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This book departs from the attempt by political theory to confront the challenges of political life with new concepts, offering instead a mode of thought so far excluded from the canon of political theory: the philosophy of presence. Making the experience of liminality the very centre of thought, it shows how embracing ‘in-betweenness'allows us to discern the limits of both the political order and contemporary political theory. Through an examination of the works of Gustav Landauer, Eric Voegelin, Simone Weil and Václav Havel, the author demonstrates the manner in which ‘in-betweenness'may be cultivated by way of the philosophy of presence as a method of self-enquiry into existence as it is experienced subjectively. Arguing that since externalisation is the essence of politics and that the way to a more just society lies inwards, through a confrontation with liminality, this study of how to read philosophers of presence renders their work intelligible to the contemporary discourse of crisis and will appeal to scholars of social, political and anthropological theory and philosophy.

Contemporary challenges related to walls, borders and encirclement, such as migration, integration and endemic historical conflicts, can only be understood properly from a long-term perspective. This book seeks to go beyond conventional definitions of the long durée by locating the social practice of walling and encirclement in the broadest context of human history, integrating insights from archaeology and anthropology. Such an approach, far from being simply academic, has crucial contemporary relevance, as its focus on origins helps to locate the essential dynamics of this practice, and provides a rare external position from which to view the phenomenon as a transformative exercise, with the area walled serving as an artificial womb or matrix. The modern world, with its ingrained ideas of borders, nation states and other entities, often makes it is very difficult to gain a critical distance and detachment to see beyond conventional perspectives. The unique approach of this book offers an antidote to this problem. Cases discussed in the book range from Palaeolithic caves, the ancient walls of Göbekli Tepe, Jericho and Babylon, to the foundation of Rome, the Chinese Empire, medieval Europe and the Berlin Wall. The book also looks at contemporary developments such as the Palestinian wall, Eastern and Southern European examples, Trump's proposed Mexican wall, the use of Greece as a bulwark containing migration flows and the transformative experience of voluntary work in a Calcutta hospice. In doing so, the book offers a political anthropology of one of the most fundamental yet perennially problematic human practices: the constructing of walls. As such, it will appeal to scholars of sociology, anthropology and political theory.

This book offers a comprehensive sociological study of the nature and dynamics of the modern world, through the use of a series of anthropological concepts, including the trickster, schismogenesis, imitation and liminality. Developing the view that with the theatre playing a central role, the modern world is conditioned as much by cultural processes as it is by economic, technological or scientific ones, the author contends the world is, to a considerable extent, theatrical - a phenomenon experienced as inauthenticity or a loss of direction and meaning. As such the novel is revealed as a means for studying our theatricalised reality, not simply because novels can be understood to be likening the world to theatre, but because they effectively capture and present the reality of a world that has been thoroughly'theatricalised'- and they do so more effectively than the main instruments usually employed to analyse reality: philosophy and sociology. With analyses of some of the most important novelists and novels of modern culture, including Rilke, Hofmannsthal, Kafka, Mann, Blixen, Broch and Bulgakov, and focusing on fin-de-siècle Vienna as a crucial'threshold'chronotope of modernity, Permanent Liminality and Modernity demonstrates that all seek to investigate and unmask the theatricalisation of modern life, with its progressive loss of meaning and our deteriorating capacity to distinguish between what is meaningful and what is artificial. Drawing on the work of Nietzsche, Bakhtin and Girard to examine the ways in which novels explore the reduction of human existence to a state of permanent liminality, in the form of a sacrificial carnival, this book will appeal to scholars of social, anthropological and literary theory.

This book provides the history and genealogy of an increasingly important subject: liminality. Coming to the fore in recent years in social and political theory and extending beyond is original use as developed within anthropology, liminality has come to denote spaces and moments in which the taken-for-granted order of the world ceases to exist and novel forms emerge, often in unpredictable ways. Liminality and the Modern offers a comprehensive introduction to this concept, discussing its development and laying out a conceptual and experiential framework for thinking about change in terms of liminality. Applying this framework to questions surrounding the implosion of'non-spaces', the analysis of major historical periods and the study of political revolution, the book also explores its possible uses in social science research and its implications for our understanding of the uncertainty and contingency of the liquid structures of modern society. Shedding new light on a concept central to social thought, as well as its capacity for pushing social and political theory in new directions, this book will be of interest to scholars across the social sciences and philosophy working in fields such as social, political and anthropological theory, cultural studies, social and cultural geography, and historical anthropology and sociology.