The chapter provides an introduction to the relationship between politics and semiotics, to Cognitive CDA as a framework for studying politics and semiotics, and to shifts in political performance and media landscapes which demand a multimodal approach to political discourse analysis. It starts by highlighting the symbolic nature of politics and the discursive means by which politics is primarily performed. The historical development of Cognitive CDA is described. The practical aims, theoretical commitments and methodological practices of Cognitive CDA are also discussed. The central position of the media in communicating politics is considered alongside the relationship between political and media institutions. Changes brought about by the advent of the internet and digital social media are discussed with a focus on the new genres of political discourse that have emerged as a result and on the more participatory forms of politics that are potentially afforded. The chapter discusses the rise of right-wing populism that has coincided with changes to the media landscape and the shifts in communicative style by which it is marked.

The Introduction reviews the widely shared understanding of Schopenhauer as an apolitical thinker. It then articulates the challenge to this view. Schopenhauer, this book argues, defined politics as the rational management of perpetual human strife. The Introduction lays out the two main steps for recovering the full scope of Schopenhauer’s political thought. First, his attitude to politics must be historically contextualized. Against the backdrop of his era and the political ideas of other thinkers, the individual profile and polemical significance of Schopenhauer’s conception of politics come into view more clearly. Second, his textually dispersed political ideas must be assembled into a recognizable whole. Many of Schopenhauer’s reflections on political skills, values, ideologies, and regimes can be found in sections that do not explicitly deal with politics, and his core conception of politics becomes visible through a series of contrasts between politics and religion, politics and morality, and politics and sociability.

This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s critical engagement with thinkers from his own era. It notes that Schopenhauer often focused his scrutiny of Kant and Hegel on their political arguments. In the former case, Schopenhauer claimed that Kant’s moral theory was in fact a concealed political theory. In the latter case, he claimed that Hegel’s philosophy of the state conflated politics, religion, and morality for the purpose of serving the Prussian state. The chapter concludes that Schopenhauer’s reputation as an apolitical thinker is misleading since his elaborate criticisms of Kant and Hegel are partly generated by his conception of politics. It also argues that Schopenhauer’s demystifying critique of statehood in German Idealism places him in a position similar to the radical Young Hegelians, including the early Marx. Yet while the young Marx attacked the bourgeois vision of state rule over a market society composed of atomized, competitive individuals, Schopenhauer affirmed it.

“Eusynoptos” takes its title from the Aristotelian notion of εὐσύνοπτος: “easily taken in at a glance.” In the Politics, Aristotle maintains that the size of a city is strictly delimited by the number of citizens that can be visually comprehended at a glance. But what if a machine were to augment the sensory capacities of humans? Could a political entity then be expanded beyond its natural limits? Confronting these questions in his film theory, Walter Benjamin modernizes eusynoptos by showing how the movie camera records large masses of individuals in a manner impossible for the naked eye. Informed by Benjamin’s idiosyncratic Marxism, the coda examines the reception of Nazi propaganda films in the United States in order to develop a critical theory of collective spectatorship that promotes a rational politics, thereby pressing back on an irrationalist tradition in aesthetics leading from Schelling and Schopenhauer through Nietzsche to fascism.

The conclusion reviews Schopenhauer’s conception of politics as the management of human strife. For Schopenhauer, politics was both indispensable and insufficient: rational political coordination can prevent society from descending into a chaos of mutual aggression, but because rationality itself is limited and metaphysically subordinate, it cannot redeem a fundamentally broken world. Schopenhauer’s attitudes – a sincere sensitivity to human and animal suffering, an uncompromising commitment to frank philosophizing, but also a fearful antidemocratic and anti-emancipatory view of society – place him outside the major ideologies of the modern age, such as liberalism, libertarianism, progressivism, and conservatism.

This chapter reconstructs Schopenhauer’s complex discussion of human sociability. Schopenhauer thought that agents in the domains of politics and morality cannot conceive of human togetherness. For him, the areas of politics and morality correspond to the exercise of egoism and the spontaneous feeling of compassion, respectively. But he added that egoism is rooted in a form of practical solipsism, and compassion is rooted in a metaphysical insight into the inessential nature of individuals. It follows that neither egoistic nor compassionate individuals ultimately care about others as others. Yet Schopenhauer supplemented these treatments of others as reducible with his discussion of sociability. His analysis of social interaction exemplified by conversations, games, and other diversions includes accounts of interpersonal harmony and friction among individuals who remain distinct from one another. Even though Schopenhauer rejected sociable interaction as superficial and embraced misanthropy, his reflections on sociability contain a conception of human community.

Chapter 5 argues that the increasing number of female servants and resulting visibility of women at court had political ramifications. By exploring the more active roles played by ladies and damsels in political events of the realm, I demonstrate how female courtiers found ways to access privilege for themselves, their families, and other associates through intercession. For example, they dramatically assisted Isabella’s coup against her husband Edward II and courageously stood by Catherine of Aragon during her divorce crisis. On the other hand, when national sentiment turned xenophobic, a queen’s foreign attendants faced scorn, retribution, and even banishment during periods of conflict. Some female attendants faced misogynistic attitudes that attacked their perceived propensity toward immodest sexuality, greed, and darker forces like witchcraft and poisoning. This role of women at court – apart from queens and particularly notorious examples like Edward III’s mistress Alice Perrers – has been neglected in many discussions of medieval court politics and patronage. I contend that the hostility experienced by some female courters highlights how medieval contemporaries themselves recognized women’s potential access to insider information about monarchs and the favors that could be bestowed to their kin, friends, and associates.

Chapter 10, A world political problem (June 11 - June 16). This chapter recounts the endgame of the Austrian crisis, while instability spreads to Germany. Norman comes to realize that in reality there is not much the central banks can do, since the real issue is "a world political problem" going all the way back to the Versaille Peace Agreement of 1919, the German war reparations and the allied’s war debts. The International Creditors Committee negotiate in Vienna with the Credit Anstalt and the Austrian government and at the very last minute they succeed in getting guarantee for their deposits, while promising to leave them for at least two years. At the same time, on June 16, negotiations with French bankers over the Austrian bond loans fails, and the Bank of England singlehandedly steps in with a bridge credit to the government. Together, the loan and the standstill agreement stops the Austrian crisis, at least for a while.

This introductory note provides an overview of the book’s original and timely framework with which to debunk Orientalism in how we read (Turkey’s) political history and present. The main argument is that political contestation is driven by shifting alliances for and against a more pluralistic society, not by forever polarized camps.

Chapter 8 focuses on the popular musical competition Primus Guma Guma Super Star. It pays particular attention to local debates about the merits of both ‘playback’ – i.e. lip-synched – and ‘live’ performance, and what they reveal about the wider relationship between the state and Rwandan youth. The chapter argues that the competition attempted to create a post-genocide celebrity subject who was required to ‘playback’ government ideology through both words and actions. However, audiences were not satisfied with these playback performances and insisted instead that popular artists should be able to perform live. These debates indexed wider anxieties about young people’s ability to access global networks – perceived to be the way to wealth and success – and called into question who was and who was not included in the government’s development vision.

Chapter 4 examines in detail a Christian crusade called Rwanda Shima Imana or Rwanda Thanksgiving Day. It explores the controversies that arose from it, in particular a conflict between a well-known Pentecostal pastor and the Catholic singer Kizito Mihigo. The conflict was in part about power: who has the right, ability, and authority to interpret the Bible and, by extension, Rwanda’s history and collective memory. This chapter also complicates the process of transformation, as some hearts were considered unable to transform, a situation which was often related to ethnic identity.

This chapter grapples with a major tension in interdisciplinary Turkish/Middle Eastern area studies, comparative politics, and the study of religion and politics: namely, how to deal with the persistence of Orientalist explanations despite their explanatory poverty. It does so via an intellectual history, identifying three “waves” or logics via which analysts and practitioners have sought to reckon with Orientalist binaries and their limitations. The chapter argues that today, a third wave within which this project is situated, seeks to dispense with Orientalism and Occidentalism alike toward making clear-eyed sense of the complex, interacting forces that shape politics in Muslim-majority countries, like anywhere else.

Chapter 7 explores how the logic of UN mediation as an art produces masculinities, particularly the subjects of ‘the mediator’, ‘conflict parties’, and ‘youths’. The first part examines the narrative representations of ‘the mediator’ as a political man who should show good judgement, have excellent interpersonal skills, and be spatially mobile. ‘The mediator’ has to be empathetic and good at listening – feminised traits that operate as capital for male mediators, but less so for women. In addition, the selection process for mediators draws from the masculinised professions of diplomacy and politics and the informal, male-dominated networks of diplomats at the UN. This chapter presents descriptive findings on the gender and career backgrounds of senior UN mediators. The second part of the chapter examines representations of local men. ‘Local men’ – often equivalent to the ‘conflict parties’ – function as the constitutive outside of ‘the mediator’. ‘Conflict parties’ are represented as emotional, traditional, and irrational, recalling colonial constructions of the ‘other’. Meanwhile, male ‘youths’ appear not as political agents, but as vectors of senseless violence. Thus, a colonial hierarchy of masculinities exists in which local men are subordinate to the mediator.

The chapter re-examines the notorious Cade scenes of 2 Henry VI in light of widespread political protests across the globe. The bloody chaos of Cade’s failed popular uprising contains within it an important flash – or counter-memory – for the political imagination. First, the popular movement creates a break with the oppressive social order by revealing the systematic silencing and oppression of the commons. It makes the invisible visible. Second, the mass movement makes a positive demand for justice that differentiates the people from the State. Examining the rebels’ “Edenic egalitarianism”, the chapter draws on the recent work of Chris Fitter, Lorna Hutson, and Annabel Patterson in reassessing Shakespeare’s representation of popular politics. However, the chapter critiques the critical tendency to concentrate on what is “useful” or “effective” at the level of plot. It instead turns to imagination as the key to thinking Shakespeare’s popular politics. The force of the “people” is not located in one figure, be it Cade or Salisbury, but is dispersed across the drama. The spirit of the “in-common”, in all its absurdity and impossibility, lives on as a form of negative, or spectral, thinking and dramaturgy. The audience is the ultimate carrier and agent of this political imagination.

Julius Caesar presents the theatrical creation of “the spirit of Caesar”. The chapter turns to Hobbes to help articulate how Shakespeare captures the role of the popular imaginary in the generation of the sovereign spirit, the Leviathan that subsumes the raucous multitude. Negation is here central. First, the spirit of Caesar is raised in and through his sacrificial death. Second, we see the power of the people (deciding Rome’s fate) as it is not seen, as it is lost, as it is given away to Antony’s manipulative theatricality and all the future Caesars. The play’s conclusion also reveals what haunts monarchical sovereignty: “a man”. Brutus is negated, but the negation, like Caesar’s before him, raises him to spiritual status. The spirit of Brutus becomes an imaginary rival to the victorious spirit of Caesar. It raises a haunting republican “what if”, a spectral, negative carrier of justice or the common good. Brutus becomes our spirit in the second circle of the audience. The audience is constituted as an alternate crowd, an overarching seat of judgment, able to see the potentially radical implications of this sceptical play: that supposedly divinely ordained sovereignty is an imaginative creation of the theatrical crowd.