Literary theory Books

Book Synopsis"Ten times, an elderly grey-haired man gets up on the stage. Ten times puffing and sighing. Ten times slowly tracing out strange multi-coloured arabesques that interweave, curling with the meanders of his speech, by turns fluid and uneasy. A whole crowd looks on, transfixed by this enigma-made-man, absorbing the ipse dixit and anticipating some illumination that is taking its time to appear.Non lucet. It’s shady in here, and the Théodores go hunting for their matches. Still, they say, cuicumque in sua arte perito credendum est, whosoever is expert in his art is to be lent credence. At what point is a person mad? The master himself poses the question.That was back in the day. Those were the mysteries of Paris forty years hence.A Dante clasping Virgil’s hand to be led through the circles of the Inferno, Lacan took the hand of James Joyce, the unreadable Irishman, and, in the wake of this slender Commander of the Faithless, made with heavy and faltering step onto the incandescent zone where symptomatic women and ravaging men burn and writhe.An equivocal troupe was in the struggling audience: his son-in-law; a dishevelled writer, young and just as unreadable back then; two dialoguing mathematicians; and a professor from Lyon vouching for the seriousness of the whole affair. A discreet Pasiphaë was being put to work backstage.Smirk then, my good fellows! Be my guest. Make fun of it all! That’s what our comic illusion is for. That way, you shall know nothing of what is happening right before your very eyes: the most carefully considered, the most lucid, and the most intrepid calling into question of the art that Freud invented, better known under its pseudonym: psychoanalysis."—Jacques-Alain MillerTable of ContentsTHE SPIRIT OF THE NODES I. On the logical use of the sinthome, or Freud with Joyce II. On what makes a hole in the real III. On the knot as the subject’s support THE JOYCE TRAIL IV. Joyce and the fox riddle V. Was Joyce mad? VI. Joyce and imposed words THE INVENTION OF THE REAL VII. On a fallace that vouches for the real VIII. On sens, sex and the real IX. From the unconscious to the real BY WAY OF CONCLUSION X. The writing of the Ego Note APPENDICES Joyce the Symptom, by Jacques Lacan Presentation at Lacan’s Seminar, by Jacques Aubert Reading notes, by Jacques Aubert A note threaded stitch by stitch, by Jacques-Alain Miller Translator’s endnotes Index

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Book SynopsisAmorous jealousy is not a monster, as Shakespeare's venomous Iago claims. It is neither prickly and bitter fancy nor a cruel and mean passion, nor yet a symptom of feeble self-esteem. All those who have experienced its wounds are well aware that it is not callous, nasty, delusional and ridiculous. It is just painful. Yet for centuries moralists have poured scorn and contempt on a feeling that, in their view, we should fight in every possible way. It is allegedly a disease to be treated, a moral vice to be eradicated, an ugly, pre-modern, illiberal, proprietary emotion to be overcome. Above all, no one should ever admit to being jealous. So should we silence this embarrassing sentiment? Or should we, like the heroines of Greek tragedy, see it as a fundamental human demand for reciprocity in love? By examining its cultural history from the ancient Greeks to La Rochefoucauld, Hobbes, Kant, Stendhal, Freud, Beauvoir, Sartre and Lacan, this book demonstrates how jealousy, far from being a 'green-eyed' fiend, reveals the intense and apprehensive nature of all erotic love, which is the desire to be desired. We should never be ashamed to love.Trade Review"Forget self-help books. Sissa rescues jealousy from the moralists, the philosophers, and an industry devoted to amplifying shame in the guise of therapy with her passionate and altogether compelling defense of erotic anger as the lifeblood of amorous relationships. Giving us much more than a history of jealousy, Sissa enlarges the lover's discourse with her capacious intelligence."Brooke Holmes, Princeton University"an eloquent cri de coeur by a woman who…has shaken off the long Western tradition that repressed women’s jealousy and shamed the jealous."Times Literary SupplementTable of Contents Introduction. I am beside myself with anger É Chapter 1. Being Medea Chapter 2. A forbidden passion Chapter 3. Sexual objects and open couples Chapter 4. The despair of not being loved Chapter 5. Art of love, art of jealousy Conclusion. Confessing the unconfessable Notes Index

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Book SynopsisAmorous jealousy is not a monster, as Shakespeare's venomous Iago claims. It is neither prickly and bitter fancy nor a cruel and mean passion, nor yet a symptom of feeble self-esteem. All those who have experienced its wounds are well aware that it is not callous, nasty, delusional and ridiculous. It is just painful. Yet for centuries moralists have poured scorn and contempt on a feeling that, in their view, we should fight in every possible way. It is allegedly a disease to be treated, a moral vice to be eradicated, an ugly, pre-modern, illiberal, proprietary emotion to be overcome. Above all, no one should ever admit to being jealous. So should we silence this embarrassing sentiment? Or should we, like the heroines of Greek tragedy, see it as a fundamental human demand for reciprocity in love? By examining its cultural history from the ancient Greeks to La Rochefoucauld, Hobbes, Kant, Stendhal, Freud, Beauvoir, Sartre and Lacan, this book demonstrates how jealousy, far from being a 'green-eyed' fiend, reveals the intense and apprehensive nature of all erotic love, which is the desire to be desired. We should never be ashamed to love.Trade Review"Forget self-help books. Sissa rescues jealousy from the moralists, the philosophers, and an industry devoted to amplifying shame in the guise of therapy with her passionate and altogether compelling defense of erotic anger as the lifeblood of amorous relationships. Giving us much more than a history of jealousy, Sissa enlarges the lover’s discourse with her capacious intelligence."Brooke Holmes, Princeton University"an eloquent cri de coeur by a woman who…has shaken off the long Western tradition that repressed women’s jealousy and shamed the jealous."Times Literary SupplementTable of Contents Introduction. I am beside myself with anger É Chapter 1. Being Medea Chapter 2. A forbidden passion Chapter 3. Sexual objects and open couples Chapter 4. The despair of not being loved Chapter 5. Art of love, art of jealousy Conclusion. Confessing the unconfessable Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn Roland Barthes's eyes, Philippe Sollers embodied the figure of the contemporary writer forever seeking something new. Thirty-six years after Barthes produced his study Sollers Writer, Sollers has written a book on the man who was his friend and who shared with him a total faith in literature as a force of invention and discovery, as a resource and an encyclopaedia.They met regularly, exchanged many letters and fought many battles together, against every kind of academicism, every political and ideological regression. Barthes shed light on Sollers's work in a series of articles that are still of great relevance today. Sollers, in turn, assumed the role of Barthes's publisher at Le Seuil from the publication of his Critical Essays in 1964, and was left deeply shocked and saddened by Barthes's death in 1980. In short, they were very close to each other, despite their differences, and Sollers expresses here what this meant at the time and what it continues to represent, highlighting the themes that sustained their friendship.The book also contains some thirty letters from Barthes to Sollers, completing our image of one of the most extraordinary partnerships in French literary life.Trade Review"These traces of an elusive life – a selection of letters by Roland Barthes, affectionate memories of him, and above all an evocative sketch of the precise place he occupied in a complex and combative intellectual history – add up to a compelling portrait of a much missed writer."—Michael Wood, Princeton University"This engaging book will give great pleasure to fans of both Sollers and Barthes. Sollers writes movingly about his long-term friendship with Barthes in a way that is full of human interest – anecdotal, autobiographical, literary, and political. The letters from Barthes to Sollers are delightful, especially the inclusion of copies of the handwritten letters. The increasing intimacy of their friendship, always expressed via the deeply respectful French vous form, will fascinate lovers of the epistolary form as well as scholars and students of Barthes and Sollers."—Christina Howells, University of Oxford, UKTable of ContentsContents Friendship R.B. Letters from Roland Barthes to Philippe Sollers Appendices

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Book SynopsisIn Roland Barthes's eyes, Philippe Sollers embodied the figure of the contemporary writer forever seeking something new. Thirty-six years after Barthes produced his study Sollers Writer, Sollers has written a book on the man who was his friend and who shared with him a total faith in literature as a force of invention and discovery, as a resource and an encyclopaedia.They met regularly, exchanged many letters and fought many battles together, against every kind of academicism, every political and ideological regression. Barthes shed light on Sollers's work in a series of articles that are still of great relevance today. Sollers, in turn, assumed the role of Barthes's publisher at Le Seuil from the publication of his Critical Essays in 1964, and was left deeply shocked and saddened by Barthes's death in 1980. In short, they were very close to each other, despite their differences, and Sollers expresses here what this meant at the time and what it continues to represent, highlighting the themes that sustained their friendship.The book also contains some thirty letters from Barthes to Sollers, completing our image of one of the most extraordinary partnerships in French literary life.Trade Review"These traces of an elusive life – a selection of letters by Roland Barthes, affectionate memories of him, and above all an evocative sketch of the precise place he occupied in a complex and combative intellectual history – add up to a compelling portrait of a much missed writer." —Michael Wood, Princeton University "This engaging book will give great pleasure to fans of both Sollers and Barthes. Sollers writes movingly about his long-term friendship with Barthes in a way that is full of human interest – anecdotal, autobiographical, literary, and political. The letters fro, Barthes to Sollers are delightful, especially the inclusion of copies of the handwritten letters. The increasing intimacy of their friendship, always expressed via the deeply respectful French vous form, will fascinate lovers of the epistolary form as well as scholars and students of Barthes and Sollers."—Christina Howells, University of Oxford, UK"enjoyably grouchy homage"The New York Review of BooksTable of ContentsContents Friendship R.B. Letters from Roland Barthes to Philippe Sollers Appendices

