Social and political philosophy Books
Cornell University Press The Shorter Socratic Writings
Book SynopsisThis book presents translations of three dialogues Xenophon devoted to the life and thought of his teacher, Socrates. Each is accompanied by notes and an interpretative essay that will introduce new readers to Xenophon and foster further reflection in...Trade ReviewThe book culminates with the most rousing of Xenophon's dialogues, the 'Symposium,' which Robert Bartlett translates in a vein of affable vivacity.... The commentators demonstrate a tight grasp of content and structure, and their perspicuous analyses could well serve as models of how to approach the elaborate works of Xenophon. * Review of Metaphysics *Brings together translations, along with introductions and notes, of Xenophon's minor writings. In keeping with the series's dictates, the translations are literal, word-for-word correspondence, allowing the Greekless reader to follow where Xenophon uses consistent language or where different terms affect the nuance. Since the translations are by different scholars, this policy is helpful, and the translators succeed in producing consistent, literal, and readable versions, though occasionally testing the limits of Greek and English idiom... McBrayer's volume makes Xenophon's shorter works considerably more accessible to a nonspecialist audience. * Choice *
£21.84
Cornell University Press Russia on the Edge
Book SynopsisSince the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, Russians have confronted a major crisis of identity. Soviet ideology rested on a belief in historical progress, but the post-Soviet imagination has obsessed over territory. Indeed, geographical metaphorswhether axes of north vs. south or geopolitical images of center, periphery, and borderhave become the signs of a different sense of self and the signposts of a new debate about Russian identity. In Russia on the Edge, Edith W. Clowes argues that refurbished geographical metaphors and imagined geographies provide a useful perspective for examining post-Soviet debates about what it means to be Russian today.Clowes lays out several sides of the debate. She takes as a backdrop the strong criticism of Soviet Moscow and its self-image as uncontested global hub by major contemporary writers, among them Tatyana Tolstaya and Viktor Pelevin. The most vocal, visible, and colorful rightist ideologue, Aleksandr Dugin, the founder oTrade Review"Russia on the Edge is an exceptionally innovative and insightful contribution to the literature on nationalism, national self-images, and identity in Russia today. Arguing that conceptions of 'what Russia is' depend critically on notions about where the country is located, Edith W. Clowes makes a compelling case for the new importance of 'imagined geographies' as perceptual arenas for the construction and contestation of identity in Post-Soviet Russia." -- Mark Bassin, Södertörn University"Clowes provides a provocative reassessment of the new Russia, positing a shift from a traditional temporal historical paradigm to a spatial one. With the fall of the multinational Soviet empire where power resided in Moscow, a more diffuse situation has developed with the rise of ethnic and national identities on the geographical perimeters. Geography has partially displaced history, to the great discomfort of the central ethnic Russian populace.... In this stimulating study, Clowes discusses liberal commentators Mikhail Ryklin and Anna Politkovskaia versus Aleksandr Dugin, an ultra-nationalist... and the more diverse attitudes of 'peripheralist' writers such as Victor Pelevin and Ludmilla Ulitskaia.""In Russia on the Edge, Edith Clowes investigates how and why borders are so central in today's Russia. She brilliantly demonstrates that much of Russian identity is defined not by what Russia is but rather where Russia is. Indeed peripheries function imaginatively as the sites of vital debates about how Russians see themselves. Clowes therefore offers a must-read analysis of how geographical and geopolitical metaphors construct post-Soviet Russian identity." -- Marlene Laruelle, The Johns Hopkins UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Is Russia a Center or a Periphery? 1. Deconstructing Imperial Moscow 2. Postmodernist Empire Meets Holy Rus': How Aleksandr Dugin Tried to Change the Eurasian Periphery into the Sacred Center of the World 3. Illusory Empire: Viktor Pelevin's Parody of Neo-Eurasianism 4. Russia's Deconstructionist Westernizer: Mikhail Ryklin's "Larger Space of Europe" Confronts Holy Rus' 5. The Periphery and Its Narratives: Liudmila Ulitskaia’s Imagined South 6. Demonizing the Post-Soviet Other: The Chechens and the Muslim South ConclusionIndex
£22.39
Cornell University Press Ideas and Foreign Policy
Book SynopsisDo people''s beliefs help to explain foreign policy decisions, or is political activity better understood as the self-interested behavior of key actors? The collaborative effort of a group of distinguished scholars, this volume breaks new ground in demonstrating how ideas can shape policy, even when actors are motivated by rational self-interest.After an introduction outlining a new framework for approaching the role of ideas in foreign policy making, well-crafted case studies test the approach. The function of ideas as road maps that reduce uncertainty is examined in chapters on human rights, decolonialization, the creation of socialist economies in China and Eastern Europe, and the postwar Anglo-American economic settlement. Discussions of parliamentary ideas in seventeenth-century England and of the Single European Act illustrate the role of ideas in resolving problems of coordination. The process by which ideas are institutionalized is further explored in chapters on the
£999.99
Cornell University Press A Moments Notice
Book SynopsisFocusing on the problem of time—the paradox of time's apparent universality and cultural relativity—Carol J. Greenhouse develops an original ethnographic account of our present moment, the much-heralded postmodern condition, which is at the same time a reflexive analysis of ethnography itself.Trade ReviewGreenhouse moves from the idea that perceptions of time and what time plans are culturally specific to the idea that cultural notions of time are linked to cultural notions about how the world works, or 'agency.' She includes discussions of the anthropological theories of time and their relationship to beliefs about death, a critique of the notion of social structure, and case studies that show the relationship of official assumptions of time-as-history to the responses of state elites toward challenges brought against them from below. These challenges to state legitimacy arise from the increasing diversity of populations within the state. The illustrative cases cover a wide range: the late-20th-century US, China 2,300 years ago, and early-16th-century Mexico. They show that official views of time and history are important in establishing and maintaining political legitimacy. * Choice *Table of ContentsPreface IntroductionPart I 1. Time, Life, and Society 2. Relative Time and the Limits of Law 3. Agency and AuthorityPart II 4. Time and Territory in Ancient China 5. Time and Sovereignty in Aztec Mexico 6. Time, Life, and Law in the United StatesConclusion: Postmodemity This TimeNotes References Index
£31.50
Cornell University Press Retrieving Experience
Book SynopsisIn Retrieving Experience, Sonia Kruks engages critically with the postmodern turn in feminist and social theory. She contends that, although postmodern analyses yield important insights about the place of discourse in constituting subjectivity, they...Trade ReviewOverall Retrieving Experience makes an outstanding political contribution to post-postmodern understandings of the subject that move significantly beyond the current impasse of the Enlightenment/postmodern nexus. Kruks retelling of a tale... offers insights that should well invigorate international mainstream discussions of the subject as well as feminist political engagements into the new millennium. -- Mary Walsh, University of Canberra * Australian Feminist Studies *
£29.45
Cornell University Press Our Sense of the Real
Book SynopsisThis bold and persuasive study rereads the works of Hannah Arendt to recuperate her relevance to contemporary politics and to show that her deepest concerns are oriented by her ontology. Kimberley Curtis interprets Arendt's earlier work through the...Trade ReviewCurtis is particularly good in her analysis of Arendt's writing on the relation between thinking and plurality; on the duality of the thinking self in its encounter both with itself and with the material world. -- Norma Claire Moruzzi, University of Illinois at Chicago * International Studies in Philosophy *Curtis's book is not easy reading, but the argument is fascinating and very much in the spirit of Arendt's thinking. * Ethics *In this excellent study, Curtis tries to reconcile the 'consensual-communicative' and 'agonistic-performative' interpretations of Arendt while exploring the ethical side of her theory. Curtis argues that our foremost moral duty, for Arendt, is to recognize and preserve 'plurality.' * Choice *
£32.30
Cornell University Press Im Not a Racist But... The Moral Quandary of
Book SynopsisBlum develops a historically grounded account of racism as the deeply morally charged notion it has become. He addresses the question whether people of color can be racist, defines types of racism, and identifies debased and inappropriate usages of the term.Trade ReviewBlum's thoughts support his main argument: that calm, reasoned deliberation about injustices can give us the moral vocabulary we need to do better as a society. * Boston Review *Discussing various scholarly perspectives on the construction of racial categories, Blum calls for a balance between 'ridding ourselves of the myth of race' and understanding the role of race in social inequality and in history. * Publishers Weekly *Few topics are in such desperate need of clear analysis as the subject of race.... In this concise volume, Blum brings the precision of a moral philosopher to bear on this perennial American dilemma, with generally helpful results.... A fresh and important contribution to applied social philosophy, recommended for general readers, upper-division undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. * Choice *In his informative treatment of the concept of racism, Lawrence Blum is most concerned with the dangers of over-appropriation. He fears that the accusation 'racist' is now used so casually and widely that it is in danger of loosing its power to shame.... His is a book that can help untangle many of the individual issues that racism raises and is a most important contribution to the growing field of applied educational and social philosophy. * Teachers College Record *This is a useful reference for anyone who wishes to think intelligently about the problem of race. * MultiCultural Review *This is a very thoughtful work on a sensitive subject, a good and practical work for all readers interested in race relations. * Booklist *Table of Contents1. "Racism": Its Core Meaning 2. Can Blacks Be Racist? 3. Varieties of Racial Ills 4. Racial Discrimination and Color Blindness 5. "Race": What We Mean and What We Think We Mean 6. "Race": A Brief History, with Moral Implications 7. Do Races Exist? 8. Racialized Groups and Social Constructions 9. Should We Try to Give Up Race?Notes Bibliography Index
£17.99
Cornell University Press Federalists in Dissent
Book SynopsisThe Federalists of Jefferson's time have been described by historians as complainers and obstructionists. A very different picture evolves from this book, which the author calls "a reconsideration of American political conversation in the early national reriod."Trade ReviewConvinced that the Federalists have not had a fair shake from Jefferson-worshipping historians, Linda K. Kerber has set out to refurbish their image by examining their rhetoric and ideology. Concentrating on the 'articulate Federalists' (mostly New Englanders) who published orations, essays, and satirical literature, she examines their attitudes toward the arts, science, education, law, and the contemporary American social order.... Her analysis will remain an indispensable introduction to Federalist thought. * Journal of American History *Kerber argues that the distinction between Federalists and Jeffersonians was as much cultural as political.... The well-documented study is based on a wide reading of contemporary pamphlets, newspapers, and correspondence. * American Historical Review *Students of the early American period, especially those with an interdisciplinary perspective, will be interested in Kerber's revision of the Federalists' image and encouraged by the volume and quality of the original material investigated. * American Political Science Review *The Federalist thinking that Kerber explores helps to give greater depth to the more familiar history of Federalist politics, and, beyond that, she brings more of the country to life. * Journal of American Studies *
£24.80
Johns Hopkins University Press Escapism
Book Synopsis"What cultural product,Tuan asks, "is not escape?In his new book, the capstone of a celebrated career, Tuan shows that escapism is an inescapable component of human thought and culture.Trade ReviewEscapism... is not so much an argument as a tour-sometimes a tour de force-of cultural escapes with exotic stops and unexpected twists and turns. And such a convivial tour guide! Tuan is chatty, engaging, unpretentious and charming. -- Francis I. Kane New York Times Book Review A reader could hardly ask for a more congenial guide, as Tuan's discussion ranges from Christ's last supper to chimpanzees copulating, from African bushmen barbecuing a turtle to diplomat-author Harold Nicolson bathing in a lake... Through this unusual perspective, Tuan is able to realign things usually considered opposites-'fantasy' and 'reality,' 'travel' and 'home,' 'work' and 'private life'-until they converge in fruitful new combinations... His playful treatment of life's glum realities feels at times as tonic as a leisurely Sunday morning... An original work to be read for both intellectual profit and pleasure. -- Jeffery Paine Washington Post Book World Writing in a deeply thoughtful style, Tuan, a leading cultural geographer, examines the wonders and atrocities that stem from the human impulse to deny the brutal realities of earthly existence. Utne ReaderTable of ContentsPreface Chapter 1. Part / Nature and Culture Chapter 2. Animality / Its Covers and Transcendence Chapter 3. People / Disconnectedness and IndifferenceChapter 4. Hell / Imagination's Distortions and LimitationsChapter 5. Heaven / The Real and the GoodNotes AcknowledgmentsIllustration CreditsIndex
£24.75
Johns Hopkins University Press The Nature of Being Human From Environmentalism
Book SynopsisPhilosophical, critical, often personal, Fromm's sweeping, interdisciplinary, and sometimes combative essays will change the way you think about your place in the environment.Trade ReviewFromm's contrarian view is explored beautifully in 'Ecology and Ecstasy on Interstate 80,' declaring that 'everything human is technological' while driving through the Sierras. The closing essays examine more esoteric issues of free will and social evolution. Fans of nature writing will find Fromm's travels witty and engaging, and his analysis unblemished by typical academic pretension or abstraction. Publishers Weekly 2009 Perfect for classroom discussion and debate. Midwest Book Review 2009 Fromm, an erudite, prolific author of numerous works ranging from ecocritical commentary to self-reflective discourses, presents a compilation of essays that illuminate his views regarding why most Americans seem oblivious to the destruction of their environment. Choice 2009 Fromm's journey from victim, to campaigner, to pioneer of eco-criticism (that is, the study of literature from an ecological viewpoint) is documented here, alongside challenging analyses of man's place in nature, free will, our relationship with technology and more. Scholarly but engaging, Fromm is an environmentalist, but also a realist. Organic Gardener 2010 The Nature of Being Human is a lively, opinionated, impressively learned and always readable contribution to the current debate on the human and natural costs of the dogma of 'progress'. British Society for Literature and Science 2010 Fromm is most truly a literary scholar rather than a philosopher or scientist. Nonetheless, the journey that this book represents traverses all three realms of inquiry as well as showing an engaging and provocative intellectual trajectory, and it would be churlish to deny that it represents a real and enduring effort by an important thinker to grapple with a range of vital human and ecological issues. Organization & Environment 2010Table of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: From Environmentalism to ConsciousnessPart I: Ecology1. Awakening to the "Environment"2. On Being Polluted3. From Transcendence to Obsolescence: A Route Map4. Air and Being: The Psychedelics of Pollution5. Ecocriticism's Genesis6. Ecology and Ideology7. Aldo Leopold: Esthetic "Anthropocentrist"8. Postmodern Ecologizing: Circumference without a Center9. The "Environment" Is Us10. Ecology and Ecstasy on Interstate 8011. Full Stomach Wilderness and the Suburban Esthetic12. Coetzee's Postmodern AnimalsPart Two: "Nature" and Evolution13. My Science Wars14. O, Paglia Mia!15. A Crucifix for Dracula: Wendell Berry Meets Edward O. Wilson16. The New Darwinism in the Humanities17. Ecocriticism's Big Bang18. Overcoming the Oversoul: Emerson's Evolutionary Existentialism19. Back to Bacteria: Richard Dawkins' Fabulous BestiaryPart Three: Consciousness20. Muses, Spooks, Neurons, and the Rhetoric of "Freedom"21. John Searle and His Ghosts22. Daniel Dennett and the Brick Wall of Consciousness23. The Crumbling Mortar of Social ConstructionConclusion: My Life as a RobotNotesIndex
£29.70
MY - University of Toronto Press Denaturalizing Ecological Politics
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£26.99
University of Toronto Press Zapatismo Beyond Borders
Book SynopsisOn January 1, 1994 in the far southeast of Mexico, a guerrilla army of indigenous Mayan peasants calling itself the Zapatista Army of National Liberation rose up in rebellion against 500 years of colonialism, imperialism, genocide, racism, and neoliberal capitalism. Zapatismo Beyond Borders examines how Zapatismo, the political philosophy of the Zapatistas, crossed the regional and national boundaries of the isolated indigenous communities of Chiapas to influence diverse communities of North American activists.Providing readers with anthropological perspectives that draw on a year of fieldwork with activists, and also enriched by the author's own experience with contemporary social justice struggles, Alex Khasnabish examines the "transnational resonance" of the Zapatista movement. He shows how the spread of Zapatismo has unexpectedly produced new imaginations and practices of radical political action in diverse socio-political movements throughout North America. Trade Review"'Khasnabish's research is solid, the conceptual framework is innovative and interesting with a logical progress from theory to history and case studies. This is a very good work: engaging, sometimes enraging, alive, and well-informed.' Philippe Couton, Department of Sociology, University of Ottawa"
£31.50
University of Toronto Press Zapatismo Beyond Borders New Imaginations of
Book SynopsisExamines how Zapatismo, the political philosophy of the Zapatistas, crossed the regional and national boundaries of the isolated indigenous communities of Chiapas to influence diverse communities of North American activists.Trade Review"'Khasnabish's research is solid, the conceptual framework is innovative and interesting with a logical progress from theory to history and case studies. This is a very good work; engaging, sometimes enraging, alive, and well-informed.' Philippe Couton, Department of Sociology, University of Ottawa"
£59.50
Stanford University Press Sustaining Loss Art and Mournful Life Atopia
Book SynopsisThis book explores the uncanny, traumatic weaving together of the living and the dead in art, and the morbid fascination it holds for modern philosophical aesthetics. Beginning with Kant, the author traces how aesthetic theory has been drawn back repeatedly to the moving power of the undead body of the work of art.
