New Books in Critical Theory

At the heart of the fiercest international conflicts is the struggle for the future of globalization.

In the wake of a pandemic that tested economies and societies, geopolitical conflict has taken on a new intensity. The Rest and the West: Capital and Power in a Multipolar World (Verso, 2024) locates
the origins of this development in the turbulent dynamics of the
capitalist world market. Rather than reducing global conflict to a
matter of great power rivalries or the process of economic decoupling, Sandro Mezzadra and Brett Neilson
investigate the increasing centrality of war to capital operations and
to the transformation of capitalism. The goal is to forge a theory of
imperialism adequate to a world in which the ‘rest’ no longer provides a
putative unity that defines and opposes the ‘West’.

Brett Neilson
is professor and deputy director at the Institute for Culture and
Society, Western Sydney University. In the last decade, his work has
centered on issues of migration, borders, and globalization, logistics
and digitalization, contemporary capitalism, geopolitics, and
automation. Apart from writings with Sandro Mezzadra, he has published many articles and books, including Free Trade in the Bermuda Triangle … and Other Tales of Counterglobalization (Minnesota, 2004).

Morteza Hajizadeh
is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New
Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory;
Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies;
18th
and 19th Century British Literature.
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From Ghostbusters to Will & Grace, One Day at a Time to Jurassic Park, the past decade has seen Hollywood reach a new peak in its obsession with reboots, remakes, and revivals. Spearheaded by media giants like Disney and Netflix, these projects promise progress—more diverse casts, “timely” social commentary, and redemptive nostalgia—yet they often reproduce the very inequalities they claim to address.Rebooting Inequality: Critical Takes on Film and Television Remakes (NYU Press, 2026) brings together twelve concise, theoretically rich essays that interrogate how Hollywood’s recycling of intellectual property sustains entrenched systems of racial, gender, and sexual inequality. Across genres and platforms, contributors explore how the industry’s nostalgic return to familiar stories masks an ongoing reliance on white, patriarchal, and heteronormative frameworks of storytelling and production.Blending critical race, feminist, and media studies, the collection analyzes dozens of recent film and television revivals, remakes, and reboots from Roseanne to Charlie’s Angels to ask what it means when entertainment markets strive for diversity while leaving the structures of inequality intact.Accessible yet deeply analytical, Rebooting Inequality exposes how nostalgia has become both a marketing strategy and a political tool, revealing how the “new” Hollywood continues to reanimate the past—profitably, repeatedly, and unequally.
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Our bodies and brains are radically transformable, mutable and plastic. From the neuroplasticity of the brain to the epigenetic malleability of our bodies and of all organic life, the work of the contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou invites us to consider our plasticity as both a creative resource and an ethical challenge.

Catherine Malabou and Contemporary French Literature and Film: Witnessing Plasticity (Edinburgh UP, 2026) brings Malabou's philosophy into dialogue with contemporary literature and film. It reads conceptions of plasticity and neuroplasticity in Malabou through the mutant bodies of Leos Carax's films; the shape-shifting bodies of Marie Darrieussecq's novels and theatre; the terrifying, traumatic metamorphoses depicted in the fiction of Marie NDiaye; and the anarchic sexualities and identities celebrated in the cinema and writing of Alain Guiraudie. It argues that, in different ways, Malabou's philosophy and literary and filmic texts develop modes of bearing witness to plasticity which can supplement, challenge and extend scientific understandings of biological plasticity, constituting ethical and creative sites of exploration.
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Most of us today would assume that morality and ethics, being value propositions, are questions for inspired leaders, religious creeds, poets—in other words, for the humanities. But what if I told you that we can construct a system of ethics and morality by studying math—more specifically: the laws of thermodynamics? That’s what Professor Drew M Dalton argues in his latest book. Dalton traces a line of metaphysical inquiry from Kant through Spinoza, Nietzsche, and others up to today to show how we get from E=mc2 to a full-throated call to resist evil and alleviate suffering to our very last breath.

By overturning our assumptions about the nature and value of reality, The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism (Northwestern UP, 2024) presents a provocative new model of ethical responsibility that is both logically justifiable and scientifically sound. Dalton argues for “ethical pessimism,” a position previously marginalized in the West, as a means to cultivate an account of ethical responsibility and political activism that takes seriously the unbecoming of being and the moral horror of existence.

Drew M. Dalton is a professor of English at Indiana University, having received his Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Leuven in Belgium. His research focuses on the normative implications of different metaphysical systems and, specifically, he’s interested in how questions of right and wrong, good and evil, beauty and pleasure are framed within aesthetics, literary theory, ethics, and political philosophy. He is the author of Longing for the Other: Levinas and Metaphysical Desire (Duquesne University Press, 2009), The Ethics of Resistance: Tyranny of the Absolute (Bloomsbury, 2018), and The Matter of Evil: From Speculative Realism to Ethical Pessimism (Northwestern University Press, 2023).
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MacArthur Fellow and National Humanities Medalist Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex and The Mind-Body Problem, returns with a revelatory book about the primal drive that in our species alone has been transformed into one of our most persistent and universal motivations: the longing to matter.

Drawing on biology, psychology, and philosophy, in The Mattering Instinct: How Our Deepest Longing Drives Us and Divides Us (Liveright Publishing, 2026) Goldstein argues that this need to matter―and the various “mattering projects” it inspires―is the source of our greatest progress and our deepest conflicts: the very crux of the human experience.Goldstein brings this profound idea to life through unforgettable stories of famous and not-so-famous people pursuing their unique mattering projects: the ragtime genius Scott Joplin, whose dedication to his ignored masterpiece, Treemonisha, ended in tragedy; the pioneering psychologist William James, who rose above the depression of his young adulthood to become perhaps the first great theorist of mattering; an impoverished Chinese woman who rescued abandoned newborns from the trash; and a neo-Nazi skinhead who as a young man dealt racial violence to feel he mattered but ultimately renounced that hateful past after realizing that mattering isn’t a zero-sum game. These portraits illuminate how our instinct for significance shapes identity, relationships, culture, and conflict―and they point the way to a future where we all might see that there is, fundamentally, enough mattering to go around.Deeply revealing and insightful, and decades in the making, The Mattering Instinct is a must read for those curious about why we seek to matter to ourselves and others―and how this insatiable longing that drives us apart may be the key to finally understanding each other.
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