what are the overarching problems in which the numerous philosophical concepts "signed Deleuze" converge? As an annex to the second volume of Collapse, this volume also include a full transcript of the workshop on "Speculative Realism" held in London in 2007.

The first published work to explore the new philosophy of speculative realism through a fresh reappropriation of the philosophical tradition and an openness to its outside. The first published work to explore the new philosophical field of speculative realism, the second volume of Collapse features a selection of speculative essays by some of the foremost young philosophers at work today, together with new work from artists and filmmakers, and searching interviews with leading scientists. Comprising subjects from probability theory to theology, from quantum theory to neuroscience, from astrophysics to necrology, it involves them in unforeseen and productive syntheses. Against the tide of institutional balkanisation and specialisation, this volume testifies to a defiant reanimation of the most radical philosophical problematics-the status of the scientific object, metaphysics and its "end," the prospects for a revival of speculative realism, the possibility of phenomenology, transcendence and the divine, the nature of causation, the necessity of contingency-both through a fresh reappropriation of the philosophical tradition and through an openness to its outside. The breadth of philosophical thought in this volume is matched by the surprising and revealing thematic connections that emerge between the philosophers and scientists who have contributed.

An examination of the new technological mediations between the human sensorium and the planetary media network and of the aesthetic as an enabler of new modes of knowledge. This series of interventions on the ramifications of Speculative Realism for aesthetics ranges from contemporary art's relation to the aesthetic, to accelerationism and abstraction, logic and design. From varied perspectives of philosophy, art, and design, participants examine the new technological mediations between the human sensorium and the massive planetary media network within which it now exists and consider how the aesthetic enables new modes of knowledge by processing sensory data through symbolic formalisms and technological devices. Speculative Aesthetics anticipates the possibility of a theory and practice no longer invested in the otherworldly promise of the aesthetic, but acknowledging the real force and traction of images in the world today, experimentally employing techniques of modelling, formalisation, and presentation so as to simultaneously engineer new domains of experience and map them through a reconfigured aesthetics that is inseparable from its sociotechnical conditions.

A detailed and inventive study of the thinking at work in modern painting, drawing on a formidable body of scholarly evidence to challenge modernist and phenomenological readings of art history, The Brain-Eye presents a series of interlinked 'case studies' in which philosophical thought encounters the hallucinatory sensations unleashed by 'painter-researchers.' Rather than outlining a new 'philosophy of art,' The Brain-Eye details the singular problems pursued by each of its protagonists. Striking readings of the oeuvres of Delacroix, Seurat, Manet, Gauguin, and Cezanne recount the plural histories of artists who worked to free the differential forces of colour, discovered by Goethe in his Colour Theory, in the name of a "true hallucination" and of a logic proper to the Visual. A rigorous renewal of the philosophical thinking of visual art, The Brain-Eye explores the complex relations between concept and sensation, theory and practice, the discursive and the visual, and draws out the political and philosophical stakes of the aesthetic revolution in modern painting.

An apparently contradictory yet radically urgent collection of texts tracing the genealogy of a controversial current in contemporary philosophy. Accelerationism is the name of a contemporary political heresy: the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is not to protest, disrupt, critique, or detourne it, but to accelerate and exacerbate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies. #Accelerate presents a genealogy of accelerationism, tracking the impulse through 90s UK darkside cyberculture and the theory-fictions of Nick Land, Sadie Plant, Iain Grant, and CCRU, across the cultural underground of the 80s (rave, acid house, SF cinema) and back to its sources in delirious post-68 ferment, in texts whose searing nihilistic jouissance would later be disavowed by their authors and the marxist and academic establishment alike. On either side of this central sequence, the book includes texts by Marx that call attention to his own "Prometheanism," and key works from recent years document the recent extraordinary emergence of new accelerationisms steeled against the onslaughts of neoliberal capitalist realism, and retooled for the twenty-first century. At the forefront of the energetic contemporary debate around this disputed, problematic term, #Accelerate activates a historical conversation about futurality, technology, politics, enjoyment, and capital. This is a legacy shot through with contradictions, yet urgently galvanized today by the poverty of "reasonable" contemporary political alternatives.

This compelling and highly original book represents a confrontation between two of the most radical thinkers at work in France today: Alain Badiou and the author, Francois Laruelle. At face value, the two have much in common: both espouse a position of absolute immanence; both argue that philosophy is conditioned by science; and both command a pluralism of thought. Anti-Badiou relates the parallel stories of Badiou's Maoist 'ontology of the void' and Laruelle's own performative practice of 'non-philosophy' and explains why the two are in fact radically different. Badiou's entire project aims to re-educate philosophy through one science: mathematics. Laruelle carefully examines Badiou's Being and Event and shows how Badiou has created a new aristocracy that crowns his own philosophy as the master of an entire theoretical universe. In turn, Laruelle explains the contrast with his own non-philosophy as a true democracy of thought that breaks philosophy's continual enthrall with mathematics and instead opens up a myriad of 'non-standard' places where thinking can be found and practised.