£25.19
MK - Stanford University Press Image Icon Economy The Byzantine Origins of the Contemporary Imaginary
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£91.80
Stanford University Press Image Icon Economy The Byzantine Origins of the
Book SynopsisThis book argues that the extraordinary force of the image in contemporary life-the contemporary imaginary-can be traced back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries.Table of ContentsContents @toc4:Translator's Acknowledgments ii Abbreviations ii Foreword ii Introduction ii @toc1:Part One: The Economy @toc2:1 Principal Themes 0 2 A Semantic Study of the Term "Economy" 00 @toc1:Part Two: The Iconic Economy @toc2:3 The Doctrine of the Image and Icon 000 4 Sacred Precinct and Profane Space 000 5 Iconic Space and Territorial Rule @toc1:Part Three: Idols and Veronicas @toc2:6 The Idol's "Delenda est" 7 Ghost Story 8 The Jew, Frontally and in Profile @toc4:Extracts from the Iconoclast "Horos" of Hieria (754) 000 Extracts from the Antirrhetics, by Nikephoros, Patriarch of Constantinople 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Library of Congress Subject Headings for this publication: Icons, Byzantine, Semiotics
£22.49
Stanford University Press An Ethics of Dissensus Postmodernity Feminism and
Book SynopsisAddressing a constellation of diverse thinkers including Emmanuel Levinas, Patricia Williams, Michel Foucault and Luce Irigaray, this book proposes a conception of ethics - an ethics of dissensus that rethinks the relation between freedom and obligation in the context of embodiment and antagonism.Trade Review"Original, carefully argued, and beautifully written, this book is one of the first sustained attempts to think through the relationship between feminist ethics and feminist politics. Ziarek's nuanced readings of central figures in current debates in postmodern ethics provide not only new ways of interpreting their work but also new directions for ethical theory." -- Kelly Oliver * SUNY-Stony Brook *"Ziarek has produced one of the most sensitive, thoughtful, original, and quietly provocative texts I know in the broad areas of contemporary philosophy and sexual and racial politics. . . . Trained in comparative literature and literary studies, she is equally at home in the most difficult and contentious of philosophical texts." -- Elizabeth Grosz, State University of New York * Buffalo *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Toward an experimental ethos of becoming: from docile bodies to ethical agency 2. Ethical responsibility, Eros, and the politics of race and rights 3. Toward an ethics of Dissensus: Lyotard's agnostic politics and the pursuit of justice 4. The libidinal economy of power, democracy and the ethics of psychoanalysis 5. Labor of the negative: the impossible ethics of sexual difference and the politics of radical democracy 6. Postmodern blackness/visionary feminism: paradigms of subjectivity, community, and ethics in Bell Hooks's work Afterword Notes Index.
£22.79
Stanford University Press Regions of Sorrow
Book SynopsisW.H. Auden and Hannah Arendt belonged to a generation that experienced the catastrophic events of the mid-20th century, and they both sought to respond to the enormity of the novel phenomena they witnessed. "Regions of Sorrow" explores the remarkable affinity between their works.Trade Review"Regions of Sorrow is full of insights, and anyone interested in [Hannah] Arendt, [W.H.] Auden, or the intellectual and cultural texture of twentieth-century modernity will profit by reading it." -- Political Theory
£21.84
Stanford University Press Communitas
Book SynopsisRoberto Esposito, a leading Italian philosopher, deconstructs the notion of community by examining its etymological roots in the Latin munus, or gift, and then reads against classical political interpretations of community.Trade Review"Underlying [Esposito's] philosophical work is the idea that our political vocabulary is exhausted. Old political notions need not to be replaced by new ones, but through historical reflection it is important to trace what has remained unthought in those concepts . . . Esposito's reflections are most stimulating."—Walter Van Herck, Bijdragen, International Journal in Philosophy and Theology"Those—especially English-speaking readers—familiar with Esposito's later research (and, in particular with Bios, Esposito [2008]) will find this work particularly valuable for laying out the ontological ground upon which his account of immunity and biopolitics was subsequently worked out."—Andrea Rossi, In-Spire Journal of Law, Politics, and Societies"Esposito is an expansive thinker, unusually attuned to the historical as well as the philosophical dimensions of that hybrid field called 'political theory.' After a wondrous excursus on the problematic of 'community,' Esposito's challenging elaboration of community as alterity unfolds. This important and attractive translation brings to political theorists working in English Esposito's skill at speaking across the division between the analytic continental traditions." —Kirstie McClure, University of California, Los Angeles"With Communitas, Esposito has made an enormous contribution to the cardinal and complex notion of community, taking issue with the essentializing view of community that remains inherent in the language of contemporary philosophy. The reader feels guided through debates of great complexity by a generous expert who knows not only the major arguments, but the minor caveats and inconsistencies as well." —Peter Connor, Columbia University"With his usual erudition and philosophical precision, Roberto Esposito traces the development of the concept of community and its limits through the European tradition. His argument poses a challenge for anyone who wants to think community today."—Michael Hardt, Duke University
£17.99
Stanford University Press Rogues
Book SynopsisRogues, published in France under the title Voyous, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term État voyou is the French equivalent of rogue state, and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida rigorously and exhaustively examines.Derrida examines the history of the concept of sovereignty, engaging with the work of Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and others. Against this background, he delineates his understanding of democracy to come, which he distinguishes clearly from any kind of regulating ideal or teleological horizon. The idea that democracy will always remain in the future is not a temporal notion. Rather, the phrase would name the coming of the unforeseeable other, the structure of an event beyond calculation and program. Derrida thus aligns this understanding of democracy with the logic he has worked Trade Review"Rogues is Derrida's most sustained reflection on deconstruction's relation to political theory in general and to the idea of democracy in particular. . . . Highly recommended."—CHOICE"It is clear that Derrida was keen that the idea of 'democracy to come' would be central to the legacy of his thought, and for those who choose to take up that burden, Rogues will prove essential."—Times Literary SupplementTable of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii Preface: Veni iii @toc1:The Reason of the Strongest (Are there Rogue States?) @toc2:1 The Free Wheel 000 2 License and Freedom: the roue 000 3 The other of democracy, the "by turns": alternative and alternation 000 4 Mastery and Measure 000 5 Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or How Not to Speak in Mottos 000 6 The Rogue that I Am 000 7 God, What More Do I Have To Say? In What Language To Come? 000 8 The Last of the Rogue States: The "Democracy to Come," Opening in Two Turns 000 9 (No) More Rogue States 000 10 Sending 000 @toc1:The "World" of the Enlightenment to Come (Exception, Calculation, Sovereignty) @toc2:1 Teleology and Architectonic: The Neutralization of the Event 000 2 To Arrive--at the Ends of the State (and of War, and of World War) 000 @toc4:Notes 000
£17.99
Stanford University Press Toward the Critique of Violence
Book SynopsisMarking the centenary of Walter Benjamin's immensely influential essay, Toward the Critique of Violence, this critical edition presents readers with an altogether new, fully annotated translation of a work that is widely recognized as a classic of modern political theory. The volume includes twenty-one notes and fragments by Benjamin along with passages from all of the contemporaneous texts to which his essay refers. Readers thus encounter for the first time in English provocative arguments about law and violence advanced by Hermann Cohen, Kurt Hiller, Erich Unger, and Emil Lederer. A new translation of selections from Georges Sorel's Reflections on Violence further illuminates Benjamin's critical program. The volume also includes, for the first time in any language, a bibliography Benjamin drafted for the expansion of the essay and the development of a corresponding philosophy of law. An extensive introduction and afterword provide additional context. With its challenging argument conTrade Review"This translation places before English readers for the first time the most comprehensible version yet of Benjamin's compelling and demanding essay."—Kevin McLaughlin, Brown University"Fenves and Ng have assembled the definitive scholarly edition in English of Walter Benjamin's influential 1921 essay "Toward the Critique of Violence"...An indispensable resource for those interested in Benjamin's particular intervention at a place where political theology meets questions of morality, power, and authority. Essential." –G.D. Miller, CHOICE"A new edition of Benjamin's allusive essay helps elucidate what is often enigmatic and esoteric about a text whose author is working towards a more Marxist perspective. It is fully annotated and includes a large and helpful selection of notes and fragments by Benjamin that are closely related to what he was formulating."—Sean Sheehan, The Prisma
£73.95
Stanford University Press Hannah Arendt Totalitarianism and the Social
Book SynopsisA study of Hannah Arendt's indictment of social science, approaches to totalitarianism (Bolshevism and National Socialism), and of the robust responses of her contemporary sociological critics: Raymond Aron, David Riesman, Jules Monnerot, and Theodor Abel.Trade Review"Baehr . . . does a commendable service to Arendt scholars by unearthing a range of sociological studies which seem to vindicate [Arendt's] complaint that social scientists had been trained to overlook the true horror of totalitarianism."—Finn Bowring, Sociology"[Peter Baehr] brings an extremely broad base of learning to bear here—sociological, historical, political, and philosophical. Baehr recaptures the illuminating debates between Hannah Arendt and three interlocutors (David Reisman, Raymond Aron, and Jules Monnerot) around the topic of totalitarianism . . . Baehr elucidates the position of each interlocutor with great care and sympathy, giving each more than a fair hearing—there are no straw men. Thus the volume is neither a mere celebration of Arendt nor a take-down. The reader is invited into a true conversation among these great thinkers. There is no grand thesis on offer, but readers are left with something more valuable—a lucid demonstration of how to think about the vexing phenomenon of the twentieth century."—Flagg Taylor, Society"Baehr's project is to rehearse Arendt's critical indictment of social scientific understanding as a vehicle for comprehending totalitarianism, while juxtaposing this critique to the objections raised by practitioners like Reisman, Aron and Monnerot . . . Baehr's book, while not an example of 'Cambridge history', is animated by a similar spirit. Attending to Arendt's disputes with her social scientist interlocutors, he provides us with an admirably specific rendering of the novel kind of political entity Arendt thought she was delineating in Origins [of Totalitarianism]."—Dana Villa, European Journal of Political Theory"We can always count on wide historical learning, deep theoretical insight, close textual reading, graceful writing and sensible judgments on contemporary political issues when encountering essays, articles and books by Peter Baehr. Hannah Arendt, Totalitarianism and the Social Sciences is certainly no exception. Organized around the engagement of sociologists David Riesman, Raymond Aron, and Jules Monnerot with Arendt's 1951 classic The Origins of Totalitarianism, Baehr's concise, well-written book raises big questions about Nazism, Communism, social science and, in the final, speculative chapter, radical Islam."—Neil McLaughlin, Canadian Journal of Sociology"The success of Baehr's argument in this book is due in no small part to the very extensive scholarship on which it is founded, which includes detailed archive research, close study of Arendt's voluminous correspondence and familiarity with the very broad range of secondary literature . . . Baehr's book should be required reading for political sociologists and historically-minded social scientists concerned with both the past and current states of their discipline."—Philip Walsh, British Journal of Sociology"Although modest in its stated ambitions, the book is virtuous in ways that few works of contemporary sociology are and implicitly beckons others to follow in its footsteps . . . [Baehr's book] gives us neither potted acontextual summaries nor plodding historical treatments, but often riveting essaylike chapters that take us just far enough inside a given intellectual-historical episode to allow us to grasp its essentials, and then immediately pull us out to contemplate the broader significance. The book is also interdisciplinary in a way that few are. Rather than simply bringing multiple disciplinary perspectives to bear on some problem, it explicitly thematizes the tensions between competing perspectives, and between humanistic and social-scientific approaches more generally. Beyond this, Baehr writes clearly and with verve, and the book serves as a reminder of the power of good sociological prose."—Neil Gross, American Journal of Sociology"This book is a jewel, at once a splendid essay in intellectual history and an original meditation on the limits and possibilities of social science. One rarely encounters profundity with elegance. Baehr offers both."—John Hall, James McGill Professor of Sociology, McGill University"In this book, Peter Baehr undertakes a careful, lucid, and highly nuanced examination of some of the finest contemporary perspectives on how best to conceptualize and explain totalitarianism. He goes on to ask how we are to understand what is unprecedented in history. The result is exceptionally illuminating, not least because the author thinks and writes on the level of those he discusses."—Steven Lukes, New York University"[Baehr] provides an original and compelling account of Arendt's critical engagement with social scientists around the question of totalitarianism."—Robert Fine, University of Warwick
£52.20
Stanford University Press Foucault Beyond Foucault
Book SynopsisThis book retraces power's intensification in Foucault in ways that both allow us to reread Foucault's own conceptual itinerary and, more importantly, to think about how we might respond to the mutations of power that that have taken place since his death in 1984.Trade Review"In his slim volume on Foucault, [Nealon] has offered a fascinating interpretation of Foucault's work, one that brings to light previous neglected elements of his thought. Although the stated motivation for Nealon's discussion is to counter the current interpretation of Foucault's ethical works, the result is one of the most interesting interpretations of Foucault to emerge in many years." -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews"Foucault Beyond Foucault is the first major renovation of the critical representation of Foucault's system in the past twenty years. Jeffrey Nealon successfully challenges the critical prejudices and assumptions that have defined Foucault's legacy, particularly in the North American academy, and stakes out new terrain by productively synthesizing recent developments in political and economic theory with Foucault's own analysis of power and subjectivity in the age of "bio-power." In fact, this is the first book that manages to successfully explain the concept itself, a concept everyone is talking about, though no one seems to understand." -- Gregg Lambert * Syracuse University *Table of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii Preface: Foucault Today iii @toc2:Chapter 1 Foucault Beyond Foucault 000 Chapter 2 Once More, with Intensity: Foucault's History of Power Revisited 000 Chapter 3 Genealogies of Capitalism: Foucault, with Deleuze and Jameson 000 Chapter 4 Foucault's Infamous Ethics; or, Biopower, Globalization, and Ethical Scarcity 000 Chapter 5 Resisting, Foucault 000 @toc4:Works Cited 000 Index 000
