Structuralism and Post-structuralism Books
Columbia University Press Hermeneutic Communism
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewHermeneutic Communism is much more than a beautifully written essay in political philosophy, reaching from ontological premises to concrete political analyses: it provides a coherent communist vision from the standpoint of Heideggerian postmetaphysical hermeneutics. All those who criticize postmodern 'weak thought' for its inability to ground radical political practice will have to admit their mistake-Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala demonstrate that weak thought does not mean weak action but is the very resort of strong radical change. This is a book that everyone who thinks about radical politics needs like the air he or she breathes! -- Slavoj Zizek, author of Living in the End Hermeneutic Communism is one of those rare books that seamlessly combines postmetaphysical philosophy and political practice, the task of a meticulous ontological interpretation and decisive revolutionary action, the critique of intellectual hegemony and a positive, creative thought. Vattimo and Zabala, unlike Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, do not offer their readers a readymade political ontology but allow radical politics to germinate from each singular and concrete act of interpretation. This is the most significant event of twenty-first-century philosophy! -- Michael Marder, author of Groundless Existence: The Political Ontology of Carl Schmitt The authors argue that 'weak thought,' or an antifoundational hermeneutics, will allow social movements to avoid both the violence attending past struggles and, if triumphant, a falling back into routines of domination-the restoration of what Jean-Paul Sartre called the 'practico-inert.' Vattimo and Zabala end with Latin America as a case study of applied weak thought politics, where the left in recent years has had remarkable success at the polls. -- Greg Grandin, New York University Those interested in the potential for theoretical reformulations made possible by postfoundational political thought and those following the rebellion of marginal sectors of society have a lot to learn from this remarkable book. -- Ernesto Laclau, author of On Populist Reason The work of Vattimo and Zabala clears a new stage for political theorizing based on a careful probe of the current state of destitution and hidden edges of social vitality. While I do not always agree with the conclusions drawn by these marvelous writers, I thank them for sparking an essential debate and replenishing our critical vocabularies. -- Avital Ronell, New York University and the European Graduate School ...action-packed... Asia Times ...Vattimo and Zabala offer a refreshing alternative to the hegemonic discourse, a breathof fresh air from the violent imposition of "metaphysics" by those in power. Ceasefire Magazine Despite its thin profile the content itself is formidable in achieving both its critical and scholarly aims. -- Maxwell Kennel Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy BlogTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction Part I. Framed Democracy 1. Imposing Descriptions 2. Armed Capitalism Part II. Hermeneutic Communism 3. Interpretation as Anarchy 4. Hermeneutic Communism Bibliography Index
£19.80
Columbia University Press Reimagining the Sacred
Book SynopsisLeading philosopher Richard Kearney engages Julia Kristeva, Gianni Vattimo, James Wood, Charles Taylor, Catherine Keller, Simon Critchley, Jean-Luc Marion, and John Caputo on the place of religion in a secular world.Trade ReviewThis eminently readable volume offers rich insights into the leading contemporary Continental philosophers of religion who are addressing the place of the sacred and the sacramental in the contemporary world after the supposed 'death of God' announced by Nietzsche and others. Kearney shows his hermeneutical and dialogical skills in illuminating interviews conducted with leading thinkers, including Jean-Luc Marion, Charles Taylor, Gianni Vattimo and Julia Kristeva. This book explores not just the clash between atheism and theism but the exploration of the traces of the divine, which Kearney has termed anatheism. This book serves both as a lucid introduction to contemporary Continental philosophy of religion and a guide through the complexity of the contested terrain between theists, atheists, and those who search for a credible way to articulate the sacred in everyday life. -- Dermot Moran, University College Dublin This unique collection of interviews stages a critical debate among some of the most respected voices in continental thought around key aspects of Kearney's thesis. This exploration of non-fundamentalist religious belief by a group of prominent philosophers will be considered a significant contribution to the field. -- William Egginton, The Johns Hopkins University A remarkable book of conversations. We learn about the influential ideas of Kearney's interlocutors. Moreover, the impressive voice of Kearney himself offers its own singular contribution and is very worthy of being honored among his peers. -- William Desmond, Villanova University and Katholieke Universteit Leuven With an infectious spirit of intellectual generosity, Kearney and his dialogue partners parse critical points of connection and divergence on the question of God and the meaning of religion in our time. For readers coming to this topic for the first time, this book provides a working bibliography for critical works in this tradition of philosophy and theology. For insiders, it adds new layers to longstanding conversations about 'great, inherited texts.' -- Shelly Rambo, Boston University This rigorous, forward-thinking intellectual treatise opens new space for religious humanism amid cacophonous secular, political, and religious debate. Publishers Weekly A lucid introduction to contemporary Continental philosophy of religion and a guide through the contested terrain between theists, atheists, and those who search for a credible ana-theist option to articulate the sacred in everyday life. -- Dermot Moran, University College Dublin A genuinely fascinating read... Reading Religion A welcome addition... for anyone unfamiliar with the work of Richard Kearney, this could be an excellent first introduction to anatheism and the God-who-may-be. Philosophischer Literaturanzeiger Few will read this book without being challenged to clarify their ideas on God and their attitude to faith. -- Joseph S. O'Leary Los Angeles Review of BooksTable of ContentsPreface, by Richard Kearney Introduction, by Jens Zimmermann 1. God After God: An Anatheist Attempt to Reimagine God, by Richard Kearney 2. Imagination, Anatheism, and the Sacred, by Richard Kearney and James Wood 3. Beyond the Impossible, by Richard Kearney and Catherine Keller 4. Transcendent Humanism in a Secular Age, by Richard Kearney and Charles Taylor 5. New Humanism and the Need to Believe, by Richard Kearney and Julia Kristeva 6. Anatheism, Nihilism, and Weak Thought, by Richard Kearney and Gianni Vattimo 7. What's God? "A Shout in the Street, by Richard Kearney and Simon Critchley 8. The Death of the Death of God, by Richard Kearney and Jean-Luc Marion 9. Anatheism and Radical Hermeneutics, by Richard Kearney and John Caputo 10. Theism, Atheism, Anatheism, by David Tracy, Merold Westphal, and Jens Zimmermann Epilogue: In Guise of a Response, by Richard Kearney Artist's Note, by Sheila Gallagher Index
£83.60
Columbia University Press Knock Me Up Knock Me Down
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA wonderful, insightful, riveting, and entertaining romp. -- Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, Boston College Clearly written...this book could serve...as a core text in a course on women in film. Choice Oliver's convincing conclusion is that in Hollywood films pregnant women may have become objects of desire, but they are not allowed to become desiring subjects... -- Fran Bigman Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: From Shameful to Sexy-Pregnant Bellies Exploding Onto the Screen 1. Academic Feminism Versus Hollywood Feminism: How Modest Maternity Becomes Pregnant Glam 2. MomCom as RomCom: Pregnancy as a Vehicle for Romance 3. Accident and Excess: The "Choice" to Have a Baby 4. Pregnant Horror: Gestating the Other(s) Within 5. "What's the Worst That Can Happen?" Techno-Pregnancies Versus Real Pregnancies Conclusion: Twilight Family Values Notes Filmography Texts Cited Index
£79.20
Columbia University Press Knock Me Up Knock Me Down
Book SynopsisTrade ReviewA wonderful, insightful, riveting, and entertaining romp. -- Kalpana Rahita Seshadri, Boston College Clearly written...this book could serve...as a core text in a course on women in film. Choice Oliver's convincing conclusion is that in Hollywood films pregnant women may have become objects of desire, but they are not allowed to become desiring subjects... -- Fran Bigman Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: From Shameful to Sexy-Pregnant Bellies Exploding Onto the Screen 1. Academic Feminism Versus Hollywood Feminism: How Modest Maternity Becomes Pregnant Glam 2. MomCom as RomCom: Pregnancy as a Vehicle for Romance 3. Accident and Excess: The "Choice" to Have a Baby 4. Pregnant Horror: Gestating the Other(s) Within 5. "What's the Worst That Can Happen?" Techno-Pregnancies Versus Real Pregnancies Conclusion: Twilight Family Values Notes Filmography Texts Cited Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press Wrestling with the Angel
Book SynopsisWrestling with the Angel is a meditation on contemporary political, legal, and social theory from a psychoanalytic perspectiveTrade ReviewA stellar piece of scholarship whose timely intervention into controversies at the very heart of today's theoretical humanities undoubtedly will draw the admiring attention of large audiences in multiple fields. -- Adrian Johnston, University of New Mexico A very exciting book, stunningly intelligent and beautifully written. It makes strong, original interventions in a number of current debates and engages with theoretical arguments in a way that is always rigorous and wonderfully lucid and accessible. -- Elizabeth Weed, Brown University. Co-editor, differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies In Wrestling with the Angel, Tracy McNulty examines the political theologies of the 'exception,' ranging from Carl Schmitt to Walter Benjamin, from Alain Badiou to Giorgio Agamben. She shows how they contradict themselves if they avoid grappling with the Symbolic order. Arguing that the force of the Symbolic must be experienced concretely via positive constraints, McNulty pushes Lacanian theory to an unprecedented sophistication and highlights its relevance for ethical activism. Wrestling with the Angel is a major book that redefines the foundations of contemporary political theory. -- Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania This provocative and original defense of law and the symbolic order in psychoanalysis is distinguished by McNulty's attention to clinical work, her supple readings of both Freudian and literary texts, and the trenchant case she makes for the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to the practice of human freedom, action, and creativity today. McNulty's command of the notoriously complex and difficult Lacanian corpus is matched by the fluency of her engagement with adjoining and competing discourses, including political theology; experimental poetics and aesthetics; political theory and critical legal studies; and religious studies and the