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Lucid and hallucinatory, this work is like a journey into the undead, affect-ridden material unconscious of modernity. --Anselm Franke Radical Philosophy The particular history being expounded here provides another perspective on Leslie(1)s other histories such as those explored in Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry. . . . A particular clandestine story is being told, with fairy-tale intrigue and political urgency, because this story has hitherto been glossed over or forgotten: a story about German fascism and its postwar industrial legacy; about nature and the culture industry; a critique of the division of labor between artists and scientists. . . . Leslie's book itself appears as a liquid crystalline incarnation with abstract sketches . . . preceding the flowing, rangy, roaming prose of her individual chapters. Just as liquid crystals pervade aspects of life, they inhere too in the prose form of Leslie's liquid crystalline text. -- Radical Philosophy Leslie drags us back to the screen, to the discovery of this uncomfortably contradictory state of matter, and to the vast range of implications it has for the way we imagine the materiality and abstraction of our world, from financial liquidity to Superman's icy Fortress of Solitude. She raises the tantalizing prospect that liquid crystals are key not only to images but to perception and to our worldview: the governing metaphor through which we comprehend the rival claims of dialectics and flow. Erudite, lucid, enthralling, Leslie's eclectically logical investigations transform our understanding of the historical generation of ideas and ways of thinking. --Sean Cubitt, Goldsmiths, University of London Radical Philosophy

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Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics in the School of English and Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London. She is the author of Walter Benjamin: Overpowering Conformism (2000), Hollywood Flatlands: Critical Theory, Animation and the Avant-garde (2002) Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (Reaktion, 2005), and the editor and translator of On Photography by Walter Benjamin (Reaktion, 2015).

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