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Eating Anxiety argues that our culture's obsession with diet, obesity, meat, and local foods enacts ideological and biopolitical responses to perceived threats to both individual and national sovereignty. Exploring discourses of food politics, Chad Lavin links the concerns of food--especially issues of sustainability, public health, and inequality--to the evolution of the world order and the possibilities for democratic rule.

An urgent argument for political responsibility, rooted in responsive action

Politics cannot function without responsibility, but there have been serious disagreements about how responsibility is to be understood and huge controversies about how it is to be distributed, rewarded, legislated, and enforced. The liberal notions of personal responsibility that have dominated political thinking in the West for more than a century are rooted in the familiar territory of individual will and causal blame, but these theories have been assailed as no longer adequate to explain or address the political demands of a global social structure. Informed by Marx, Foucault, and Butler, Chad Lavin argues for a "postliberal" theory of responsibility, formulating responsibility as a process that is anchored in a persistent ability to respond, not reproach. Lavin works this formulation through discussions of contemporary political issues such as globalization, police brutality, and abortion. Rather than assigning individual blame, postliberal responsibility challenges the supposed autonomy of individual subjects by taking structural arguments into account. Lavin concludes that a liberal concept of responsibility gives rise to a moralistic and oppressive approach to social problems, while a postliberal approach highlights a shared responsibility for developing collective solutions to systemic problems. Postliberal responsibility not only suggests more generous and democratic responses to social ills, it also allows us to theorize a greater range of issues that demand political response.

Debates about obesity are really about the meaning of responsibility. The trend toward local foods reflects the changing nature of space due to new communication technologies. Vegetarian theory capitalizes on biotechnology’s challenge to the meaning of species. And food politics, as this book makes powerfully clear, is actually about the political anxieties surrounding globalization. In Eating Anxiety, Chad Lavin argues that our culture’s obsession with diet, obesity, meat, and local foods enacts ideological and biopolitical responses to perceived threats to both individual and national sovereignty. Using the occasion of eating to examine assumptions about identity, objectivity, and sovereignty that underwrite so much political order, Lavin explains how food functions to help structure popular and philosophical understandings of the world and the place of humans within it. He introduces the concept of digestive subjectivity and shows how this offers valuable resources for rethinking cherished political ideals surrounding knowledge, democracy, and power. Exploring discourses of food politics, Eating Anxiety links the concerns of food—especially issues of sustainability, public health, and inequality—to the evolution of the world order and the possibilities for democratic rule. It forces us to question the significance of consumerist politics and—simultaneously—the relationship between politics and ethics, public and private.

Drawing on early modern French thought to free nature and aesthetics from metaphysical humanism What good is aesthetics in a time of ecological crisis? Toward a Premodern Posthumanism: Anarchic Ontologies of Earthly Life in Early Modern France shows that philosophical aesthetics contains unheeded potentialities for challenging the ontological subjection of nature to the human subject. Drawing on deconstructive, ecological, and biopolitical thought, Chad Córdova uncovers in aesthetics something irreducible to humanist metaphysics: an account of how beings emerge and are interrelated, responsive, and even response-able without reason or why. This anarchic and atelic ontology, recovered from Kant, becomes the guiding thread for a new, premodern trajectory of posthumanism. Charting a path from Aristotle to Heidegger to today’s plant-thinking, with new readings of Montaigne, Pascal, Diderot, Rousseau, and others along the way, this capacious study reveals the untimely relevance of pre-1800 practices of writing, science, and art. Enacting a multitemporal mode of reading, Córdova offers a defense and illustration of the importance of returning to early modern texts as a way to rethink nature, art, ethics, and politics in a time when these concepts are in flux and more contentious than ever.

This book explores the role of theory and research in criminology. Adopting a unique and refreshing approach to criminological theory, it focuses on the great debates in criminology from its inception as a field to the present day. It explores the debates that have motivated criminological thought, that have represented turning points in theoretical and empirical trajectories, that have offered mini-paradigm shifts, and that have moved the field forward. Coverage includes: Classical debates, including the work of Lombroso, Durkheim, and Sutherland; Sociological vs. psychological debates in criminology; Control theory and cultural deviance theory; Criminal career and trait-based theory; Theory testing in criminology; Critical theories in criminology; Debates on the state of criminology and criminal justice; Policy issues in criminology. Each chapter explores several key debates, summarizes key points, and offers a discussion of the current empirical status. This book is novel in emphasising the role of debate in criminology and offering an enlightening synthesis of theorists and their perspectives. It is essential reading for students taking courses on criminological theory and teachers of those theories.

The will of God has always been set in stone … until now. Rick Walters knew that his life was meant for something greater, but he had no idea just how great it could actually be. Praymar, an angel of God, has joined with Rick, empowering him with God’s light and strength, revealing a world beyond the limits of Rick’s understanding. With Praymar’s help, he can mend the destructive ways of the church, unifying them under God’s glory and light. As he falls in love with Christine Feldman, a close friend and local lawyer in the small town of Marquette, Ohio, Rick begins to realize just how important each and every choice is. Together, with help from heaven, Rick and Christine struggle to rescue their embattled church from collapse. But their close friends have a secret, one that will open their eyes to a world beyond the realm of human understanding, a world of heavenly angels and sinister demons; a world of sacrifice, betrayal, and death, and of those who would change God’s will for good and evil purposes. Hell is on its way to Marquette. As the darkness closes around each of them, Rick’s greatest choice could be his very last. Dark Forces Rising, the first novel in the Will Changer Series, exposes the ultimate spiritual battle raging with all of us: If you had the power to manipulate God’s will…would you?

Three short stories by Chad Taylor: 'Here She Comes Now', 'Close to You' and 'DIN.'

The new series of gothic and macabre stories with surprising twists for a new generation of Vincent Price fans. Orok is the fire-maker for a clan of Neanderthals in the primordial European forest. When an unspeakable creature claims the life of his young daughter, Orok must venture into the darkest recesses of the human psyche where he confronts the dawning of a horrible legend.