legacy of Judaism. Arguing that novelty, invention, and renewal occur not despite but because of processes of symbolization, Wrestling with the Angel recalls us to our limits to remind us of our capacities. -- Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life In Wrestling with the Angel, McNulty shows how the traditional reduction of Lacan's symbolic register to the Oedipus complex falsifies the complexity and disturbing incompleteness inherent to this crucial aspect of his theory. Her insight opens the way for a fundamental reassessment and reunderstanding of Lacan's work, and is, by itself, worth the price of admission. But she goes much farther, tracing out the implications of her rereading on a series of social thinkers, notably the influential conservative German political theorist Carl Schmitt, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and the French Marxist philosopher, Alain Badiou. With the exception of Carl Schmitt, these analyses revolve around two principal collections of seminal legal texts: the Hebrew Decalogue and Saint Paul's discussions of the "new law" of Christianity. Essentially, she argues that in each case an imaginary version of the law is juxtaposed to a more complex and "liberatory" symbolic version of it. Rich, densely thought, and provocative, this book will reorient studies on Lacan and will excercise an enduring influence on how his writings are used in other fields and disciplines. -- Jonathan Strauss, Miami University As a reading of the French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan, the book makes an invaluable contribution to the rich discussion of the symbolic register and its relation to the real. CHOICETable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Enabling Constraints Part 1. Reinventing the Symbolic 1. Inventions of the Symbolic: Lacan's Reading of Freud 2. Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change Part 2. Political Theology and the Question of the Written 3. Wrestling with the Angel 4. The Gap in the Law and the Unwritable Act of Decision: Carl Schmitt's Political Theology 5. The Event of the Letter: Two Approaches to the Law and Its Real 6. The Commandment Against the Law: Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment Coda: Toward an Aesthetics of Symbolic Life 7. Freedom Through Constraints: On the Question of Will Notes Index
£90.00
Columbia University Press Wrestling with the Angel
Book SynopsisWrestling with the Angel is a meditation on contemporary political, legal, and social theory from a psychoanalytic perspectiveTrade ReviewA stellar piece of scholarship whose timely intervention into controversies at the very heart of today's theoretical humanities undoubtedly will draw the admiring attention of large audiences in multiple fields. -- Adrian Johnston, University of New Mexico A very exciting book, stunningly intelligent and beautifully written. It makes strong, original interventions in a number of current debates and engages with theoretical arguments in a way that is always rigorous and wonderfully lucid and accessible. -- Elizabeth Weed, Brown University. Co-editor, differences. A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies In Wrestling with the Angel, Tracy McNulty examines the political theologies of the 'exception,' ranging from Carl Schmitt to Walter Benjamin, from Alain Badiou to Giorgio Agamben. She shows how they contradict themselves if they avoid grappling with the Symbolic order. Arguing that the force of the Symbolic must be experienced concretely via positive constraints, McNulty pushes Lacanian theory to an unprecedented sophistication and highlights its relevance for ethical activism. Wrestling with the Angel is a major book that redefines the foundations of contemporary political theory. -- Jean-Michel Rabate, Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Pennsylvania This provocative and original defense of law and the symbolic order in psychoanalysis is distinguished by McNulty's attention to clinical work, her supple readings of both Freudian and literary texts, and the trenchant case she makes for the ongoing relevance of psychoanalysis to the practice of human freedom, action, and creativity today. McNulty's command of the notoriously complex and difficult Lacanian corpus is matched by the fluency of her engagement with adjoining and competing discourses, including political theology; experimental poetics and aesthetics; political theory and critical legal studies; and religious studies and the legacy of Judaism. Arguing that novelty, invention, and renewal occur not despite but because of processes of symbolization, Wrestling with the Angel recalls us to our limits to remind us of our capacities. -- Julia Reinhard Lupton, author of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life In Wrestling with the Angel, McNulty shows how the traditional reduction of Lacan's symbolic register to the Oedipus complex falsifies the complexity and disturbing incompleteness inherent to this crucial aspect of his theory. Her insight opens the way for a fundamental reassessment and reunderstanding of Lacan's work, and is, by itself, worth the price of admission. But she goes much farther, tracing out the implications of her rereading on a series of social thinkers, notably the influential conservative German political theorist Carl Schmitt, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin, the philosopher Immanuel Kant, and the French Marxist philosopher, Alain Badiou. With the exception of Carl Schmitt, these analyses revolve around two principal collections of seminal legal texts: the Hebrew Decalogue and Saint Paul's discussions of the "new law" of Christianity. Essentially, she argues that in each case an imaginary version of the law is juxtaposed to a more complex and "liberatory" symbolic version of it. Rich, densely thought, and provocative, this book will reorient studies on Lacan and will excercise an enduring influence on how his writings are used in other fields and disciplines. -- Jonathan Strauss, Miami University As a reading of the French psychoanalytic thinker Jacques Lacan, the book makes an invaluable contribution to the rich discussion of the symbolic register and its relation to the real. CHOICETable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: Enabling Constraints Part 1. Reinventing the Symbolic 1. Inventions of the Symbolic: Lacan's Reading of Freud 2. Demanding the Impossible: Desire and Social Change Part 2. Political Theology and the Question of the Written 3. Wrestling with the Angel 4. The Gap in the Law and the Unwritable Act of Decision: Carl Schmitt's Political Theology 5. The Event of the Letter: Two Approaches to the Law and Its Real 6. The Commandment Against the Law: Writing and Divine Justice in Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment Coda: Toward an Aesthetics of Symbolic Life 7. Freedom Through Constraints: On the Question of Will Notes Index
£27.00
Columbia University Press Deleuze Beyond Badiou
Book SynopsisRestoring the reputation of a twentieth-century philosopher and his relevance to twenty-first-century political thought.Trade ReviewThis book offers insightful interpretations of several of Deleuze's major works. ChoiceTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Part I. Setting Up the Encounter 1. Introduction 2. The Clamor of Being: Badiou vs. Deleuze Part II. Deleuze 3. A Repetition of Difference 4. Deleuze's Logic of Double Articulation 5. Producing the Event as Machine Part III. Badiou 6. Being a Sublime Event 7. Being a Subject in a Transcendental World Part IV. Deleuze Beyond Badiou 8. Energetics of Being 9. Politics of the Event 10. Vodou Economics: Haiti and the Future of Democracy Index
£83.60
Columbia University Press Deleuze Beyond Badiou
Book SynopsisRestoring the reputation of a twentieth-century philosopher and his relevance to twenty-first-century political thought.Trade ReviewThis book offers insightful interpretations of several of Deleuze's major works. ChoiceTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Part I. Setting Up the Encounter 1. Introduction 2. The Clamor of Being: Badiou vs. Deleuze Part II. Deleuze 3. A Repetition of Difference 4. Deleuze's Logic of Double Articulation 5. Producing the Event as Machine Part III. Badiou 6. Being a Sublime Event 7. Being a Subject in a Transcendental World Part IV. Deleuze Beyond Badiou 8. Energetics of Being 9. Politics of the Event 10. Vodou Economics: Haiti and the Future of Democracy Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press DerridaSearle
Book SynopsisRevisiting the schism that rendered twentieth-century philosophy into irreconcilable continental and analytic camps.Trade ReviewIn its very violence, the debate between Jacques Derrida and John Searle was the proof of the gap that continues to separate the continental speculative tradition from its Anglo-Saxon analytic counterpart. Raoul Moati's book is much more than a review of the debate-he is part of the debate, bringing it to its philosophical conclusion. Sometimes, while reading his book, one has the feeling that Derrida and Searle engaged in their debate so that Moati could write his book on them, in the same way that, for Hegel, the Peloponnesian War was fought so that Thucydides could write his classic book on it. -- Slavoj Zizek Derrida and Searle's confrontation divided once and for all philosophical debate and division with consequences that probably surpassed both masters' predictions. The fact that this debate never took place (considering that Searle and Derrida never met personally and the former also refused to reprint one of his responses in an edited collection) makes Moati's text particularly useful in reconstructing the history of this famous dispute. -- Santiago Zabala, ICREA Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of Barcelona A very brilliant reconstruction of the philosophical clash between two prominent giants of continental and American philosophies. -- Thibaut Gress, ActuPhilosophia There are almost no other studies of this controversy either in France or in the United States; at least, there is no other book that I know about on this topic. The dialogue between Searle and Derrida concerning Austin's theory on the 'performative' or 'speech acts' has been, as it were, resurrected by Moati-and it is fascinating. By focusing so strictly on a limited series of polemical texts, Moati does more than provide a subtle explanation of the historical divergence between Austin, Searle, and Derrida, he allows us to understand the very roots of a lasting misunderstanding between Anglo-American language philosophy and continental traditions of phenomenology. -- Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania, member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences Moati's work is a real breakthrough. He helps us make sense of the very distinction between so-called analytic and continental philosophies. The exceptional clarity of his style, the accuracy of his analyses shed a completely new light on both authors and the nature of their quarrel. He provides deep insight into Derrida's view and Searle's, addressing their common presuppositions. The outcome of such an unbiased approach is a completely new understanding of the contemporary philosophical landscape. It will prove helpful for philosophers of language and mind, as well as for metaphysicians, and for everyone who wants to understand the big philosophical divide that has characterized the past fifty years. -- Jocelyn Benoist, University of Paris-I, Pantheon-Sorbonne A thoughtful and judicious analysis... CHOICETable of ContentsForeword: Per Formam Domi, by Jean-Michel Rabate Acknowledgments Introduction: The Circumstances of an "Improbable" Debate 1. The Iterative as the Reverse Side of the Performative 2. Do Intentions Dissolve in Iteration? From Differance to the Dispute (Differend) Conclusion Notes Index
