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This essay outlines the philosophical and the psychoanalytic work that makes Anti-Oedipus by Deleuze and Guattari one of the most important books works of the last 50 years. The main issues are the notion of desire in Marx and Freud, schizoanalysis as an alternative to Freudian psychoanalysis, and the psyche's emergence as a political, rather than psychological concept.

From Kant to postmodernism the idea of the sublime was always tied with questions of ethics and politics. Kant saw the sublime as a proof that rationality triumphs over nature, validating law and judgement through the subjective experience of pleasure and pain. Lyotard saw in the sublime a symptom of a crisis at which rationality reaches its limit, and subjectivity is confronted with its own collapse. As this chapter will show, both these approaches are inadequate to account for the sublime in 21st century. The failure of liberal democracy and the rise of populist and fascist ideologies calls for a re-evaluation of the sublime as the dissolution of the symbolic order and the coming face to face with the alternative reality of the death drive. This chapter names this reality 'The Diogenes Complex', after the homeless beggar who made his form of existence the manifestation of his philosophical creed. Through his performative actions Diogenes has shown that reality is sublime because it is irreconcilable with rational logic and warned against the futility of trying to act rationally in irrational times.

Both photography and philosophy are invested in light as a form of intelligence, but while representation is central to photography as a recording practice, for Heidegger it is fundamental to the alienation of human beings from the world, and for Deleuze it is the foundation of political conservatism. This chapter brings together these critiques of representation and demonstrates that photography is both the visual form of Western metaphysics and the means for overcoming the boundaries imposed by the representational paradigm. It is argued that far from being rooted in 'objectivity', photography is usually interpreted through a philosophical framework that imposes upon it the concomitant ideologies of subjectivity and realism. It further contends that when photography is liberated from the totalizing effects of representation it begins to offer a fractured and fragmented 'image' of the interface between current technical, social and cultural norms.

It is strange to live at a time when political liberalism and democracy are seeking new and more imaginative ways of damaging and even destroying themselves. Key preoccupations of liberalism are being employed specifically to undermine and discredit cultural pluralism and to advance new forms of nationalism and racism aimed at repressing the very 'other' that is the focus and the concern of progressive politics. One by one all of the staples of liberalism – such as class, gender, sexuality, race, faith, the body, diversity and identity – are being weaponised not to advance inclusion and tolerance but in order to promote the interests of specific groups, whether these are white supremacists, misogynistic gamers, autocratic nationalists or pro-life activists. In this hall of mirrors, the 'other' is no longer the LGBTQ, the black, or the woman, rather it is the defender of white masculinity, the protester against the demolition of confederate statues, and the born again Evangelical Christian.

In what follows I wish to argue that in the twenty-first century the importance of photography is not in freezing moments in time, nor in portraying situations and individual points of view, but in exposing the inherent contradictions of structures that take representation as their ground. As representation is one of the building blocks of our culture, from the political order (representational democracy), to economics (money represents assets and labor) to science (theories and laws represent real-world systems), photography provides an insight into its abyssal paradoxes, precisely because it configures the very space of the visual. Photography is fundamental to the transition from the industrial to the information age because it allows to think about power not as the reactive logic of ideology, but as the fractal and self-referential process by which information and knowledge are produced, distributed and utilized. For this reason, the question for this chapter is not how individuals use images but how individuality is produced by the photographic image. The challenge therefore is not to describe photography as a representation of politics, but to suggest that representation is a force that molds and configures political action. Fractal photography then becomes a means to radicalize politics by making available to the gaze the dynamic techno-political forces that shape the world.

M. Confino and D. Rubinstein, Kropotkin as scientist. Twenty-five unpublished letters front Peter Kropotkin to Marie Goldsmith, 27 July 1901-9 July 1915.
Peter Kropotkin is remembered as the greatest anarchist theoretician of his generation, as a social thinker, and a prolific writer. But in addition to these achievements, he had also a deep interest in science (originating probably from the "scientist" ethos of the 1860's). The fields which attracted him most were, first geology, then biology and genetics.
Using twenty-five unpublished letters of his to Marie Goldsmith, a fellow anarchist and a professional biologist at the Sorbonne, this study describes and analyses Kropotkin's scientific contribution, and his involvement in the great debates in the early twentieth century: nature versus nurture, inherited versus acquired characteristics, role of the environment, mutations, plasticity of animal behavior, mutual aid in and among the species, social Darwinism... A genuine polymath, Kropotkin wrote with skill and intuition on these fundamental issues, some of which are still on the agenda of contemporary science and of social theory.