£17.99
Stanford University Press Lessons from a Materialist Thinker
Book SynopsisThis book provides a penetrating and original reconstruction of Hobbes's materialist accounts of self-consciousness, cognition, and agency and shows how such an account of subjectivity demands that we pursue peace in our ethical and political lives.Trade Review"[Frost] is an exquisitely careful and attentive reader and she demonstrates a Talmudic reverence for Hobbes' texts, one that allows her to read his books as if the last three hundred and fifty odd years of heavy interpretive authority had never happened. This is a singular accomplishment and because of it, Frost has written one of the most important books on Hobbes for quite some time." -- James R. Martel * Theory & Event *"This is an intensively philosophical book that speaks importantly to issues in the philosophy of mind, of action, and of responsibility. The author is fully conversant with Cartesian and post-Cartesian anti-materialism and has a refined and complex understanding of the Hobbesean alternative to it. As the term "lessons" indicates, Frost aims to help us escape from Cartesian ways of thinking and to move us to a sense of ourselves and one another as material, embodied beings who can and should relate to one another in sinuous but mutually productive ways." -- Richard Flathman * The Johns Hopkins University *"Drawing upon Thomas Hobbes' well-known if dark concept of the brutal self at war with all others, as juxtaposed with a Cartesian view of the self split into the mind and the body, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker questions tacitly occurring assumptions humans make about themselves as well as the common, negative view of Hobbes' insight A welcome contribution to philosophical studies shelves, especially for its insights into the border where philosophy and politics meets concepts of sociology and anthropology." -- The Midwest Book ReviewTable of Contents:Contents Acknowledgments xxx Introduction 1 1 Hobbes and the Matter of Self-Consciousness 000 2 Hobbes and the Caprice of Reason 000 3 The Time of Determination: Movement, Will, and Action 000 4 The Ethics in Determinism: Inter-subjectivity, the Collective, and Peace 000 5 The Action and Passion of Politics: Hobbes on Power 000 Notes 000 Bibliography 000 Index 000
£17.99
Stanford University Press Giorgio Agamben
Book SynopsisA critical introduction to the work of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.Trade Review"Leland de la Durantaye has not only offered an illuminating and provocative account of Agamben's most important work, he has also made this philosophical corpus appealing and accessible to a very broad audience—to all those interested in aesthetics, literature, ethics, and political theory. Carefully attuned to the multiple voices of Agamben's rich polyphony, in both a theoretical and historical sense, this book generously invites the reader to consider and reflect upon some of the most pressing issues in contemporary thought." -- John Hamilton"[D]e la Durantaye's critical introduction for Stanford's increasingly impressive work in continental philosophy . . . assist[s] in clarifying why Agamben's philosophy deserves our attention . . . [de la Durantaye] shows a delicate touch in noting important conceptual connections many might overlook in the primary sources." -- Benjamin Hutchens * Philosophy in Review *"Readers of Giorgio Agamben have long yearned for a guide to his work. This book is just such a guide: comprehensive, erudite, reliable, up-to-date, accessible, and properly critical. Leland de la Durantaye traces meticulously the development of concepts and terms in Agamben's oeuvre and provides future scholarship with a sound footing." -- Wlad Godzic, University of CaliforniaTable of Contents@fmct:Contents @toc4:Acknowledgments iii Abbreviations iii Preface: The Law of the Good Neighbor iii @toc2:Introduction: The Idea of Potentiality 0 @toc3:Scholium I: The Inoperative 00 Scholium II: On Creation and Decreation 00 Scholium III: Heidegger's Potential, or Creative Terminology 000 @toc2:Chapter One: Art for Art's Sake. The Destruction of Aesthetics and The Man Without Content (1970) 000 @toc3:Scholium I: Benjamin and Heidegger or Poison and Antidote 000 Scholium II: The Potentiality of Art 000 @toc2:Chapter Two: A General Science of the Human. Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture (1977) 000 @toc3:Scholium: On Erudition 000 @toc2:Chapter Three: A Critique of the Dialectic. Infancy and History: The Destruction of Experience (1978) 000 @toc3:Scholium I: Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, or The Floodgates of Enthusiastic Misunderstanding 000 Scholium II: The Now of Knowability 000 Scholium III: Kairos 000 Scholium IV: Dialectics at a Standstill, or Means and Ends 000 @toc2:Chapter Four: The Pure Potentiality of Representation. Idea of Prose (1985) 000 @toc3:Scholium I: The Art of Citation Without Quotation Marks 000 Scholium II: The Idea of Benjamin 000 Scholium III: Reading What Was Never Written 000 Scholium IV: The Storyteller 000 @toc2:Chapter Five: From Spectacle to Shekinah: The Coming Community (1990) 000 @toc3:Scholium I: Jacques Derrida, Rabbi Akiba, Aher and the Cutting of the Branches 000 Scholium II: The Idea of Pornography 000 Scholium III: Guy Debord, Strategy, and Political Ontology 000 Scholium IV: On Hope, Redemption and the Irreparable 000 @toc2:Chapter Six: The Potential of Paradigms. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995) 000 @toc3:Scholium I: Progress and Catastrophe, or Clear and Present Dangers 000 Scholium II: Paradigm and Dialectical Image, or the Shadow of the Present 000 @toc2:Chapter Seven: The Unique and the Unsayable. Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive. Homo Sacer III (1998) 000 @toc3:Scholium I: What is a Remnant? 000 Scholium II: On Genius, or Heidegger's Poison and Benjamin's Antidote 000 Scholium III: Eternal Recurrence of the Same, or Nietzsche and the Potentiality of the Past 000 @toc2:Chapter Eight: The Suspended Substantive. On Animals and Men in The Open: Man and Animal (2002) 000 Chapter Nine: The Exceptional Life of the State. State of Exception (2003) 000 @toc3:Scholium I: Adorno, Profanity and the Secular Order 000 Scholium II: Carl Schmitt, or Politics and Strategy 000 @toc2:Chapter Ten: The Messiah, or on the Sacred and the Profane 000 Conclusion: The Idea of the Work 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Bibliogrpahy 000 Index 000
£21.59
Stanford University Press Deleuzian Concepts Philosophy Colonization
Book SynopsisThese essays provide important interpretations and analyze critical developments in the political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.Trade Review"[A] masterful exegete of Deleuze . . . Patton has an insight into Deleuze's texts which makes his commentary invaluable. What is more, this mastery includes both Deleuze's solo writings, as well as his collaborations with Guattari, a distinct advantage in a field of Deleuzian commentators who tend to be comfortable primarily with one or the other. . . [A] deep boon for our understanding of Deleuze." -- Simon Glezos * Philosophy in Review *"Patton's book is an important and innovative contribution to Deleuze studies and to contemporary debates in philosophy and the humanities. His arguments are convincing and stimulating: they open the way for a new and sober reading of Deleuze and bring him into dialogue with the tradition of political liberalism and pragmatism. His use of the concept of the event to understand the history of colonization gives the reader a compelling example of what the political function of philosophy is, or could be." -- Paola Marrati * Johns Hopkins University *
£22.79
Stanford University Press The Future and Its Enemies
Book SynopsisHumans may be the only creatures conscious of having a future, but all too often we would rather not think about it. Likewise, our societies, unable to deal with radical uncertainty, do not make policies with a view to the long term. Instead, we suffer from a sense of powerlessness, collective irrationality, and perennial political discontent. In The Future and Its Enemies, Spanish philosopher Daniel Innerarity makes a plea for a new social contract that would commit us to moral and political responsibility with respect to future generations. He urges us to become advocates for the future in the face of enemies who, oblivious to the costs of modernization, press for endless and unproductive acceleration. His accessible book proposes a new way of confronting the unknownone grounded in the calculation of risk. Declaring the classical right-left divide to be redundant, Innerarity presents his hopes for a renewed democracy and a politics that would find convincing ways to Trade Review"[Innerarity] ably surveys a rich literature on the role of time in governance and planning in an erudite, pleasant-to-read style of grand social theorizing not unlike that of recent books by Zygmunt Bauman."—Peter Vanhuysse, Political Studies Review"This is a wonderful little book, striking the perfectly right balance between our hopes for the future and a realistic appraisal of where we presently are in contemporary Western democracies."—Frank Ankersmit, Common Knowledge"Innerarity offers a practical alternative to the model that ignores the past. By treating the past as past, he asks us to recognize that there are real problems we can deal with now that might be rooted in that unchangeable history and, most importantly, that the future of our functioning democracies depends responsibly addressing these issues."—George Fourlas, Philosophy and Social Criticism"Innerarity is the sole thinker to date, who is attuned to the futurity of actually exisiting democracies. . . [H]e masterfully combines the insights of a seasoned philosopher with the hands-on analyses of a political scientist or a sociologist. The conclusions of every chapter provide us with invaluable tools for coping with the complexity of our world without either simplifying or getting lost in it. At its best, The Future and Its Enemies maintains alive the very future of political philosophy."—Michael Marder, TELOS: Journal of Critical Social Thought"To Innerarity, modern societies ignore the future by treating it as a mere accumulation of small decisions in an endless present. . . Although belief in automatic progress has dissipated, Innerarity hopes individuals will now take responsibility for an open future with its character dependent on a leading role for civil society. . . Recommended."—E. R. Gill, CHOICE"Thanks to its clear analyses and its multiple avenues of inquiry, this essay points the way to a new democratic lucidity."—Pierre Rosanvallon, Libération"The future no longer holds meaning for societies in thrall to the present. And in this present devoid of meaning, we have as much trouble accepting the legacy of the past as we do envisaging collective action that would take us beyond ourselves. We're obsessed by the here and now and incapable of making plans that would engage us and the future of society as a whole. Without a vision of what is yet to come, and without the will to endow it with meaning, we are reduced to the insignificance of our moment, that of a present ignorant of both its past and future."—Dominique Schnapper, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, member of the French Constitutional Council (2001-2010)"As we increasingly accelerate our transformation of the present, the future has slowly disappeared. Daniel Innerarity ferrets out this future and finds it where it is to be found: in the discussions that give rise to it, discussions powerful enough to anticipate the ever faster changes to our present. The future is not the result of necessity but of political action. This last only has meaning if it entails choosing a future; if it does not, it already belongs to the past.Political action must look ever further ahead so as not to be overtaken by the convulsions of the short term. Against those who define themselves as post-modern, Innerarity discovers a world of hope and of controlled transformations. The more we discover the future behind the accelerations of the present, the more we find the possibility of choice and the responsibility of making decisions. In so doing, we liberate ourselves from imprisonment in a present that will accelerate on automatic pilot, rejecting intervention of any form and thus any form of democracy.The struggle between the destroyers of the future and its liberators is now central. It has replaced the opposition between the right and the left, because conservers of the present and creators of the future are everywhere to be found. After so many ideologies and somber philosophies that forbid us any future, Daniel Innerarity allows us, and even imposes upon us, an optimism that is also our freedom."—Alain Touraine, École des hautes études en sciences sociales"In this fascinating inquiry into how our image of the future has changed and into the consequences of this modification for democracy, Innerarity explores the challenges of post-heroic politics and the prospect for reclaiming hope as part of transformative politics. The Future and Its Enemies enriches our democratic imagination with new vistas."—Alessandro Ferrara, University of Rome
£18.99
Stanford University Press Watching War
Book SynopsisWatching War explores what it means to be a spectator to battles in an era in which the boundaries between witnessing, representing, and perpetrating violence have become profoundly blurred.Trade Review"[Watching War seeks to theorize in a broad way the nature of modern war spectatorship rather than focusing specifically on Romantic literature . . . What Mieszkowski adds is a capacity to see the Romantic-era eyewitness in literary terms, particularly as he comes to focus on novelists who see in the imagination the best way to make sense of war (26)." -- Neil Ramsey * European Romantic Review *"With consistent intelligence and a flair for newly formulating the paradoxes at the heart of its subject, Watching War advances a series of stalled debates about total war, representation, and agency. Wars become total, it argues, when they are too engulfing to be seen whole and must be imagined as total. Mieszkowski's book is a rigorous and original contribution to one of the liveliest areas of humanities scholarship today." -- Paul K. Saint-Amour * University of Pennsylvania *"Mieszkowski describes how the modern spectacle of war and the storytelling that surrounds it and contributes to its experience create distance and confusion, if not the impossibility of grasping the reality of its significance and lived experience . . . The questions he engages are of interest to many . . . Recommended." -- J. K. Chakars * CHOICE *"Urgent, difficult, and often painful questions drive this captivating book: the inextricable link between waging and representing war, between witnessing and perpetrating atrocity, and between the various logics that organize, mediate, disseminate, and legitimate the militarization of the world. We ignore such questions at our own peril." -- Rebecca Comay * University of Toronto *"The book's greatest value for the field of media ethics is in introducing a critical perspective on not only how writers, photographers, painters, and others represent war but also about the assumptions average citizens make as onlookers to war." -- Susan Keith * Journal of Mass Media Ethics *"Jan Mieszkowski's Watching War makes a compelling case for understanding questions about war spectatorship in a broader historical context, one that extends back to a historical period that predates the era of technological reproduction . . . The monograph's interdisciplinarity is one of its strengths. While theoretical, it is not overly so—it makes judicious use of a number of philosophers and theorists to underscore the continuity of the discussions about representability that have marked war depictions over the last 150 years. The author is able to shift deftly between fictional and philosophical texts and analyses literature and visual images with the same level of rigorous attention." -- Michael D. Richardson * Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies *
£89.10
Stanford University Press Watching War
Book SynopsisWatching War explores what it means to be a spectator to battles in an era in which the boundaries between witnessing, representing, and perpetrating violence have become profoundly blurred.Trade Review"[Watching War seeks to theorize in a broad way the nature of modern war spectatorship rather than focusing specifically on Romantic literature . . . What Mieszkowski adds is a capacity to see the Romantic-era eyewitness in literary terms, particularly as he comes to focus on novelists who see in the imagination the best way to make sense of war (26)." -- Neil Ramsey * European Romantic Review *"With consistent intelligence and a flair for newly formulating the paradoxes at the heart of its subject, Watching War advances a series of stalled debates about total war, representation, and agency. Wars become total, it argues, when they are too engulfing to be seen whole and must be imagined as total. Mieszkowski's book is a rigorous and original contribution to one of the liveliest areas of humanities scholarship today." -- Paul K. Saint-Amour * University of Pennsylvania *"Mieszkowski describes how the modern spectacle of war and the storytelling that surrounds it and contributes to its experience create distance and confusion, if not the impossibility of grasping the reality of its significance and lived experience . . . The questions he engages are of interest to many . . . Recommended." -- J. K. Chakars * CHOICE *"Urgent, difficult, and often painful questions drive this captivating book: the inextricable link between waging and representing war, between witnessing and perpetrating atrocity, and between the various logics that organize, mediate, disseminate, and legitimate the militarization of the world. We ignore such questions at our own peril." -- Rebecca Comay * University of Toronto *"The book's greatest value for the field of media ethics is in introducing a critical perspective on not only how writers, photographers, painters, and others represent war but also about the assumptions average citizens make as onlookers to war." -- Susan Keith * Journal of Mass Media Ethics *"Jan Mieszkowski's Watching War makes a compelling case for understanding questions about war spectatorship in a broader historical context, one that extends back to a historical period that predates the era of technological reproduction . . . The monograph's interdisciplinarity is one of its strengths. While theoretical, it is not overly so—it makes judicious use of a number of philosophers and theorists to underscore the continuity of the discussions about representability that have marked war depictions over the last 150 years. The author is able to shift deftly between fictional and philosophical texts and analyses literature and visual images with the same level of rigorous attention." -- Michael D. Richardson * Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies *
£21.59
Stanford University Press The Highest Poverty
Book SynopsisIn this book, Agamben investigates monasticism from its beginnings up through the Franciscan movement in an attempt to find a new form-of-life that escapes from the logic of Western politics as put forth in his Homo Sacer series.Trade Review"The range of primary sources Agamben relies on to make his argument . . . is impressively vast. As his readers have come to expect, Agamben demonstrates an uncanny ability to discover enduring significance in obscure corners of the Western tradition while doing justice to their proper historicity." -- Brian Hamilton * Modern Theology *"The Highest Poverty is Agamben's attempt to define what he calls a 'form-of-life,' a mode of living where life and law enter into a zone of indistinction so that one is not able to discern between living according to the law and applying the law to a pre-existing life . . . The first thing that became quite clear in reading this book is the depth of knowledge and understanding Agamben has of monastic history as well as medieval philosophy and theology. He knows the literature, the languages, and the nuances needed for any depth of understanding . . . This book was not written for the spiritual or theological nourishment of monastics and friars. It was written as a piece of political philosophy concerned about the current all-consuming nature of law and what that does to life. Nevertheless, there is a great deal that monastics and friars can learn from the work of Agamben. He shows us a picture of ourselves from a vantage point that we seldom see. There is more to our form-of-life than immediately meets the eye." -- Eugene Hensell * American Benedictine Review *"At a time when current anthropological debate has turned toward ontology, this book challenges us to return anew to questions of habits and habitus. The Highest Poverty offers a productive . . . lens through which to examine modernity, its antecedents, and its reimagined futures in the global South. Especially salient for anthropologists is the book's attention to theories of practice and a common life not wholly defined by the logics of capital and formal institutions." -- Kerry Chance * Anthropology Southern Africa *"[I]t deepens the insights of Agamben's earlier work and extends them into the theological realm. . . . Recommended." -- A. W. Klink * Choice *"Agamben's work remains a thought-provoking and tightly written tract, and a number of trenchant observations can be found therein. For scholars of monasticism, The Highest Poverty will present old texts in productive new lights, and for scholars of philosophy and other disciplines, it will suggest new methods and tools that can be transposed into different fields of study." -- Joshua Campbell * Journal of Medieval Monastic Studies *"Like much of Agamben's writing, The Highest Poverty mixes historical, philosophical, and philological discourse with impressive skill. Agamben's book provokes insight through juxtaposition, analogy, and acts of theoretical imagination." -- Brian Britt * Journal of Religion *
£66.60
Stanford University Press Human Rights as a Way of Life
Book SynopsisThe work of Henri Bergson, the foremost French philosopher of the early twentieth century, is not usually explored for its political dimensions. Indeed, Bergson is best known for his writings on time, evolution, and creativity. This book concentrates instead on his political philosophyand especially on his late masterpiece, The Two Sources of Morality and Religionfrom which Alexandre Lefebvre develops an original approach to human rights.We tend to think of human rights as the urgent international project of protecting all people everywhere from harm. Bergson shows us that human rights can also serve as a medium of personal transformation and self-care. For Bergson, the main purpose of human rights is to initiate all human beings into love. Forging connections between human rights scholarship and philosophy as self-care, Lefebvre uses human rights to channel the whole of Bergson''s philosophy.Trade Review"Alexandre Lefebvre's beautifully conceived book is a bid to revive the moral philosophy of Henri Bergson, notably in the Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932), for our own age of human right . . . Lefebvre revisits it in an accessible and demotic style that suggests how easily a wide range of readers (including students of very different philosophical traditions) would gain from reading this book." -- Samuel Moyn * Political Theory *"By analyzing Bergson's moral thinking from a contemporary viewpoint, the book advances a theory of human rights on the basis of self-care . . . The book's great merit is to introduce a novel approach to human rights studies, one that can eventually account for the fluidity and inconsistencies of the subject. More controversially, but no less stimulating, is Lefebvre's aspiration to introduce 'mysticism' as a procedure for philosophical research on the basis of Bergson's concept of open love." -- Alessandra Sarquis * Political Studies Review *"He offers a creative synthesis of contemporary human rights theory, the philosophy of self-care, and several generations of Bergson scholarship; the result should be of interest to a wide range of scholars . . . Although human rights are often conceived in terms of political and legal measures to protect people from harm, Lefebvre's most original suggestion is to treat them in addition as forms of self-care or processes of conversion." -- Alex Feldman * Contemporary Political Theory *"Alexandre Lefebvre took on the challenge, presenting his outlook with the required philosophical depth and writing style that grabs the reader from the start . . . Human Rights as a Way of Life does not take the easy path of arguing in favor of Bergson without facing some of the hidden implications of his thought. On the contrary, the depth and sharpness of Lefebvre's arguments are revealed as he presents and ingeniously answers some of the major critiques that Bergson's theoretical stands face . . . Thus, in its philosophical contents, Human Rights as a Way of Life makes several important contributions." -- Magda Costa-Carvalho * The Review of Politics *"Through a distinctive interpretation of [Two Sources of Morality and Religion], Lefebvre's provocative work of genuine, scholarly creativity is the first monograph on human rights devoted to Bergson's thought . . . Lefebvre's work returns us to a nest of central questions in political philosophy and human-rights literature by returning these discussions to the level of the everyday agent—whether she comports herself with a closed or open love, an attitude or disposition that weakens or strengthens her commitment to human rights. As such, this work returns political philosophy and human-rights theory to 'a way of life', and it should be read closely and taken seriously." -- Michael R. Kelly * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews *"Clearly and engagingly written, with a good bibliography. . . . Recommended." -- J. Donohoe * Choice *"An informed, informative, detailed, and impressive work of seminal scholarship, Human Rights As A Way Of Life is an important contribution and a highly recommended addition to academic library Political Philosophy reference collections and supplemental reading lists." -- Midwest Book Review"Lefebvre's new book is a fascinating interpretation of Bergson's last work . . . Lefebvre teases out the political implications of The Two Sources of Morality and Religion, with its equally lovely and confronting description of open and closed societies . . . Thinking like Lefebvre's, channeling Bergson, can help jump the needle out of the deepening grooves of party-political discourse." -- Miriam Cosic * The Australian *"Pierre Hadot wrote that essential to Bergsonism is the idea that philosophy entails the transformation of perception. In this hugely instructive new book Alexandre Lefebvre shows what such a transformation means for our appreciation of human rights. For him we require a new way of being in the world, one that involves a fundamental self-transformation and establishing relationships with others based on generosity and love. The remarkable innovation of this text is to use Bergson's philosophy for this end and to show that human rights involve a practice of self-care, one that opens us up to the world and to life and in which love is no longer tied to preference, exclusion, and closure. This message remains as vital today as when Bergson first attempted to articulate it in the 1930s. Lefebvre is to be congratulated for producing such a novel and fresh approach to the issue of human rights. The book is a fabulous exercise in contemporary philosophizing and deserves to be widely read." -- Keith Ansell-Pearson * University of Warwick *"Lefebvre's elaboration of Bergson's concept of love is brilliant. His insistence on Bergson's use of biology to understand morality ties the book into contemporary debates on neo-vitalism, and his discussion of De Waal engages with contemporary debates around naturalism and morality. This important book makes a real contribution to contemporary political theory and, more locally, to Bergson studies and studies in recent French thought." -- Leonard Lawlor * Penn State University *"Because of its clarity and accessibility, this study would make a good textbook. Any course on mysticism which makes a claim to completeness should include Lefebvre's book. So should a course which attempts to study Bergson's later thought or the relations between process philosophy and religion." -- P. A. Y. Gunter * Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy *
£21.59
Stanford University Press Why Internet Porn Matters
Book SynopsisNow that pornography is on the Internet, its political and social functions have changed. So contends Margret Grebowicz in this imperative philosophical analysis of Internet porn. The production and consumption of Internet porn, in her account, are a symptom of the obsession with self-exposure in today''s social networking media, which is, in turn, a symptom of the modern democratic construction of the governable subject as both transparent and communicative. In this first feminist critique to privilege the effects of pornography''s Internet distribution rather than what it depicts, Grebowicz examines porn-sharing communities (such as the bestiality niche market) and the politics of putting women''s sexual pleasure on display (the squirting market) as part of the larger democratic project. Arguing against this project, she shows that sexual pleasure is not a human right. Unlikely convergences between thinkers like Catherine MacKinnon, Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, and Jean-FrançoTrade Review"Why Internet Porn Matters renews philosophical debate about the function of pornography for the twenty-first century by examining the effects of a 'democratized Internet' as the new mode or form of pornography distribution and consumption, as distinct from philosophical and feminist criticisms of pornography, which take issue with the content and production . . . This text is surely a valuable revival of MacKinnon's work. In addition, its return to early feminist concerns over the gendering of the private sphere in dialogue with the production of homogeneity through state practices enables critiques of the political tactics in current civil rights movements." -- Melissa Mosko * Hypatia Reviews Online *"[A]rresting . . . Grebowicz's central premise is that the means by which pornography is distributed is as significant as its content—the 'graphy', in other words, as significant as the 'porn' . . . The internet has put cameras everywhere. It used to be radical to turn the lights on for sex; perhaps the time has come to switch them off." -- Hannah Dawson * Times Literary Supplement *"[T]his book by Grebowicz offers an adroit analysis of Internet pornography that has large implications for feminism, gender studies, and media studies . . . Recommended." -- M. Uebel * Choice *"Grebowicz's skillful argument goes far beyond the usual debates about whether Internet pornography is 'good' or 'bad', encouraging us to think instead about the deeper philosophical and political meanings of porn and its distribution today." -- Karmen MacKendrick * Le Moyne College *"Margret Grebowicz has written a bracing, vital book that should be required reading for any scholar interested in the politics and theory of sexuality. Relying on an eclectic but carefully chosen set of interlocutors (from Baudrillard to MacKinnon to Scarlet the Harlot), Grebowicz has carved out a space to ask specifically philosophical questions about an emerging, and increasingly influential, set of social practices." -- Ann Cahill * Elon University *
£13.94
Stanford University Press The Figure of the Migrant
