From the books and heretics incinerated on the pyres of the Inquisition to self-immolations at protest rallies, from the mass burning of global warming to the melting pot of races, from the image of revolutionary sparks ready to ignite the spirits of the oppressed to the car bombings of the Middle East, fire turns out to be the sine qua non of politics.

Pyropolitics in a World on Fire aims to create a semantic-discursive field that attracts to itself, like a magnet, the cases in which fires, flames, sparks, immolations, incinerations and burnings have made their appearance in political theories and practices. Based on classical political theory, theology, philosophy, literature and cinema, as well as on an analysis of current events, Michael Marder argues that geopolitics, or the politics of the Earth, has always had an unstable, at once dark and blinding underside: pyropolitics, or the politics of fire. If this dark double of geopolitics increasingly dictates the rules of the game today, it is crucial to learn to speak its language, discern its manifestations and project where our burning world is heading.