£18.00
Columbia University Press SelfConsciousness and the Critique of the Subject
Book SynopsisRevisiting the philosopher’s key texts, Lumsden calls attention to Hegel’s reformulation of liberal and Cartesian conceptions of subjectivity, identifying a critical though unrecognized continuity between poststructuralism and German idealismTrade ReviewSelf-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject addresses a topic that, while familiar within the tradition of continental philosophy, is rarely addressed with the focus and clarity found here. Simon Lumsden has his own distinctive way of bringing Hegel to life, with Hegel's views insightfully presented in a readily understandable way in clear prose uncluttered by 'Hegelese.' -- Paul Redding, University of Sydney The great strength of Simon Lumsden's analysis is that it straddles a number of different philosophical worlds. Though writing from a largely Hegelian perspective, Lumsden has the audacity to wander about in other fields and consider other figures-that is, to venture outside the confines of his academic territory. Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject is a highly disciplined work. It focuses on the status of the subject in the five philosophers that it analyzes and brings those thinkers into a confrontation with each other in a way that charts a new path for our understanding of German idealism and poststructuralism. -- Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University This clearly written and ambitiously set up book does provide a welcome kind of Anstoss to provoke further thought for anyone interested in the relation between German idealism, Heidegger and poststructuralism. -- Johan de Jong Hegel-StudienTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. The Metaphysics of Presence and the Worldless Subject: Heidegger's Critique of Modern Philosophy 2. Fichte's Striving Subject 3. Hegel: Self-Consciousness and Self-Determination 4. Heidegger, Care, and Selfhood 5. Derrida and the Question of Subjectivity 6. The Dialectic and Transcendental Empiricism: Deleuze's Critique of Hegel Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index
£42.50
Columbia University Press The Philosophers Plant
Book SynopsisA secret history of philosophy grafting theory onto science, combining art and storytelling to bring Western thought back to its roots.Trade ReviewFrom the conversation of Socrates and Phaedrus in the shade of the plane tree to Irigaray's meditation on the water lily, The Philosopher's Plant takes us outside city walls, across gardens of letters and vegetables, grassy slopes and vineyards, to the dimly lit sources of philosophy's vitality. With distinctive depth and clarity, Marder reminds us that, far from walled in, the human community communes with nature and is itself inhabited by nature. -- Claudia Baracchi, Universita degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca The Philosopher's Plant is an original contribution to a concept which for too long has been marginalized. As the only contemporary philosopher working on plants from a deconstructive and weak-thought perspective, Marder provides not only another contribution to the philosophical concept of plants in general, but also adds onto his own work. -- Santiago Zabala, ICREA/University of Barcelona The Philosopher's Plant is a genuine pleasure to read and one of the most innovative books I have encountered in some time. Marder's argument is that contemporary scientific research into how plants communicate, interact with, and possibly even perceive the environment should be enriched by an engagement with how the Western philosophical tradition has already thought and continues thinking the problem of plant life for human being-in-the-world. -- William Egginton, Johns Hopkins University The Philosopher's Plant is an alluring immersion in phytophilia, exploring the thought of philosophers from Plato to Irigaray by way of their intimate reflections on plant life. Not only do we learn much that is subtle and profound about plants but we come to see the work of these thinkers in refreshing new lights. Humor and wit alternate with penetrating philosophical insight in this bouquet of delights. -- Edward S. Casey, SUNY at Stony Brook, author of The World at a Glance and The World on Edge One must give Michael Marder credit for combining the deconstruction of our traditional metaphysics with a focus on the plant world. He invites us to perceive and consider again the presence and the potential of our living environment, the thoughtless use of which has damaged both our life and our culture. -- Luce Irigaray All who get a taste of this succulent study will find much food for thought. Library Journal (starred review) [The Philosopher's Plant] provides provocative insight into the significance of plant life in the evolution of philosophical thought... Recommended. ChoiceTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Prologue: Herbarium Philosophicum Part I: Ancient Plant-Souls 1. Plato's Plane Tree 2. Aristotle's Wheat 3. Plotinus' Anonymous "Great Plant" Part II. Medieval Plant-Instruments 4. Augustine's Pears 5. Avicenna's Celery 6. Maimonides' Palm Tree Part III. Modern Plant-Images 7. Leibniz's Blades of Grass 8. Kant's Tulip 9. Hegel's Grapes Part IV: Postmodern Plant-Subjects 10. Heidegger's Apple Tree 11. Derrida's Sunflowers 12. Irigaray's Water Lily Notes Bibliography Index
£66.50
Columbia University Press Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants
Book SynopsisHuman Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants makes philosophy fun, tactile, and popular. Moral thinking is simple, Ruwen Ogien argues, and as inherent as the senses. In our daily experiences, in the situations we confront and in the scenes we witness, we develop an understanding of right and wrong as sophisticated as the moral outlook of the world's most gifted philosophers. By drawing on this knowledge to navigate life's most perplexing problems, ethics becomes second nature. Ogien explores, through experimental philosophy and other methods, the responses nineteen real-world conundrums provoke. Is a short, mediocre life better than no life at all? Is it acceptable to kill a healthy person so his organs can save five others? Would you swap a natural life filled with frustration, disappointment, and partial success for a world in which all of your needs are met, but through artificial and mechanical means? Ogien doesn't seek to show how difficult it is to determine right from wrong Trade ReviewHuman Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants is Ruwen Ogien at his very best. The book's richness lies in Ogien's endeavor to do philosophy from the reality of lived experience rather than the kind of imaginary reflection that is characteristic of so much of philosophy. -- Laurence Thomas, Syracuse University A lucid translation of a wide-ranging intellectual foray. Booklist (starred review)Table of ContentsPreface: An Antimanual of Ethics Acknowledgments Introduction: What Is the Use of Thought Experiments? Part I. Problems, Dilemmas, and Paradoxes: Nineteen Moral Puzzles 1. Emergencies 2. The Child Who Is Drowning in a Pond 3. A Transplant Gone Mad 4. Confronting a Furious Crowd 5. The Killer Trolley 6. Incest in All Innocence 7. The Amoralist 8. The Experience Machine 9. Is a Short and Mediocre Life Preferable to No Life at All? 10. I Would Have Preferred Never to Have Been Born 11. Must We Eliminate Animals in Order to Liberate Them? 12. The Utility Monster 13. A Violinist Has Been Plugged Into Your Back 14. Frankenstein, Minister of Health 15. Who Am I Without My Organs? 16. And If Sexuality Were Free? 17. It Is Harder to Do Good Intentionally Than It Is to Do Evil 18. We Are Free, Even If Everything Is Written in Advance 19. Monsters and Saints Part II. The Ingredients of the Moral "Cuisine" 20. Intuitions and Rules 21. A Little Method! 22. What Remains of Our Moral Intuitions? 23. Where Has the Moral Instinct Gone? 24. A Philosopher Aware of the Limits of His Moral Intuitions Is Worth Two Others, Indeed More 25. Understand the Elementary Rules of Moral Reasoning 26. Dare to Criticize the Elementary Rules of Moral Argument Conclusion Glossary Notes Index
£79.20
Columbia University Press Human Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants
Book SynopsisHuman Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants makes philosophy fun, tactile, and popular. Moral thinking is simple, Ruwen Ogien argues, and as inherent as the senses. In our daily experiences, in the situations we confront and in the scenes we witness, we develop an understanding of right and wrong as sophisticated as the moral outlook of the world's most gifted philosophers. By drawing on this knowledge to navigate life's most perplexing problems, ethics becomes second nature. Ogien explores, through experimental philosophy and other methods, the responses nineteen real-world conundrums provoke. Is a short, mediocre life better than no life at all? Is it acceptable to kill a healthy person so his organs can save five others? Would you swap a natural life filled with frustration, disappointment, and partial success for a world in which all of your needs are met, but through artificial and mechanical means? Ogien doesn't seek to show how difficult it is to determine right from wrong Trade ReviewHuman Kindness and the Smell of Warm Croissants is Ruwen Ogien at his very best. The book's richness lies in Ogien's endeavor to do philosophy from the reality of lived experience rather than the kind of imaginary reflection that is characteristic of so much of philosophy. -- Laurence Thomas, Syracuse University A lucid translation of a wide-ranging intellectual foray. Booklist (starred review)Table of ContentsPreface: An Antimanual of Ethics Acknowledgments Introduction: What Is the Use of Thought Experiments? Part I. Problems, Dilemmas, and Paradoxes: Nineteen Moral Puzzles 1. Emergencies 2. The Child Who Is Drowning in a Pond 3. A Transplant Gone Mad 4. Confronting a Furious Crowd 5. The Killer Trolley 6. Incest in All Innocence 7. The Amoralist 8. The Experience Machine 9. Is a Short and Mediocre Life Preferable to No Life at All? 10. I Would Have Preferred Never to Have Been Born 11. Must We Eliminate Animals in Order to Liberate Them? 12. The Utility Monster 13. A Violinist Has Been Plugged Into Your Back 14. Frankenstein, Minister of Health 15. Who Am I Without My Organs? 16. And If Sexuality Were Free? 17. It Is Harder to Do Good Intentionally Than It Is to Do Evil 18. We Are Free, Even If Everything Is Written in Advance 19. Monsters and Saints Part II. The Ingredients of the Moral "Cuisine" 20. Intuitions and Rules 21. A Little Method! 22. What Remains of Our Moral Intuitions? 23. Where Has the Moral Instinct Gone? 24. A Philosopher Aware of the Limits of His Moral Intuitions Is Worth Two Others, Indeed More 25. Understand the Elementary Rules of Moral Reasoning 26. Dare to Criticize the Elementary Rules of Moral Argument Conclusion Glossary Notes Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press There Are Two Sexes