Book SynopsisAt a time when more people than ever are being constrained to move for political, economic, and environmental reasons, this book provides a new political theory of migration, one based on the social primacy of movement.Trade Review"Nail provides an innovative conceptual framework that disaggregates and contextualises social motions and movements throughout Western history. Beyond the originality of the kinopolitic theory, the real contribution is the focus on migrant's conditions that are too often neglected in the field of migration studies." -- Betty Rouland * Geopolitics *"Nail focuses on numerous ways that social and political developments can be viewed as a history of migrants . . . Nail concludes that migration is not derivative within a static framework but is primary to a history of society. Nail's book is a novel approach to history and political theory." * E.R. Gill CHOICE *"In this powerful book, Thomas Nail forces us to think migration from the perspective of movement and so builds both a theoretical argument and a political intervention. A bold and provocative engagement with one of the world's most pressing contemporary issues." -- Stuart Elden * University or Warwick *"Hardly a day goes by without some reference in the media to the "problem" of migration. In offering a theoretical account of the figure of the migrant throughout history, Thomas Nail's book thus performs an important service for the interdisciplinary study of one of the most important subjects of our century. Carefully argued, well informed, hugely ambitious, and analytically precise, it will become a standard reference for years to come." -- Tim Cresswell * Northeastern University *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction lays out the objectives of the book as a whole. Given the contemporary importance of migration, this book develops a political theory of the migrant. In particular, the aim is to overcome two problems: the migrant has been predominantly understood from the perspective of stasis and the state. If we want to develop a political theory of the migrant itself and not of the migrant as a failed citizen, we need to reinterpret the migrant first and foremost according to its own defining feature: its movement. This allows us to conceptualize the emergence of the historical conditions that give rise to the different types of social expulsion that define the migrant and to diagnose the capacity of the migrant to create an alternative to its social expulsion. 1The Figure of the Migrant chapter abstractThis chapter defines "the figure of the migrant" as a political concept that identifies the common points where mobile figures are socially expelled or dispossessed as a result, or as the cause, of their mobility. The movement of the migrant is thus not simply from A to B but the constitutive condition for the qualitative transformation of society as a whole. This chapter defines the migrant as a figure, which is not a fixed identity or specific person but a mobile social position. One becomes a figure when one occupies this position and may do so to different degrees, at different times, and in different circumstances. The figure of the migrant, for example, is like a social persona that bears many masks (the nomad, barbarian, vagabond, proletariat) depending on the relative social conditions of expulsion. 2Kinopolitics chapter abstractThe history of the migrant is the history of social motion. This chapter defines and lays out the logical structure of social motion or "kinopolitics," the politics of movement. Instead of analyzing societies as primarily static, spatial, or temporal types of entities, kinopolitics or social kinetics understands them primarily as "regimes of motion." Societies are always in motion: directing people and objects, reproducing their social conditions (periodicity), and striving to expand their territorial, political, juridical, and economic power through diverse forms of expulsion. This chapter introduces three key concepts to understanding social motion: flow, junction, and circulation. In this way, it is possible to identify something like a political theory of movement. In particular, this chapter argues that the migrant is defined by two intertwined social motions: expansion and expulsion. 3Centripetal Force chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the first type of social expansion by expulsion: centripetal force. The first historically dominant type of expansion by expulsion can be described as a centripetal social force because its dominant motion is inward—toward the creation of the first stable social centers on the earth's center-less surface. Since centripetal social force is primarily concerned with accumulation, territorial expulsion remains an indirect phenomenon. Nomads were not first expelled because they were foreigners or social inferiors. Rather, the type of expulsion proper to territorial kinopower creates a centripetal remainder: leftovers—that which is not territorially accumulated. The figure of the nomad is simply expelled because there are not enough territorial flows left over for them, and they are in the way. 4Centrifugal Force chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the second type of social expansion by expulsion: centrifugal force. This force emerges historically alongside the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Political or centrifugal kinopower expands the curved movements of territorial control into a completely enclosed circle, brings all its stock into a shared resonance around a central axis, and radiates outward. It adds to the system of curved, centripetal expansion a system of concentric, centrifugal expansion and produces a new figure of the migrant: the barbarian. Territorial kinopower expands by creating a stock and expels only certain plants, animals, and people (nomads) as an indirect consequence: as an unaccumulated, aterritorial remainder. 5Tensional Force chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the third type of social expansion by expulsion: tensional force. This force emerges historically alongside the feudal societies of medieval Europe. This type of kinopower is "juridical" in the kinetic sense in which law binds the movement of social beings to one another and to a certain social condition or territory. Tensional migratory expulsion occurs when these juridical linkages are severed and release a social flow: vagabondage. However, just as easily as this network of juridical linkages can be dissolved, so the links can be reassembled into new circuits. Internally, juridical kinopower expels peasants and debtors from their legal right to the land and expands legal power by criminalizing them as vagabonds. Externally, juridical kinopower expels foreign peoples through war, colonialism, and kidnapping and expands its legal power by colonial legislation: the encomienda. 6Elastic Force I chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the fourth type of social expansion by expulsion: elastic force. This type of kinopower comes to dominance during the sociohistorical period between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and can be kinopolitically defined by the emergence of a newly dominant force of social motion: elasticity. This elastic force is a specifically "economic" type of kinopower in the sense that economics strives for the free arrangement and movement of things to and fro with a minimum of territorial, political, or juridical restrictions and with a maximum of equilibrium. The migrant proletariat is the spectrum of the proletariat that is economically expelled as a mobile social surplus. This chapter and the next analyze the specific social technologies of expulsion and mobilization that give rise to a variety of such migrant proletarian subjects and expand economic kinopower, including enclosures, capitalism, and eighteenth-century workhouses. 7Elastic Force II chapter abstractThis chapter continues to analyzes the fourth type of social expansion by expulsion: elastic force. Not only is a migrant proletariat created through an intensive expulsion—enclosures, capitalist valorization, and workhouses—in order to increase competition and production, but it is also produced through an extensive expulsion via penal transportation, emigration, and denationalization. The chapter describes the forms of external expansion by expulsion in their intensive forms (the Atlantic slave trade) and their extensive forms (British colonialism in Ireland and North America). 8Pedetic Force chapter abstractThe migrant has many different figures. The nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat are only four major ones. Not only does each figure of the migrant emerge under different historical and social conditions of expansion and expulsion, but each figure also invents a form of kinetic power of its own that poses an alternative to social expulsion. Although each of the figures of the migrant deploys this force in its unique way, each is also the social expression of a more general "pedetic" social force. This chapter briefly outlines the concept of pedetic social force that is deployed by the four figures of the migrant analyzed in the following chapters of Part 3. 9The Nomad chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the first figure of pedetic social force: the nomad. The nomad is not simply the result of a primary territorial, centripetal expulsion. Early hunter-gathers were not simply left out from territorial society; they also actively left it and invented an entirely different form of social motion. Hunter-gathers moved to the mountains and cultivated the newly discovered art of animal raising. In cultivating this art so exclusively, they had to invent a form of social motion most conducive to it. Nomadism oscillates continually by following the earth's flows wherever they may go, without centripetal capture or accumulation. Nomadism also deploys a transportation of social kinetic disturbances: waves. The nomads' kinetic wave is a mass or common phenomenon that links them by force without producing a division in their motion. Finally, nomadism creates a social pressure against territorial barriers. 10The Barbarian chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the second figure of pedetic social force: the barbarian. The barbarian, like the nomad, is not merely the result of a kinetic expulsion. Barbarians also invent their own form of social motion that functions in a pedetic way. Just as "barbarian" in the ancient world was often etymologically or literally the word for the "slave by nature," it is not surprising that the ancient art of pedesis appears most predominantly in the oscillations, waves, and social pressures of refugees and slave revolts. 11The Vagabond chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the third figure of pedetic social force: the vagabond. The vagabond is not only the criminalized migrant expelled by the tensional force of law as the tramp, the debtor, the beggar, the pauper, the vagrant, the heretic, the witch, the Jew, the minstrel, the foreigner, the homeless. The vagabond, from the Latin vagus, meaning "to wander," from the Latin proprius, meaning "one's own way," is also the migrant whose free wandering has its own techniques of pedetic force found in the kinetic counterpower of rebellion: the direct battle with the forces of expulsion. 12The Proletariat chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the fourth figure of pedetic social force: the proletariat. The proletariat is not only a migratory surplus expelled by the elastic force of the economy; the proletariat also breaks free from the driving forces of oscillation (profit, equilibrium, competition, etc.). In other words, the proletariat responds to elastic force with a pedetic force of its own. This pedetic force is defined by the free oscillation of social movements, the wave of protests, communes, and the pressure of the strike in its various forms: the barricade, the labor strike, the hunger strike, the boycott, and others. 13Centripetal Force and Land Grabbing chapter abstractThe aim of the final part of this book is to deploy a hybrid theory of kinopolitical analysis to the increasingly complex phenomenon of contemporary migration. The history of the migrant this book has traced so far is not simply a history of the past; it is also a history of the present in which all of the historical conditions and figures of the migrant return and mix. This chapter describes the reemergence of centripetal social force seen in contemporary Mexico-US migration. While unquestionably mixed with several other types of social motion, centripetal force in its most basic form remains a crucial condition for the expulsion of the Mexican people and the expansion of US and private power. Today, we call this "land grabbing." This chapter describes two major periods of centripetal accumulation in Mexico: the Porfiriato and neoliberalism. 14Centrifugal Force and Federal Enforcement chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the use of centrifugal social force in Mexico-US migration. There are several ways centrifugal power operates through federal power in Mexico and the United States to expand its reach and expel migrants. The centrifugal force of the Mexican state expands its centralized force by the direct expulsion of indigenous farmers from public lands and the reappropriation of their labor by other means. It also uses direct police and military violence to expel migrants. When peasants will not migrate or sell their land "voluntarily" to these state-sponsored mega-projects, a centrally directed police and military force is sent out from the city to directly expel people from the territory. Finally, Mexico and the United States treat migrants as naturally inferior and depoliticized barbarians. 15Tensional Force and Illegal People chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the use of tensional social force in Mexico-US migration. Contemporary tensional force is created by the rise of multiple legal powers: international, supranational, humanitarian, and corporate law that now poses entirely new limitations on the executive power of sovereign governments. Today's tensional forces that bind social motions, although no longer feudal, still take the form of a vast network of legal contracts binding at every level of society, that is, between individuals, local law, states, nations, and other non-state international organizations. This is accomplished in several ways: the reform of the countryside in Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement, Free Trade Zones and maquiladoras, the criminalization of labor in the United States, and the detention and expulsion of migrants in the United States. 16Elastic Force and Neoliberalism chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the use of elastic social force in Mexico-US migration. Elastic force expands and expels not by creating and breaking juridical tensions between social motions but by creating and redistributing a surplus of motion elsewhere. As long as a society is capable of producing and mobilizing its surplus and deficits, it will be able to pursue equilibrium and hopefully expand. Thus, elasticity expands and expels, not from the outside to the center (centripetally), nor from the center to the outside (centrifugally), nor by rigid links between centers (tension), but rather by the redistribution of a surplus wherever it is needed. This accomplished in several ways: the redistribution of surplus in Mexico, privatization, guest-worker programs, and undocumented migrant workers. 17Pedetic Force and Migrant Power chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes four types of contemporary migrant counterpower in the case of Mexico-US migration. Just as contemporary migration is produced by the forces of social expansion and expulsion, so it is also defined by the pedetic counterforces of oscillation, waves, and pressure. Social pedesis is the irregular movement of a collective body: a social turbulence. It is the force of motion of the social figure who moves outside the dominant forms of social motion: the migrant. This is expressed in four contemporary figures of Mexico-US migration: the nomadic seasonal worker, the barbarian invader, the vagabond rebel, and the proletarian occupier. Conclusion chapter abstractThe Conclusion recapitulates the main problems and consequences of the movement-oriented theory of the migrant presented throughout the book. Additionally, it highlights three major areas where further work is necessary. First, future work is necessary to analyze the kinopolitical technologies presented in this book (and others) according to their full historical and kinetic mixture or hybridization—which this book has presented only in their relative isolation. Second, many other major and interesting areas of contemporary migration remain to be analyzed with this framework, such as the landless peasant movement in Brazil, the recent home foreclosure process happening around the world, the recent land grabs and expulsions in Cambodia, and the sans-papiers (without papers) struggle in France. Third, future work is needed to examine additional figures of the migrant, such as tourists, commuters, diplomats, and business travelers, with respect to their degrees of expulsion and movement.
