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Theory of the Alien: Astropolitics, Spacepower, and the Outside
Hardcover
Series: Routledge Innovations in Political Theory
General Political ScienceGeneral Sociology
Publisher Price: $233.99
ISBN13: 9781032893259
Publisher: Routledge
Published: Oct 29 2026
Pages: 248
Language: English
Theory of the Alien: Astropolitics, Spacepower, and the Outside develops a political theory of the Space Age organized around the conceptual figure of the alien, arguing that the constitution of outer space as an economic and warfighting domain transforms the categories through which we think politics and the human.
Staging critical encounters with Helmuth Plessner, Carl Schmitt, Hans Blumenberg, and Bernard Stiegler, the book defines the astropolitical as the condition in which politics exceeds its terrestrial horizon, then derives a tentacular theory of spacepower in which orbital infrastructures reconfigure territory, perception, and strategy. Reading the mythopoetics of spaceflight, the conceptual history of ufology, and the UAP security crisis as sites where political theory discloses itself as political anthropology, it directs attention back to the planetary conditions of human life. Because those conditions are mediated rather than given, the book develops a planetary mythotechnics: an account of how strategic myths (from Homer to Cordwainer Smith) and technical infrastructures render the planet available to political contestation. Ultimately, only a traversal of the Outside and encountering what is alien can enable the rediscovery of the human.
It will be essential reading for scholars and students in political theory, political geography, philosophical anthropology, science and technology studies, security studies, space policy, astroculture, and the environmental humanities, as well as readers interested in extraterrestrial life, UAP, and the politics of outer space.
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