Book SynopsisKey selections from the work of a groundbreaking French feminist who thought beyond Freud and Lacan to realize true parity between men and women.Trade ReviewThis is a strong and powerful collection that repays reading and rereading by anyone interested in the areas of sex, gender, and women. -- Owen Heathcote, author of From Bad Boys to New Men? Masculinity, Sexuality, and Violence in the Work of Eric Jourdan Antoinette Fouque played a decisive role in the formation and subsequent history of the women's liberation movement in France. An extraordinary character, a highly cultivated woman, and a relentless activist, she took controversial steps while opening new paths for the inscription and recognition of women in the world. Her formulations were idiosyncratic, forceful, debatable, and provocative. This book is a precious testimony to her thought and action. It will help the English-speaking world interested in feminism complete the intellectual and political puzzle formed by what was called 'French Feminism' some decades ago. -- Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, Cornell University The feminology Fouque advocates here goes beyond feminism, since it triggers drastic shifts in our all-too-familiar worldview. Modernity is her tempo. Movement is her motto. Gestation is her guiding thread for a new epistemology, one of a world in which misogyny is eliminated. Procreation is her paradigm for a new human contract. The quest for liberty is her calling. The will to stay ahead of the game is her way of changing the rules. Sparkling with wit, this story of an everlasting commitment deserves a place in the international hall of fame. -- Laurence Zordan, philosopher and writer There Are Two Sexes departs from the same principle as Simone de Beauvoir's classic The Second Sex, that the feminine is devalued within traditional human cultures. Yet Fouque does not conclude, as feminists do, that it is necessary to align the secondary sex with the primary one. Instead, she accords women their own genius, a genius she calls matricial, a creative faculty that first appears in procreation, the power of life. In the process, the struggle of women for recognition is altered and exalted. -- Francois Guery, faculty of philosophy, University Jean Moulin Lyon A fitting testimony to the dedication and energy of a remarkable woman. -- Catherine Rodgers Modern Language ReviewTable of ContentsForeword, by Jean-Joseph Goux Preface to the First Edition Preface to the Second Edition Acknowledgments Note on the Translation 1. Our Movement Is Irreversible 2. Women in Movements: Yesterday 3. There Are Two Sexes 4. Does Psychoanalysis Have an Answer for Women? 5. The Plague of Misogyny 6. And If We Were to Speak of Women's Powerlessness? 7. "It Is Not Power That Corrupts But Fear": Aung San Suu Kyi 8. My Freud, My Father 9. From Liberation to Democratization 10. Our Editorial Policy Is a Poethics 11. Dialogue with Isabelle Huppert 12. Recognitions 13. Wartime Rapes 14. Religion, Women, Democracy 15. Our Bodies Belong to Us: Dialogue with Taslima Nasrin 16. Homage to Serge Leclaire 17. How to Democratize Psychoanalysis? 18. Democracy and Its Discontents 19. Tomorrow, Parity 20. Women and Europe 21. If This Is a Woman 22. They're Burning a Woman 23. What Is a Woman? 24. Gestation for Another: Paradigm of the Gift 25. Gravida Notes Biographical Notes Index
£23.75
Columbia University Press Broken Tablets Levinas Derrida and the Literary
Book SynopsisOver thirty years, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida conversed across texts about the interrelation of philosophy, religion and literature. In Broken Tablets, Sarah Hammerschlag traces that conversation and argues for its political significance, highlighting the role that Judaism played in their relationship.Trade ReviewThis text offers a careful tracking of the intellectual dynamic between Derrida and Levinas, showing how a biographical and philosophical proximity coexisted with divergent views on religion and language. The ethical claim in Levinas's work is taken up by Derrida with gravity and irony. This careful historical and textual analysis allows us to see how these thinkers are bound up with one another even as Levinas presses philosophy toward religion and for Derrida, it is literature that is at the heart of sanctity and betrayal. At stake in this copious and attentive comparative work is the question, what is it to be a Jewish thinker? In the end, it appears that 'otherness' remains and persists as a broken tablet whose secret meaning is never fully revealed but hides out in public view. This is a welcome book, exacting and detailed, that gives us a story and a theory, a scene of enigmatic and provocative encounter between Levinas and Derrida. -- Judith Butler, University of California, Berkeley A remarkably clear, incisive, and important book. It will be required reading for those interested in Levinas and Derrida and for all of those in the study of religion who wish to explore the relationship between ethics, politics, religion, and literature. -- Amy Hollywood, Harvard Divinity School Deconstruction teaches us to question the integrity of binary oppositions, destabilizing conventional wisdom about the fixity of our categorical distinctions. But what if the field of contesting terms has three or more components? Beginning with the legacies of Derrida and Levinas, Hammerschlag investigates the oscillating similarities that united and dissimilarities that divided them. But then with her customary analytical acumen, she builds upon that exercise to explore their dynamic implications for the triangulated relationship between philosophy, religion, and literature, while complicating the argument still further by adding politics to the mix. The result is a remarkable, four-dimensional map of the rolling and jagged landscape of recent theoretical discourse. -- Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley From early texts such as Violence and Metaphysics to late works such as Adieu, Derrida sustained a powerful and philosophically productive bond with Levinas. But their differences, in matters of metaphysics and on the question of Jewish 'communitarianism,' were profound. In this searching and suggestive meditation, Hammerschlag asks us to consider anew this troubled affiliation and examines the dialectic of fidelity and betrayal that marked their intellectual friendship across the decades. -- Peter E. Gordon, Harvard UniversityTable of ContentsPreface Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1. "What Must a Jewish Thinker Be?" 2. Levinas, Literature, and the Ruin of the World 3. Between the Jew and Writing 4. To Lose One's Head: Literature and the Democracy to Come 5. Literature and the Political-Theological Remains Epilogue: "There Is Not a Pin to Choose Between Us" Notes Bibliography Index
£25.20
Columbia University Press Foucaults Futures
Book SynopsisPenelope Deutscher reconsiders the role of procreation in Foucault’s thought, especially its proximity to risk, mortality, and death. Foucault’s Futures brings together his work on sexuality and biopolitics to provide new insights into the conflicted political status of reproductive conduct and what it means for feminism and critical theory.Trade ReviewFoucault's Futures opens up a new future for Foucault by showing how profoundly, and how unexpectedly, his account of biopolitical power informs the procreative politics implicit in his various writings on sex. Combining theoretical rigor with intellectual generosity, Penelope Deutscher proposes and enacts a critical ethics that mobilizes the "suspended reserves" of Foucault (and many other theorists) to generate striking conceptual convergences that make for a brilliantly productive critique of reproductive reason. -- Lee Edelman, Fletcher Professor of English Literature, Tufts University Foucault's Futures teaches us to read, with generosity and curiosity, for the limits that enable contemporary work on reproductive biopolitics. With impeccable intellectual skill, Deutscher maps the illegibilities, resistances, inclusions, violences, gatherings and vulnerabilities that form the infrastructure of reproductive futurism, maternal bodies, and fetal life. This is feminist theory at its finest: an accomplished and exquisitely argued book that expands the conceptual space within which feminism can engage text and world. -- Elizabeth A. Wilson, Emory University The book is unique not only for the originality of its complex philosophical argument about life, children, and maternity in biopower but also for the interdisciplinary range of works it thinks together in surprising new ways. -- Lynne Huffer, Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Emory University This strikingly imaginative book brings Foucault into dialogue with unexpected interlocutors and explores fascinating themes and figures in his thought - fetuses, viruses and marsupial mothers. Deutscher's ideas never fail to interest and provoke. -- Johanna Oksala, University of Helsinki Foucault's Futures, the latest of Penelope Deutscher's many pathbreaking works, not only challenges us to rethink what we know about recent French thought, feminism, queer studies, biopolitics, the very question of futurity. It also shows us how to work with the peculiar "resources" of debates that do not give us what we seem to want from them. Capacious in its breadth, riveting in its prose, surprising in its arguments and choice of examples, Foucault's Futures is itself the resource we will turn to frequently for help in imagining futures for theory. -- Andrew Parker, author of The Theorist's Mother Deutscher has an enticing facility with her material, and illuminates previously neglected texts. When you read Foucault's Futures, you become wholly aware of the brilliant mind at work weaving together disparate material eloquently and forcefully. Pedagogically brilliant and conceptually surprising, this is a deeply pleasurable and innovative book that allows us to see all its characters in a new light. -- Ranjana Khanna, Duke University In Foucault's Futures, Penny Deutscher stages a series of perverse encounters-between Foucault and Derrida, between reproductive futurism and feminism, between Judith Butler and the biopolitical-carefully interrogating some of contemporary critical theory's most fertile missed opportunities. Through her surprising juxtapositions and her slyly brilliant readings, Deutscher unlocks the "suspended resources of Foucault's work" for thinking the mother, the child, and the family thanopolitically, and offers a fresh and original consideration of the logics and politics of reproduction. Essential reading. -- Gayle Salamon, Princeton UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgments List of Abbreviations Introduction 1. Suspensions of Sex: Foucault and Derrida 2. Reproductive Futurism, Lee Edelman, and Reproductive Rights 3. Foucault's Children: Re-Reading The History of Sexuality 4. Immunity, Bare Life, and the Thanatopolitics of Reproduction: Foucault, Esposito, Agamben 5. Judith Butler, Precarious Life, and Reproduction: From Social Ontology to Ontological Tact Notes Index
£79.20
Columbia University Press Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences European
