The body, as Merleau-Ponty claims, brings existence “into being and actualizes it.” But, what’s at stake in arguing for a philosophy of the body—for (usually opposed) notions of subjectivity and objectivity, for the nature of knowledge, for sexuality ? How can we understand the experience of being in the world?

First enunciated in the demand for “Wages for Housework,” Social Reproduction Theory explodes the conventional economic distinction between “productive” and “unproductive” labor—between waged production for the market and the (often invisible, often feminized, often unpaid) work of biological, physical, and social reproduction—from sex and pregnancy to childcare, housework, and education, and beyond. How can we understand the centrality of socially reproductive labor to the perpetuation of the capitalist system?

Few contemporary intellectuals have generated enough interest in their work to achieve simultaneous fame and infamy, yet this distinction undoubtedly applies to Edward Said. In the aftermath of his monumental Orientalism (1978) and his outspoken advocacy on behalf of the Palestinian people, Said became a lightning rod within both academic and policy debates about multiculturalism, Euro-American exceptionalism, and the nature of American foreign policy. How, and why, do the questions that Said raised decades ago about culture, power, aesthetics, identity, and liberation continue to reverberate today?

How did the promises of the Soviet project, particularly in relation to the emancipation of women, peasants, workers, and colonial subjects globally, change or reverse over time? Were there turning points in the Soviet Union’s radical political trajectory, and what can be salvaged from Soviet history as an example for alternative futures?

While the external events of her life were few, its internal events were as varied and dramatic as the age in which she became a poet. In her poems are the chill of mortality, the blaze of unruly passions, a menagerie of animals, grief, suffering, ecstasy, paradoxes of intellect, emotion, and form, pleasure, pain, power, time, and defiance. How do we read Dickinson’s poetry? And how do we read her myth?