Melanie Klein is one of the few analysts whose body of work has inspired sociologists, philosophers, religious scholars, literary critics and political theorists, all attracted to the cross-fertilisation of her ideas. Other Banalities represents a long over-due exploration of her legacy, including contributions from acclaimed interdisciplinary scholars and practitioners. The contributors situate Klein within the history of the psychoanalytic movement, investigate her key theoretical and clinical advances, and look at how her thought has informed contemporary perspectives in the behavioural sciences and humanities. Topics covered range from Klein’s major psychological theories to clinical pathology, child development, philosophy, sociology, politics, religion, ethics and aesthetics. This volume reflects the auspicious future for Kleinian revivalism and demonstrates the broad relevance of Kleinian thought. It will be of great interest to scholars and practitioners of psychology, psychoanalysis and psychotherapy.

How is it possible to murder a million people one by one? Hatred, fear, madness of one or many people cannot explain it. No one can be so possessed for the months, even years, required for genocides, slavery, deadly economic exploitation, sexual trafficking of children. In The Evil of Banality, Elizabeth Minnich argues for a tragic yet hopeful explanation. “Extensive evil,” her term for systematic horrific harm-doing, is actually carried out, not by psychopaths, but by people like your quiet next door neighbor, your ambitious colleagues. There simply are not enough moral monsters for extensive evil, nor enough saints for extensive good. In periods of extensive evil, people little different from you and me do its work for no more than a better job, a raise, the house of the family “disappeared” last week. So how can there be hope? The seeds of such evils are right there in our ordinary lives. They are neither mysterious nor demonic. If we avoid romanticizing and so protecting ourselves from responsibility for the worst and the best of which humans are capable, we can prepare to say no to extensive evil—to act accurately, together, and above all in time, before great harm-doing has become the daily work of ‘normal’ people.

In times that are rife with complex manifestations of identity politics, writing classrooms across the world are hosting heated debates about what it means for authors to write about experiences outside their own. This book focuses on writing as the act of witnessing when the writers themselves were not present to witness in person. It seeks to answer the questions that come along with these experiences, such as what might it mean to write in order “to watch,” “to try and understand,” “to never look away,” and “to never forget” when the writer is an outsider to an experience? What might it mean to write about others in ways that do not essentialize or sensationalize, and in ways that are as humble, ethical, and responsible as possible? What might it mean to bear witness through the written word while engaged in a constant (re)negotiation with one’s own positioning i.e., to cultivate a condition of critical empathy that doesn’t also have the consequence of creative paralysis?

This book offers an inquiry into the ways in which entertainment discourse extends beyond entertainment and its initial humorous function due to its political and ideological underpinnings. Rather than considering entertainment discourse as “just for fun”, this book justifies the importance of taking it seriously. Humorous features in entertainment discourses can trivialize some stereotypical moments, and, in doing so, encourage viewers to downplay the seriousness of the events they are watching. In other words, these stereotypical images are camouflaged and mitigated by the inclusion of humorous elements and imaginative images, which can lead the audience to perceive them as natural scenes that do not deserve criticism. Embedding banalities within entertainment discourses remains an effective strategy that drives the audience to laugh, meaning that they fail to detect the embedded ideologies regarding different cultures and identities. This confirms the fact that “small talk” can often become “big talk”.

The Futurist movement was founded and promoted by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, beginning in 1909 with the First Futurist Manifesto, in which he inveighed against the complacency of "cultural necrophiliacs" and sought to annihilate the values of the past, writing that "there is no longer any beauty except the struggle. Any work of art that lacks a sense of aggression can never be a masterpiece." In the years that followed, up until his death in 1944, Marinetti, through both his polemical writings and his political activities, sought to transform society in all its aspects. As Günter Berghaus writes in his introduction, "Futurism sought to bridge the gap between art and life and to bring aesthetic innovation into the real world. Life was to be changed through art, and art was to become a form of life." This volume includes more than seventy of Marinetti's most important writings—many of them translated into English for the first time—offering the reader a representative and still startling selection of texts concerned with Futurist art, literature, politics, and philosophy.