Thorsten Botz-Bornstein is Professor of philosophy at the Gulf University in Kuwait. He is the author of Place and Dream: Japan and the Virtual (2004); Films and Dreams: Tarkovsky, Sokurov, Bergman, Kubrik, Wong Kar-wai (2007); La Chine contre l’Amérique. Culture sans civilisation contre civilisation sans culture? (2012); Vasily Sesemann: Experience, Formalism and the Question of Being (2006); Aesthetics and Politics of Space in Russia and Japan (2009); The Cool-Kawaii: Afro-Japanese Aesthetics and New World Modernity (2010); The Veil in Kuwait: Gender, Fashion, Identity (with Noreen Abdullah-Khan, 2014); Transcultural Architecture: Limits and Opportunities of Critical Regionalism (2015). Veils, Nudity, Tattoos: the New Feminine Aesthetics (Lexington 2014); Virtual Reality: The Last Human Narrative? (2015); Organic Cinema: Film, Architecture, and the Work of Béla Tarr (2017). The New Aesthetics of Deculturation: Neoliberalism, Fundamentalism, Kitsch (9 Bloomsbury, 2018). The Political Aesthetics of ISIS and Italian Futurism (Lexington, 2018).