£81.90
Stanford University Press The World of Freedom
Book SynopsisThis first systematic and comprehensive engagement of the relationship of Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault makes a unique contribution to our thinking about the question of freedom and shows why these major thinkers must be read in tandem if we want to fully understand twentieth-century Continental thought.Trade Review"Robert Nichols' basic idea is an interesting one: viewing Foucaults 'care of the self' as a successful historicizing of Heidegger's existential analytic of care offers us a powerful alternative to the 'prevailing (Kantian) tradition['s problematic] model of freedom as autonomous rational willing.' . . . [He] provides clear and thoughtful reconstructions of Heidegger's and Foucault's attempts to develop a situational account of freedom, while engaging some other, in Nichols' view, less successful attempts by Herbert Marcuse and Axel Honneth to develop Heideggerian alternatives to the prevailing Kantian tradition . . . There is much to learn from Nichols' account of Foucault's historical ontology and how it leads us to a more politically helpful understanding of freedom. Similarly, many will be interested in how Nichols reads Foucault along with Heidegger, showing how each helps us to understand the other."—Alan D. Schrift, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews"Robert Nichols makes a powerful case for reading the late Foucault in the light of Heidegger's conception of freedom. His masterful demonstration of their convergences not only shows how Foucault's historical ontology of human subjectivity complements Heidegger's account of the historicity of Being, it transforms our understanding of the political significance of Foucault's genealogies. The World of Freedom is a valuable contribution to Heidegger scholarship, Foucault studies, and to the understanding of key Continental political philosophical concepts."—Paul Patton, University of New South Wales"This book breaks new ground in an underdeveloped area of both Foucault and Heidegger studies and advances current debates within critical theory. While clearly appreciating Foucault's departures from Heidegger, Robert Nichols makes the case that Foucault and Heidegger share an understanding of freedom as an ethical relationship to our world of practical engagements. Moving beyond comparative exegesis, he argues that Foucault's later writings on 'spiritual' practices of the self offer a more compelling critical response to the problem of reification than Hegelian appeals to recognition."—Jana Sawicki, Williams College
£98.60
Stanford University Press Globalizing Knowledge
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Globalizing Knowledge is a tour de force, grappling with one of the most important challenges of our time—how to develop and mobilize knowledge produced in the university for global problems, and to do so in an equitable way. Michael Kennedy commands an enormous experience in promoting global networks of knowledge, and is well-versed in the debates about their possibilities and limitations." -- Michael Burawoy, University of California"Kennedy argues masterfully that the urgent project of building global knowledge can and should preserve the richness and texture of vernacular ways of knowing. He demonstrates simultaneously his intense commitment to the engaged, context-sensitive social science and keen awareness of the intellectual and ethical dilemmas unavoidable in the production of universally germane knowledge." -- Jan Kubik, Professor and Director, School of Slavonic and East European Studies * University College London *"Drawing upon his vast experiences and wide readings, Michael Kennedy has written a cogent and compelling book on the globalization of knowledge(s) and of universities. At once empirically rich and theoretically provocative, it is a necessary book for our challenging and confusing times." -- John Lie, University of California"Path-breaking in its depth and sophistication, Globalizing Knowledge makes a key contribution to an evolving field of research and conceptualization. We need new categories of analysis, which Michael Kennedy now gives us, to work with the growing mass of data about our global condition." -- Saskia Sassen * Columbia University, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy *"Michael Kennedy's wise reflections on—and broad experience in working through—some of the key issues at stake in our new global knowledge economy are timely and critical. Kennedy provides readers with important insight into what global knowledge should genuinely mean at a time of pervasive (if also clichéd) globalization. Globalizing Knowledge offers fascinating perspectives on issues of monumental significance not just to our societies, polities, and economies but also our planet." -- Nicholas B. Dirks, Chancellor, University of California * Berkeley *"In a changing world, Michael Kennedy introduces an innovative theoretical framework to increase equality in modern countries while also preserving liberty and freedom. Case studies focusing on different countries allow the reader to better understand the context of Kennedy's ideas." -- Ricardo Lagos Escobar * Former President of Chile *"Information has become the most powerful global asset. With this book, Michael Kennedy makes a plea to all to reach beyond the existing limitations of both academic and political imaginations to seek new socio-political transformations. As long as there is a willingness to consciously explore alternatives, humanity will be able to fulfill the promises of a progress, resulting in a better world for all. Globalizing Knowledge is a major contribution." -- Alfred Gusenbauer * Former Chancellor of Austria *"University presidents have said that globalization was a goal for at least two decades. It is now a reality that is rapidly changing higher education. But with all the attention to student flows, rankings, competition, and fundraising, the primary importance of globalizing knowledge can be forgotten. Michael Kennedy's book puts the focus where it needs to be: on how intellectuals and universities work in different global contexts to inform publics and educate students and how the global organization of academic work shapes both knowledge itself and the responsibilities of intellectuals. These are issues that academics can't afford to ignore." -- Craig Calhoun, President * London School of Economics and Political Science *
£112.20
Stanford University Press Globalizing Knowledge
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Globalizing Knowledge is a tour de force, grappling with one of the most important challenges of our time—how to develop and mobilize knowledge produced in the university for global problems, and to do so in an equitable way. Michael Kennedy commands an enormous experience in promoting global networks of knowledge, and is well-versed in the debates about their possibilities and limitations." -- Michael Burawoy, University of California"Kennedy argues masterfully that the urgent project of building global knowledge can and should preserve the richness and texture of vernacular ways of knowing. He demonstrates simultaneously his intense commitment to the engaged, context-sensitive social science and keen awareness of the intellectual and ethical dilemmas unavoidable in the production of universally germane knowledge." -- Jan Kubik, Professor and Director, School of Slavonic and East European Studies * University College London *"Drawing upon his vast experiences and wide readings, Michael Kennedy has written a cogent and compelling book on the globalization of knowledge(s) and of universities. At once empirically rich and theoretically provocative, it is a necessary book for our challenging and confusing times." -- John Lie, University of California"Path-breaking in its depth and sophistication, Globalizing Knowledge makes a key contribution to an evolving field of research and conceptualization. We need new categories of analysis, which Michael Kennedy now gives us, to work with the growing mass of data about our global condition." -- Saskia Sassen * Columbia University, author of Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy *"Michael Kennedy's wise reflections on—and broad experience in working through—some of the key issues at stake in our new global knowledge economy are timely and critical. Kennedy provides readers with important insight into what global knowledge should genuinely mean at a time of pervasive (if also clichéd) globalization. Globalizing Knowledge offers fascinating perspectives on issues of monumental significance not just to our societies, polities, and economies but also our planet." -- Nicholas B. Dirks, Chancellor, University of California * Berkeley *"In a changing world, Michael Kennedy introduces an innovative theoretical framework to increase equality in modern countries while also preserving liberty and freedom. Case studies focusing on different countries allow the reader to better understand the context of Kennedy's ideas." -- Ricardo Lagos Escobar * Former President of Chile *"Information has become the most powerful global asset. With this book, Michael Kennedy makes a plea to all to reach beyond the existing limitations of both academic and political imaginations to seek new socio-political transformations. As long as there is a willingness to consciously explore alternatives, humanity will be able to fulfill the promises of a progress, resulting in a better world for all. Globalizing Knowledge is a major contribution." -- Alfred Gusenbauer * Former Chancellor of Austria *"University presidents have said that globalization was a goal for at least two decades. It is now a reality that is rapidly changing higher education. But with all the attention to student flows, rankings, competition, and fundraising, the primary importance of globalizing knowledge can be forgotten. Michael Kennedy's book puts the focus where it needs to be: on how intellectuals and universities work in different global contexts to inform publics and educate students and how the global organization of academic work shapes both knowledge itself and the responsibilities of intellectuals. These are issues that academics can't afford to ignore." -- Craig Calhoun, President * London School of Economics and Political Science *
£28.80
Stanford University Press Pilate and Jesus
Book SynopsisA probing investigation of the trial of Jesus by noted Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.
