Theory of the Alien Astropolitics, Spacepower, and the Outside

Introduction: The great pain of space  Part 1: Extraterrestrial Spacial Order  Chapter 1. The concept of the astropolitical: spatiality, Carl Schmitt, and downwing theory  Chapter 2. Nomos of the sky: geopolitics, territorialization, and tentacular spacepower  Part 2: Politics of the Alien  Chapter 3. Archaeologies of the Space Age: the astronaut and the UFO  Chapter 4. Theory of the alien: political anthropology, Helmuth Plessner, and the UAP security crisis  Part 3: Progress or Rediscovery? Planetary Crisis and Beyond  Chapter 5. Nostos of the sky: outsideness and planetary mythotechnics  Conclusion: Second sailings

Biography

Michael Uhall is a political theorist at Indiana University East. His research spans political ecology, critical geography, philosophical anthropology, the philosophy of technology, intelligence and security studies, and film and literary criticism. His work has appeared with Bloomsbury and Stanford University Press, in Contemporary Political Theory, Nature and Culture, Critical Horizons, and Configurations, and in public-facing venues such as 3:AM Magazine, Ancillary Review of Books, Extrapolation, Gothic Nature, Limina, Lovecraft Annual, Radical Philosophy, and Vault of Culture.

Michael Uhall has written an intelligent, sophisticated and timely book. It asks fundamental questions about what it means to be human in the Space Age, and how humans can make sense of existing in space as a planetary species, which is both a terrifyingly new and yet also innate human challenge. As Uhall states, “the human was never exhausted by the terrestrial enclosure in which it first appeared.” The kaleidoscopic book engages with different audiences and weaves in the many facets in which the transformational encounter with space and its emanations of alienness will be shaping the astropolitical development of humanity.

Professor Michael Bohlander, Chair in Global Law and SETI Policy, Durham University, UK

Michael Uhall’s Theory of the Alien makes a couple of essential arguments for our times. First, if we are to take seriously that human identity can only be defined in relation to the non-human, then a better understanding of our humanity should result from extending our understanding of the non-human to the extraterrestrial. Second, drawing on Helmuth Plessner’s idea of humanity’s ‘eccentric positionality’, Uhall argues that a heightened awareness of our ‘outlier’ status, not only in spatial but also cognitive terms, can be leveraged into a kind of ‘transcendental’ perspective that would enable us to deal with any extraterrestrials, and quite possibly with the alien human in our midst. The literatures of many different fields – ranging from political theory to science fiction – are exploited to drive home these arguments in ways that should prove compelling to a wide range of readers. 

Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology, University of Warwick, UK

This is a daring work of political anthropology revealing an unexpected and delightful coherence to our fragmented cultural perceptions and philosophic understandings of Outer Space.  Michael Uhall succeeds in constructing a subject matter field from material heretofore treated as radically incompatible: astropolitics and ufology.  The result confirms that encounters with the extraterrestrial will not make us less but instead more human, a species consciously transforming itself by undertaking challenges without precedent. 

John Hickman, Professor Emeritus, Berry College, USA

Uhall's book is a fun, challenging, and deeply provocative exploration of how the alien, in the epoch of planetary history, refigures our sense of territory, technology, and the human. 

Brad Tabas, Associate Professor, ENSTA, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, France

Michael Uhall’s Theory of the Alien explores the “incomprehensibly remote and unbearably intimate domain” of the extraterrestrial.  Venturing a theoretical “overview effect,” Uhall re-views worldly politics from an off-world perspective and reconceives the human against the background of the alien. Politically, anthropologically, and philosophically learned, original, and provocative, Theory of the Alien charts the unsettling implications of its focal insight that “We cannot learn how to inhabit this planet adequately by turning away from the sky.

Bryan Sentes, Dawson College, Canada

I don't always agree with conclusions Michael Uhall reaches in this book, but the questions--oh, the questions!--are spectacular. Uhall dares to go with political thought where very few indeed dare to fly. This book is well worth reading and discussing.

Ned O'Gorman, Professor, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA