The studies included in this edited volume explore discourses surrounding the ageing population, those who assist them, their families and the institutions/organisations that offer services to them. Qualitative and quantitative theoretical inputs from a variety of research domains – (socio)linguistics, anthropology, philosophy, cultural studies, cognitive science, as well as statistics and information technology – are employed to survey an array of themes that pay close attention to the linguistic, social, economic and ethical aspects regarding seniors. Different registers and genres are examined, which are produced by diverse diatopic distributions, diaphasic/diastratic variations and diamesic dimensions of the language. All this underlines the importance of integrating various strands of analysis and multidisciplinary perspectives to attend to the complexity of a changing discourse and complex issue which are being looked at closely by the international scientific community. The book is suitable for a wide readership, including scholars and neophyte readers with an interest in discourse and cultural studies, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics.

The current volume brings together a collection of essays from the conference "The Postmodern Condition: Forty Years Later" held at University of Genova on December 2019. Taking advantage of the fortieth anniversay of The Postmodern Condition by Jean-François Lyotard, a book that initiated the cultural explosion of postmodern philosophy, in order to relaunch and further investigate the ongoing debate around the essential meaning of postmodernity, the end of postmodernism and the advent of new aesthetics, philosophy and social "structure of feelings" that have (or tried to) overcome the postmodern paradigm. The book thus brings together two interwoven but often separated themes: on the one hand, the analysis of the vitality, legacy, topicality and historicizing process of postmodernity and postmodernism; on the other, the analysis of the debate around the crisis of the postmodern paradigm and of the advent of new conceptual frameworks, often born out of a direct refusal of postmodern critical discourse and philosophy. Through the filters of different philosophical and aesthetic paradigms, the book thus offers a complex description of contemporary society from the 1980s down to the present moment, dwelling on crucial topics such as the relationship between humanity and technology, the digital revolution, the social role of representations, the dialectics between image and reality, and the vitality of postmodern stylistic features (quotation, metafiction, appropriation etc.).

This volume examines the rise and apparent fall of 'neo-liberalism', whose historical roots and theoretical implications are explored throughout. This begins with today's current climate, dominated by a range of political mediatic populisms that run across the contemporary political scene, and a critical comparison with the seminal analysis of Ernesto Laclau. The volume also analyzes the failure of the multicultural paradigm in terms of the Lockean concept of tolerance in light of the theses developed by the political theorist Wendy Brown concerning the civil and social dynamics of de-democratization. From this point of view, an original concept of post-hegemony is proposed, which - attempting to go beyond Antonio Gramsci and his modern followers - focuses on the subject of desire and enjoyment within a Freudian and Lacanian framework, a subject whose drives are incompatible with the systemic grid of contemporary hyper-capitalism. Finally, following a provocative analysis of violence and terrorism in the globalized world, the volume proposes - on the basis of Judith Butler's analysis - a paradigm of a "democracy of bodies" as an alternative to and salvation from the decline of the "political" in the present era.

In the year 2020, everything we used to think about our habits has been profoundly disrupted. Lockdown still represents an unprecedented experience for all those who went through it, radically affecting our freedom of movement and all those social interactions that used to make up our daily lives. Some people believe that once the pandemic ends, nothing will be the same. Others believe that once the virus becomes weaker or a vaccine is at our disposal and the fear is diminished, everything will go back to normal because the mechanism of habit is in many ways similar to the mechanisms of nature, reiterating the uniformity of its functioning. Which is correct? Both positions, perhaps. When philosophers addressed the issue of customs, namely collective habits, they have generally emphasized that caution us required when it comes to changing them - and indeed, if we look back at history… Could pandemics affect shared habits in specific territories, habits that were ultimately generated in reaction to other natural risks and threats?

