Sets out an innovative agenda for the potential applications of worldlessness in practical philosophy Roland Vegso opens up a new debate in favour of abandoning the very idea of the world in both philosophy and politics. Opening with a reconsideration of the Heideggerian critique of worldlessness, he goes on to trace the overlooked history of this argument in the works of Hannah Arendt, Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou. This critical genealogy shows that the post-Heideggerian critique of the phenomenological tradition remained limited by its unquestioning investment in the category of the 'world'. As a way out of this historical predicament, Vegso encourages us to create affirmative definitions of worldlessness. About the Author: Roland Vegso is Associate Professor of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the author of The Naked Communist: Cold War Modernism and the Politics of Popular Culture (Fordham University Press, 2013). He is co-editor of Life After Literature: Constructions of Life in Literature and Theory (Springer, forthcoming). | 
