Nick Mansfield

What am I referring to when I say I? This little word is so easy to use in daily life, yet it has become the focus of intense theoretical debate. Where does my sense of self come from? Does it arise spontaneously or is it created by the media or society? This concern with the self, with our subjectivity, is now our main point of reference in Western societies. How has it come to be so important, and what are the different ways in which we can approach an understanding of the self? Nick Mansfield explores how our notions of subjectivity have developed over the past century. Analyzing the work of key modern and postmodern theorists such as Freud, Foucault, Nietzsche, Lacan, Kristeva, Deleuze and Guattari, and Haraway, he shows how subjectivity is central to debates in contemporary culture, including gender, sexuality, ethnicity, postmodernism, and technology.

This second edition provides a comprehensive overview of issues in the humanities at the turn of the new millennium, providing historical background, defining key terms, and introducing the ideas of key thinkers. This book is intended for undergraduate students in cultural studies and theory, literary studies, literary theory and history, semiotics, textual theory, cinema studies, film theory and criticism and postmodern theory.

The contemporary humanities--from intertextuality to queer theory--are a minefield of new theories and controversies. This book explores some of the new ways of thinking about the traditional arts and human sciences, providing historical background, defining key terms, and introducing the ideas of the important personalities.

"We all think we know what war is, yet it has always been explained in relation to something else: sovereign authority, civil society, peace, friendship, love. Traditionally, war has been perceived as either the opposite of these values or as their instrument. Yet, in our time, it seems to be both of these things at once: social values, like human rights, are both what justifies war and what we need to protect from war." "In this book, Nick Mansfield studies this paradox through a reading of canonical thinkers on war like Hobbes and Clausewitz, and also of other thinkers (from Freud and Bataille to Deleuze and Guattari, Levinas and Derrida) who have attempted to deal with our complex and contradictory relationship to war. He also investigates the way that the most influential recent thinkers (from Virilio and Baudrillard to Mbembe, Badiou and Zizek) have theorized war."--BOOK JACKET.

‘I am persuaded that the Memorial Crosses, in the Churchyards, on the village greens, where the roads meet, will for many years to come cry eloquent but silent protest against all that divides and degrades village life.’ The Bishop of Hereford, 1920.