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Book SynopsisThis book by one of Latin America’s leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture. Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories – what she calls the ‘biographical space’ – can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension. The ‘I’ who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification. Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction, therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of life itself. Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch’s own poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina’s last dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.Trade Review"Leonor Arfuch's Memory and Autobiography is a brilliant reflection on autobiography not as a mere exercise in self-construction but as an act of witnessing the unforgettable and as a call to communal dialogue. An invaluable contribution by one of Latin America's most insightful cultural critics."—Sylvia Molloy, Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities Emerita, New York UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction by Michael Lazzara Prologue I. A Beginning II. The Gaze as Autobiography: Time, place, objects 1. Journeys: time, place 2. Objects, memory 3. Biographies / autobiographies 4. Recapitulations III. Memory and Image IV. Women Who Narrate: Autobiography and Traumatic Memories 1. About narration 2. Biography, memory 3. Being and the limit 4. (In)conclusions V. Political Violence, Autobiography and Testimony 1. The tone of the debate 2. Colophon VI. The Threshold, the Frontier. Explorations in the Limits 1. Language and transgression 2. Art on the frontier 3. Public art / critical art VII. The Name, the Number 1. On the massacre 2. The distance of the number 3. Ethics and responsibility 4. Naming 5. Silence, names Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisThis book by one of Latin America’s leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture. Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories – what she calls the ‘biographical space’ – can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension. The ‘I’ who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification. Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction, therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of life itself. Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch’s own poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina’s last dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.Trade Review"Leonor Arfuch's Memory and Autobiography is a brilliant reflection on autobiography not as a mere exercise in self-construction but as an act of witnessing the unforgettable and as a call to communal dialogue. An invaluable contribution by one of Latin America's most insightful cultural critics."—Sylvia Molloy, Albert Schweitzer Chair in the Humanities Emerita, New York UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction by Michael Lazzara Prologue I. A Beginning II. The Gaze as Autobiography: Time, place, objects 1. Journeys: time, place 2. Objects, memory 3. Biographies / autobiographies 4. Recapitulations III. Memory and Image IV. Women Who Narrate: Autobiography and Traumatic Memories 1. About narration 2. Biography, memory 3. Being and the limit 4. (In)conclusions V. Political Violence, Autobiography and Testimony 1. The tone of the debate 2. Colophon VI. The Threshold, the Frontier. Explorations in the Limits 1. Language and transgression 2. Art on the frontier 3. Public art / critical art VII. The Name, the Number 1. On the massacre 2. The distance of the number 3. Ethics and responsibility 4. Naming 5. Silence, names Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisRecent efforts to diversify and decentre the literary canon taught at universities have been moderately successful. Yet this expansion of our reading lists is only the start of a broader decolonization of literary studies as a discipline; there is much left to be done. How can students and educators best participate in this urgent intellectual and political project? Anna Bernard argues that the decolonization of literary studies requires a change to not only what, but how, we read. In lively prose, she explores work that has already been done, both within and beyond the academy, and challenges readers to think about where we go from here. She suggests ways to recognize and respond to the political work that texts do, considering questions of language and translation, comparative reading, ideological argument, and genre in relation to the history of anticolonial struggle. Above all, Bernard shows that although we still have far to go, the work of decolonizing literary studies is already under way. Decolonizing Literature is a must-have resource for all those concerned by the development and future of the field.Trade Review‘Decolonizing Literature is the book we need today. Reminding us of the transformative possibilities of politicized literary criticism, Anna Bernard is continuing the legacy of Edward Said, Barbara Harlow, and Benita Parry by helping us imagine ourselves into different futures.’Anthony C. Alessandrini, Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York‘A full and substantial introduction to the contentious topic of “decolonizing” the English literary curriculum. Bernard’s account, which is fully cognisant of the challenges of this project, is lucid and accessible but never glib or shallow.’Priyamvada Gopal, University of CambridgeTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1 Decolonization and Literature: A History2 Unfinished Business: How Do We Decolonize Literature?3 Language and Translation: What Is ‘English’ Literature?4 ‘A Comparative Literature of Imperialism’: Reading Colonial and Anticolonial Texts Together5 Telling a Collective Story: Literature and Anticolonial Struggle6 Decolonizing Genre: Anticolonial Understandings of Literary CraftConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisRecent efforts to diversify and decentre the literary canon taught at universities have been moderately successful. Yet this expansion of our reading lists is only the start of a broader decolonization of literary studies as a discipline; there is much left to be done. How can students and educators best participate in this urgent intellectual and political project? Anna Bernard argues that the decolonization of literary studies requires a change to not only what, but how, we read. In lively prose, she explores work that has already been done, both within and beyond the academy, and challenges readers to think about where we go from here. She suggests ways to recognize and respond to the political work that texts do, considering questions of language and translation, comparative reading, ideological argument, and genre in relation to the history of anticolonial struggle. Above all, Bernard shows that although we still have far to go, the work of decolonizing literary studies is already under way. Decolonizing Literature is a must-have resource for all those concerned by the development and future of the field.Trade Review‘Decolonizing Literature is the book we need today. Reminding us of the transformative possibilities of politicized literary criticism, Anna Bernard is continuing the legacy of Edward Said, Barbara Harlow, and Benita Parry by helping us imagine ourselves into different futures.’Anthony C. Alessandrini, Kingsborough Community College, City University of New York‘A full and substantial introduction to the contentious topic of “decolonizing” the English literary curriculum. Bernard’s account, which is fully cognisant of the challenges of this project, is lucid and accessible but never glib or shallow.’Priyamvada Gopal, University of CambridgeTable of ContentsAcknowledgementsIntroduction1 Decolonization and Literature: A History2 Unfinished Business: How Do We Decolonize Literature?3 Language and Translation: What Is ‘English’ Literature?4 ‘A Comparative Literature of Imperialism’: Reading Colonial and Anticolonial Texts Together5 Telling a Collective Story: Literature and Anticolonial Struggle6 Decolonizing Genre: Anticolonial Understandings of Literary CraftConclusionNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisRefiguring in Black is a meditation on black life, and a meditation on the questions and concerns with which black life is confronted. It takes the form of a critical engagement with the thought of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Charles Mingus – key figures in the black radical tradition. Sithole does not reduce these thinkers to biographical subjects but examines them as figures of black thought in ways that are creative and generative. Erudite and passionate, this book is a statement of and testimony to refiguring as a form of critical practice by those who are engaged in a radical refusal, and thus part of the long arc of the black radical tradition. As a way of understanding the contemporary moment and unmasking antiblackness in all its forms and guises, Sithole’s work brings the annals of black thought into being in order to think differently and necessitate rupture, refusing to concede to the order of things and refusing to be complicit in the dehumanization that has marked the black condition.Trade Review"Tendayi Sithole renders the black radical imagination as de/formation – as a proliferation of inscription and configuration automated, in this account, by convocation of four ceaselessly engrossing thinker-tinkers. Refiguring in Black explores their practices in the orchestration of ideas and life at black study's critical edge, and contributes to such by way of its own demonstration of how this insurgency is always an improvisation of form. This is a tradition of making and breaking form; a breaking into and away from it; an incessant refiguring. True to the spirit of its object, this book is wonderfully generous in its forging innumerable openings, or 'apertures' as Sithole puts it, that cannot but rewrite the world deranged."—Fumi Okiji, University of California Berkeley "Tendayi Sithole broadens the range of acceptable conversations about Blackness by meditating on the ontological dimensions of Blackness through Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison and Hortense Spillers. Sithole purposefully disrupts the Western canon on these aforementioned Black figures by reconceptualising Douglass, Morrison and Spillers via an explicit and unapologetic Black point of view. In the hands of Sithole, Douglass, Morrison and Spillers become insurgent intellectuals who act out an 'engaged insurgent praxis' against anti-Black racism."—TheoriaTable of ContentsAperture 1. Aunt Hester's Flesh 2. The Specter of the Africanistic Presence 3. "Sophisticated Lady"—On Phonographic Authorship Verso

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Book SynopsisRefiguring in Black is a meditation on black life, and a meditation on the questions and concerns with which black life is confronted. It takes the form of a critical engagement with the thought of Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison, Hortense Spillers, and Charles Mingus – key figures in the black radical tradition. Sithole does not reduce these thinkers to biographical subjects but examines them as figures of black thought in ways that are creative and generative. Erudite and passionate, this book is a statement of and testimony to refiguring as a form of critical practice by those who are engaged in a radical refusal, and thus part of the long arc of the black radical tradition. As a way of understanding the contemporary moment and unmasking antiblackness in all its forms and guises, Sithole’s work brings the annals of black thought into being in order to think differently and necessitate rupture, refusing to concede to the order of things and refusing to be complicit in the dehumanization that has marked the black condition.Trade Review"Tendayi Sithole renders the black radical imagination as de/formation – as a proliferation of inscription and configuration automated, in this account, by convocation of four ceaselessly engrossing thinker-tinkers. Refiguring in Black explores their practices in the orchestration of ideas and life at black study's critical edge, and contributes to such by way of its own demonstration of how this insurgency is always an improvisation of form. This is a tradition of making and breaking form; a breaking into and away from it; an incessant refiguring. True to the spirit of its object, this book is wonderfully generous in its forging innumerable openings, or 'apertures' as Sithole puts it, that cannot but rewrite the world deranged."—Fumi Okiji, University of California Berkeley "Tendayi Sithole broadens the range of acceptable conversations about Blackness by meditating on the ontological dimensions of Blackness through Frederick Douglass, Toni Morrison and Hortense Spillers. Sithole purposefully disrupts the Western canon on these aforementioned Black figures by reconceptualising Douglass, Morrison and Spillers via an explicit and unapologetic Black point of view. In the hands of Sithole, Douglass, Morrison and Spillers become insurgent intellectuals who act out an 'engaged insurgent praxis' against anti-Black racism."—TheoriaTable of ContentsAperture 1. Aunt Hester's Flesh 2. The Specter of the Africanistic Presence 3. "Sophisticated Lady"—On Phonographic Authorship Verso

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Book SynopsisIn Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography, Stefan H. Uhlig offers a new account of the emergence of literary studies. Most histories of the early years of the field search for unifying origins of literature as a discipline and object of study. Uhlig turns to the decades around 1800 in Europe to reveal that the inception of the literary field was instead defined by intellectual diversity and contestation. He draws on an array of European writers to show how three schools of literary study—rhetoric teaching, theories of poetry, and literary history—emerged and clashed during this time, offering near-contemporaneous, yet divergent, visions of how to understand literature. Rhetoric and poetics thwarted criticism, to different ends, while literary historiography proved institutionally reassuring yet less useful as a tool for textual understanding. Uhlig details how Scottish writers like Adam Smith and Hugh Blair taught rhetoric as a form self-expression, while Anglophone and German theorists of poetry like William Wordsworth, Friedrich Schlegel, and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe both engaged with and resented critics. At the same time, varying opinions on the practice of literary history emerged, with Immanuel Kant and Thomas De Quincey arguing for the independence of literature from historical forces while writers like Matthew Arnold approached literature as a means of narrating cultural archives instead of drawing on close reading and analysis. Rhetoric, Poetics, and Literary Historiography traces current debates in literary studies back to this formative moment, serving as a guide to past and present controversies in the field.Trade Review"An ambitious essay in the history of ideas—one based on lots of close reading and scrupulous attention to the actual positions in the debates examined." * Paul Hamilton, Queen Mary University of London *"This book stands to be of great value to literary studies, both because of the precision it helps introduce into discussions of literary history—suddenly revealed to be an even looser, baggier monster than even far-reaching projects of distant reading have revealed—and because of the compelling microhistories it unearths within the genealogy of literary studies." * Matthew Wickman, Brigham Young University *

