Racism, collective violence, sickness, environmental catastrophe, body obsession, greed, and accelerated life concern everyone. In this book, however, they are not viewed as social problems to be solved by technical experts. Instead, they are viewed as products of the joint transference of aspects of ourselves onto objects independent of ourselves. More specifically, they emerge from conviction there is something "out there" that can complete us, secure us, fill us, stabilize us, or in some other way enable us to escape from or deny our "lack": our existential precariousness or death.

Kevin Aho is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Communication and Philosophy at Florida Gulf Coast University. He is the author of Existentialism: An Introduction (Polity, 2014), Heidegger's Neglect of the Body (SUNY Press, 2009), and co-author of Body Matters: A Phenomenology of Sickness, Illness, and Disease (Lexington Books, 2008).