Jacques Lacan: The Basics provides a clear and succinct introduction to the work of Jacques Lacan, one of the key thinkers of the twentieth century.

The left views alienation as something to be resisted or overcome, but could it actually form the basis of our emancipation? In Embracing Alienation, Todd McGowan offers a completely different take on alienation, claiming that the effort to overcome it is not a radical response to the current state of things but a failure to see the constitutive power of alienation for all of us. Instead of trying to overcome alienation and accede to an unalienated existence, it argues, we should instead redeem alienation as an existential and political program.

Byung-Chul Han, a star of German philosophy, continues his passionate critique of neoliberalism, trenchantly describing a regime of technological domination that, in contrast to Foucault’s biopower, has discovered the productive force of the psyche.

Renowned psychoanalytic philosopher Richard Boothby puts forward a novel theory of religion inspired by Jacques Lacan's theory of das Ding, the disquieting, inaccessible dimension of fellow human beings. This notion of an unfathomable excess, originally encountered in the figure of the mother, led Lacan to break with Freud's formulation of the Oedipus complex and underlies Lacan's distinctive conception of unconscious dynamics. Leaning on this account, Boothby shows how our sense of the sacred arises from our relation to what we do not know.

While understanding the psychic structure of pleasure and desire might seem to be unrelated to grasping our current political crisis, Todd McGowan argues that the intrinsically excessive nature of enjoyment is critically important to this effort.

Mysticism is about existential ecstasy—an experience of heightening one's senses and self into a sheer feeling of aliveness. Mystical experiences offer us a practical way to open our thoughts and deepen the sense of our lives, whether through a mainstream connection to God or by taking part in mind-altering experiences. Here, Simon Critchley explores the history and practice of mysticism, from its origins in Eastern and Western religion, through its association with esoteric and occult knowledge, and up to the ecstatic modernism of T.S. Eliot and others.

Contemporary cultural style boosts transparency and instantaneity. These are values absorbed from our current economic conditions of disintermediation: cutting out the middleman. Like Uber, but for art. Immediacy names this style to make sense of what we lose when the contradictions of twenty-first-century capitalism demand that aesthetics negate mediation. Surging realness as an aesthetic program synchs with the economic imperative to intensify circulation when production stagnates. Flow is the ultimate twenty-first-century buzzword, but speedy circulation grinds art down to the nub.

First published in 1961, Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth offers a powerful exploration of race, colonialism, and the psychological impact of oppression. This seminal text has inspired generations of revolutionaries and activists, influencing movements from decolonization struggles in the Global South to Black Lives Matter. As a cornerstone of civil rights, anti-colonialism, and Black consciousness studies, Fanon's most celebrated work stands alongside such essential texts as Edward Said's Orientalism and The Autobiography of Malcolm X.

First published in French in 1907, Henri Bergson's L'évolution créatrice is a scintillating and radical work by one of the great French philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This outstanding new translation, the first for over a hundred years, brings one of Bergson's most important and ambitious works to a new generation.

In this extraordinary best seller, James Hillman presents a brilliant vision of our selves, and an exciting approach to the mystery at the center of every life that asks, “What is it, in my heart, that I must do, be, and have? And why?” Drawing on the biographies of figures such as Ella Fitzgerald and Mohandas K. Gandhi, Hillman argues that character is fate, that there is more to each individual than can be explained by genetics and environment. The result is a reasoned and powerful road map to understanding our true nature and discovering an eye-opening array of choices.