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Book SynopsisAn unconventional take on the corpse challenges traditional conceptions of who—and what—counts as human, while offering bold insights into the modernist project Too often regarded as the macabre endpoint of life, the corpse is rarely discussed and largely kept out of the public eye. In The Modernist Corpse, Erin E. Edwards unearths the critically important but previously buried life of the corpse, which occupies a unique place between biology and technology, the living and the dead. Exploring the posthumous as the posthuman, Edwards argues that the corpse is central to understanding relations between the human and its “others,” including the animal, the machine, and the thing.From photographs of lynchings to documentation of World War I casualties, the corpse is also central to the modernist project. Edwards turns critical attention to the corpse through innovative, posthumanist readings of canonical thinkers such as William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, offering new insights into the intersections among race, gender, technical media, and matter presumed to be dead. Edwards’s expansive approach to modernism includes diverse materials such as Hollywood film, experimental photography, autopsy discourses, and the comic strip Krazy Kat, producing a provocatively broad understanding of the modernist corpse and its various “lives.”The Modernist Corpse both establishes important new directions for modernist inquiry and overturns common thought about the relationship between living and dead matter. Trade Review"The Modernist Corpse is a far-reaching and original study of the complexity of the cultural categories that organize representations of human life and death in modernist writing and art. Erin E. Edwards brings together an impressive range of writers, genres, and media, reflecting that increasingly expansive sense, among literary historians, of modernism's archive."—David Sherman, author of In a Strange Room: Modernism's Corpses and Mortal Obligation"The Modernist Corpse combines historically informed close readings of early twentieth-century works with an insistence on cultural and theoretical concerns that were barely visible at the time these works were made, but that loom large today, in retrospect. Erin E. Edwards shows us that American writers of a century ago—Faulkner, Toomer, Barnes, and Stein—were already struggling with the dilemmas of what we see today as the posthuman condition."—Steven Shaviro, author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism"The Modernist Corpse is a brilliant study of the costly differentiation between human and non-human as a legacy of the Cartesian separation of mind and body, such a division responsible for categorical boundaries warranting epistemological and ontological assumptions that organize western social hierarchies, including those of gender, race, and class. Erin Edwards’ readings of Faulkner, Toomer, Djuna Barnes, and numerous others are extraordinarily original in their demonstration of how modern literature is intent on imagining a ‘posthuman humanness.’ The Modernist Corpse is a splendid book—intellectually tense, stylish, and relentlessly provocative."—John T. Matthews, Boston University"The Modernist Corpse vividly demonstrates that the posthumous and the posthuman are neither finite nor conclusive. Rather, these terms index conditions of possibility."—American Literary History Online Review"Through her posthumanist approach, Edwards infuses new life into the Modernist canon."—The Goose"The Modernist Corpse attempts not only to reanimate the corpse in modernism but to reimagine experimental modernism itself by rereading and reassembling its corpus."—Critical InquiryTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Modernist Body Count1. Inhuman Remains: The Production and Decomposition of the Human in William Faulkner’s South2. Autopsy-Optics: Jean Toomer’s Cane through the Photographic Lens3. Sutures and Grooves: Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa, and the Corpus of Early-Twentieth-Century Media4. Love and Corpses: Djuna Barnes's Queer PosthumanismCoda. In Kind Cuts: Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and the Nonhuman CorpseNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn unconventional take on the corpse challenges traditional conceptions of who—and what—counts as human, while offering bold insights into the modernist project Too often regarded as the macabre endpoint of life, the corpse is rarely discussed and largely kept out of the public eye. In The Modernist Corpse, Erin E. Edwards unearths the critically important but previously buried life of the corpse, which occupies a unique place between biology and technology, the living and the dead. Exploring the posthumous as the posthuman, Edwards argues that the corpse is central to understanding relations between the human and its “others,” including the animal, the machine, and the thing.From photographs of lynchings to documentation of World War I casualties, the corpse is also central to the modernist project. Edwards turns critical attention to the corpse through innovative, posthumanist readings of canonical thinkers such as William Faulkner, Jean Toomer, W. E. B. Du Bois, Mina Loy, Djuna Barnes, and Gertrude Stein, offering new insights into the intersections among race, gender, technical media, and matter presumed to be dead. Edwards’s expansive approach to modernism includes diverse materials such as Hollywood film, experimental photography, autopsy discourses, and the comic strip Krazy Kat, producing a provocatively broad understanding of the modernist corpse and its various “lives.”The Modernist Corpse both establishes important new directions for modernist inquiry and overturns common thought about the relationship between living and dead matter. Trade Review"The Modernist Corpse is a far-reaching and original study of the complexity of the cultural categories that organize representations of human life and death in modernist writing and art. Erin E. Edwards brings together an impressive range of writers, genres, and media, reflecting that increasingly expansive sense, among literary historians, of modernism's archive."—David Sherman, author of In a Strange Room: Modernism's Corpses and Mortal Obligation"The Modernist Corpse combines historically informed close readings of early twentieth-century works with an insistence on cultural and theoretical concerns that were barely visible at the time these works were made, but that loom large today, in retrospect. Erin E. Edwards shows us that American writers of a century ago—Faulkner, Toomer, Barnes, and Stein—were already struggling with the dilemmas of what we see today as the posthuman condition."—Steven Shaviro, author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism"The Modernist Corpse is a brilliant study of the costly differentiation between human and non-human as a legacy of the Cartesian separation of mind and body, such a division responsible for categorical boundaries warranting epistemological and ontological assumptions that organize western social hierarchies, including those of gender, race, and class. Erin Edwards’ readings of Faulkner, Toomer, Djuna Barnes, and numerous others are extraordinarily original in their demonstration of how modern literature is intent on imagining a ‘posthuman humanness.’ The Modernist Corpse is a splendid book—intellectually tense, stylish, and relentlessly provocative."—John T. Matthews, Boston University"The Modernist Corpse vividly demonstrates that the posthumous and the posthuman are neither finite nor conclusive. Rather, these terms index conditions of possibility."—American Literary History Online Review"Through her posthumanist approach, Edwards infuses new life into the Modernist canon."—The Goose"The Modernist Corpse attempts not only to reanimate the corpse in modernism but to reimagine experimental modernism itself by rereading and reassembling its corpus."—Critical InquiryTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: A Modernist Body Count1. Inhuman Remains: The Production and Decomposition of the Human in William Faulkner’s South2. Autopsy-Optics: Jean Toomer’s Cane through the Photographic Lens3. Sutures and Grooves: Mina Loy, Baroness Elsa, and the Corpus of Early-Twentieth-Century Media4. Love and Corpses: Djuna Barnes's Queer PosthumanismCoda. In Kind Cuts: Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons and the Nonhuman CorpseNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisExploring why there is so much fecal matter in literary works that matterCacaphonies takes fecal matter and its place in literature seriously. Readers and critics have too long overlooked excrement’s vital role in the twentieth- and twenty-first-century French canon. In a stark challenge to the tendency to view this literature through sanitizing abstractions, Annabel L. Kim undertakes close readings of key authors to argue for feces as a figure of radical equality, both a literary object and a reflection on literature itself, without which literary studies is impoverished and sterile. Following the fecal through line in works by Céline, Beckett, Genet, Sartre, Duras, and Gary and the contemporary authors Anne Garréta and Daniel Pennac, Kim shows that shit, far from vanishing from the canon after the early modern period, remains present in the modern and contemporary French literature that follows. She argues that all the shit in the canon expresses a call to democratize literature, making literature for all, just as shit is for (or of) all. She attends to its presence in this prized element of French identity, treating it as a continually uttered desire to manifest the universality France aspires to—as encapsulated by the slogan Liberté, égalité, fraternité—but fails to realize. In shit there is a concrete universalism that traverses bodies with disregard for embodied differences. Cacaphonies reminds us that literature, and the ideas to be found therein, cannot be separated from the corporeal envelopes that create and receive them. In so doing, it reveals the aesthetic, political, and ethical potential of shit and its capacity to transform literature and life. Trade Review "In dazzling readings of classic French texts, Annabel L. Kim reclaims feces as literary matter. Sidestepping familiar psychoanalytic frames, Kim turns excrement into a force for democracy. From Céline to Duras to Garréta, this caca communism blows up our old ways of thinking. Irreverent and erudite, as funny as Rabelais, Cacaphonies is a genuine scatological pleasure!"—Lynne Huffer, Emory University "We tend to assume that the trajectory of modern literature repeats that of society and technology (urbanization, sanitation, dematerialization, sanitization, deodorization) in taking us ever further away from the excretory body. It does not, insists Annabel L. Kim. On the contrary, modern literature refuses to endorse the fantasy of being ‘free from or clear of shit.’ Thus, to turn to the excretory body in literary works is to ask what literature’s deepest understanding of the human is, and what literature itself is. Cacaphonies is an extraordinarily engaging project: insightful, serious, self-consciously ‘profane,’ metacritically alive."—Thangam Ravindranathan, author of Behold an Animal: Four Exorbitant Readings "Kim’s readings are creative, bold and surprising. They reek, but they are never gratuitous, and they open up a field of literary waste studies that poses pressing ecological questions."—Times Literary Supplement "Kim’s book offers a fresh, fun(ny), clever, and innovative perspective on canonical texts while weaving through her analysis a discussion about life and death, and about how shit ultimately brings us back to that."—H-France Reviews "A must-read, Cacaphonies provides a truly insightful, engaging, and joyful reading experience."—The French Review Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: We Have Always Been FecalPart I. Necessary Shit1. Céline: Shit on the Installment Plan2. Beckett: Shit for BrainsPart II. Shitty Ideas3. Fecal Freedom: Sartre and Genet’s ))< >((4. To Wipe the Other: Duras’s and Gary’s Fecal Care EthicsPart III. Political Shit5. Fighting Words: Anne Garréta’s Ultimate Weapon6. Daniel Pennac’s Excremental Poetics: Literature for AllConclusion: Caca CommunismAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisAn examination of the presumed opposition between the natural human body and artificial inanimate objectsProsthesis is a landmark work in posthuman thought that analyzes and explores the human body as a technology, seamlessly integrated (both physically and psychologically) with prosthetics. Here David Wills lays the groundwork for ideas he develops in two of his other books, Dorsality, exploring how technology functions behind or before the human, and Inanimation, giving perspective on what it means to be “alive.” In Prosthesis, Wills promotes the idea that the human body is open to supplementation by artificial addenda that operate both internally or externally and engage it in an unceasing arbitration with the environment. Questioning the opposition between animate and inanimate along with the logic of the automatic prioritization of living flesh, Prosthesis undertakes these assumptions by studying thematics of artificiality through the writings of Freud, Derrida, William Gibson, Peter Greenaway, and others. In the twenty-five years since its first publication, Prosthesis has been a point of reference in the field of disability studies. It has also been recognized for its “prosthetic” writing, consisting of academic and autobiographical voices and styles that are artificially attached to one another. Trade Review"Many of you, many of us know [David Wills's] work and, like me, have admired it for a long time. It is work that I not only admire, but to which I owe a great deal. . . . [Prosthesis] is in my estimation a great book, a magnificent book."—Jacques DerridaTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsOn David Wills and ProsthesisJacques DerridaPreface to 25th Anniversary Edition of Prosthesis1. Hamilton, 19702. Mentone, 18883. Africa, 21st Century4. Berchtesgaden, 19295. Paris, 19766. Rome, 19857. Cambridge, 15538. Menton, 19219. Geneva, 1978NotesBibliography

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Book SynopsisAs a transformative thinker of the twentieth century, whose work spanned all branches of the humanities, Michel Foucault had a complex and profound relationship with literature. And yet this critical aspect of his thought, because it was largely expressed in speeches and interviews, remains virtually unknown to even his most loyal readers. This book brings together previously unpublished transcripts of oral presentations in which Foucault speaks at length about literature and its links to some of his principal themes: madness, language and criticism, and truth and desire.The associations between madness and language—and madness and silence—preoccupy Foucault in two 1963 radio broadcasts, presented here, in which he ranges among literary examples from Cervantes and Shakespeare to Diderot, before taking up questions about Artaud’s literary correspondence, lettres de cachet, and the materiality of language. In his lectures on the relations among language, the literary work, and literature, he discusses Joyce, Proust, Chateaubriand, Racine, and Corneille, as well as the linguist Roman Jakobson. What we know as literature, Foucault contends, begins with the Marquis de Sade, to whose writing—particularly La Nouvelle Justine and Juliette—he devotes a full two-part lecture series focusing on notions of literary self-consciousness.Following his meditations on history in the recently published Speech Begins after Death, this current volume makes clear the importance of literature to Foucault’s thought and intellectual development.Table of ContentsContentsEditors’ Introduction Note on the Text Language, Madness, and Desire Language and Madness The Silence of the Mad Mad Language Literature and Language Session One: What Is Literature? Session Two: What Is the Language of Literature? Lectures on Sade Session One: Why Did Sade Write? Session Two: Theoretical Discourses and Erotic Scenes Editors’ Notes

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Book SynopsisBringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisis Why has psychoanalysis long been kept at the margins of environmental criticism despite the many theories of eco-Marxism, queer ecology, and eco-deconstruction available today? What is unique, possibly even traumatic, about eco-psychoanalysis? The Environmental Unconscious addresses these questions as it provides an innovative and theoretical account of environmental loss focused on the counterintuitive forms of enjoyment that early modern poetry and psychoanalysis jointly theorize.Steven Swarbrick urges literary critics and environmental scholars fluent in the new materialism to rethink notions of entanglement, animacy, and consciousness raising. He introduces concepts from psychoanalysis as keys to understanding the force of early modern ecopoetics. Through close readings of Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, he reveals a world of matter that is not merely hyperconnected, as in the new materialism, but porous and off-kilter. And yet the loss these poets reveal is central to the enjoyment their works offer—and that nature offers.As insightful as it is engaging, The Environmental Unconscious offers a provocative challenge to ecocriticism that, under the current regime of fossil capitalism in which everything solid interconnects, a new theory of disconnection is desperately needed. Tracing the propulsive force of the environmental unconscious from the early modern period to Freudian and post-Freudian theories of desire, Swarbrick not only puts nature on the couch in this book but also renews the psychoanalytic toolkit in light of environmental collapse.Trade Review"Situating early modern poetry in conversation with Lucretius and Lacan, The Environmental Unconscious resists conventional critical distinctions between linguistic and materialist turns. Steven Swarbrick argues that matter, no less than the unconscious, is structured like a language: lively nonhuman matter, no less than the disembodied Cartesian cogito, is characterized by loss and self-estrangement. Because early modern poets take the environmental unconscious as the model for human desire (rather than vice-versa), Swarbrick shows, this body of work offers an overlooked yet urgent mode of theorizing life beyond the human."—Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania"An overdue methodological detour from historicist business as usual, this sharply original book binds Spenser and Derrida, Ralegh and Glissant, Marvell and Deleuze, and Freud and Milton into vivid new relationships. Steven Swarbrick’s ‘environmental unconscious’—a structurally consequential but radically inhospitable alterity lodged within both conceptions of matter and their literary analogues—drives thrilling new readings of early modern literature as it renews the possibilities offered by psychoanalysis for thinking poetic form."—Drew Daniel, author of Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

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Book SynopsisBringing psychoanalysis to bear on the diagnosis of ecological crisis Why has psychoanalysis long been kept at the margins of environmental criticism despite the many theories of eco-Marxism, queer ecology, and eco-deconstruction available today? What is unique, possibly even traumatic, about eco-psychoanalysis? The Environmental Unconscious addresses these questions as it provides an innovative and theoretical account of environmental loss focused on the counterintuitive forms of enjoyment that early modern poetry and psychoanalysis jointly theorize.Steven Swarbrick urges literary critics and environmental scholars fluent in the new materialism to rethink notions of entanglement, animacy, and consciousness raising. He introduces concepts from psychoanalysis as keys to understanding the force of early modern ecopoetics. Through close readings of Edmund Spenser, Walter Ralegh, Andrew Marvell, and John Milton, he reveals a world of matter that is not merely hyperconnected, as in the new materialism, but porous and off-kilter. And yet the loss these poets reveal is central to the enjoyment their works offer—and that nature offers.As insightful as it is engaging, The Environmental Unconscious offers a provocative challenge to ecocriticism that, under the current regime of fossil capitalism in which everything solid interconnects, a new theory of disconnection is desperately needed. Tracing the propulsive force of the environmental unconscious from the early modern period to Freudian and post-Freudian theories of desire, Swarbrick not only puts nature on the couch in this book but also renews the psychoanalytic toolkit in light of environmental collapse.Trade Review"Situating early modern poetry in conversation with Lucretius and Lacan, The Environmental Unconscious resists conventional critical distinctions between linguistic and materialist turns. Steven Swarbrick argues that matter, no less than the unconscious, is structured like a language: lively nonhuman matter, no less than the disembodied Cartesian cogito, is characterized by loss and self-estrangement. Because early modern poets take the environmental unconscious as the model for human desire (rather than vice-versa), Swarbrick shows, this body of work offers an overlooked yet urgent mode of theorizing life beyond the human."—Melissa E. Sanchez, University of Pennsylvania"An overdue methodological detour from historicist business as usual, this sharply original book binds Spenser and Derrida, Ralegh and Glissant, Marvell and Deleuze, and Freud and Milton into vivid new relationships. Steven Swarbrick’s ‘environmental unconscious’—a structurally consequential but radically inhospitable alterity lodged within both conceptions of matter and their literary analogues—drives thrilling new readings of early modern literature as it renews the possibilities offered by psychoanalysis for thinking poetic form."—Drew Daniel, author of Joy of the Worm: Suicide and Pleasure in Early Modern English Literature

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Book SynopsisA provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself Challenging the contemporary notion of “self-care” and the Western mania for “self-possession,” The Comic Self deploys philosophical discourse and literary expression to propose an alternate and less toxic model for human aspiration: a comic self. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred argue that the problem with the “care of the self,” from Foucault onward, is that it reinforces identity, strengthening the relation between I and mine. This assertion of self-possession raises a question vital for understanding how we are to live with each other and ourselves: How can you care for something that is truly not yours?The answer lies in the unrepresentable comic self. Campbell and Farred range across philosophy, literature, and contemporary comedy—engaging with Socrates, Burke, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas; Shakespeare, Cervantes, Woolf, Kafka, and Pasolini; and Stephen Colbert, David Chappelle, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. They uncover spaces where the dispossession of self and, with it, the dismantling of the regime of self-care are possible. Arguing that the comic self always keeps a precarious closeness to the tragic self, while opposing the machinations of capital endemic to the logic of self-possession, they provide a powerful and provocative antidote to the tragic self that so dominates the tenor of our times.Trade Review"You can’t reassure the frightened child. Your letter must add to the child’s terror. Welcome to the world of racism in America. Brilliantly original, mixing Heidegger and Chappelle, Grant Farred proves that Baldwin’s genre has not exhausted its magical potential to provoke and instruct. By a mysterious dialectical legerdemain, he bestows on his son an unlikely endowment: a sort of Afro-optimism, both outraged and salvific."—Bruce Robbins, author of The Beneficiary"Phrased as an epistle to his young son, Grant Farred's An Essay for Ezra grapples with difficult loci of racial violence in U.S. culture and in various philosophical traditions, from the Black exile of Baldwin to Heideggerian questionability of self. He proposes new genealogies and new problems for struggles of becoming and judgment amid the perpetual crisis that is the American racial order."—Rei Terada, University of California, IrvineTable of ContentsContentsPreface: The Art of Self-DispossessionIntroduction: The Fallacy of Self-Possession1. The Sunset of the Self2. Renunciation and Refusal = Rupture and Rapture3. Elide Tragedy4. The Comic Self Is Not Comic5. “I Think”6. David Hume: The Master Critic of Identity7. Temporality contra Cogito Ergo Sum8. From a Terminal Walk to a Tightrope Walker9. Don Quijote’s Comic Selves10. The Unequal11. Tragic RepetitionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA provocative and unconventional call to dispossess the self of itself Challenging the contemporary notion of “self-care” and the Western mania for “self-possession,” The Comic Self deploys philosophical discourse and literary expression to propose an alternate and less toxic model for human aspiration: a comic self. Timothy Campbell and Grant Farred argue that the problem with the “care of the self,” from Foucault onward, is that it reinforces identity, strengthening the relation between I and mine. This assertion of self-possession raises a question vital for understanding how we are to live with each other and ourselves: How can you care for something that is truly not yours?The answer lies in the unrepresentable comic self. Campbell and Farred range across philosophy, literature, and contemporary comedy—engaging with Socrates, Burke, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas; Shakespeare, Cervantes, Woolf, Kafka, and Pasolini; and Stephen Colbert, David Chappelle, and the cast of Saturday Night Live. They uncover spaces where the dispossession of self and, with it, the dismantling of the regime of self-care are possible. Arguing that the comic self always keeps a precarious closeness to the tragic self, while opposing the machinations of capital endemic to the logic of self-possession, they provide a powerful and provocative antidote to the tragic self that so dominates the tenor of our times.Trade Review"You can’t reassure the frightened child. Your letter must add to the child’s terror. Welcome to the world of racism in America. Brilliantly original, mixing Heidegger and Chappelle, Grant Farred proves that Baldwin’s genre has not exhausted its magical potential to provoke and instruct. By a mysterious dialectical legerdemain, he bestows on his son an unlikely endowment: a sort of Afro-optimism, both outraged and salvific."—Bruce Robbins, author of The Beneficiary"Phrased as an epistle to his young son, Grant Farred's An Essay for Ezra grapples with difficult loci of racial violence in U.S. culture and in various philosophical traditions, from the Black exile of Baldwin to Heideggerian questionability of self. He proposes new genealogies and new problems for struggles of becoming and judgment amid the perpetual crisis that is the American racial order."—Rei Terada, University of California, IrvineTable of ContentsContentsPreface: The Art of Self-DispossessionIntroduction: The Fallacy of Self-Possession1. The Sunset of the Self2. Renunciation and Refusal = Rupture and Rapture3. Elide Tragedy4. The Comic Self Is Not Comic5. “I Think”6. David Hume: The Master Critic of Identity7. Temporality contra Cogito Ergo Sum8. From a Terminal Walk to a Tightrope Walker9. Don Quijote’s Comic Selves10. The Unequal11. Tragic RepetitionAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThe Political Logic of Experience argues that experience and phenomenology are essentially political, with profound implications for our understanding of subjectivity, epistemology, experience, the phenomenological method, and politics. Drawing on work from across the phenomenological tradition, it develops an account of expression as the internal relationship uniting knowing, being, and doing with both transcendental conditions and empirical phenomena. This expressive unification generates subjectivity as an expression of particular communities and subjects as an expression of subjectivity. Subjectivity and experience are therefore both revealed to be inherently political prior to their expression in particular subjects. In clarifying the political nature of experience and the constitution of subjectivity, the book puts the work of critical phenomenology in dialogue with transcendental phenomenology to reveal the need for a phenomenological politics: a field tasked with explaining the expressive, co-constitutive, and necessarily political relationships between subjects and their communities. It is only through such a phenomenological politics that we can properly make sense of the epistemological, ontological, and practical significance of issues like racism and sexism, problems that concern our very experience of the world. The book reveals phenomenology to be both essentially political and politically essential, as it emerges within particular communities and shapes and transforms how individuals within those communities experience the world. Touching on issues of transcendental phenomenology, political strategy, historical interpretation and inter-disciplinary phenomenological method, the book argues for foundational claims pertaining to phenomenology, politics, and social criticism that will be of interest to those working in philosophy, gender studies, race, queer theory, transcendental and applied phenomenology, and beyond.Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations | ix Introduction: Experience and the Problem of Expression | 1 1 A Phenomenological Account of Expressivity | 27 2 Material-Spiritual Flesh: The Subjective Implications of Expressivity | 47 3 From Sense to Sensings: The Epistemological Implications of Expressivity | 67 4 Making Sense of Experience: The Transcendental Implications of Expressivity | 87 5 The Subject, Reduction, and Uses of Phenomenology: The Methodological Implications of Expressivity | 113 6 Toward a Phenomenological Politics: The Political Implications of Expressivity | 135 Conclusion: The Logic of Phenomenality | 159 Acknowledgments | 181 Notes | 183 Works Cited | 221 Index | 233