The Western idea of democracy, based on human opinions and the counting of votes, has become obsolete. The exclusively human form of democracy is being substituted by a new kind of contract which, through digital architecture, the internet of things and sensors, extends participation to all of the different entities that make up our habitat. Parliaments, citizen assemblies, parties and all kinds of the political architecture of interaction, inspired by the model of the polis, are giving way to platforms, blockchains and different network environments. In this interactive ecosystem, humans, data, viruses, the climate, sensors, biodiversity and informatic territories have begun to express collaborative policies and solutions through a dialogue with data. Today, the Western idea of society, founded on a contract between citizens and limited to the cohabitation of human subjects (just as the idea of citizenship is based on the fundamental rights of people) faced with the challenges of the pandemic, of climate change and those posed by the latest generation of intelligent networks, turns out to be inadequate. The digital citizenship of today is the research area in which to search for the overcoming of the Western political project and to begin a new culture of governance within complex networks characterized by interactions within an architecture that is no longer composed either of subjects nor objects.

This volume offers a fascinating journey into the world of symbols, architecture and myths, both familiar and less well-known. The road it takes is sometimes the caravan trail, others a Roman road from the classical world, and includes junctions and overlapping influences between East and West. The first stop takes us from the steppe of the Goths through to the city of Ravenna, focusing on King Theodoric. A man of the steppe, Theodoric was illiterate but wrote in stone through his indecipherable, famous monument, the mausoleum of Ravenna. It is an architecture of myth that needs to be read in all of its architectonic connections – within its spatial dynamism and geometric symbolism, which reveals echoes of the Middle East. The second step begins in Greece and arrives in Italy. The third encompasses an enormous arch, passing from the Roman imperial eagle to the Chinese imperial dragon. Extensively illustrated, this volume explores symbolic, architectural, and mythological connections across the globe.

Yonaoshi (世直し、よなおし, world renewal/repair/remaking) is a Japanese term that first appeared in the context of peasant uprisings in the mid-nineteenthth century, signifying the restoration and/or recreation of the world in an ideal form. In the years since, it has been used to evoke a variety of ideas for fixing, redirecting, or recreating all human society in part or entirely. Although arising from a specifically Japanese context, the term nonetheless resonates with experiences and thought among settings around the world. This volume brings together scholars working in such diverse fields as anthropology, art history, literature, history and philosophy, focusing their research on regions across the world to discuss the concept of Yonaoshi in a diverse variety of contexts – temporal, spatial, disciplinary – and the global connections it reveals.

Research on gender inequality uses limited and sectoral areas as a reference. A team of scholars, academics and researchers from fourteen different countries – Cuba, Haiti, India, Iraq, Iran, Italy, Ivory Coast, Mexico, Pakistan, Peru, Poland, Tunisia, United States and Venezuela – bring out instead in a synchronous and transversal way the gender discrimination for women’s experiences at work, in family, for education. Results show that in the varied landscape of countries considered over 50 percent believe it is still difficult to be a woman in their own country today. Only one third of respondents believe women’s policies in their country are right and less than the majority believe there’s a possibility of having support to balance and reconcile family and work. At the same time, the tragedy of domestic violence – worsened in the Covid period – crosses borders and refers to that culture of machismo that still characterizes genderinequality. Why? For the atavistic presumption of superiority of one sex over the other so difficult to eradicate from culture, education and stereotypes still existing today. On the contrary, certainty is rather that “donnons le monde aux femmes, elles en feront un paradis!” (“Give the world to women, they will make it a paradise”), as an interviewee from Haiti wrote.

Originally written for the stage, We, the Women of Tehran illustrates from a female standpoint the origins and contradictions of the Iranian capital, and the rights of religious minorities and women. It showcases women who have played a leading role in various disciplines and sports but who all too often have simply become an element in the regime's propaganda. The volume presents a lively narrative with verses from the great Persian poets and a hefty dose of irony: as a way to laugh about complex issues and dismantle misleading stereotypes.

The present volume brings together translations of hitherto neglected texts from Asian philosophical traditions, along with critical essays dealing with the philosophical issues of translating these texts into Western languages. As the third volume in the "Asian Philosophical Texts" series, dedicated to making primary sources of Asian philosophies available to a wider audience in Western academia and beyond, this book includes a diverse range of primary sources written by a broad spectrum of thinkers from different historical periods and intellectual traditions, including India, China, Korea and Japan. The main theme of the volume is the concept of "discontents", focusing on the way different philosophical traditions of Asia enter into dialogue with each other, as well as their critical engagement with Western thought.

