Get Free Shipping on orders over $79
Existential Liberation Critique - A. Shahid Stover

Existential Liberation Critique

By: A. Shahid Stover

Paperback | 11 August 2026

At a Glance

Paperback


$21.95

or 4 interest-free payments of $5.49 with

Ships in 5 to 7 business days

Existential Liberation Critique is an insurgent reckoning of the Black radical imagination that seizes discursive responsibility for the task of interrogating the Real and enunciating Revolt through a philosophical commitment to reconstitute the fundamental question of the meaning of human 'being' in dynamic correlation with emancipatory imperatives towards socio-historical struggles of human liberation against Empire. Rather than settle for an analytic abdication to the normative gaze of modernity, Existential Liberation Critique communicates a compelling lived experience of epistemic rupture in philosophical dialogue with the anti-slavery dialectic of Frederick Douglass, the existential Marxism of Jean-Paul Sartre and the decolonial phenomenology of Frantz Fanon.

What can the Revolt of human 'being' against chattel slavery tell us about the human condition? What does it mean to be human? And, how does this question of the meaning of human 'being' speak to socio-historical imperatives of human liberation against established structures of power in our contemporary world that are inscribed with an originary violence of chattel slavery, and thus systematically disavow ethical responsibility and disallow human consideration when confronted with the assertion of Black subjectivity-as-human 'being'?

Existential Liberation Critique brings vital questions to the fore by the very staunchness of Stover's spiritual refusal to discursively retreat from the lived cost of sustained insurgent philosophical engagement. Existential liberation critique is thus communicated as an unrestrained interpretive method that develops conceptually out of the emancipatory trajectory of Stover's philosophical intentionality, in particular, by means of the concentrated focus and discursive force Black radical thought requires to interrogate the Real and enunciate Revolt against the normative gaze of western imperialist power.

Industry Reviews

"an outlaw philosopher baad@ss from New York's radical Black leftist intellectual underground."

-Daryle Lamont Jenkins, anti-fascist organizer and founder of ONE PEOPLE'S PROJECT.

"what is here presents a variety of new avenues for thinking about existence and liberation that could only possibly be understood by an engaged reader willing to think with the text."

-Sartre Studies International

"For around a decade, A. Shahid Stover has been building a precise philosophical apparatus with the materials of Black Radicalism, Existentialism, and their intersection. Existential Liberation Critique is the next entry in his development of this apparatus, an invigorating and necessary work of what he calls "insurgent philosophy". Opposing Hegel's master/slave dialectic with an anti-slavery dialectic grounded in the work of Frederick Douglass, Stover simultaneously opposes abstract ontology with a rigorous socio-ontology from which he constructs a precise lexicon. In a time when social theory has dismissed notions of being and subjectivity to the margins of thought, Existential Liberation Critique demonstrates why such notions are not only important but in fact demonstrate universality through the singularity of lived Black experience. Arguing for "the radical ontological freedom of human 'being' as the basis of emancipatory praxis," Stover demonstrates that the struggle to be, as disclosed by Black liberation struggle, reveals the meaning of the human condition itself."

- J. Moufawad-Paul, author of Being Subjects: Preliminary Materials of the Person (2024), Demarcation and Demystification: Philosophy and its Limits (2019), Continuity and Rupture: Philosophy in the Maoist Terrain (2016) and The Communist Necessity (2014).

More in Philosophy

Beginning to Live : The Art of Existential Freedom - Emmy van Deurzen
How Lucky Am I : A Skeleton's Guide to Living Your Best Life - Christian Watson
Winnie-the-Pooh : The Little Book of Wisdom - A. A. Milne

RRP $19.99

$14.99

25%
OFF
The I Ching or Book of Changes : Bollingen Series - Cary F. Baynes

RRP $39.99

$23.99

40%
OFF
Lunacy : Ten False Promises of the New Space Age - Ben Bramble

RRP $34.99

$21.75

38%
OFF
On the Shortness of Life : The Stoic Classic - Lucius Annaeus Seneca

RRP $24.95

$21.75

13%
OFF
Wabi Sabi : Japanese Wisdom for a Perfectly Imperfect Life - Beth Kempton
12 Rules for Life : Antidote to Chaos - Jordan B. Peterson

RRP $26.99

$22.99

15%
OFF
The Wisdom Of Insecurity : A Message for an Age of Anxiety - Alan W Watts
The Golden Road : How Ancient India Transformed the World - William Dalrymple
The Beginning Comes After the End : Notes on a World of Change - Rebecca Solnit
The Creative Act : A Way of Being - Rick Rubin

RRP $55.00

$42.75

22%
OFF
Monsters : What Do We Do with Great Art by Bad People? - Claire Dederer
Nineteen Eighty-Four : Collins Classics - George Orwell

RRP $9.99

$8.99

10%
OFF
Man's Search For Meaning - Viktor E Frankl

RRP $16.99

$14.75

13%
OFF
Ikigai : The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life - Hector Garcia
Start With Why : How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action - Simon Sinek
First Knowledges Politics : Philosophical Ordering by Country - Morgan James Brigg