£13.29
Stanford University Press The Figure of the Migrant
Book SynopsisAt a time when more people than ever are being constrained to move for political, economic, and environmental reasons, this book provides a new political theory of migration, one based on the social primacy of movement.Trade Review"Nail provides an innovative conceptual framework that disaggregates and contextualises social motions and movements throughout Western history. Beyond the originality of the kinopolitic theory, the real contribution is the focus on migrant's conditions that are too often neglected in the field of migration studies." -- Betty Rouland * Geopolitics *"Nail focuses on numerous ways that social and political developments can be viewed as a history of migrants . . . Nail concludes that migration is not derivative within a static framework but is primary to a history of society. Nail's book is a novel approach to history and political theory." * E.R. Gill CHOICE *"In this powerful book, Thomas Nail forces us to think migration from the perspective of movement and so builds both a theoretical argument and a political intervention. A bold and provocative engagement with one of the world's most pressing contemporary issues." -- Stuart Elden * University or Warwick *"Hardly a day goes by without some reference in the media to the "problem" of migration. In offering a theoretical account of the figure of the migrant throughout history, Thomas Nail's book thus performs an important service for the interdisciplinary study of one of the most important subjects of our century. Carefully argued, well informed, hugely ambitious, and analytically precise, it will become a standard reference for years to come." -- Tim Cresswell * Northeastern University *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractThe Introduction lays out the objectives of the book as a whole. Given the contemporary importance of migration, this book develops a political theory of the migrant. In particular, the aim is to overcome two problems: the migrant has been predominantly understood from the perspective of stasis and the state. If we want to develop a political theory of the migrant itself and not of the migrant as a failed citizen, we need to reinterpret the migrant first and foremost according to its own defining feature: its movement. This allows us to conceptualize the emergence of the historical conditions that give rise to the different types of social expulsion that define the migrant and to diagnose the capacity of the migrant to create an alternative to its social expulsion. 1The Figure of the Migrant chapter abstractThis chapter defines "the figure of the migrant" as a political concept that identifies the common points where mobile figures are socially expelled or dispossessed as a result, or as the cause, of their mobility. The movement of the migrant is thus not simply from A to B but the constitutive condition for the qualitative transformation of society as a whole. This chapter defines the migrant as a figure, which is not a fixed identity or specific person but a mobile social position. One becomes a figure when one occupies this position and may do so to different degrees, at different times, and in different circumstances. The figure of the migrant, for example, is like a social persona that bears many masks (the nomad, barbarian, vagabond, proletariat) depending on the relative social conditions of expulsion. 2Kinopolitics chapter abstractThe history of the migrant is the history of social motion. This chapter defines and lays out the logical structure of social motion or "kinopolitics," the politics of movement. Instead of analyzing societies as primarily static, spatial, or temporal types of entities, kinopolitics or social kinetics understands them primarily as "regimes of motion." Societies are always in motion: directing people and objects, reproducing their social conditions (periodicity), and striving to expand their territorial, political, juridical, and economic power through diverse forms of expulsion. This chapter introduces three key concepts to understanding social motion: flow, junction, and circulation. In this way, it is possible to identify something like a political theory of movement. In particular, this chapter argues that the migrant is defined by two intertwined social motions: expansion and expulsion. 3Centripetal Force chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the first type of social expansion by expulsion: centripetal force. The first historically dominant type of expansion by expulsion can be described as a centripetal social force because its dominant motion is inward—toward the creation of the first stable social centers on the earth's center-less surface. Since centripetal social force is primarily concerned with accumulation, territorial expulsion remains an indirect phenomenon. Nomads were not first expelled because they were foreigners or social inferiors. Rather, the type of expulsion proper to territorial kinopower creates a centripetal remainder: leftovers—that which is not territorially accumulated. The figure of the nomad is simply expelled because there are not enough territorial flows left over for them, and they are in the way. 4Centrifugal Force chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the second type of social expansion by expulsion: centrifugal force. This force emerges historically alongside the ancient empires of Mesopotamia, Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Political or centrifugal kinopower expands the curved movements of territorial control into a completely enclosed circle, brings all its stock into a shared resonance around a central axis, and radiates outward. It adds to the system of curved, centripetal expansion a system of concentric, centrifugal expansion and produces a new figure of the migrant: the barbarian. Territorial kinopower expands by creating a stock and expels only certain plants, animals, and people (nomads) as an indirect consequence: as an unaccumulated, aterritorial remainder. 5Tensional Force chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the third type of social expansion by expulsion: tensional force. This force emerges historically alongside the feudal societies of medieval Europe. This type of kinopower is "juridical" in the kinetic sense in which law binds the movement of social beings to one another and to a certain social condition or territory. Tensional migratory expulsion occurs when these juridical linkages are severed and release a social flow: vagabondage. However, just as easily as this network of juridical linkages can be dissolved, so the links can be reassembled into new circuits. Internally, juridical kinopower expels peasants and debtors from their legal right to the land and expands legal power by criminalizing them as vagabonds. Externally, juridical kinopower expels foreign peoples through war, colonialism, and kidnapping and expands its legal power by colonial legislation: the encomienda. 6Elastic Force I chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the fourth type of social expansion by expulsion: elastic force. This type of kinopower comes to dominance during the sociohistorical period between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries and can be kinopolitically defined by the emergence of a newly dominant force of social motion: elasticity. This elastic force is a specifically "economic" type of kinopower in the sense that economics strives for the free arrangement and movement of things to and fro with a minimum of territorial, political, or juridical restrictions and with a maximum of equilibrium. The migrant proletariat is the spectrum of the proletariat that is economically expelled as a mobile social surplus. This chapter and the next analyze the specific social technologies of expulsion and mobilization that give rise to a variety of such migrant proletarian subjects and expand economic kinopower, including enclosures, capitalism, and eighteenth-century workhouses. 7Elastic Force II chapter abstractThis chapter continues to analyzes the fourth type of social expansion by expulsion: elastic force. Not only is a migrant proletariat created through an intensive expulsion—enclosures, capitalist valorization, and workhouses—in order to increase competition and production, but it is also produced through an extensive expulsion via penal transportation, emigration, and denationalization. The chapter describes the forms of external expansion by expulsion in their intensive forms (the Atlantic slave trade) and their extensive forms (British colonialism in Ireland and North America). 8Pedetic Force chapter abstractThe migrant has many different figures. The nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat are only four major ones. Not only does each figure of the migrant emerge under different historical and social conditions of expansion and expulsion, but each figure also invents a form of kinetic power of its own that poses an alternative to social expulsion. Although each of the figures of the migrant deploys this force in its unique way, each is also the social expression of a more general "pedetic" social force. This chapter briefly outlines the concept of pedetic social force that is deployed by the four figures of the migrant analyzed in the following chapters of Part 3. 9The Nomad chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the first figure of pedetic social force: the nomad. The nomad is not simply the result of a primary territorial, centripetal expulsion. Early hunter-gathers were not simply left out from territorial society; they also actively left it and invented an entirely different form of social motion. Hunter-gathers moved to the mountains and cultivated the newly discovered art of animal raising. In cultivating this art so exclusively, they had to invent a form of social motion most conducive to it. Nomadism oscillates continually by following the earth's flows wherever they may go, without centripetal capture or accumulation. Nomadism also deploys a transportation of social kinetic disturbances: waves. The nomads' kinetic wave is a mass or common phenomenon that links them by force without producing a division in their motion. Finally, nomadism creates a social pressure against territorial barriers. 10The Barbarian chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the second figure of pedetic social force: the barbarian. The barbarian, like the nomad, is not merely the result of a kinetic expulsion. Barbarians also invent their own form of social motion that functions in a pedetic way. Just as "barbarian" in the ancient world was often etymologically or literally the word for the "slave by nature," it is not surprising that the ancient art of pedesis appears most predominantly in the oscillations, waves, and social pressures of refugees and slave revolts. 11The Vagabond chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the third figure of pedetic social force: the vagabond. The vagabond is not only the criminalized migrant expelled by the tensional force of law as the tramp, the debtor, the beggar, the pauper, the vagrant, the heretic, the witch, the Jew, the minstrel, the foreigner, the homeless. The vagabond, from the Latin vagus, meaning "to wander," from the Latin proprius, meaning "one's own way," is also the migrant whose free wandering has its own techniques of pedetic force found in the kinetic counterpower of rebellion: the direct battle with the forces of expulsion. 12The Proletariat chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the fourth figure of pedetic social force: the proletariat. The proletariat is not only a migratory surplus expelled by the elastic force of the economy; the proletariat also breaks free from the driving forces of oscillation (profit, equilibrium, competition, etc.). In other words, the proletariat responds to elastic force with a pedetic force of its own. This pedetic force is defined by the free oscillation of social movements, the wave of protests, communes, and the pressure of the strike in its various forms: the barricade, the labor strike, the hunger strike, the boycott, and others. 13Centripetal Force and Land Grabbing chapter abstractThe aim of the final part of this book is to deploy a hybrid theory of kinopolitical analysis to the increasingly complex phenomenon of contemporary migration. The history of the migrant this book has traced so far is not simply a history of the past; it is also a history of the present in which all of the historical conditions and figures of the migrant return and mix. This chapter describes the reemergence of centripetal social force seen in contemporary Mexico-US migration. While unquestionably mixed with several other types of social motion, centripetal force in its most basic form remains a crucial condition for the expulsion of the Mexican people and the expansion of US and private power. Today, we call this "land grabbing." This chapter describes two major periods of centripetal accumulation in Mexico: the Porfiriato and neoliberalism. 14Centrifugal Force and Federal Enforcement chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the use of centrifugal social force in Mexico-US migration. There are several ways centrifugal power operates through federal power in Mexico and the United States to expand its reach and expel migrants. The centrifugal force of the Mexican state expands its centralized force by the direct expulsion of indigenous farmers from public lands and the reappropriation of their labor by other means. It also uses direct police and military violence to expel migrants. When peasants will not migrate or sell their land "voluntarily" to these state-sponsored mega-projects, a centrally directed police and military force is sent out from the city to directly expel people from the territory. Finally, Mexico and the United States treat migrants as naturally inferior and depoliticized barbarians. 15Tensional Force and Illegal People chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the use of tensional social force in Mexico-US migration. Contemporary tensional force is created by the rise of multiple legal powers: international, supranational, humanitarian, and corporate law that now poses entirely new limitations on the executive power of sovereign governments. Today's tensional forces that bind social motions, although no longer feudal, still take the form of a vast network of legal contracts binding at every level of society, that is, between individuals, local law, states, nations, and other non-state international organizations. This is accomplished in several ways: the reform of the countryside in Mexico, the North American Free Trade Agreement, Free Trade Zones and maquiladoras, the criminalization of labor in the United States, and the detention and expulsion of migrants in the United States. 16Elastic Force and Neoliberalism chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes the use of elastic social force in Mexico-US migration. Elastic force expands and expels not by creating and breaking juridical tensions between social motions but by creating and redistributing a surplus of motion elsewhere. As long as a society is capable of producing and mobilizing its surplus and deficits, it will be able to pursue equilibrium and hopefully expand. Thus, elasticity expands and expels, not from the outside to the center (centripetally), nor from the center to the outside (centrifugally), nor by rigid links between centers (tension), but rather by the redistribution of a surplus wherever it is needed. This accomplished in several ways: the redistribution of surplus in Mexico, privatization, guest-worker programs, and undocumented migrant workers. 17Pedetic Force and Migrant Power chapter abstractThis chapter analyzes four types of contemporary migrant counterpower in the case of Mexico-US migration. Just as contemporary migration is produced by the forces of social expansion and expulsion, so it is also defined by the pedetic counterforces of oscillation, waves, and pressure. Social pedesis is the irregular movement of a collective body: a social turbulence. It is the force of motion of the social figure who moves outside the dominant forms of social motion: the migrant. This is expressed in four contemporary figures of Mexico-US migration: the nomadic seasonal worker, the barbarian invader, the vagabond rebel, and the proletarian occupier. Conclusion chapter abstractThe Conclusion recapitulates the main problems and consequences of the movement-oriented theory of the migrant presented throughout the book. Additionally, it highlights three major areas where further work is necessary. First, future work is necessary to analyze the kinopolitical technologies presented in this book (and others) according to their full historical and kinetic mixture or hybridization—which this book has presented only in their relative isolation. Second, many other major and interesting areas of contemporary migration remain to be analyzed with this framework, such as the landless peasant movement in Brazil, the recent home foreclosure process happening around the world, the recent land grabs and expulsions in Cambodia, and the sans-papiers (without papers) struggle in France. Third, future work is needed to examine additional figures of the migrant, such as tourists, commuters, diplomats, and business travelers, with respect to their degrees of expulsion and movement.
