Western philosophy from c 1800 Books
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Wittgenstein Understanding and Meaning
Book SynopsisThis is a much revised and extended new edition of Part I of the first volume of the monumental four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations. Takes into account much new material that was unavailable when the first edition was written Following Baker's death in 2002, P.M.S. Hacker has rewritten many essays completely Part I: Essays now includes two completely new essays: ''Meaning and Use'' and ''The Recantation of a Metaphysician''; the essays: The Augustinian Conception of Language', The Language-Game Method', Contextual Dicta and Contextual Principles', Philosophy', Surveyability and Surveyable Representations', and Truth and the General Propositional Form' are redrafted and expanded, incorporating new source materials and new arguments, as well as taking into account debates of the last quarter of a century The accompanying Part II:Exegesis 1-184 - has been thoroughly revised in the Table of ContentsAcknowledgements. Introduction to Part I: Essays. Note to the paperback edition 2009. Abbreviations. I The Augustinian conception of language (§1). II Explanation (§6). III The language-game method (§7). IV Descriptions and the uses of sentences (§18). V Ostensive definition and its ramifications (§28). VI Indexicals (§39). VII Logically proper names (§39). VIII Meaning and use (§43). IX Contextual dicta and contextual principles (§50). X The standard metre (§50). XI Family resemblance (§65). XII Proper names (§79). XIII Turning the inquiry round: the recantation of a metaphysician (§89). XIV Philosophy (§109). XV Surveyability and surveyable representations (§122). XVI Truth and the general propositional form (§134). XVII Understanding and ability (§143). 1. The place of the elucidation of understanding in the Investigations. 2. Meaning and understanding as the soul of signs. 3. Categorial misconceptions of understanding. 4. Categorial clarification. (a) Understanding is not an experience. (b) Understanding is not a process. (c) Understanding is not a mental state. (d) Understanding is neither a dispositional state of the brain nor a disposition. 5. Powers and abilities. 6. Understanding and ability. Index.
£26.55
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Wittgenstein Understanding And Meaning
Book SynopsisThis is a much revised and extended new edition of Part II of the first volume of the monumental four-volume Analytical Commentary on the Philosophical Investigations. Takes into account much new material that was unavailable when the first edition was written Following Baker's death in 2002, P.M.S. Hacker has rewritten many sections of exegesis completely Part II: Exegesis 1-184 has been thoroughly revised in the light of the electronic publication of Wittgenstein's Nachlass, and includes many new interpretations of the remarks, a history of the composition of the Philosophical Investigations and an overview of its structure The accompanying Part I: Essays now includes two completely new essays: ''Meaning and Use'' and ''The Recantation of a Metaphysician''; the essays: The Augustinian Conception of Language', The Language-Game Method', Contextual Dicta and Contextual Principles', Philosophy', SurTable of ContentsAcknowledgements. Introduction to Part II: Exegesis. Note to the paperback edition 2009. Abbreviations. The history of the composition of the Philosophical Investigations. An overview of the structure and argument of the Philosophical Investigations. Exegesis. The Title. The Motto. The Preface. Chapter 1 The Augustinian conception of language (§§1–27(a)). Chapter 2 Illusions of naming: ostensive definition, logically proper names, simples and samples, and analysis (§§27(b)–64). Chapter 3 Family resemblance, determinacy of sense, and the quest for essence (§§65–88). Chapter 4 Philosophy (§§89–133). Chapter 5 The general propositional form (§§134–42). Chapter 6 Understanding and ability (§§143–84). Index.