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Book SynopsisGrammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging. Weigel reinterprets Derrida’s and Freud’s concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, she illuminates the threshold between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas. Weigel’s approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art.Table of ContentsNote to the English-Language Edition | vii List of Figures | ix Introduction: Toward a Grammatology of Images | 1 1 The Trace and the Current Revaluation of Lines | 15 2 Faces: Between Trace and Image, Encoding and Measurement | 43 3 Indexical Images: Trace, Resemblance, and Code | 84 4 Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and the Supplementary Economy of the Likeness (Ebenbild) | 101 5 Defamatory Images: Disfiguration in Physiognomy and Caricature’s Two Bodies | 118 6 Cult Images: Iconoclastic Controversy, the Desire for Images, and the Dialectic of Secularization | 170 7 Angels: Images of Making-Appearance between Religion, Art, and Science | 202 8 Perspectives of the Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture | 264 Notes | 275 Bibliography | 319 Index | 347

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Book SynopsisGrammatology of Images radically alters how we approach images. Instead of asking for the history, power, or essence of images, Sigrid Weigel addresses imaging as such. The book considers how something a-visible gets transformed into an image. Weigel scrutinizes the moment of mis-en-apparition, of making an appearance, and the process of concealment that accompanies any imaging. Weigel reinterprets Derrida’s and Freud’s concept of the trace as that which must be thought before something exists. In doing so, she illuminates the threshold between traces and iconic images, between something immaterial and its pictorial representation. Chapters alternate between general accounts of the line, the index, the effigy, and the cult-image, and case studies from the history of science, art, politics, and religion, involving faces as indicators of emotion, caricatures as effigies of defamation, and angels as embodiments of transcendental ideas. Weigel’s approach to images illuminates fascinating, unexpected correspondences between premodern and contemporary image-practices, between the history of religion and the modern sciences, and between things that are and are not understood as art.Table of ContentsNote to the English-Language Edition | vii List of Figures | ix Introduction: Toward a Grammatology of Images | 1 1 The Trace and the Current Revaluation of Lines | 15 2 Faces: Between Trace and Image, Encoding and Measurement | 43 3 Indexical Images: Trace, Resemblance, and Code | 84 4 Effigiēs: Double, Representation, and the Supplementary Economy of the Likeness (Ebenbild) | 101 5 Defamatory Images: Disfiguration in Physiognomy and Caricature’s Two Bodies | 118 6 Cult Images: Iconoclastic Controversy, the Desire for Images, and the Dialectic of Secularization | 170 7 Angels: Images of Making-Appearance between Religion, Art, and Science | 202 8 Perspectives of the Grammatology of Images beyond Visual Culture | 264 Notes | 275 Bibliography | 319 Index | 347

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Book SynopsisA provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles’ Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture. There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles’ Antigone. The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all these readings and rewritings keep emerging? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular “obsessions” have driven the author’s thinking and writing about Antigone. First is the issue of violence. The violence in Antigone is the opposite of “graphic” as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific “undeadness” that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted the author to look at the relationship between language, sexuality, death, and “second death.” The third issue, which constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone’s statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. The author asks, how does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the “unwritten law” she follows, tally with Antigone’s universal appeal and compelling power? Attempting to answer this leads to the question of what this particular (Oedipal) family’s misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, shares with the general condition of humanity. Which in turn forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: “What is incest?” Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupančič’s absorbing and succinct guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising intervention into the broad and prominent field of study related to Sophocles’ Antigone illuminates the classical text’s ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.Table of ContentsPreface | vii Prologue | 1 1. Violence, Terror, and Unwritten Laws | 9 2. Death, Undeadness, and Funeral Rites | 21 3. “I’d Let Them Rot” | 50 Works Cited | 83 Index | 85

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Book SynopsisThe Philology of Life retraces the outlines of the philological project developed by Walter Benjamin in his early essays on Hölderlin, the Romantics, and Goethe. This philological program, McLaughlin shows, provides the methodological key to Benjamin’s work as a whole. According to Benjamin, German literary history in the period roughly following the first World War was part of a wider “crisis of historical experience”—a life crisis to which Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) had instructively but insufficiently responded. Benjamin’s literary critical struggle during these years consisted in developing a philology of literary historical experience and of life that is rooted in an encounter with a written image. The fundamental importance of this “philological” method in Benjamin’s work seems not to have been recognized by his contemporary readers, including Theodor Adorno who considered the approach to be lacking in dialectical rigor. This facet of Benjamin’s work was also elided in the postwar publications of his writings, both in German and English. In recent decades, the publication of a wider range of Benjamin’s writings has made it possible to retrace the outlines of a distinctive philological project that starts to develop in his early literary criticism and that extends into the late studies of Baudelaire and Paris. By bringing this innovative method to light this study proposes “the philology of life” as the key to the critical program of one of the most influential intellectual figures in the humanities.Table of ContentsNote on Abbreviations | ix Introduction: The Philology of Life | 1 1. “Two Poems by Friedrich Hölderlin” | 15 2. The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism | 42 3. “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” | 68 Coda: The Afterlife of Philology | 109 Acknowledgments | 127 Appendix: Sources for Benjamin’s “Goethe’s Elective Affinities” (1924–25) | 129 Notes | 131 Bibliography | 179 Index | 189

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Book SynopsisSpectacles and Specters draws on theories of performativity to conceptualize the entanglements of law and political violence, offering a radical departure from accounts that consider political trials as instrumental in exercising or containing political violence. Legal scholar Başak Ertür argues instead that making sense of the often incalculable interpenetrations of law, politics, and violence in trials requires shifting the focus away from law’s instrumentality to its performativity. Ertür develops a theory of political trials by reconstructing and building on a legacy of critical thought on Nuremberg in close engagement with theories of performativity. She then offers original case studies that introduce a new perspective by looking beyond the Holocaust trials, to the Armenian genocide and its fragmentary legal aftermaths. These cases include the 1921 trial of Soghomon Tehlirian, the 2007-21 Hrant Dink Murder Trial, and the 2015 case before the European Court of Human Rights concerning the denial of the Armenian genocide. Enabling us to capture the various modalities in which the political emerges in, through and in relation to legal forms on the stage of the trial, this focus on law’s performativity also allows us to account for how sovereign schemes can misfire and how trials can come to have unintended political lives and afterlives. Further, it reveals how law is entangled with and perpetuates certain histories of violence, rather than simply ever mastering these histories or providing closure.Table of ContentsPreface | ix Introduction | 1 Performativity and Performance • Performativity and Errancy • Rethinking the Politics of Trials • Law and Violence: An Oblique Address PART I: A PERFORMATIVE THEORY OF POLITICAL TRIALS 1 Theorizing Political Trials | 21 Kirchheimer: Setting the Parameters • Judgment on Nuremberg • Arendt: A Trial of One’s Own? • The Breach That Speaks the Bind • Shklar: “There’s Politics and Politics” • Between Atrocity and Legal Violence 2 The Form and Substance of Doing Justice: Law, Performativity, Performance | 52 Not a Profound Word • Law and Performativity • Masquerade and Fate • The Trial: Performativity and Performance 3 Sovereign Infelicities | 76 Three Scenes • Sovereign Spectacles • Sovereign Performatives? • (Mis)Reading the Performative as Performance • Derrida’s Austin: Sovereign Pretensions • Performing the (Structural) Unconscious • Undoing Sovereignty PART II: TRACING THE SPECTERS IN THE SPECTACLES 4 Ghosts in the Courtroom: The Trial of Soghomon Tehlirian | 103 Talat • Tehlirian • Enter Ghost • The Telegrams • The Haunted Hunter • The Many Lives of Tehlirian • The Politics of Haunting 5 Spectral Legacies: Legal Aftermaths of the Armenian Genocide | 131 Legal Returns • Atemporal Histories of Terror • Process unto Oblivion • “Genocide” as Counter-Memory 6 Law of Denial: The Armenian Genocide before the European Court of Human Rights | 156 The Envoy • The Judge, The Historian, and the Politician • Judging the Presence of the Past Conclusion | 175 Acknowledgments | 187 Notes | 191 Index | 223

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Book SynopsisThis volume focuses on the relational aspect of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking. As Nancy himself showed, thinking might be a solitary activity but it is never singular in its dimension. Building on or breaking away from other thoughts, especially those by thinkers who had come before, thinking is always plural, relational. This “singular plural” dimension of thought in Nancy’s philosophical writings demands explication. In this book, some of today’s leading scholars in the theoretical humanities shed light on how Nancy’s thought both shares with and departs from Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Weil, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Lyotard, elucidating “the sharing of voices,” in Nancy’s phrase, between Nancy and these thinkers. Contributors: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Emily Apter, Rodolphe Gasché, Werner Hamacher, Eleanor Kaufman, Marie-Eve Morin, Timothy Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John H. SmithTable of ContentsIntroduction: Jean-Luc Nancy Passes | 1 Irving Goh 1 The Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time (Reading Descartes with Jean-Luc Nancy) | 21 Georges Van Den Abbeele 2 Nancy with Hegel: The Restless Pleasures of Calculus and the Infinite Opening in Finitude | 52 John H. Smith 3 The World, Absolutely: On Jean-Luc Nancy (and Karl Marx) | 75 Rodolphe Gasché 4 Worldless: Heidegger, Simone Weil, and Anti-Judaism via Nancy | 91 Eleanor Kaufman 5 Flesh and Écart in Merleau-Ponty and Nancy | 111 Marie-Eve Morin 6 Sexistence: Nancy and Lacan | 135 Emily Apter 7 Sublime Seizures in Lyotard and Nancy: The Political Blooming of Art and Technology | 149 Timothy Murray 8 D’avec: Mutations and Mutisms in Jean-Luc Nancy | 166 Werner Hamacher 9 Infinitely Passing (or, Pascal Passes) | 205 Jean-Luc Nancy List of Contributors | 211 Index | 215

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Book SynopsisThis volume focuses on the relational aspect of Jean-Luc Nancy’s thinking. As Nancy himself showed, thinking might be a solitary activity but it is never singular in its dimension. Building on or breaking away from other thoughts, especially those by thinkers who had come before, thinking is always plural, relational. This “singular plural” dimension of thought in Nancy’s philosophical writings demands explication. In this book, some of today’s leading scholars in the theoretical humanities shed light on how Nancy’s thought both shares with and departs from Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Weil, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Lyotard, elucidating “the sharing of voices,” in Nancy’s phrase, between Nancy and these thinkers. Contributors: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Emily Apter, Rodolphe Gasché, Werner Hamacher, Eleanor Kaufman, Marie-Eve Morin, Timothy Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John H. SmithTable of ContentsIntroduction: Jean-Luc Nancy Passes | 1 Irving Goh 1 The Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time (Reading Descartes with Jean-Luc Nancy) | 21 Georges Van Den Abbeele 2 Nancy with Hegel: The Restless Pleasures of Calculus and the Infinite Opening in Finitude | 52 John H. Smith 3 The World, Absolutely: On Jean-Luc Nancy (and Karl Marx) | 75 Rodolphe Gasché 4 Worldless: Heidegger, Simone Weil, and Anti-Judaism via Nancy | 91 Eleanor Kaufman 5 Flesh and Écart in Merleau-Ponty and Nancy | 111 Marie-Eve Morin 6 Sexistence: Nancy and Lacan | 135 Emily Apter 7 Sublime Seizures in Lyotard and Nancy: The Political Blooming of Art and Technology | 149 Timothy Murray 8 D’avec: Mutations and Mutisms in Jean-Luc Nancy | 166 Werner Hamacher 9 Infinitely Passing (or, Pascal Passes) | 205 Jean-Luc Nancy List of Contributors | 211 Index | 215