£20.89
Stanford University Press Theodor Adorno and the Century of Negative
Book SynopsisCovering the period of the Frankfurt School's exile in the United States, this book examines how the critique of racism, authoritarianism, and hard-right agitation impacted the American and German individual's self-conception (identity), while examining how a new form of politics, based on defining an Other, has shaped our everyday language, institutions, and social world.Trade Review"An indispensable contribution to the history and theory of the concept of identity in the twentieth century, Eric Oberle's book has convinced me that Adorno's wrestling with this question not only permits but requires a reinterpretation of the whole body of his work." -- Gerald Izenberg, Professor Emeritus * Washington University in St. Louis *"The historical and philosophical literature on Adorno is abundant, and the bar is high for new work. With a mix of persuasive analysis, meticulous research, and astute commentary, Eric Oberle's book clears it." -- Warren Breckman * University of Pennsylvania *"In a work of boundless ambition and comparable achievement, which combines close reading of familiar texts and synoptic intellectual histories that bring together unfamiliar texts, The Century of Negative Identity shows just how indebted the Frankfurt School, particularly Adorno and Horkheimer, was to its time in America." -- Corey Robin * crookedtimber.org *"Oberle's book is full of pathbreaking insights rendered in a dense, fast-paced but crystalline prose. Written for an audience of intellectual historians, it nevertheless speaks directly to all of us as we grapple with the contemporary 'interconnections among racism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of prejudice.'" -- James Loeffler * Marginalia, Los Angeles Review of Books *Table of ContentsContents and Abstracts1"Jazz , the Wound": Negative Identity, Culture, and the Shadow of Race chapter abstractChapter 1 offers a revised interpretation of the infamous jazz controversy and Adorno's first confrontation with the idea of race and the American concept of culture. Chronicling Adorno's missteps in applying a theory of the commodification of musical universalism developed in Weimar Germany to the substantially different conditions of American society of the 1930s, this chapter reconstructs the political and cultural situations in which these essays were written and published. By examining the history of critical theory through the story of Adorno's understanding—and misunderstandings—of jazz and through Adorno's postwar consideration of his own Jewish heritage and that of the German-Jewish poet Heinrich Heine, this chapter explores Adorno's intellectual development in relation to the historical trajectory of twentieth-century attitudes toward culture between the worlds of ethnicity and the avant-garde. 2America; or, the Stranger chapter abstractChapter 2 looks at how Adorno's early experiences in America shaped his commitment to a Kantian vision of science, ethics, and universalism that would also accommodate individual expression, observation, and resistance. The chapter's central focus is an important 1940 lecture at Columbia. It explores how Adorno used Simmel's model of the sociological Stranger to understand America and American academic sociology's emphasis on assimilation and adaptation as the essence of truth and progress and also how, for an émigré scientist, personal alienation might lead to theoretical innovation. Considering what it meant for Adorno to be a Kantian Marxist and Nietzschean universalist, this chapter argues that during these years Adorno engaged with the problem of the relation between universalism and particularity in a way that laid the grounds for his turn toward the social dynamics of subjective identity in relation to racism and authoritarian politics. 3Negative Identities of the Subject in Wartime America chapter abstractChapter 3 introduces a long argument developed across Chapters 3 through 6. Examining Adorno's most famous, or notorious, philosophical work, Dialectic of Enlightenment (cowritten with Max Horkheimer), it challenges several persistent scholarly assumptions about Adorno's intellectual biography: that the war years marked a "retreat" from empirical research to theory; that the esoteric philosophical speculation of Dialectic of Enlightenment and Minima Moralia represented the "true" Adorno; that Adorno and Horkheimer were "pessimists" or "nihilists" during this period; and that the empirical study of The Authoritarian Personality was a distraction from Adorno's real concerns. Countering this narrative, these chapters argue that this period can all be read in terms of an ongoing attempt, when Adorno had become Horkheimer's closest intellectual interlocutor, to realize the work envisioned by the 1931 programmatic essay "Traditional and Critical Theory": creating a social-psychological model of interdisciplinary inquiry that devolved into neither positivism nor social Darwinism. 4Critical Theory Goes to War: The Critique of Positive Identity and Positive Science chapter abstractChapter 4 explores how Adorno's work and that of the Institute for Social Research were shaped by a schism over the introduction of the term identity by its then most prominent theorist, Erich Fromm, in his 1941 Escape from Freedom. Showing how he articulated the language of identity as nonalienated subjectivity, which was almost immediately rejected by other members as Romantic and uncritical, this chapter argues that the struggle over the identity concept made the problem of subjective rationality a central concern for the institute; that it reshaped intellectual relationships within the institute, leading Adorno to become Horkheimer's chief collaborator; and that it set the institute on the path to developing a different understanding of its interdisciplinary project. It further challenges a long-standing misconception of the relationship between theory and practice in the institute, arguing for a dynamic interplay between private theorization and publicly engaged practical science. 5Negative Modeling: Objectivity, Normativity, and the Refusal of the Universal chapter abstractChapter 5 offers a reexamination of The Authoritarian Personality, the massive, multiauthored empirical study that constituted the capstone of Adorno's collaboration with American social scientists and the beginning of discussion on the study of prejudice, racism, and authoritarian politics. The standard account of Adorno's career suggests that the time Adorno spent on empirical psychological research was time lost for work on critical theory; it emphasizes tensions between Adorno and his American colleagues and implies that Adorno was ineffective at social-scientific collaboration. This chapter contests these myths by showing how Adorno's critical, multidisciplinary intelligence was important to this groundbreaking study's construction of Weberian ideal types for the study of racism: Adorno became a key architect of the way The Authoritarian Personality studied how irrational projection shaped society and politics while critiquing the false essentialism of race. 6Subject/Object and Disciplinarity chapter abstractChapter 6 concludes the story of how the confrontation with identity transformed the institute's theoretical concerns and shaped its career in America by showing how Adorno and Horkheimer arrived at a quite different understanding of the institute's interdisciplinary project than they had started with. This allowed them to articulate a new notion of social objectivity, reason, and legitimate authority that was explicitly understood as a negation of theories of subjective identity. In pure theoretical terms, it argues that Horkheimer and Adorno came to see themselves as defending an "orthodox" Freudianism and Marxism and a "heterodox" Kantianism and Weberianism. Politically speaking, the critical attitude toward the sciences of man contained in these orthodoxies and heterodoxies positioned Adorno particularly well to contribute to the reconstruction of postwar German culture. 7Conclusion chapter abstractThe conclusion summarizes the philosophical value of exile, negative identity and non-identity. It considers why critical theory's invention of the concept of identity, and its subsequent philosophical negation, emerged out of the experience of exile and racism, and it reflects on this history and ideas should remain part of the problem of identity, the critique of science, and the notion of interdisciplinary analysis. Finally, the conclusion discusses the politics of Adorno and Horkheimer's return to Germany and the precariousness of their position within both the German academy and German society. Introduction chapter abstractThe Introduction narrates the rise of the identity concept in the twentieth century, arguing for a distinction between two types of identity. Just as Isaiah Berlin, following Erich Fromm, suggested the terms "positive" and "negative" liberty are necessary to understanding the double-sided logic of freedom in the modern world, the concept of identity must be approached through the tension between its "positive" and "negative" dimensions. Positive identity is familiar: the expressive, creative, and emancipatory language of what the self might become. Negative identity is its shadow: unwanted or imposed, rupturing the universal, expressing injuries inflicted on the self or imposed on others. Arguing that Adorno sharply criticized a one-sided, implicitly positive notion of identity, the Introduction establishes positive and negative identity's intertwinement from its origin, showing how Adorno's approach to this new language of selfhood offers an overlooked resource for understanding identity's complexity in the twenty-first century.
£81.90
LSU Press Political Philosophy and the Open Society
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£17.05
Northwestern University Press Beckett After Wittgenstein
Book SynopsisAmong the best-represented authors in Samuel Beckett's library was Ludwig Wittgenstein, yet the philosopher's relevance to the Nobel laureate's work is scarcely acknowledged and seldom elucidated. Beckett after Wittgenstein is the first book to examine Beckett's formative encounters with, and profound affinities to, Wittgenstein's thought, style, and character.
£999.99
Northwestern University Press The Worker Dominion and Form
Book SynopsisWritten in 1932, just before the fall of the Weimar Republic and on the eve of the Nazi accession to power, Ernst Jünger's The Worker: Dominion and Form articulates a trenchant critique of bourgeois liberalism and seeks to identify the form characteristic of the modern age. Jünger's analyses are inspired by a profound intuition of the movement of history.
£999.99
Northwestern University Press Hegels Theory of Normativity
Book SynopsisHegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right offers an innovative account of normativity, yet the theory rests on philosophical foundations that have remained largely obscure. Kevin Thompson proposes an interpretation of the foundations that underlie Hegel's theory: its method of justification, its concept of freedom, and its account of right.
£27.96
Northwestern University Press Distributions of the Sensible
Book SynopsisJacques Rancière's work is increasingly central to several debates across the humanities. Distributions of the Sensible confronts a question at the heart of his thought: How should we conceive the relationship between the politics of aesthetics and the aesthetics of politics?
£87.20
Northwestern University Press Creolizing the Nation
Book SynopsisDrawing on Caribbean, decolonial, and Latina feminist resources, Kris Sealey argues that creolization provides a rich theoretical ground for rethinking the nation and deploying its political and cultural apparatus to imagine more just, humane communities.Trade Review“A valiant effort to rescue the concept and role of the nation from those who would use it to marginalize and abuse. Charting a middle path between the monolithic forms of nationalism that seek to eliminate difference on the one hand, and the complete abandonment of any appeal to the nation on the other, Sealey draws on Caribbean and Latin American resources to argue that the nation must be understood in a creolizing way. Her rigorous yet engaging analysis allows her to offer a vision of the nation as a resource through which it becomes possible to build a more just, and ultimately more human community. This is an important and timely book.” —Michael J. Monahan, author of The Creolizing Subject: Race, Reason, and the Politics of Purity “This book offers a brilliant articulation of the concept of creolization. Sealey’s thesis is that with this concept the nation state can be rethought and reconstructed rather than abandoned, since the creolization paradigm reveals that coloniality has never achieved hegemony—there has always been sabotage, cracks from below—and that all of our cultural formations are creolized in substantial ways. She further shows that creolization is not equivalent to cosmopolitanism but has significant advantages over the letter. A must-read.” —Linda MartÍn Alcoff, Rape and Resistance: Understanding the Complexities of Sexual ViolationTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction Part I: Setting the Stage: Thinking ‘Nation’ through Creolization Chapter 1. The Phenomenon of the Nation Chapter 2. The Time and Place of Creolization Part II: Living Ambiguously: Intersections between Creolization and Latina Feminisms Chapter 3. On Glissant’s Creolization Chapter 4. Subjectivity Otherwise Part III: The Poetics and Politics of “Community” Otherwise Chapter 5. Difference, Borders and Community Chapter 6. The Composite Community in Fanon’s Postcolonial Moment Conclusion: Creolizing as an Imperative Notes Selected Bibliography
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Northwestern University Press The Desire of Psychoanalysis Exercises in Lacanian Thinking Diaeresis
Book SynopsisBy focusing on the underlying dynamic that binds clinical practice, theoretical work, and institutional security in Lacanian psychoanalysis today, Gabriel Tupinamba is able to locate sites for conceptual innovation that have been ignored by the discipline, such as the understanding of the role of money in clinical practice.Trade Review“Gabriel TupinambÁ is one of the most talented and creative psychoanalysts of this new generation of Brazilian Lacanians. His rigorous style combines a broad domain of dense areas of Lacan's work with the necessary courage to renew psychoanalysis in the face of the acute problems posed by the clinic's social reality . . . Recovering the narrative force of clinical accounts, he manages to adjust Lacan's logical-formalistic pretensions with a beneficial conception on the multiplicity of practices that claim the name of psychoanalysis." —Christian Dunker, author of The Constitution of the Psychoanalytic Clinic: A History of its Structure and Power”There are books that are written, and there are books that absolutely needed to be written. TupinambÁ’s The Desire of Psychoanalysis definitely falls in this last category. It is a groundbreaking interrogation of psychoanalysis and of how the latter is situated in the broader conceptual and social context. Coming at exactly the right moment, and written by someone who is himself a psychoanalyst, philosopher and political activist, The Desire of Psychoanalysis is bound to shatter the status quo, which psychoanalysis sometimes all to easily gives in to. An outstanding book.” —Alenka Zupancic, author of What IS Sex?Table of Contents Acknowledgments Foreword: For Lacan, against Lacanian ideology, by Slavoj Žižek Introduction 1. Psychoanalysis and Politics after 2017 2. The Basis of Lacanian Ideology 3. The History of an Impasse in Lacanian Thinking 4. The Generic Perspective in Psychoanalysis 5. The Political Economy of Clinical Practice 6. The Form of the Other and Its Institutional Enclosure 7. Groundwork for a Metapsychology of Ideas 8. The Idea of the Passe Conclusion Bibliography Notes Index
£74.25
University of Pennsylvania Press On the Old Saw
Book SynopsisIn this famous essay, first published in 1793, Kant considers the alleged conflict between theory and practice in the conduct of human affairs in three widening contexts: those of the common person faced with a moral decision, of the politician and the citizen concerned with the extent and limits of political obligation, and, finally, of the citizen of the world whose actions have a bearing on war and peace among nations.Unlike other animals, Kant reminds us, people must decide how they will live their lives. They therefore ask for a guide to action, a set of principles—a theory.From the outset, Kant rejects the ancient claim that the practical possibilities of action cannot always be reconciled with moral demands. He offers his own moral theory, a theory starting out from the principle of the right as an unequivocal guide to action. In partial disagreement with the rival theories of Hobbes and Locke, he proposes that the only condition under which the individual cTrade Review"The old objection to philosophy that it is 'impractical' seems to have as one of its best targets Kant's philosophy. In this essay, Kant responds to this objection in the name of philosophy in general and in his own name as a philosopher whose thoughts were and still are commonly believed to be singularly applicable to the realities of politics and everyday life. This essay is of prime importance in reaching a just estimate of the contribution philosophy, including Kantian philosophy, can make to the practical solution of human problems." * Lewis White Beck *
£15.19
University of Pennsylvania Press Faces of Moderation
Book SynopsisAristotle listed moderation as one of the moral virtues. He also defined virtue as the mean between extremes, implying that moderation plays a vital role in all forms of moral excellence. But moderation''s protean character—its vague and ill-defined omnipresence in judgment and action—makes it exceedingly difficult to grasp theoretically. At the same time, moderation seems to be the foundation of many contemporary democratic political regimes, because the competition between parties cannot properly function without compromise and bargaining. The success of representative government and its institutions depends to a great extent on the virtue of moderation, yet the latter persists in being absent from both the conceptual discourse of many political philosophers and the campaign speeches of politicians fearful of losing elections if they are perceived as moderates.Aurelian Craiutu aims to resolve this paradox. Examining the writings of prominent twentieth-century thiTrade Review"Superb and timely." * Peter Wehner, New York Times *"I've been inspired by Aurelian Craiutu's great book Faces of Moderation." * David Brooks, New York Times *"[Craiutu] has written a work that challenges readers to consider the complexity of moderation, raising interesting questions about its effects and contexts, and has thereby enriched the discussion. In the spirit of the moderates, may the conversation continue so this virtue and others are better appreciated." * Society *"Stimulating and learned, Faces of Moderation displays the virtue of moderation in the very act of highlighting exemplary cases of the virtue in action from throughout the twentieth-century, granting readers a grounded understanding of its uses and limits. Aurelian Craiutu's conclusion, with its call for moderation in a hyperpartisan age, is intellectually moving and lyrically written." * Samuel Moyn, Yale University *"Aurelian Craiutu is devoted to rehabilitating what he believes to be, correctly in my view, the forgotten virtue of moderation. He demonstrates a considerable mastery of the topic and his knowledge of the central figures is impeccable." * Steven Smith, Yale University *Table of ContentsPrologue. In Search of an Elusive Virtue Chapter 1. The Ethos of Moderation Chapter 2. The Lucidity of Moderation: Raymond Aron as a "Committed Observer" Chapter 3. Moderation as an Antidote to Monism: Isaiah Berlin's Cold War Liberalism Chapter 4. Meekness as a Face of Moderation: Norberto Bobbio's Politics of Dialogue Chapter 5. Moderation and Trimming: Michael Oakeshott's Politics of Skepticism Chapter 6. Radical Moderation and the Search for Moral Clarity: Adam Michnik's Lesson Epilogue. Beyond the Golden Mean Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments
£25.19
