"When Trump became president, much of the country was repelled by what they saw as the vulgar spectacle of his ascent, the perversion of the highest office in the land. In his bold, groundbreaking book Political Perversion, rhetorician Joshua Gunn argues that this "mean-spirited turn" in American politics (of which Trump is the paragon) is best understood as a structural perversion enhanced primarily by the speed of communication technologies. Drawing on insights from critical theory, media ecology, and psychoanalysis, Gunn argues that perverse rhetorics dominate not only the political sphere but also our daily interactions with others, in person and online. From sexting to campaign rhetoric, Gunn shows how technology has changed our ways of relating (and not relating) to others and has engendered infantile and sadistic forms of provocation and enjoyment. In this book, Trump is only the tip of a sinister, rapidly growing iceberg, one to which we ourselves unwittingly contribute on a daily basis"--

Whitney Strub illustrates the crucial function of pornography in constructing the New Right agenda, which emphasized social issues over racial & economic inequality. He situates the fight over obscenity within the politics of 1950s pop culture & the pivotal events that followed, including the sexual revolution & feminist activism.

In The Sublime Perversion of Capital Gavin Walker examines the Japanese debate about capitalism between the 1920s and 1950s, using it as a "prehistory" to consider current discussions of uneven development and contemporary topics in Marxist theory and historiography. Walker locates the debate's culmination in the work of Uno Kōzō, whose investigations into the development of capitalism and the commodification of labor power are essential for rethinking the national question in Marxist theory. Walker's analysis of Uno and the Japanese debate strips Marxist historiography of its Eurocentric focus, showing how Marxist thought was globalized from the start. In analyzing the little-heralded tradition of Japanese Marxist theory alongside Marx himself, Walker not only offers new insights into the transition to capitalism, the rise of globalization, and the relation between capital and the formation of the nation-state; he provides new ways to break Marxist theory's impasse with postcolonial studies and critical theory.

In this critical work on the political thought of Leo Strauss, Sean Noah Walsh addresses Leo Strauss's claims about esotericism in the philosophic texts of Plato. He challenges Strauss's understanding of esoteric writing as an attempt by Plato to secretly encode the highest truths "exclusively between the lines" in order to avoid persecution. Indeed, through the character of Socrates, the speaker with whom Plato is inextricably associated, Walsh asserts that Plato's exoteric writings were sufficiently incendiary and provocative to demonstrate that a fear of persecution was not his highest priority. The politics that follow from Strauss's thought depend on the interpretation of these Platonic philosophical bases and by analyzing how the problem of fear has been confronted in the works of Plato and Leo Strauss, Walsh offers a direct and thorough account of the politics that emerge from Strauss's esoteric reading of political philosophy. Applying Lacanian psychoanalysis, Walsh investigates the discourse of Straussian esotericism. and examines Plato's writing for examples of exoteric risk, subjecting both Plato and Strauss's writings to Lacan's psychoanalytic technique for interpreting the function of desire in discourse. Given the continuing influence of Strauss's ideas on contemporary politics, particularly within American foreign policy, Walsh's examination of this Straussian esotericism for these effects will prove an interesting read for political theorists, international relations scholars, and philosophers alike.

Exploring the fields of architecture, philosophy, and queer theory, Grosz shows how feminism and cultural analysis have conceptually stripped bodies of their specificity, their corporeality, and the vestigal traces of their production as bodies. She investigates the work of Michel Foucault, Teresa de Lauretis, Gilles Deleuze, Judith Butler and Alphonso Lingi, considering their work by examining the ways in which the functioning of bodies transforms understandings of space and time, knowledge and desire. Grosz moves toward a radical consideration of bodies and their relationship to transgression and perversity.

In this provocative retelling of the story of political corruption in the modern period, Ruth A. Miller argues that narratives of political corruption rely upon an explicitly pornographic rhetoric and have been instrumental in carving out lawless or exceptional space. Drawing upon an extensive and wide-ranging literature, she examines corruption, the erotic, and legal exceptionalism as they appear in media representations of Saddam Hussein as "corrupt leader," nineteenth-century political cartoons, Pier Pasolini's film Salo, Ernst Kantorowicz's theorization of the body politic, Giorgio Agamben's analysis of biopolitics, and Achille Mbembe's discussion of the postcolony. Miller comments on both the erotic nature of the state of exception and colonial or postcolonial manifestations of it, and presents a new voice in ongoing conversations about law, violence, and sexuality in the contemporary world.

This book examines the philosophical and political relevance of perversion in the works of three key representatives of contemporary philosophy and psychoanalysis: Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Lacan. Perversion is often understood simply in terms of cultural or sexual phenomena. By contrast, Boštjan Nedoh places perversion at the heart of philosophical, ontological and political issues in the works of Deleuze, Agamben and Lacan. He examines the relevance of their discussions of perversion for their respective critical ontological projects. By tracing the differences between these thinkers’ understanding of perversion, the book finally draws lines of delimitation between the vitalist and the structuralist or psychoanalytic philosophical positions in contemporary philosophy.