In The Poetics of Political Thinking Davide Panagia focuses on the role that aesthetic sensibilities play in theorists’ evaluations of political arguments. Examining works by thinkers from Thomas Hobbes to Jacques Rancière, Panagia shows how each one invokes aesthetic concepts and devices, such as metaphor, mimesis, imagination, beauty, and the sublime. He argues that it is important to recognize and acknowledge these poetic forms of representation because they provide evaluative standards that theorists use in appraising the value of ideas—ideas about justice, politics, and democratic life. An investigation into the intertwined histories of aesthetic and political accounts of representation—such as Panagia presents here—sheds light on how modes of poetic thinking delimit the questions of unity and diversity that continue to animate contemporary political theory. Panagia not only illuminates the structure of much contemporary political theory but also shows why understanding the poetics of political thinking is vital to contemporary society. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s critique of negation and his privileging of paradox as the source of political thought, Panagia suggests that a non-teleological concept of difference might generate insight into pressing questions about foreignness and citizenship. Turning to the liberal/poststructural debate that dominates contemporary political theory, he compares John Rawls’s concept of justice to Rancière’s ideas about political disagreement in order to demonstrate how, despite their differences, both thinkers comprehend aesthetic and moral reasoning as part and parcel of political writing. Considering the writings of William Hazlitt and Jürgen Habermas, he describes how the essay has become the exemplary genre of what is considered rational political argument. The Poetics of Political Thinking is a compelling reappraisal of the role of representation within political thought.

DIVInvestigates the ways in which thinking and judgment have been represented in political philosophy from Thomas Hobbes to Jacques Ranciere, with an emphasis on the relationship between aesthetic and political representation./div

This book discusses the problem of freedom and the limits of liberalism considering the challenges of governing climate change and artificial intelligence (AI). It mobilizes resources from political philosophy to make an original argument about the future of technology and the environment. Can artificial intelligence save the planet? And does that mean we will have to give up our political freedom? Stretching the meaning of freedom but steering away from authoritarian options, this book proposes that, next to using other principles such as justice and equality and taking collective action and cooperating at a global level, we adopt a positive and relational conception of freedom that creates better conditions for human and non-human flourishing. In contrast to easy libertarianism and arrogant techno-solutionism, this offers a less symptomatic treatment of the global crises we face and gives technologies such as AI a role in the gathering of a new, more inclusive political collective and the ongoing participative making of new common worlds. Written in a clear and accessible style, Green Leviathan or the Poetics of Political Liberty will appeal to researchers and students working in political philosophy, environmental philosophy, and the philosophy of technology.

"This is the best study of a single Chinese poet I have seen in decades. And the best study of Du Fu known to me. David Schneider goes beyond previous works in revealing what might be called the source of Du Fu's gravitas. What is especially refreshing is that the author, while making use of well-selected modern authorities to cast light on Du Fu's poetry, is equally careful never to embrace their "theories" fully, with the ancillary danger of anachronism which taints so much contemporary "humanities" scholarship. The combination of empathy and critical thinking here is exemplary. The author writes eloquently and clearly, and is a very fine translator indeed, and gives us some of the very finest translations of Du Fu we now possess." - Jonathan Chaves, George Washington University

"I suggest that although at any given place and moment the aesthetic expressions of a political system just are that political system, the concepts are separable. Typically, aesthetic aspects of political systems shift in their meaning over time, or even are inverted or redeployed with an entirely transformed effect. You cannot understand politics without understanding the aesthetics of politics, but you cannot understand aesthetics as politics. The point is precisely to show the concrete nodes at which two distinct discourses coincide or connive, come apart or coalesce."—from Political Aesthetics Juxtaposing and connecting the art of states and the art of art historians with vernacular or popular arts such as reggae and hip-hop, Crispin Sartwell examines the reach and claims of political aesthetics. Most analysts focus on politics as discursive systems, privileging text and reducing other forms of expression to the merely illustrative. He suggests that we need to take much more seriously the aesthetic environment of political thought and action.Sartwell argues that graphic style, music, and architecture are more than the propaganda arm of political systems; they are its constituents. A noted cultural critic, Sartwell brings together the disciplines of political science and political philosophy, philosophy of art and art history, in a new way, clarifying basic notions of aesthetics—beauty, sublimity, and representation—and applying them in a political context. A general argument about the fundamental importance of political aesthetics is interspersed with a group of stimulating case studies as disparate as Leni Riefenstahl's films and Black Nationalist aesthetics, the Dead Kennedys and Jeffersonian architecture.

Reiner Schurmann's thinking is, as he himself would say, "riveted to a monstrous site." It remains focused on and situated between natality and mortality, the ultimate traits that condition human life. This book traces the contours of Schurmann's thinking in his magnum opus BROKEN HEGEMONIES in order to uncover the possibility of a politics that resists the hegemonic tendency to posit principles that set the world and our relationships with one another into violent order. Long's book follows in the footsteps of Oedipus who, in abject recognition of his finitude, stumbles upon the possibility of another politics with the help of his daughters at Colonus. The path toward this other, collaboratively created and thus poetic politics begins with an encounter with Aristotle, a thinker whom Schurmann most frequently read as the founder of hegemonic metaphysics, but whose thinking reveals itself as alive to beginnings in ways that open new possibility for human community. This return to beginnings leads, in turn, to Plotinus, who Schurmann reads as marking the destitution of the ancient hegemony of the Parmenidean principle of the One. By bringing Schurmann's innovative and compelling reading of Rene Char's poem, "The Shark and the Gull," into dialogue with Plotinus we come to encounter the power of symbols to transform reality and open us to new constellations of possible community. In Plotinus, where we expected to encounter an end, we experience a new way of thinking natality in terms of what comes to language in Char as the nuptial. Having thus been awakened to the power of symbols, we are prepared to experience how in Kant being itself comes to expression as plurivocal in a way that reveals just how pathologically delusional it is to attempt to deploy univocal principles in a plurivocal world. This opens us to what Schurmann calls the "singularization to come," a formulation that gestures to a mode of comportment at home in the ravaged site between natality and mortality. This then returns us to Oedipus at Colonus; but not to him alone. Rather, it points to the relationship that emerges for a time between Antigone, Ismene, and Oedipus, as they navigate a way between their exile from Thebes and Oedipus's final resting place near Athens. Here, having been awakened to the power of a poetic politics, we attend to three symbolic moments of touching between Oedipus and his daughters through which we might discern something of the new possibilities a poetic politics opens for us if we settle into the ravaged site that conditions our existence, together.

Hermann Kappelhoff casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment. Appreciating cinema's unique ability to bind concrete living conditions to individual experience (which existing political institutions cannot), he reads films by Sergei Eisenstein and Pedro Almodóvar, by the New Objectivity and the New Hollywood, to demonstrate how cinema situates spectators within society. Kappelhoff applies the Deleuzean practice of "thinking in images" to his analysis of films and incorporates the approaches of Jacques Rancière and Richard Rorty, who see politics in the permanent reconfiguration of poetic forms. This enables him to conceptualize film as a medium that continually renews the audiovisual spaces and temporalities through which audiences confront reality. Revitalizing the reading of films by Visconti, Fassbinder, Kubrick, Friedkin, and others, Kappelhoff affirms cinema's historical significance while discovering its engagement with politics as a realm of experience.