Book SynopsisCan psychoanalysis expand our comprehension of social and political life?Trade ReviewPsychoanalysis and the Human Sciences is a significant contribution to the literature. The question of whether psychoanalysis is a science and of its relationship to psychology is very much alive; Althusser's solution was and remains an original one. -- William S. Lewis, Skidmore College Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences is short, clear and readable. Its accessibility and lucidity will appeal to both novices and experts in Continental-style philosophy -- Adrian Johnston, author of Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change Exploring the epistemic break affected by Lacan's departure from psychology and its reduction of Freud's teaching to a technique of social adaptation, Louis Althusser clarifies the difference between science and ideology. The result is a powerful defense of the scientificity of the human sciences that manages to liberate their objects from the normalizing function of technocratic ideology and social control. -- Linda M. G. Zerilli, author of A Democratic Theory of Judgment This intervention exemplifies Althusser's conception of the role of philosophy in the history of scientific revolutions and reveals the outlines of the larger project of intellectual renovation within which the rereading of Marx took place. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences provides a vivid account of the combative intellectual world of Althusser and his contemporaries, with many delightful digressions and personal anecdotes. -- Gopal Balakrishnan, author of Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of WarTable of ContentsForeword, by Pascale Gillot Editor's Preface, by Olivier Corpet and Francois Matheron 1. The Place of Psychoanalysis in the Human Sciences 2. Psychoanalysis and Psychology Notes Index
£63.00
Columbia University Press Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences
Book SynopsisCan psychoanalysis expand our comprehension of social and political life?Trade ReviewPsychoanalysis and the Human Sciences is a significant contribution to the literature. The question of whether psychoanalysis is a science and of its relationship to psychology is very much alive; Althusser's solution was and remains an original one. -- William S. Lewis, Skidmore College Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences is short, clear and readable. Its accessibility and lucidity will appeal to both novices and experts in Continental-style philosophy -- Adrian Johnston, author of Badiou, Zizek, and Political Transformations: The Cadence of Change Exploring the epistemic break affected by Lacan's departure from psychology and its reduction of Freud's teaching to a technique of social adaptation, Louis Althusser clarifies the difference between science and ideology. The result is a powerful defense of the scientificity of the human sciences that manages to liberate their objects from the normalizing function of technocratic ideology and social control. -- Linda M. G. Zerilli, author of A Democratic Theory of Judgment This intervention exemplifies Althusser's conception of the role of philosophy in the history of scientific revolutions and reveals the outlines of the larger project of intellectual renovation within which the rereading of Marx took place. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences provides a vivid account of the combative intellectual world of Althusser and his contemporaries, with many delightful digressions and personal anecdotes. -- Gopal Balakrishnan, author of Antagonistics: Capitalism and Power in an Age of WarTable of ContentsForeword, by Pascale Gillot Editor's Preface, by Olivier Corpet and Francois Matheron 1. The Place of Psychoanalysis in the Human Sciences 2. Psychoanalysis and Psychology Notes Index
£19.80
Columbia University Press Foucaults Strange Eros
Book SynopsisIn this deeply original consideration of Foucault’s erotic ethics, Lynne Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet. She uncovers eros as a mode of thought that erodes the interiority of the thinking subject.Trade ReviewIn a provocative take on eros as a verb—as erosion of the thinking subject bound by grids of intelligibility that define her identity—Huffer offers the splendid final installment of her Foucault trilogy. Forcefully written with a capacious imagination, this book exemplifies the enviable rewards of a sustained in-depth engagement with Foucault as an ethopoietic thinker. -- Rey Chow, author of Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial ExperienceIn this innovative and intimate work, Huffer recuperates from the work of Michel Foucault a philosophy of eros with the potential to replace the unduly dominant orders of sexuality. Eros would always be murmuring and calling for various forms of release, including the release of 'self from self.' The consequences of eros' broad scope and elusiveness, are shown to encompasses the full range of Foucault’s work, and to challenging our understanding of freedom, intimacy, passion, ethics, and selfhood. -- Penelope Deutscher, author of Foucault's Futures: A Critique of Reproductive ReasonFoucault's Strange Eros challenges its readers to describe aptly, to touch delicately their seeking, mortal, embodied selves. The book elicits and sustains their interest. It rejoices on some pages to weep on others, but it is animated throughout by generous reading and creative responding. -- Mark Jordan, author of Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in FoucaultBowing, bending down, and keeping watch over Foucault's work, Lynne Huffer listens for Foucault's Strange Eros and its ethical call. Huffer reads Foucault as a poet, allowing us to hear the discontinuous Sapphic murmur beneath philosophy's Platonic ground. This is an inspired work of love and a tour de force. -- Sverre Raffnsøe, editor in chief of Foucault Studies and author of Michel Foucault: A Research CompanionFoucault's Strange Eros is a haunting and beautiful book. In this final book in her Foucault trilogy, Lynne Huffer once again returns to the theme of Foucault’s erotic ethics. Drawing on Anne Carson's new translations and writings on Sappho, she identifies a queer feminist erotic, a non-phallic creative capacity for new relational forms. In this light, Foucault's genealogies are revealed as rooted in a poignant ethical sensibility—that of a loving and vigilant guardian of the lost 'little ones' in the archives, one who uncovers traces of unnecessary and intolerable suffering, and events that did not take place. This is what is meant by thought of the outside—impossible thought, or thoughts and experiences erased and rendered impossible within present conditions of possibility. Thus, Huffer deepens our appreciation of genealogy as an ethical practice of freedom, of eros—a practice that might loosen our attachments to present understandings of self and world—to ways of living that create unnecessary suffering and violence. -- Jana Sawicki, Williams CollegeTable of ContentsPreface: ProwlingIntroduction: Foucault’s Strange Eros1. Eros Is Strange: Foucault, the Outside, and the Historical A Priori (Fragments)2. Ars Erotica: Poetic Cuts in the Archives of Infamy3. Erotic Time: Unreason, Eros, and Foucault’s Evil Genius4. Prowling Eros: Carriers of Light in the Panopticon5. Now Again (δεῦτε): Foucault, Wittig, SapphoCoda: SapphicAcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesIndex
£72.00
Columbia University Press Foucaults Strange Eros
Book SynopsisIn this deeply original consideration of Foucault’s erotic ethics, Lynne Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet. She uncovers eros as a mode of thought that erodes the interiority of the thinking subject.Trade ReviewIn a provocative take on eros as a verb—as erosion of the thinking subject bound by grids of intelligibility that define her identity—Huffer offers the splendid final installment of her Foucault trilogy. Forcefully written with a capacious imagination, this book exemplifies the enviable rewards of a sustained in-depth engagement with Foucault as an ethopoietic thinker. -- Rey Chow, author of Not Like a Native Speaker: On Languaging as a Postcolonial ExperienceIn this innovative and intimate work, Huffer recuperates from the work of Michel Foucault a philosophy of eros with the potential to replace the unduly dominant orders of sexuality. Eros would always be murmuring and calling for various forms of release, including the release of 'self from self.' The consequences of eros' broad scope and elusiveness, are shown to encompasses the full range of Foucault’s work, and to challenging our understanding of freedom, intimacy, passion, ethics, and selfhood. -- Penelope Deutscher, author of Foucault's Futures: A Critique of Reproductive ReasonFoucault's Strange Eros challenges its readers to describe aptly, to touch delicately their seeking, mortal, embodied selves. The book elicits and sustains their interest. It rejoices on some pages to weep on others, but it is animated throughout by generous reading and creative responding. -- Mark Jordan, author of Convulsing Bodies: Religion and Resistance in FoucaultBowing, bending down, and keeping watch over Foucault's work, Lynne Huffer listens for Foucault's Strange Eros and its ethical call. Huffer reads Foucault as a poet, allowing us to hear the discontinuous Sapphic murmur beneath philosophy's Platonic ground. This is an inspired work of love and a tour de force. -- Sverre Raffnsøe, editor in chief of Foucault Studies and author of Michel Foucault: A Research CompanionFoucault's Strange Eros is a haunting and beautiful book. In this final book in her Foucault trilogy, Lynne Huffer once again returns to the theme of Foucault’s erotic ethics. Drawing on Anne Carson's new translations and writings on Sappho, she identifies a queer feminist erotic, a non-phallic creative capacity for new relational forms. In this light, Foucault's genealogies are revealed as rooted in a poignant ethical sensibility—that of a loving and vigilant guardian of the lost 'little ones' in the archives, one who uncovers traces of unnecessary and intolerable suffering, and events that did not take place. This is what is meant by thought of the outside—impossible thought, or thoughts and experiences erased and rendered impossible within present conditions of possibility. Thus, Huffer deepens our appreciation of genealogy as an ethical practice of freedom, of eros—a practice that might loosen our attachments to present understandings of self and world—to ways of living that create unnecessary suffering and violence. -- Jana Sawicki, Williams CollegeTable of ContentsPreface: ProwlingIntroduction: Foucault’s Strange Eros1. Eros Is Strange: Foucault, the Outside, and the Historical A Priori (Fragments)2. Ars Erotica: Poetic Cuts in the Archives of Infamy3. Erotic Time: Unreason, Eros, and Foucault’s Evil Genius4. Prowling Eros: Carriers of Light in the Panopticon5. Now Again (δεῦτε): Foucault, Wittig, SapphoCoda: SapphicAcknowledgmentsNotesReferencesIndex
£20.90
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Foucaults Last Decade
Book SynopsisOn 26 August 1974, Michel Foucault completed work on Discipline and Punish, and on that very same day began writing the first volume of The History of Sexuality. A little under ten years later, on 25 June 1984, shortly after the second and third volumes were published, he was dead.Trade Review'Stuart Elden's analytic portrait of Michel Foucault's final years dramatically testifies to the developing strength and power of critical observation that defined his writing and reflection after the "turn" to sexuality. Elden integrates, brilliantly, the new Foucauldian topics - governmentality, a concern with neoliberalism and contemporary economic thought - with persistent intellectual principles of speaking truth to power. Elden's own thinking sensitively embodies the best critical resources of our period in this elegant consideration, which belongs on the shelves of serious scholars and students alike.' Paul A. Bové, University of Pittsburgh and Editor, boundary 2'Elden has produced a masterful text that reconstructs how a "thinker" thinks between failure and success, between the possible and the as-yet unimaginable. This is philosophical inspiration at its most poetic height. Elden teaches us to read Foucault in a new way.' Eduardo Mendieta, Penn State University"fascinating"The NationTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction 1. Pervert, Hysteric, Child 2. The War of Races and Population 3. The Will to Know and the Power of Confession 4. From Infrastructures to Governmentality 5. Return to Confession 6. The Pleasures of Antiquity 7. The Two Historical Plans of the History of Sexuality 8. Speaking Truth to Power Notes