£24.65
Johns Hopkins University Press The Birth of the Past
Book SynopsisFeaturing a foreword by the eminent historian Anthony Grafton, this fascinating book draws upon a diverse range of sources-ancient histories, medieval theology, Renaissance art, literature, legal thought, and early modern mathematics and social science-to uncover the meaning of the past and its relationship to the present.Trade ReviewComplex and erudite, confident and controversial. As Schiffman's brilliant argument suggests, anachronism not only helps define the past but becomes its doppelganger. Times Literary Supplement Lively, brilliant, and erudite. [Schiffman's] learned and engaging style [and] fresh, stimulating ideas provide a intellectual feast not only for students of Western civilization, but for those of us seeking to understand other traditions. Essential. Choice This ambitious, lucid book chronicles European methods of imagining and representing the past from the ancient Greeks to the French Enlightenment. Schiffman provides a masterful account of the emergence of modern notions of historical causation that begins with Thucydides and ends more than two thousand years later with Montesquieu and Herder. Sixteenth Century Journal Anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, or the history of historiography for that matter, will find that this book repays close attention. Reviews in History Thought-provoking. History Wire - Where the Past Comes Alive This is an important book, and deserves to be widely read. The Sun News Network Schiffman has given us a 'historiographical essay' by his own admission, and an excellent one at that: not the whole truth, but, more valuably, a new foothold for serious engagement. -- Anthony Ossa-Richardson Intellectual History Review It is refreshing to read a book with a clear, even bold, thesis that forces readers to reexamine the authority and applicability of basic historical concepts... The strength of this engaging study is not simply that it historicizes and thus defamiliarizes what passes for common sense in the present but also that it reconstructs what had been regarded as common sense in previous epochs in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the Christian era, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Journal of Modern HistoryTable of ContentsForeword, by Anthony GraftonGestationIntroduction The Past Definedpart oneAntiquityFlatlandPasts PresentThe Herodotean AchievementThucydides and the RefashioningsLinear TimeHellenistic Innovationspart twoChristianityCan't Get Here from ThereThe Power of PrayerBreakthrough to the NowThe Idea of the SæculumThe Sæculum ReconfiguredGregory of Tours and the SæculumBack from the Futurepart threeRenaissanceThe Living PastThe Birth of AnachronismPetrarch's "Copernican Leap"The Commonplace View of the WorldJean Bodin and the Unity of Historypart fourEnlightenmentPresence and DistanceBiography as a Form of HistoryThe Politics of HistoryThe Relations of Truth / The Truth of RelationsMontesquieu and the Relations of ThingsThe Past EmergesEpilogue The Past HistoricizedNotesSelected BibliographyIndex
£52.20
Johns Hopkins University Press The Birth of the Past
Book SynopsisFeaturing a foreword by the eminent historian Anthony Grafton, this fascinating book draws upon a diverse range of sources-ancient histories, medieval theology, Renaissance art, literature, legal thought, and early modern mathematics and social science-to uncover the meaning of the past and its relationship to the present.Trade ReviewComplex and erudite, confident and controversial. As Schiffman's brilliant argument suggests, anachronism not only helps define the past but becomes its doppelganger. Times Literary Supplement Lively, brilliant, and erudite. [Schiffman's] learned and engaging style [and] fresh, stimulating ideas provide a intellectual feast not only for students of Western civilization, but for those of us seeking to understand other traditions. Essential. Choice This ambitious, lucid book chronicles European methods of imagining and representing the past from the ancient Greeks to the French Enlightenment. Schiffman provides a masterful account of the emergence of modern notions of historical causation that begins with Thucydides and ends more than two thousand years later with Montesquieu and Herder. Sixteenth Century Journal Anyone with an interest in the history of ideas, or the history of historiography for that matter, will find that this book repays close attention. Reviews in History Thought-provoking. History Wire - Where the Past Comes Alive This is an important book, and deserves to be widely read. The Sun News Network Schiffman has given us a 'historiographical essay' by his own admission, and an excellent one at that: not the whole truth, but, more valuably, a new foothold for serious engagement. -- Anthony Ossa-Richardson Intellectual History Review It is refreshing to read a book with a clear, even bold, thesis that forces readers to reexamine the authority and applicability of basic historical concepts... The strength of this engaging study is not simply that it historicizes and thus defamiliarizes what passes for common sense in the present but also that it reconstructs what had been regarded as common sense in previous epochs in the Western tradition, from antiquity to the Christian era, the Renaissance, and the Enlightenment. Journal of Modern HistoryTable of ContentsForeword, by Anthony GraftonGestationIntroduction The Past Definedpart oneAntiquityFlatlandPasts PresentThe Herodotean AchievementThucydides and the RefashioningsLinear TimeHellenistic Innovationspart twoChristianityCan't Get Here from ThereThe Power of PrayerBreakthrough to the NowThe Idea of the SæculumThe Sæculum ReconfiguredGregory of Tours and the SæculumBack from the Futurepart threeRenaissanceThe Living PastThe Birth of AnachronismPetrarch's "Copernican Leap"The Commonplace View of the WorldJean Bodin and the Unity of Historypart fourEnlightenmentPresence and DistanceBiography as a Form of HistoryThe Politics of HistoryThe Relations of Truth / The Truth of RelationsMontesquieu and the Relations of ThingsThe Past EmergesEpilogue The Past HistoricizedNotesSelected BibliographyIndex