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Book SynopsisSecret Sharers traces a genealogy of secret sharing between literary modernism and psychoanalysis, focusing on the productive entanglements and intense competitive rivalries that helped shape Anglo-American modernism as a field. As Jennifer Spitzer reveals, such rivalries played out in explicit criticism, inventive misreadings, and revisions of Freudian forms—from D. H. Lawrence’s re-descriptions of the unconscious to Vladimir Nabokov’s parodies of the psychoanalytic case study. While some modernists engaged directly with Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis with unmistakable rivalry and critique, others wrestled in more complex ways with Freud’s legacy. The key protagonists of this study—D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov—are noteworthy for the way they engaged with, popularized, and revised the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, while also struggling with it as an encroaching discourse. Modernists read psychoanalysis, misread psychoanalysis, and sometimes refused to read it altogether, while expressing anxiety about being read by psychoanalysis—subjecting themselves and their art to psychoanalytic interpretations. As analysts, such as Freud, Ernest Jones, and Alfred Kuttner, turned to literature and art to illustrate psychoanalytic theories, modernists sought to counter such reductive narratives by envisioning competing formulations of the relationship between literature and psychic life. Modernists often expressed ambivalence about the probing, symptomatic style of psychoanalytic interpretation and responded with a re-doubling of arguments for aesthetic autonomy, formal self-consciousness, and amateurism. Secret Sharers reveals how modernists transformed the hermeneutic and diagnostic priorities of psychoanalysis into novel aesthetic strategies and distinctive modes of epistemological and critical engagement. In reassessing the historical and intellectual legacies of modernism, this book suggests that modernist responses to psychoanalytic criticism anticipate more recent critical debates about the value of “symptomatic” reading and the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”Table of ContentsIntroduction: Intimate Others | 1 1 On Not Reading Freud: Amateurism, Expertise, and the “Pristine Unconscious” in D. H. Lawrence | 31 2 The Soul under Psychoanalysis: Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy | 59 3 The Heterodox Psychology and Queer Poetics of Auden in the 1930s | 88 4 Nabokov and the Lure of Freudian Forms | 115 Conclusion: Modernist Afterlives and the Legacies of Suspicion | 143 Acknowledgments | 155 Notes | 159 Index | 191

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Book SynopsisSecret Sharers traces a genealogy of secret sharing between literary modernism and psychoanalysis, focusing on the productive entanglements and intense competitive rivalries that helped shape Anglo-American modernism as a field. As Jennifer Spitzer reveals, such rivalries played out in explicit criticism, inventive misreadings, and revisions of Freudian forms—from D. H. Lawrence’s re-descriptions of the unconscious to Vladimir Nabokov’s parodies of the psychoanalytic case study. While some modernists engaged directly with Freud and Freudian psychoanalysis with unmistakable rivalry and critique, others wrestled in more complex ways with Freud’s legacy. The key protagonists of this study—D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, W. H. Auden, and Vladimir Nabokov—are noteworthy for the way they engaged with, popularized, and revised the terms of Freudian psychoanalysis, while also struggling with it as an encroaching discourse. Modernists read psychoanalysis, misread psychoanalysis, and sometimes refused to read it altogether, while expressing anxiety about being read by psychoanalysis—subjecting themselves and their art to psychoanalytic interpretations. As analysts, such as Freud, Ernest Jones, and Alfred Kuttner, turned to literature and art to illustrate psychoanalytic theories, modernists sought to counter such reductive narratives by envisioning competing formulations of the relationship between literature and psychic life. Modernists often expressed ambivalence about the probing, symptomatic style of psychoanalytic interpretation and responded with a re-doubling of arguments for aesthetic autonomy, formal self-consciousness, and amateurism. Secret Sharers reveals how modernists transformed the hermeneutic and diagnostic priorities of psychoanalysis into novel aesthetic strategies and distinctive modes of epistemological and critical engagement. In reassessing the historical and intellectual legacies of modernism, this book suggests that modernist responses to psychoanalytic criticism anticipate more recent critical debates about the value of “symptomatic” reading and the “hermeneutics of suspicion.”Table of ContentsIntroduction: Intimate Others | 1 1 On Not Reading Freud: Amateurism, Expertise, and the “Pristine Unconscious” in D. H. Lawrence | 31 2 The Soul under Psychoanalysis: Virginia Woolf and the Ethics of Intimacy | 59 3 The Heterodox Psychology and Queer Poetics of Auden in the 1930s | 88 4 Nabokov and the Lure of Freudian Forms | 115 Conclusion: Modernist Afterlives and the Legacies of Suspicion | 143 Acknowledgments | 155 Notes | 159 Index | 191

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Book SynopsisToday, an international new right has coalesced. Variously described as nativist, right-populist, alt-right, and neofascist, far-right movements in many countries have achieved electoral victories that not long ago seemed highly improbable. They have also developed a new cultural politics. Adapting tactics from the left, the new right has moved from decorum to transgression; from conservative propriety to the frank sexualization of political figures and positions; from appealing to the conscious normalcy of the “silent majority” to recasting itself as a protest movement of and for the aggrieved. These movements share a mandate for robust nationalism, yet they also cultivate a striking international solidarity. Who is the subject of this ethnonationalism? Many new right movements have in fact intensified or laid bare long-standing tendencies, but this volume seeks to address aspects of their cultural politics that raise new and urgent questions. How should we assess the new right’s disconcerting appropriations of strategies of minoritarian resistance? How can we practice critique in the face of adversaries who claim to practice a critique of their own? How do apparently post-normative versions of nationalism give rise to heightened forms of militarism, incarceration, censorship, and inequality? How should we understand the temporality of ethnonationalism, which combines a romance with archaic tradition, an ethos of disruption driven by tech futurism frequently tinged with accelerationist pathos, and a kitschy nostalgia for a hazily defined recent past, when things were “greater” than they are now? Surveying nationalisms from Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Israel-Palestine, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Reaction Formations gives a critical account of contemporary ethnonationalist cultural politics, while drawing out counterstrategies for anti-fascist resistance. Contributors: Tyler Blakeney, Chiara Bottici, Joshua Branciforte, Gisela Catanzaro, Melinda Cooper, Julian Göpffarth, Ramsey McGlazer, Benjamin Noys, Bruno Perreau, Rahul Rao, Shaul Setter, and M. TyTable of ContentsIntroduction: On the Subject of Ethnonationalism Joshua Branciforte and Ramsey McGlazer | 1 I. Psychic Economieies 1. Fascism Without Men: On the Gender Politics of the Radical Right Joshua Branciforte | 23 2. Navigating Mass Psychology: The Political Myth of Trumpism Chiara Bottici | 58 3. Challenging the Outlaw Thesis: New Configurations of Sexuality, Politics, and Aesthetics Ty Blakeney | 88 4. The Myth of What We Can Take In: Global Migration and the “Receptive Capacity” of the Nation-State M. Ty | 118 II. Ethnostates 5. The Return to Exile: Critical Shifts in the Age of Neo-Zionism Shaul Setter | 145 6. The Alt-Right: From Libertarianism to Paleolibertarianism and Beyond Melinda Cooper | 166 7. Nationalisms By, Against, and Beyond the Indian State Rahul Rao | 190 8. Giving the Heimat a New Home: National Belonging and Ethnopluralism on the German Far Right Julian Göpffarth | 207 III. Counterrevolutions and Culture 9. Planetary Technology and Reactionary Accelerationism Benjamin Noys | 241 10. “The New Conservative Humanism”: Reflections on a New Ethnonational Counterrevolution Bruno Perreau | 263 11. Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Neocolonial Subordination: Beyond the National Question (Argentina, 2015–2019) Gisela Catanzaro | 297 12. Gramsci’s Grave Ramsey McGlazer | 324 About the Contributors | 349 Index | 353

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Book SynopsisToday, an international new right has coalesced. Variously described as nativist, right-populist, alt-right, and neofascist, far-right movements in many countries have achieved electoral victories that not long ago seemed highly improbable. They have also developed a new cultural politics. Adapting tactics from the left, the new right has moved from decorum to transgression; from conservative propriety to the frank sexualization of political figures and positions; from appealing to the conscious normalcy of the “silent majority” to recasting itself as a protest movement of and for the aggrieved. These movements share a mandate for robust nationalism, yet they also cultivate a striking international solidarity. Who is the subject of this ethnonationalism? Many new right movements have in fact intensified or laid bare long-standing tendencies, but this volume seeks to address aspects of their cultural politics that raise new and urgent questions. How should we assess the new right’s disconcerting appropriations of strategies of minoritarian resistance? How can we practice critique in the face of adversaries who claim to practice a critique of their own? How do apparently post-normative versions of nationalism give rise to heightened forms of militarism, incarceration, censorship, and inequality? How should we understand the temporality of ethnonationalism, which combines a romance with archaic tradition, an ethos of disruption driven by tech futurism frequently tinged with accelerationist pathos, and a kitschy nostalgia for a hazily defined recent past, when things were “greater” than they are now? Surveying nationalisms from Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Israel-Palestine, the United Kingdom, and the United States, Reaction Formations gives a critical account of contemporary ethnonationalist cultural politics, while drawing out counterstrategies for anti-fascist resistance. Contributors: Tyler Blakeney, Chiara Bottici, Joshua Branciforte, Gisela Catanzaro, Melinda Cooper, Julian Göpffarth, Ramsey McGlazer, Benjamin Noys, Bruno Perreau, Rahul Rao, Shaul Setter, and M. TyTable of ContentsIntroduction: On the Subject of Ethnonationalism Joshua Branciforte and Ramsey McGlazer | 1 I. Psychic Economieies 1. Fascism Without Men: On the Gender Politics of the Radical Right Joshua Branciforte | 23 2. Navigating Mass Psychology: The Political Myth of Trumpism Chiara Bottici | 58 3. Challenging the Outlaw Thesis: New Configurations of Sexuality, Politics, and Aesthetics Ty Blakeney | 88 4. The Myth of What We Can Take In: Global Migration and the “Receptive Capacity” of the Nation-State M. Ty | 118 II. Ethnostates 5. The Return to Exile: Critical Shifts in the Age of Neo-Zionism Shaul Setter | 145 6. The Alt-Right: From Libertarianism to Paleolibertarianism and Beyond Melinda Cooper | 166 7. Nationalisms By, Against, and Beyond the Indian State Rahul Rao | 190 8. Giving the Heimat a New Home: National Belonging and Ethnopluralism on the German Far Right Julian Göpffarth | 207 III. Counterrevolutions and Culture 9. Planetary Technology and Reactionary Accelerationism Benjamin Noys | 241 10. “The New Conservative Humanism”: Reflections on a New Ethnonational Counterrevolution Bruno Perreau | 263 11. Authoritarian Neoliberalism and Neocolonial Subordination: Beyond the National Question (Argentina, 2015–2019) Gisela Catanzaro | 297 12. Gramsci’s Grave Ramsey McGlazer | 324 About the Contributors | 349 Index | 353