The right to rebel against an authoritarian power is part of liberal and democratic culture. As early as the late seventeenth century, John Locke theorised that if a state abuses its citizens, they have the right to revolt. Nowadays, information and communication technologies can help the early stages of revolt. However, at the same time they also seem to offer the threatened autocrats powerful tools. Failed revolutions that have unfolded in our digital age in countries such as Myanmar, Ukraine, Iran, Egypt, Hong Kong and Belarus, bring to light the great and often successful efforts of authoritarian regimes to use new technologies for surveillance, oppression, propaganda, censorship, and the suppression of fundamental rights. The risk of a drift towards despotism, from which even long-established democracies are not immune, prompts us to ask what skills, rules and institutions might help citizens to defend their freedom when it is under threat, including in the digital sphere.

The tradition of Kant's critical philosophy developed the concept of imagination in a rigorous and productive way. It also allows us to develop an aesthetic approach suitable to explaining and understanding the relationship between sensitivity and technology. In this book, Montani defends the reasons to place this concept in a paleo-anthropological framework, linking it to the imaginative practices that preceded and prepared the advent of articulated discourse. This event involved a profound reorganization of the technical performances that can be traced back to imagination and related internalization processes. Furthermore, the emergence of an articulated language inaugurated a singular story, that of the relationship between word and image. In this study, that story is followed through particular attention to developments in cinema and digital image formats.

The volume tries to offer a comparison between two philosophers who belong to two different philosophical traditions and who have thus been rarely discussed together: Karl Marx and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Despite these thinkers’ many distinctions, the contributions to the current volume try to reconstruct not only how the ‘second’ Wittgenstein was influenced by the Marxist tradition, but also – and above all – the theoretical affinities between the two philosophers. In this way, the book underlines the potential that Marx’s political thought holds for philosophers of language as well as the social implications of Wittgenstein’s thought and the political potential of some of his central topics, such as his critique of the private language argument and his theory of language games.

The ‘long 1960s’, beginning in the mid-1950s and continuing into the mid-1970s, was an epoch defined by social and political upheaval and an international scope that challenged established orders across the globe. The period demonstrated its full disruptive and transformative potential in both Italy and Japan. Both countries experienced an important recovery from the traumatic destruction of the Second World War and social disruption arising from this post-war generational change – even while they faced challenges in coming to terms with their national pasts and integrating into the post-war international order. These parallel contexts produced massive social and political movements, provoking intense reactions from established elites, and sparked pitched battles that shook both countries to their cores. This volume brings together eight historians from Italy and Japan to compare and contrast the long 1960s in each country, producing a new vision of shared history.

One hundred years after the birth of Pier Paolo Pasolini, his oeuvre might best be described as “une pensée”, as a meandering thought-provoking thought, to quote Jean-Luc Godard’s exceptional comment on Pasolini in Histoire(s) du cinéma. Pasolini scholarship has certainly increased in recent years, but mainly from the perspective of Italian Studies and with a particular focus on his poetry, prose and film. The proposed volume instead highlights the interest of his work for the history of twentieth-century philosophy. It therefore compiles key writings by philosophers who are relatively unknown even within the context of contemporary French and Italian thought. By collecting little known or newly translated essays from these philosophers, the volume aims to foster a contemporary discussion about the (in-)actuality of Pasolini’s work.

In this relatively short book, Johns, in the style of Derrida, looks over the absence or spectre of the signifier “dialectic” in both Martin Heidegger and Graham Harman’s work, arguing that such a negation of the term turns out to be more of an intentional repression than any passive act of neglection. Johns insists that such repression finds its way into their writing as an alternative interpretation of their core concepts altogether. Less a Hegelian critique of such thinkers and more a Heideggerian and Harmanian resuscitation of the dialectic in Hegel as a realist method capable of integration into contemporary philosophy, this book will be invaluable to anyone interested in the crossroads of contemporary strands of idealism, materialism and realism and the place of the dialectical method today.