£49.50
Cornell University Press On Deconstruction
Book SynopsisWith an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considered deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader-response criticism. On Deconstruction is both an authoritative synthesis of Derrida's thought and an analysis of the often-problematic relation between his philosophical writings and the...Trade ReviewAcademic literary criticism continues to be dominated by 'theory' and the struggle between deconstructionist and humanist approaches to the business of reading. Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction is a typically patient, thoughtful, illuminating exposition of the ideas of Jacques Derrida and their application to literary studies. -- David Lodge * Commonweal *As a practicing critic, Culler has always been a deconstructor, and he approaches this topic with special immediacy and force. In On Deconstruction, he offers generous summaries of numerous representative articles and a fine annotated bibliography.... His magisterial way of tracing particular topics and techniques through our diaspora of critical texts, and his provocative analyses, cannot fail to focus any critic's thinking about deconstruction. * Modern Language Quarterly *Culler is lucid and thorough, can move into and out of other people's arguments without losing the sense of his own voice and argument, and can manage to seem equally at home with Freudianism, feminism, and traditional literary criticism. * Times Literary Supplement *Gifted with grace and clarity, Culler provides us with a stimulating survey of contemporary literary criticism. * Antioch Review *Table of ContentsPreface to the 25th Anniversary EditionPreface to the First EditionIntroductionChapter One. Readers and Reading1. New Fortunes2. Reading as a Woman3. Stories of ReadingChapter Two. Deconstruction1. Writing and Logocentrism2. Meaning and Iterability3. Grafts and Graft4. Institutions and Inversions5. Critical ConsequencesChapter Three. Deconstructive CriticismBibliographyTranslations BibliographyBibliography for the 25th Anniversary EditionIndex
£24.69
Stanford University Press Georges Bataille
Book SynopsisThis book investigates what Bataille, in The Pineal Eye, calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and philosophical) anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille''s thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille''s understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille''s innovative approach entails. Gasché concludes that Bataille''s mythological anthropology takes on Hegel''s phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs low materialism. Phenomenology, Gasché argues, tTrade Review"A splendid introduction to a revolutionary thinker, still not as known in this country as he ought to be, written by a renowned commentator on twentieth-century French thought. An important book!"—Arkady Plotnitksy, Purdue University
£84.15
Stanford University Press Politics of Deconstruction
Book SynopsisA comprehensive presentation of, and engagement with, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), against the backdrop of the political, cultural, and intellectual currents of his times.Trade Review"Lüdemann's book is a clearly written and remarkably well-researched analysis of Derrida's work. The author presents her views with clarity and at a welcome pace." -- Analysis & Metaphysics"Susanne Lüdemann's introduction to the thought of Jacques Derrida is a praiseworthy model of lucidity and evenhandedness. Her skillful interweaving of close readings of Derrida's texts with broader systematic concerns will not only meet the needs of students coming to the beauty and rigor of Derrida's corpus for the very first time, but also will serve more seasoned scholars seeking innovative engagements with a broad spectrum of Derridean questions. The book embodies much of what is best in German and American styles of scholarship." -- Gerhard Richter * Brown University *
£74.70
Stanford University Press Politics of Deconstruction
Book SynopsisA comprehensive presentation of, and engagement with, the philosophy of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), against the backdrop of the political, cultural, and intellectual currents of his times.Trade Review"Lüdemann's book is a clearly written and remarkably well-researched analysis of Derrida's work. The author presents her views with clarity and at a welcome pace."—Analysis & Metaphysics"Susanne Lüdemann's introduction to the thought of Jacques Derrida is a praiseworthy model of lucidity and evenhandedness. Her skillful interweaving of close readings of Derrida's texts with broader systematic concerns will not only meet the needs of students coming to the beauty and rigor of Derrida's corpus for the very first time, but also will serve more seasoned scholars seeking innovative engagements with a broad spectrum of Derridean questions. The book embodies much of what is best in German and American styles of scholarship."—Gerhard Richter, Brown University
£17.99
LSU Press Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwins Poetry
Book SynopsisIn the first monograph on W.S. Merwin to appear since his death in 2019, Feng Dong focuses on the dialectical movement of desire and infinity that ensouls the poet's entire oeuvre. His analysis foregrounds what Merwin calls ""the other side of despair"", the opposite of humans' articulated personal and social agonies.
£35.06
Northwestern University Press Voice and Phenomenon
Book SynopsisPublished in 1967, when Derrida is 37 years old, Voice and Phenomenon appears at the same moment as Of Grammatology and Writing and Difference. All three books announce the new philosophical project called ""deconstruction"".
£16.96
Northwestern University Press Turning Emotion Inside Out
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£74.25
Fordham University Press The Mark of Theory
Book SynopsisTrade Review"By the sheer force of its sophistication and range, this book demands that we engage anew with poststructuralist theory's evolving potentialities-in particular, with its intimate ties to the politics and ethics of wounding."-Rey Chow, Duke University -- -Rey Chow Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature, Duke UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: At the Scene of Inscription 1. Savage Marks: Subjection and the Specters of Anthropology 2. Impact Erasure: Psychoanalysis and the Multiplication of Trauma 3. Stings of Visibility: Picture Theories and Visual Contact 4. Out of the Groove: Aural Traces and the Mediation of Sound Conclusion: Against Inscription? Notes Works Cited Index
£78.30
Fordham University Press The Mark of Theory
Book SynopsisTrade Review"By the sheer force of its sophistication and range, this book demands that we engage anew with poststructuralist theory's evolving potentialities-in particular, with its intimate ties to the politics and ethics of wounding."-Rey Chow, Duke University -- -Rey Chow Anne Firor Scott Professor of Literature, Duke UniversityTable of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction: At the Scene of Inscription 1. Savage Marks: Subjection and the Specters of Anthropology 2. Impact Erasure: Psychoanalysis and the Multiplication of Trauma 3. Stings of Visibility: Picture Theories and Visual Contact 4. Out of the Groove: Aural Traces and the Mediation of Sound Conclusion: Against Inscription? Notes Works Cited Index
£23.39
Fordham University Press Atopias
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Everything is in flux, as we are told over and over again. And yet, these are fluxes in which nothing ever really changes... Other thinkers have characterized globalized and financialized capitalism in this way; Neyrat sees it as a dilemma for critical thought as well... In a world where anything can be anyplace, and anything can switch places with anything else, philosophy must insist on its power to be, not everyplace, but noplace. It must never fit in, but always disturb its context, ... maintaining a relation with the very Outside that our dominant social, economic, and intellectual conditions seek to deny or suppress... Above all, Atopias is a work of ethics, exhorting us to recognize and find room for the many forms of existence with whom we share our planet." -- -from Steven Shaviro's ForewordTable of ContentsCritique of pure madness Book I: Toposophy 1.1 The undamaged and the contagious 1.2 Saturated immanence and transcendence x 1.3 Socratic divergence Book II: Theory of the trans-ject 2.1 Being-outside 2.2 Coalitions 2.3 Ab-solved freedom 2.4 Language and dis-joining 2.5 On the subject of animals Book III: The metaphysical proposition 3.1 The transgression of the principle of the excluded middle 3.2 The leap and the loop 3.3 The unlocatable 3.4 The madwoman of the out-of-place 3.5 Science(s), art, politics What cries out
£73.80
Fordham University Press The Technological Introject Friedrich Kittler
Book SynopsisThis essay collection further familiarizes the English-speaking world with the work of late German media scholar Friedrich Kittler. It features well-established and emergent scholars who present investigations that traverse all of Kittler’s major phases, from early studies of German romanticism to his recent volumes on ancient Greece.Trade Review"Spearheaded by New York philosophy icon Avital Ronell, this book pays tribute to Germany's most controversial yet most original media theorist, who completely changed the German academic landscape by following his declared goal to drive the human out of the humanities. In completely new and exciting ways, the essays collected in this important volume introduce Friedrich Kittler's radical and challenging approach to the study of Western culture, literature, and philosophy to an American audience." -- -Arne Hocker University of Colorado Boulder "The Technological Introject marks a major contribution to the work of the late Friedrich Kittler, whose defining impact on the fields of discourse analysis, media studies, and the archaeology of technology is increasingly recognized. Featuring essays by well-established and emergent scholars and engaging all the major phases of Kittler's rich academic life-from his early studies of German literature to his late volumes on music and mathematics, including his recent work on the history of sound-the contributors position Kittler's work in relation to French poststructuralism, the German literary and philosophical tradition he reacted against, and the theories and practices of media discourse analysis which he significantly redefined and enlarged. Erudite and avant-garde, The Technological Introject is among the first volumes to offer a posthumous assessment of Kittler's reach and to map the considerable legacy of a major theorist on the way we think (all things) 'media.'" -- -Michael Wutz Weber State University
£92.70
Fordham University Press The Technological Introject Friedrich Kittler