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Book SynopsisPhilosophical thinking is interrupted by the finitude of what cannot be named, on the one hand, and that within which it is subsumed as one of multiple modes of sense-making, on the other. Sense and Singularity elaborates Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical project as an inquiry into the limits or finitude of philosophy itself, where it is interrupted, and as a practice of critical intervention where philosophy serves to interrupt otherwise unquestioned ways of thinking. Nancy’s interruption of philosophy, Van Den Abbeele argues, reveals the limits of what philosophy is and what it can do, its apocalyptic end and its endless renewal, its Sisyphean interruption between the bounds of infinitely replicating sense and the conceptual vanishing point that is singularity. In examinations of Nancy’s foundational rereading of Descartes's cogito as iterative, his formal experimentations with the genres of philosophical writing, the account of “retreat” in understanding the political, and the interruptive play of sense and singularity in writings on the body, sexuality, and aesthetics, Van Den Abbeele offers a fresh account of one of our major thinkers as well as a provocative inquiry into what philosophy can do.Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations | vii Introduction: From the Interruption of Sense to the Poetics of Finitude | 1 1 Descartes’s Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time | 23 2 Monograms: Writing Singular Plural | 49 3 The “Singular Logic of the Retreat”: Interruptions of the Political | 78 4 Corpus Interruptus: Uncommon Sense and the Singular Crossings of Eros, Logos, and Tekhnè | 115 Acknowledgments | 163 Notes | 167 Bibliography | 197 Index | 209

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Book SynopsisPhilosophical thinking is interrupted by the finitude of what cannot be named, on the one hand, and that within which it is subsumed as one of multiple modes of sense-making, on the other. Sense and Singularity elaborates Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophical project as an inquiry into the limits or finitude of philosophy itself, where it is interrupted, and as a practice of critical intervention where philosophy serves to interrupt otherwise unquestioned ways of thinking. Nancy’s interruption of philosophy, Van Den Abbeele argues, reveals the limits of what philosophy is and what it can do, its apocalyptic end and its endless renewal, its Sisyphean interruption between the bounds of infinitely replicating sense and the conceptual vanishing point that is singularity. In examinations of Nancy’s foundational rereading of Descartes's cogito as iterative, his formal experimentations with the genres of philosophical writing, the account of “retreat” in understanding the political, and the interruptive play of sense and singularity in writings on the body, sexuality, and aesthetics, Van Den Abbeele offers a fresh account of one of our major thinkers as well as a provocative inquiry into what philosophy can do.Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations | vii Introduction: From the Interruption of Sense to the Poetics of Finitude | 1 1 Descartes’s Iterative Cogito, or the Sum of Each and Every Time | 23 2 Monograms: Writing Singular Plural | 49 3 The “Singular Logic of the Retreat”: Interruptions of the Political | 78 4 Corpus Interruptus: Uncommon Sense and the Singular Crossings of Eros, Logos, and Tekhnè | 115 Acknowledgments | 163 Notes | 167 Bibliography | 197 Index | 209

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Book SynopsisA foundational book by one of the most distinguished German humanists of the last half century, Tempus joins cultural linguistics and literary interpretation at the hip. Developing two controversial theses—that sentences are not truly meaningful in isolation from their contexts and that verb tenses are primarily indicators not of time but of the attitude of the speaker or writer—Tempus surveys a dazzling array of ancient and modern texts from famous authors as well as casual speakers of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Latin, and English, with a final chapter extending the observations to Greek, Russian, and world languages. A classic in German and long available in many other languages, Tempus launched a new discipline, text linguistics, and established a unique career that was marked by precise observation, sensitive cultural outreach, and practical engagement with the situation of migrants. Weinrich’s robust and lucid close readings of famous and little-known authors from all the major languages of western Europe expand our literary horizons and challenge our linguistic understanding.Table of ContentsTranslators’ Note | ix Introduction | 1 Jane K. Brown and Marshall Brown 1 Tense in Texts | 9 Tense and Time, 9 • Text Linguistics, 11 • A Preliminary Reflection: Obstinate Signs, 14 • Tense Distribution, 17 • Two Tense Groups: Discussing and Narrating, 22 • On the Freedom of the Narrator, 25 2 Discussing–Narrating | 32 Syntax and Communication, 32 • Register, 36 • Tense in Different Genres, 42 • The World of Discussion, 45 • The World of Narrating, 50 • Tense in the Language of Children, 55 3 Perspective | 60 Time in Texts, 60 • The Future (using French as an example), 64 • The Perfekt in German, 69 • The Perfect in English, 75 • Thornton Wilder: The Ides of March, 78 • The Passé composé in French, 83 • The Passato prossimo in Italian, 87 • The Perfecto compuesto in Spanish, 91 • Narration, Past, Truth, 96 4 Highlighting | 101 Narrative Highlighting, 101 • Narrative Tempo in the Novel, 106 • Baudelaire: “Le vieux saltimbanque” (The Old Mountebank), 111 • Of the Tense of Death, 117 5 Tense in Novellas and Short Stories: Highlighting vs. Aspect | 121 Maupassant, 121 • Pirandello, 126 • Unamuno, Darío, Echegaray, 129 • Hemingway, 135 • Frame Narrative (Boccaccio), 142 • Narration in the Middle Ages, 147 • Frame and Highlighting in Modern Stories, 150 6 Tense Transitions 153 Tense in Dialogue, 153 • Descartes, Rousseau, and the Sequence of Tenses, 164 7 Tense Metaphors | 171 Tense Metaphors in Texts, 171 • Condition and Consequence, Reality and Unreality, 180 8 Tense Combinations | 186 Tense and Person, 186 • Tense and Adverbs, 190 • Combined Transitions, 197 • Semi-finite Verbs, 205 9 A Crisis in Narration? | 211 Tense in Old French, 211 • Evidence of Language Consciousness in French Classicism, 217 • The Time of Newspapers, 224 • Albert Camus: L’étranger, 227 • Oral Narration in French, 236 • A Parallel: Tense in South-German Dialects, 244 10 Other Languages—Other Tenses? | 252 Tense in Ancient Greek, 252 • Tense in Latin, 256 • Whorf, Spengler, and the Hopi Indians, 264 • Toward a New Method of Description, 270 Index | 275

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Book SynopsisWhen Jean-Luc Nancy first encountered the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, he knew he was hearing something new, a voice genuinely of its time. Thinking with and against each other over the course of their long friendship, the two thinkers reshaped the European intellectual landscape. Nancy’s writings on Derrida, collected in this volume, reflect on the elements of their shared concerns with politics, the arts, religion, the fate of deconstruction, and the future of sense. Rather than studies, commentaries, or interpretations of Derrida’s thought, they are responses to his presence—not exactly a presence to self, but a presence in the world.Table of ContentsPrologue | 1 1 Elliptical Sense | 5 2 Borborygmi | 27 3 The Judeo-Christian | 44 4 Derrida in Strasbourg | 63 5 J.D. | 68 6 Parallel Differences: Deleuze and Derrida | 75 7 Derrida da capo | 88 8 Mad Derrida: Ipso facto cogitans ac demens | 95 9 The Independence of Algeria and the Independence of Derrida | 110 10 Eloquent Stripes | 115 11 Derrida disant dix | 121 12 A Differant Orientation | 124 13 Jouis anniversaire! “Scenes of the Inner Life”: On the Tenth Anniversary of the Death of Jacques Derrida | 131 14 Derridapolitics | 146 15 Homage to Jacques Derrida: An Interview with Laure Adler | 153 16 What Is Deconstruction? An Interview with Federico Ferrari | 161 Afterword: Nothing to See, Nothing to Do | 175 by Alexander García Düttmann Notes | 185 Bibliography | 199

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Book SynopsisWhen Jean-Luc Nancy first encountered the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, he knew he was hearing something new, a voice genuinely of its time. Thinking with and against each other over the course of their long friendship, the two thinkers reshaped the European intellectual landscape. Nancy’s writings on Derrida, collected in this volume, reflect on the elements of their shared concerns with politics, the arts, religion, the fate of deconstruction, and the future of sense. Rather than studies, commentaries, or interpretations of Derrida’s thought, they are responses to his presence—not exactly a presence to self, but a presence in the world.Table of ContentsPrologue | 1 1 Elliptical Sense | 5 2 Borborygmi | 27 3 The Judeo-Christian | 44 4 Derrida in Strasbourg | 63 5 J.D. | 68 6 Parallel Differences: Deleuze and Derrida | 75 7 Derrida da capo | 88 8 Mad Derrida: Ipso facto cogitans ac demens | 95 9 The Independence of Algeria and the Independence of Derrida | 110 10 Eloquent Stripes | 115 11 Derrida disant dix | 121 12 A Differant Orientation | 124 13 Jouis anniversaire! “Scenes of the Inner Life”: On the Tenth Anniversary of the Death of Jacques Derrida | 131 14 Derridapolitics | 146 15 Homage to Jacques Derrida: An Interview with Laure Adler | 153 16 What Is Deconstruction? An Interview with Federico Ferrari | 161 Afterword: Nothing to See, Nothing to Do | 175 by Alexander García Düttmann Notes | 185 Bibliography | 199

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Book SynopsisToy Stories: Analyzing the Child in Nineteenth-Century Literature explores the stakes of recurrent depictions of children’s violent, damaging, and tenuously restorative play with objects within a long nineteenth century of fictional and educational writing. As Vanessa Smith shows us, these scenes of aggression and anxiety cannot be squared with the standard picture of domestic childhood across that period. Instead, they seem to attest to the kinds of enactments of infant distress we would normally associate with post-psychoanalytic modernity, creating a ripple effect in the literary texts that nest them: regressing developmental narratives, giving new value to wooden characters, exposing Realism’s solid objects to odd fracture, and troubling distinctions between artificial and authentic interiority. Toy Stories is the first study to take these scenes of anger and overwhelm seriously, challenging received ideas about both the nineteenth century and its literary forms. Radically re-conceiving nineteenth-century childhood and its literary depiction as anticipating the scenes, theories, and methodologies of early child analysis, Toy Stories proposes a shared literary and psychoanalytic discernment about child’s play that in turn provides a deep context for understanding both the “development” of the novel and the keen British uptake of Melanie Klein’s and Anna Freud’s interventions in child therapy. In doing so, the book provides a necessary reframing of the work of Klein and Freud and their fractious disagreement about the interior life of the child and its object-mediated manifestations.Table of ContentsPreface: A Toy Is Being Beaten | ix Introduction: Child’s Play | 1 1 Proper Objects | 27 2 Possible Persons | 54 3 Our Plays | 82 4 Bildung Blocks | 110 Conclusion: Toy Stories | 137 Acknowledgments | 147 Notes | 149 Works Cited | 189 Index | 205

