This book brings together key essays from the career of social theorist John O'Neill, including his uncollected later writings, focusing on embodiment to explore the different ways in which the body trope informs visions of familial, economic, personal, and communal life.

Mark Featherstone is Senior Lecturer at Keele University, UK, and author of Tocqueville's Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Thought (2006) and Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, Globalisation (2017).

Thomas Kemple is Professor of Sociology at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and author of Reading Marx Writing: Marx, Melodrama, and the 'Grundrisse' (1995), Intellectual Work and the Spirit of Capitalism: Weber's Calling (2014), and Simmel (2018).

Editors' Introduction

Part 1: The Bio-Body

1. Foucault's Optics: The (In)vision of Mortality and Modernity

2. The Specular Body: Merleau-Ponty and Lacan on Infant Self and Other

3. Childhood and Embodiment

4. Infant Theory

Part 2: The Productive Body

5. The Disciplinary Society: From Weber to Foucault

6. Orphic Marxism

7. Televideo Ergo Sum: Some Hypotheses on the Specular Functions of the Media

8. Empire versus Empire: A Post-Communist Manifesto

Part 3: The Libidinal Body

9. Marcuse's Maternal Ethic: Myths of Narcissism and Maternalism in Utopian Critical Memory

10. Structure, Flow and Balance in Montaigne's 'Of Idleness'

11. Mecum Meditari: Descartes Demolishing Doubt, Building a Prayer

12. Psychoanalysis and Sociology: From Freudo-Marxism to Freudo-Feminism

Part 4: The Civic Body

13. Vico's Arborescence

14. Oh, My Others, There is No Other! Capital Culture, Class, and Hegelian Other-wiseness

15. Ecce Homo: The Political Theology of Good and Evil

16. The Circle and the Line: Kinship, Vanishment, and Globalization Narratives in a Rich/Poor World

Appendix A: Body Politics, Civic Schooling, and Alien-nation: An Interview with John O'Neill

Appendix B: Biographical Notes on John O'Neill, with an Autobiographical Postscript

Appendix C: Selected Works by John O'Neill