Book SynopsisThis essay collection further familiarizes the English-speaking world with the work of late German media scholar Friedrich Kittler. It features well-established and emergent scholars who present investigations that traverse all of Kittler’s major phases, from early studies of German romanticism to his recent volumes on ancient Greece.Trade Review"Spearheaded by New York philosophy icon Avital Ronell, this book pays tribute to Germany's most controversial yet most original media theorist, who completely changed the German academic landscape by following his declared goal to drive the human out of the humanities. In completely new and exciting ways, the essays collected in this important volume introduce Friedrich Kittler's radical and challenging approach to the study of Western culture, literature, and philosophy to an American audience." -- -Arne Hocker University of Colorado Boulder "The Technological Introject marks a major contribution to the work of the late Friedrich Kittler, whose defining impact on the fields of discourse analysis, media studies, and the archaeology of technology is increasingly recognized. Featuring essays by well-established and emergent scholars and engaging all the major phases of Kittler's rich academic life-from his early studies of German literature to his late volumes on music and mathematics, including his recent work on the history of sound-the contributors position Kittler's work in relation to French poststructuralism, the German literary and philosophical tradition he reacted against, and the theories and practices of media discourse analysis which he significantly redefined and enlarged. Erudite and avant-garde, The Technological Introject is among the first volumes to offer a posthumous assessment of Kittler's reach and to map the considerable legacy of a major theorist on the way we think (all things) 'media.'" -- -Michael Wutz Weber State University
£29.45
Fordham University Press EcoDeconstruction
Book SynopsisEco-Deconstruction marks a new approach to the degradation of the natural environment, including habitat loss, species extinction, and climate change. While the work of French philosopher Jacques Derrida (19302004), with its relentless interrogation of the anthropocentric metaphysics of presence, has already proven highly influential in posthumanism and animal studies, the present volume, drawing on published and unpublished work by Derrida and others, builds on these insights to address the most pressing environmental issues of our time.The volume brings together fifteen prominent scholars, from a wide variety of related fields, including eco-phenomenology, eco-hermeneutics, new materialism, posthumanism, animal studies, vegetal philosophy, science and technology studies, environmental humanities, eco-criticism, earth art and aesthetics, and analytic environmental ethics. Overall, eco-deconstruction offers an account of differential relationality explored in a non-totaTable of ContentsAbbreviations for Works by Jacques Derrida Introduction Matthias Fritsch, Philippe Lynes, and David Wood Part I. Diagnosing the Present 1. The Eleventh Plague: Thinking Ecologically after Derrida David Wood 2. Thinking after the World: Deconstruction and Last Things Ted Toadvine 3. Scale as a Force of Deconstruction Timothy Clark Part II. Ecologies 4. The Posthuman Promise of the Earth Philippe Lynes 5. Un/limited Ecologies Vicki Kirby 6. Ecology as Event Michael Marder 7. Writing Home: Eco-choro-spectrography John Llewelyn Part III. Nuclear and Other Biodegradabilitie 8. E-phemera: Of Deconstruction, Biodegradability, and Nuclear War Michael Naas 9. Troubling Time/s and Ecologies of Nothingness: On the Im/Possibilities of Living and Dying in the Void Karen Barad 10. Responsibility and the Non(bio)degradable Michael Peterson 11. Extinguishing Ability: How we Became Post-Extinction Persons Claire Colebrook Part IV. Environmental Ethics 12. An Eco-Deconstructive Account of the Emergence of Normativity in “Nature” Matthias Fritsch 13. Opening ethics onto the other shore of another heading Dawne McCance 14. Wallace Stevens’s Birds, or, Derrida and Ecological Poetics Cary Wolfe 15. Earth: Love It or Leave It Kelly Oliver List of Contributors Index
£102.60
Fordham University Press Reified Life Speculative Capital and the Ahuman
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsIntroduction: Humanisms, Posthumanisms, and their Discontents Chapter 1: Market Humans: Homo Oeconomicus, Entrepreneurs, and Beings of Risk Chapter 2: Utilitarian Humanism: Culture in the Service of Regulating “We Other Humans” Chapter 3: The Hedge Fund of Reality: Ontology and Financial Derivatives Chapter 4: Human Rights and States of Emergency: Humanitarians and Governmentality Chapter 5: Translating Rights: The International Criminal Court, Translation and the Human Status Chapter 6: Speculative Fictions and Other Cartographies of Life with Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story Chapter 7: Between Words, Numbers, and Things: Transgenics and Other Objects of Life in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddams Chapter 9: Reification of the Human: Global Organ Harvesting and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go Conclusion: Ahumans: A Guide to Non-Market Living
£92.70
Fordham University Press Reified Life Speculative Capital and the Ahuman
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsIntroduction: Humanisms, Posthumanisms, and their Discontents Chapter 1: Market Humans: Homo Oeconomicus, Entrepreneurs, and Beings of Risk Chapter 2: Utilitarian Humanism: Culture in the Service of Regulating “We Other Humans” Chapter 3: The Hedge Fund of Reality: Ontology and Financial Derivatives Chapter 4: Human Rights and States of Emergency: Humanitarians and Governmentality Chapter 5: Translating Rights: The International Criminal Court, Translation and the Human Status Chapter 6: Speculative Fictions and Other Cartographies of Life with Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story Chapter 7: Between Words, Numbers, and Things: Transgenics and Other Objects of Life in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddams Chapter 9: Reification of the Human: Global Organ Harvesting and Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go Conclusion: Ahumans: A Guide to Non-Market Living
£27.90
Fordham University Press Systems of Life
Book SynopsisSystems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid eighteenth to the midnineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Systems of Life, or Bioeconomic Politics Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag 1 1. Looking for (Economic) Growth in the Eighteenth Century Christian Marouby 35 2. An African Diasporic Critique of Violence James Edward Ford III 56 3. Rousseau: Vital Instinct and Pity Pierre Macherey 82 4. System and Subject in Adam Smith’s Political Economy: Nature, Vitalism, and Bioeconomic Life Catherine Packham 93 5. Vitalism’s Revolution: John Thelwall, Life, and the Economy of Radical Politics Richard A. Barney 114 6. Writing Generation: Revolutionary Bodies and the Poetics of Political Economy Annika Mann 135 7. William Blake and the Time of Ontogeny Amanda Jo Goldstein 162 8. Concerning Hunger: Empire Aesthetics in the Present Moment Mrinalini Chakravorty 201 9. The Hero Takes a Fall: Gravity, Comedy, and Darwin’s Entangled Bank Timothy C. Campbell 236 List of Contributors 257 Index 261
£27.90
Fordham University Press Systems of Life
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsIntroduction: Systems of Life, or Bioeconomic Politics Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag 1 1. Looking for (Economic) Growth in the Eighteenth Century Christian Marouby 35 2. An African Diasporic Critique of Violence James Edward Ford III 56 3. Rousseau: Vital Instinct and Pity Pierre Macherey 82 4. System and Subject in Adam Smith’s Political Economy: Nature, Vitalism, and Bioeconomic Life Catherine Packham 93 5. Vitalism’s Revolution: John Thelwall, Life, and the Economy of Radical Politics Richard A. Barney 114 6. Writing Generation: Revolutionary Bodies and the Poetics of Political Economy Annika Mann 135 7. William Blake and the Time of Ontogeny Amanda Jo Goldstein 162 8. Concerning Hunger: Empire Aesthetics in the Present Moment Mrinalini Chakravorty 201 9. The Hero Takes a Fall: Gravity, Comedy, and Darwin’s Entangled Bank Timothy C. Campbell 236 List of Contributors 257 Index 261
£92.70
Fordham University Press A Theology of Failure Zizek against Christian
Book SynopsisThis book draws the work of Slavoj Žižek into conversation with the Christian mystical theological tradition in order to propose a materialist account of Christian identity as constituted by failure.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Failing | 1 1 Ontology and Desire in Dionysius the Areopagite | 15 2 Apophatic Theology and Its Vicissitudes | 29 3 The Death Drive: From Freud to Žižek | 56 4 The Gift and Violence | 86 5 Divine Violence as Trauma | 119 6 Mystical Theology and the Four Discourses | 150 Conclusion: Theology as Failure | 175 Acknowledgments | 183 Notes | 185 Bibliography | 235 Index | 251
£27.90
Fordham University Press A Theology of Failure
Book SynopsisThis book draws the work of Slavoj Žižek into conversation with the Christian mystical theological tradition in order to propose a materialist account of Christian identity as constituted by failure.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Failing | 1 1 Ontology and Desire in Dionysius the Areopagite | 15 2 Apophatic Theology and Its Vicissitudes | 29 3 The Death Drive: From Freud to Žižek | 56 4 The Gift and Violence | 86 5 Divine Violence as Trauma | 119 6 Mystical Theology and the Four Discourses | 150 Conclusion: Theology as Failure | 175 Acknowledgments | 183 Notes | 185 Bibliography | 235 Index | 251
£102.60
Fordham University Press Jacques the Sophist Lacan Logos and
Book SynopsisSophistry has long been philosophy’s bad other, yet in many ways, its emphasis on words and performativity remain more important than philosophical Truth. This book celebrates an underground survival of the sophistical tradition in the work of work of psychoanalysis, and its determination to take seriously equivocations, jokes, and unfinishable projects of interpretation.Table of ContentsPrologue: “How Kind of You to Recognize Me” | 1 1. Doxography and Psychoanalysis, or Relegating Truth to the Lowly Status It Deserves | 5 2. The Presence of the Sophist in Our Time | 23 3. Logos-Pharmakon | 39 4. Sense and Nonsense, or Lacan’s Anti-Aristotelianism | 59 5. The Jouissance of Language, or Lacan’s Ab-Aristotelianism | 93 Epilogue: The Drowning of a Fish | 127 Acknowledgments | 133 Translator’s Note: Performing Untranslatability | 135 Notes | 141 Index | 171
£24.69
Fordham University Press Jacques the Sophist Lacan Logos and
Book SynopsisSophistry has long been philosophy’s bad other, yet in many ways, its emphasis on words and performativity remain more important than philosophical Truth. This book celebrates an underground survival of the sophistical tradition in the work of work of psychoanalysis, and its determination to take seriously equivocations, jokes, and unfinishable projects of interpretation.Table of ContentsPrologue: “How Kind of You to Recognize Me” | 1 1. Doxography and Psychoanalysis, or Relegating Truth to the Lowly Status It Deserves | 5 2. The Presence of the Sophist in Our Time | 23 3. Logos-Pharmakon | 39 4. Sense and Nonsense, or Lacan’s Anti-Aristotelianism | 59 5. The Jouissance of Language, or Lacan’s Ab-Aristotelianism | 93 Epilogue: The Drowning of a Fish | 127 Acknowledgments | 133 Translator’s Note: Performing Untranslatability | 135 Notes | 141 Index | 171
£85.50