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Book SynopsisIn Narrating Humanity, Cynthia G. Franklin makes a critical intervention into practices of life writing and contemporary crises in the United States about who counts as human. To enable this intervention, she proposes a powerful new analytical language centered on “narrative humanity,” “narrated humanity,” and “grounded narrative humanity” and foregrounds concepts of the human that emerge from movement politics. While stories of “narrative humanity” propagate the status quo, Franklin argues, those of “narrated humanity” and “grounded narrative humanity” are ones that articulate ways of being human necessary for not only surviving but also thriving during a time of accelerating crises brought on by the intersecting effects of racial capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and climate change. Through chapters focused on Hurricane Katrina; Black Lives Matter; the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; and the Native Hawaiian movement to protect Mauna a Wākea, Franklin reveals how life writing can be mobilized to do more than perpetuate dominant forms of dehumanization that underwrite violence. She contends that life narratives can help materialize ways of being human inspired by these contemporary political movements that are based on queer kinship, inter/national solidarity, abolitionist care, and decolonial connectivity among humans, more-than-humans, land, and waters. Engaging writers, artists, and activists who inspire radical forms of relationality, she comes to write side-by-side with them in her own acts of narrated humanity by refusing the boundaries between autobiography, community-based activism, and literary and cultural criticism.Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments | ix Introduction: The Human in Crisis | 1 PART I: NARRATIVE HUMANITY 1 Love and Terror: Formulas of Citizenship in Zeitoun and Trouble the Water | 33 2 Criminals and Kinship: Fruitvale Station, Between the World and Me, and Black Selfhood in the Age of BLM | 68 PART II: NARRATED HUMANITY 3 From Movement to Memoir: When They Call You a Terrorist and the Power of Queer Black Kinship | 109 4 “Nursing Visions of the Unimagined”: BDS and Steven Salaita’s World-Making Narratives of Fatherhood, Affiliation, and Freedom | 144 PART III: NARRATED HUMANITY AND GROUNDED NARRATIVE HUMANITY 5 “E Hū ē” (Rising Like a Mighty Wave): Mauna Kea and the Movement beyond the Human | 187 Postscript: Hope, Joy, and “The Struggle for Ea” | 231 Notes | 237 Works Cited | 255 Index | 283

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Book SynopsisIn Narrating Humanity, Cynthia G. Franklin makes a critical intervention into practices of life writing and contemporary crises in the United States about who counts as human. To enable this intervention, she proposes a powerful new analytical language centered on “narrative humanity,” “narrated humanity,” and “grounded narrative humanity” and foregrounds concepts of the human that emerge from movement politics. While stories of “narrative humanity” propagate the status quo, Franklin argues, those of “narrated humanity” and “grounded narrative humanity” are ones that articulate ways of being human necessary for not only surviving but also thriving during a time of accelerating crises brought on by the intersecting effects of racial capitalism, imperialism, heteropatriarchy, and climate change. Through chapters focused on Hurricane Katrina; Black Lives Matter; the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement; and the Native Hawaiian movement to protect Mauna a Wākea, Franklin reveals how life writing can be mobilized to do more than perpetuate dominant forms of dehumanization that underwrite violence. She contends that life narratives can help materialize ways of being human inspired by these contemporary political movements that are based on queer kinship, inter/national solidarity, abolitionist care, and decolonial connectivity among humans, more-than-humans, land, and waters. Engaging writers, artists, and activists who inspire radical forms of relationality, she comes to write side-by-side with them in her own acts of narrated humanity by refusing the boundaries between autobiography, community-based activism, and literary and cultural criticism.Table of ContentsPreface and Acknowledgments | ix Introduction: The Human in Crisis | 1 PART I: NARRATIVE HUMANITY 1 Love and Terror: Formulas of Citizenship in Zeitoun and Trouble the Water | 33 2 Criminals and Kinship: Fruitvale Station, Between the World and Me, and Black Selfhood in the Age of BLM | 68 PART II: NARRATED HUMANITY 3 From Movement to Memoir: When They Call You a Terrorist and the Power of Queer Black Kinship | 109 4 “Nursing Visions of the Unimagined”: BDS and Steven Salaita’s World-Making Narratives of Fatherhood, Affiliation, and Freedom | 144 PART III: NARRATED HUMANITY AND GROUNDED NARRATIVE HUMANITY 5 “E Hū ē” (Rising Like a Mighty Wave): Mauna Kea and the Movement beyond the Human | 187 Postscript: Hope, Joy, and “The Struggle for Ea” | 231 Notes | 237 Works Cited | 255 Index | 283

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Book SynopsisNew Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the discipline’s early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with far-reaching social consequences resulted in what we might call our first crisis of academic life. Rovee probes literary study’s nostalgic attachments to this past, by recasting an essential episode in the historiography of English—the vigorous rejection of romanticism by American New Critics—in the new light of the American university’s tectonic growth. In the process, he demonstrates literary study’s profound investment in romanticism and reveals the romantic lyric’s special affect, nostalgia, as having been part of English’s professional identity all along. New Critical Nostalgia meticulously shows what is lost in reducing mid-century American criticism and the intense, quirky, and unpredictable writings of central figures, such as Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and W. K. Wimsatt, to a glib monolith of New Critical anti-romanticism. In Rovee’s historically rich account, grounded in analysis of critical texts and enlivened by archival study, readers discover John Crowe Ransom’s and William Wordsworth’s shared existential nostalgia, witness the demolition of the “immature” Percy Shelley in the revolutionary textbook Understanding Poetry, explore the classroom give-and-take prompted by the close reading of John Keats, consider the strange ambivalence toward Lord Byron on the part of formalist critics and romantic scholars alike, and encounter the strikingly contemporary quantitative studies by one of the mid-century’s preeminent poetry scholars, Josephine Miles. These complex and enthralling engagements with the romantic lyric introduce the reader to a dynamic intellectual milieu, in which professionals with varying methodological commitments (from New Critics to computationalists), working in radically different academic locales (from Nashville and New Haven to Baton Rouge and Berkeley), wrangled over what it means to read, with nothing less than the future of the discipline at stake.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Our Elegiac Professionalism | 1 1 Ransom’s Melancholy (Reading Wordsworth in Gambier, Ohio) | 23 2 Shelley’s Immaturity | 52 3 Brooks and the Collegiate Public, Reading Keats Together | 85 4 The Case of Byron | 110 5 The Emergence of Josephine Miles (Reading Wordsworth in Berkeley, California) | 135 Epilogue: The Fields of Learning | 177 Acknowledgments | 193 Notes | 197 Index | 253

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Book SynopsisNew Critical Nostalgia weighs the future of literary study by reassessing its past. It tracks today's impassioned debates about method back to the discipline’s early professional era, when an unprecedented makeover of American higher education with far-reaching social consequences resulted in what we might call our first crisis of academic life. Rovee probes literary study’s nostalgic attachments to this past, by recasting an essential episode in the historiography of English—the vigorous rejection of romanticism by American New Critics—in the new light of the American university’s tectonic growth. In the process, he demonstrates literary study’s profound investment in romanticism and reveals the romantic lyric’s special affect, nostalgia, as having been part of English’s professional identity all along. New Critical Nostalgia meticulously shows what is lost in reducing mid-century American criticism and the intense, quirky, and unpredictable writings of central figures, such as Cleanth Brooks, Josephine Miles, and W. K. Wimsatt, to a glib monolith of New Critical anti-romanticism. In Rovee’s historically rich account, grounded in analysis of critical texts and enlivened by archival study, readers discover John Crowe Ransom’s and William Wordsworth’s shared existential nostalgia, witness the demolition of the “immature” Percy Shelley in the revolutionary textbook Understanding Poetry, explore the classroom give-and-take prompted by the close reading of John Keats, consider the strange ambivalence toward Lord Byron on the part of formalist critics and romantic scholars alike, and encounter the strikingly contemporary quantitative studies by one of the mid-century’s preeminent poetry scholars, Josephine Miles. These complex and enthralling engagements with the romantic lyric introduce the reader to a dynamic intellectual milieu, in which professionals with varying methodological commitments (from New Critics to computationalists), working in radically different academic locales (from Nashville and New Haven to Baton Rouge and Berkeley), wrangled over what it means to read, with nothing less than the future of the discipline at stake.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Our Elegiac Professionalism | 1 1 Ransom’s Melancholy (Reading Wordsworth in Gambier, Ohio) | 23 2 Shelley’s Immaturity | 52 3 Brooks and the Collegiate Public, Reading Keats Together | 85 4 The Case of Byron | 110 5 The Emergence of Josephine Miles (Reading Wordsworth in Berkeley, California) | 135 Epilogue: The Fields of Learning | 177 Acknowledgments | 193 Notes | 197 Index | 253

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Book SynopsisThe Ruse of Techne offers a reappraisal of Heidegger's entire work by focusing on the forms of activity he regards as separate from instrumentality. Non-instrumental activities like authenticity, poetry, and thinkingin short, the ineffectualare critical for Heidegger as they offer the only path to the truth of being throughout his work.By unearthing the source of the conception of non-instrumental action in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle, Vardoulakis elaborates how it forms part of Heidegger's response to an old problem, namely, how to account for difference after positing a single and unified being that is not amenable to change. He further demonstrates that an action without ends and effects leads to an ethics and politics rife with difficulties and contradictions that only become starker when compared to other responses to the same problem that we find in the philosophical tradition and which rely on instrumentality.Heidegger's conception of an action without

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Book SynopsisThe Ruse of Techne offers a reappraisal of Heidegger's entire work by focusing on the forms of activity he regards as separate from instrumentality. Non-instrumental activities like authenticity, poetry, and thinkingin short, the ineffectualare critical for Heidegger as they offer the only path to the truth of being throughout his work.By unearthing the source of the conception of non-instrumental action in Heidegger's reading of Aristotle, Vardoulakis elaborates how it forms part of Heidegger's response to an old problem, namely, how to account for difference after positing a single and unified being that is not amenable to change. He further demonstrates that an action without ends and effects leads to an ethics and politics rife with difficulties and contradictions that only become starker when compared to other responses to the same problem that we find in the philosophical tradition and which rely on instrumentality.Heidegger's conception of an action without

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Book SynopsisIn reconsidering the question of sexual difference, Weed offers a fresh perspective on what is at stake for critical reading in the neoliberal university.

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Book SynopsisThreshold Phenomena reexamines Jacques Derrida's thinking of hospitality, from his well-known writings of the 1990s to his recently-published seminars on the same topic. The book follows Derrida's rereading of several central figures and texts on hospitality (Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Kant's Perpetual Peace, Levinas's Totality and Infinity) and his attempt to rethink questions surrounding not only private but also public hospitality in the form of immigration law, the contemporary treatment of migrants or stateless peoples, and the establishment of cities of asylum.Naas develops many of the central themes of Derrida's seminarthe relationship between hospitality and teletechnology (telephone, internet, cyberspace, etc.), the role of fatherlands and mother tongues in hospitality, questions of purity, immunity, and xenophobia, and the possibility of extending hospitality beyond the humanto animals, plants, gods, and clones. Reframing Derrida's app

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Book SynopsisThreshold Phenomena reexamines Jacques Derrida's thinking of hospitality, from his well-known writings of the 1990s to his recently-published seminars on the same topic. The book follows Derrida's rereading of several central figures and texts on hospitality (Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus, Kant's Perpetual Peace, Levinas's Totality and Infinity) and his attempt to rethink questions surrounding not only private but also public hospitality in the form of immigration law, the contemporary treatment of migrants or stateless peoples, and the establishment of cities of asylum. Naas develops many of the central themes of Derrida's seminarthe relationship between hospitality and teletechnology (telephone, internet, cyberspace, etc.), the role of fatherlands and mother tongues in hospitality, questions of purity, immunity, and xenophobia, and the possibility of extending hospitality beyond the humanto animals, plants, gods, and clones. Reframing Derrida's approach to ethics, Naas reconsiders the relationship between hospitality and deconstruction, concluding that hospitality is not merely a theme to be treated by deconstruction but one of the best ways of describing its work. Naas's book turns around a figure that Derrida himself returns to several times throughout the seminar: the thresholda figure of hospitality par excellence, but also, in his seminars, another name for what Derrida in the 1960s began calling différance. Threshold Phenomena concludes that Derrida's seminar on hospitality is one of the best introductions we have to Derrida's work in general and one of the surest signs of its continuing relevance, a seminar that is at once fascinating and engaging in its own right and necessary for analyzing today's increasingly nationalistic and xenophobic political climate.

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