Fordham University Press In Defense of Secrets
Book SynopsisTable of ContentsPreamble | ix I. Memories of the Secret Origins | 3 In the Crypt | 6 Etymology | 8 When the Secret Appears | 10 Occult Force | 14 II. The Secret’s Passions Lifting the Veil | 19 The Unavowable | 22 A Treasure, a Poison | 25 Genesis | 27 Storia I | 29 III. Being or Having The Last Secret | 39 The Body au secret | 41 Eroticism | 44 Storia II | 47 Storia III | 53 IV. Transparency and Truth Violations | 59 Dissimulations | 63 Surveillances | 65 Adaptations | 67 Mirages | 69 Big Data, Hyperconnection, Speed: The Spiral | 72 Archives | 74 Secret Societies | 77 The Unifying Secret | 81 V. An Ethics of the Secret Panopticum: Bentham, Kant, Constant | 85 Inappropriable | 88 Creative Power | 90 The Secret of Dreams | 92 Sex and Prayer | 95 Secret Sideration | 97 Jealousies | 102 The Conspiracy Theory | 105 VI. Toward Mystery Secret Nature | 109 Veils | 111 Legacies | 114 Aside | 117 A Part of One’s Own | 123 Secret of the Prophetic Voice | 125 Sacrifice | 129 Mystery’s Share | 133 Notes | 139 Bibliography | 141
£75.65
Fordham University Press Vertigo
Book SynopsisReading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself. In doing so, Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature of identity.Table of ContentsForeword by Daniel Heller-Roazen | vii Incipit | 1 1 Vertigo Effect | 3 2 We Are Not Here | 34 3 Habit, Mask | 79 4 A Singular Rapture | 106 5 Chasm | 113 6 Surface | 130 Explicit | 147 Notes | 151 Bibliography | 177 Index | 197
£78.30
Fordham University Press Vertigo
Book SynopsisReading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself. In doing so, Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature of identity.Table of ContentsForeword by Daniel Heller-Roazen | vii Incipit | 1 1 Vertigo Effect | 3 2 We Are Not Here | 34 3 Habit, Mask | 79 4 A Singular Rapture | 106 5 Chasm | 113 6 Surface | 130 Explicit | 147 Notes | 151 Bibliography | 177 Index | 197
£21.59
John Wiley and Sons Ltd A Companion to Derrida
Book SynopsisA Companion to Derrida is the most comprehensive single volume reference work on the thought of Jacques Derrida. Leading scholars present a summary of his most important accomplishments across a broad range of subjects, and offer new assessments of these achievements.Trade Review“Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through researchers/faculty.” (Choice, 1 March 2015)Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations (Works by Derrida) ix Notes on Contributors xv Introduction 1 Zeynep Direk and Leonard Lawlor Part I Fundamental Themes and Concepts in Derrida’s Thought 21 1 Truth in Derrida 23 Christopher Norris 2 A Certain Truth: Derrida’s Transformation of the Kantian Heritage 42 Olivia Custer 3 Difference 57 Claire Colebrook 4 The Obscurity of “Différance” 72 Gary Gutting 5 Metaphor and Analogy in Derrida 89 Geoffrey Bennington 6 The “Slow and Differentiated” Machinations of Deconstructive Ethics 105 Kelly Oliver 7 Deconstruction 122 Leonard Lawlor 8 The Transcendental Claim of Deconstruction 132 Maxime Doyon 9 Writing the Violence of Time: Derrida Beyond the Deconstruction of Metaphysics 150 Björn Thorsteinsson 10 Derrida’s Radical Atheism 166 Martin Hägglund 11 Play and Messianicity: The Question of Time and History in Derrida’s Deconstruction 179 Françoise Dastur 12 I See Your Meaning and Raise the Stakes by a Signature: The Invention of Derrida’s Work 194 Peggy Kamuf 13 An Immemorial Remainder: The Legacy of Derrida 207 Rodolphe Gasché Part II Derrida and . . . 229 14 Derrida and Ancient Philosophy (Plato and Aristotle) 231 Michael Naas 15 There Is Neither Jew Nor Greek: The Strange Dialogue Between Levinas and Derrida 251 Robert Bernasconi 16 The Crystallization of the Impossible: Derrida and Merleau-Ponty at the Threshold of Phenomenology 269 Sabrina Aggleton 17 The Politics of Writing: Derrida and Althusser 287 Edward Baring 18 Derrida and Psychoanalysis 304 Elizabeth Rottenberg 19 Derrida and Barthes: Speculative Intrigues in Cinema, Photography, and Phenomenology 321 Louise Burchill 20 Derrida and de Man: Two Rhetorics of Deconstruction 345 J. Hillis Miller 21 Fraternal Politics and Maternal Auto-Immunity: Derrida, Feminism, and Ethnocentrism 362 Penelope Deutscher 22 Antigone as the White Fetish of Hegel and the Seductress of Derrida 378 Tina Chanter 23 Art’s Work: Derrida and Artaud and Atlan 391 Andrew Benjamin 24 Heidegger and Derrida on Responsibility 412 François Raffoul 25 On Faith and the Holy in Heidegger and Derrida 430 Ben Vedder and Gert-Jan van der Heiden 26 “Safe, Intact”: Derrida, Nancy, and the “Deconstruction of Christianity” 447 Kas Saghafi 27 Derrida and the Trace of Religion 464 John D. Caputo 28 Derrida and Islamic Mysticism: An Undecidable Relationship 480 Recep Alpyaðýl 29 Derrida and Education 490 Samir Haddad Part III Areas of Investigation 507 30 A Philosophy of Touching Between the Human and the Animal: The Animal Ethics of Jacques Derrida 509 Patrick Llored 31 Poetry, Animality, Derrida 524 Nicholas Royle 32 On Forgiveness and the Possibility of Reconciliation 537 Ann V. Murphy 33 Cosmopolitanism to Come: Derrida’s Response to Globalization 550 Fred Evans 34 The Flipside of Violence, or Beyond the Thought of Good Enough 565 Leonard Lawlor 35 Derrida/Law: A Differend 581 Pierre Legrand Bibliography of Secondary Sources on Derrida 599 Index 605
£129.56
John Wiley and Sons Ltd The Sinthome: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book
Book Synopsis"Ten times, an elderly grey-haired man gets up on the stage. Ten times puffing and sighing. Ten times slowly tracing out strange multi-coloured arabesques that interweave, curling with the meanders of his speech, by turns fluid and uneasy. A whole crowd looks on, transfixed by this enigma-made-man, absorbing the ipse dixit and anticipating some illumination that is taking its time to appear.Non lucet. It’s shady in here, and the Théodores go hunting for their matches. Still, they say, cuicumque in sua arte perito credendum est, whosoever is expert in his art is to be lent credence. At what point is a person mad? The master himself poses the question.That was back in the day. Those were the mysteries of Paris forty years hence.A Dante clasping Virgil’s hand to be led through the circles of the Inferno, Lacan took the hand of James Joyce, the unreadable Irishman, and, in the wake of this slender Commander of the Faithless, made with heavy and faltering step onto the incandescent zone where symptomatic women and ravaging men burn and writhe.An equivocal troupe was in the struggling audience: his son-in-law; a dishevelled writer, young and just as unreadable back then; two dialoguing mathematicians; and a professor from Lyon vouching for the seriousness of the whole affair. A discreet Pasiphaë was being put to work backstage.Smirk then, my good fellows! Be my guest. Make fun of it all! That’s what our comic illusion is for. That way, you shall know nothing of what is happening right before your very eyes: the most carefully considered, the most lucid, and the most intrepid calling into question of the art that Freud invented, better known under its pseudonym: psychoanalysis."—Jacques-Alain MillerTable of ContentsTHE SPIRIT OF THE NODES I. On the logical use of the sinthome, or Freud with Joyce II. On what makes a hole in the real III. On the knot as the subject’s support THE JOYCE TRAIL IV. Joyce and the fox riddle V. Was Joyce mad? VI. Joyce and imposed words THE INVENTION OF THE REAL VII. On a fallace that vouches for the real VIII. On sens, sex and the real IX. From the unconscious to the real BY WAY OF CONCLUSION X. The writing of the Ego Note APPENDICES Joyce the Symptom, by Jacques Lacan Presentation at Lacan’s Seminar, by Jacques Aubert Reading notes, by Jacques Aubert A note threaded stitch by stitch, by Jacques-Alain Miller Translator’s endnotes Index
£49.50
University of Minnesota Press The Elements of Foucault
Book SynopsisA new conceptual diagram of Foucault’s original vision of the biopolitical order The history around the critical reception of Michel Foucault’s published writings is troubled, according to Gregg Lambert, especially in light of the controversy surrounding his late lectures on biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality. In this book, Lambert’s unique approach distills Foucault’s thought into its most basic components in order to more fully understand its method and its own immanent rules of construction.The Elements of Foucault presents a critical study of Foucault’s concept of method from the earlier History of Sexuality, Volume 1, to his later lectures. Lambert breaks down Foucault’s post-1975 analysis of the idea of biopower into four elements: the method, the conceptual device (i.e., dispositif), the grid of intelligibility, and the notion of “milieu.” Taken together, these elements compose the diagram of Foucault’s early analysis and the emergence of the neoliberal political economy. Lambert further delves into how Foucault’s works have been used and misused over time, challenging the periodization of Foucault’s later thought in scholarship as well as the major and most influential readings of Foucault by other contemporary philosophers—in particular Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben. The Elements of Foucault is the first generally accessible, yet rigorous and comprehensive, discussion of lectures and major published works of Foucault’s post-1975 theory of biopower and of the major innovation of the concept of dispositif. It is also the first critical work to address the important influence of French philosopher Georges Canghuilhem on Foucault’s thought.Trade Review"In this provocative and highly original text, Gregg Lambert challenges the standard view that Michel Foucault’s works are discontinuous by showing that Foucault does not leave his past ideas behind, but rather incorporates them into new constellations as he confronts new problems. By introducing a fourth element—milieu—into Foucault’s analysis of biopower to supplement the elements of method, dispositif, and grid of intelligibility, Lambert’s self-described mutation of biopower will be required reading for any serious Foucault scholar."—Alan D. Schrift, author of Twentieth-Century French Philosophy: Key Themes and Thinkers"Gregg Lambert's study of Michel Foucault's work from the formulation of the concept of discipline to the notion of biopower demonstrates the inadequacy of interpretations that offer either an evolutionary or devolutionary reading of its movement. He shows that, at every step, Foucault both retains and sets aside concepts elaborated in previous texts and does so in a purely provisional manner, subject to perpetual revision. Lambert takes us beyond the too obvious periodizations into which Foucault's work is so often divided and allows us to see the complexity and unevenness that give some of his most important contributions their singular power."—Warren Montag, Occidental CollegeTable of ContentsContentsArticle I. On “Foucault”Article II. On the Elements of Biopower (Circa 1975–1979)1. MethodFoucault’s More GeometricoThe Problem of “Rationalizing Power”The Axiomatic Method of AnalysisThe Rules of Immanence2. Conceptual Device“What is a Dispositif?”The “Deployment” of Sexuality“The Category of the Subject and its Functioning”The Birth of the Cartesian Dispositif3. Grid of IntelligibilityToward a Government of the LivingThe Principle of VitalpolitikThe Society of ControlThe Problem of an “Inflationary Theory of the State”Article III. On the Mutations of Biopower (Post-1984)AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex
£65.60