£27.45
University of Toronto Press Essays on French History and Historians
Book SynopsisJ.S. Mill's deep interest in French intellectual, political, and social affairs began in 1820 when, in his fourteenth year, he went to France to live for a year with the family of Sir Samuel Bentham. French became his second language, and France his second home, where he died and was buried in 1873. His interest in history began even earlier when, as a child of seven, he tried to imitate his father's labours on the History of British India; though he never wrote a history in his maturity, study of the past remained a passion and helped shape the philosophy of history that informed his views of society and ethics. His intense interest in contemporary French politics also led him to seek connections between historical developments and present trends, both seen by his from a Radical perspective approproate to what he believed to be an age of transition. The English historians of France, including Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle, as well as the French, some of whom were themselve
£39.60
University of Toronto Press MerleauPonty and Marxism
Book SynopsisInfluenced by Kojève's interpretation of Hegel as well as his direct political experience of the second world war, Maurice Merleau-Ponty abandoned the religious and philosophical position he had assumed in the 1930s and turned to Marxism. This is the first critical study of the French philosopher's political ideas and the context in which they evolved. In its origin and its development, Merleau-Ponty's political thought expressed a subtle dialectic between ongoing political events and the apparent truths of Marx's analysis. With the onset of the cold war, the discovery of the Soviet concentration camps, the repression of Eastern Europe, the Algerian crisis, and the founding of the Fifth Republic, Merleau-Ponty began to take a critical look at Marx's ideas of the genesis of humanism in the light of these disturbing political realities. His reconsideration of the basis of Marxism and his conclusion that it had lost contact with history led to a f
£24.29
University of Toronto Press Cultural Hermeneutics
Book SynopsisIn Cultural Hermeneutics, Mario J. Valdés offers a synthesis of the hermeneutic philosophies of Miguel de Unamuno and Paul Ricoeur.Trade Review"I would encourage readers to approach the book as if it were a tour through a curio shop. The author shows us interesting artefacts that he has discovered through his travels and shares his stories about them. When approached in this manner, the book is a delightful companion." -- Scott Davidson, Oklahoma City University * University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018 *Table of ContentsForeword Introduction Chapter One: From Unamuno to Ricoeur Chapter Two: Unamuno's Hermeneutics Chapter Three: Ricoeur's Hermeneutics of the Creative Imagination Conclusion: Unamuno and Ricoeur on Making Sense. The Dialectic of Order and Disorder
£38.70
University of Toronto Press Heideggers Way of Being
Book SynopsisRichard Capobianco makes the case that the core matter of Heidegger's lifetime of thought was Being as the temporal emergence of all beings and things.Trade Review‘This book will prove indispensable to anybody working within Heidegger studies, especially those interested in his work on poetry, language, and Heraclitus.’ -- S. Montgomery Ewegen * Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews January 2015 *‘Capobianco immerses his readers in a dexterous set of considerations which engage an impressively vast array of texts spanning Heidegger’s corpus… He provides a valuable resource for scholars and others interested in further pursuing Heidegger.’ -- Katherine Davis * Gatherings: The Heidegger Circle Annual vol 8:2018 *"What stands out as Capobianco’s truly unique contribution to the literature of Heidegger is how he carefully unfolds the subtle differences in Heidegger’s many names for Being…In the end, the reader is left with a renewed appreciation not only for the continued relevance of Heidegger’s work, but for the beauty and necessity of thought itself." -- Timothy Jussuame * Philosophy in Review *
£30.60
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Gramsci and Educational Thought
Book SynopsisThrough a series of writings from international scholars, Gramsci and Educational Thought pays tribute to the educational influence of Antonio Gramsci, considered one of the greatest social thinkers and political theorists of the 20th century.Trade Review"Overall, and despite its somewhat modest length (of just over 150 pages), Gramsci and Educational Thought is a commendable and scholarly collection." (Philosophy in Review, 1 December 2011) Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors vii ForewordMichael A. Peters ix Introduction: Antonio Gramsci and Educational Thought 1Peter Mayo 1 A Brief Commentary on the Hegelian-Marxist Origins of Gramsci’s ‘Philosophy of Praxis’ 5Deb J. Hill 2 Antonio Gramsci and his Relevance to the Education of Adults 21Peter Mayo 3 The Revolutionary Party in Gramsci’s Pre-Prison Educational and Political Theory and Practice 38John D. Holst 4 Introducing Giovanni Gentile, the ‘Philosopher of Fascism’ 57Thomas Clayton 5 Global English, Hegemony and Education: Lessons from Gramsci 78Peter Ives 6 Antonio Gramsci and Feminism: The elusive nature of power 100Margaret Ledwith 7 Towards a Political Theory of Social Work and Education (Translated by Florian Sichling with Editing by Peter Mayo) 114Uwe Hirschfeld 8 Gramscian Thought and Brazilian Education 127Rosemary Dore Soares Index 146
£19.71
John Wiley and Sons Ltd A Companion to Rawls
Book SynopsisWide ranging and up to date, this is the single most comprehensive treatment of the most influential political philosopher of the 20th century, John Rawls.Trade Review“An outstanding collection of 31 essays, this collection provides a wide range of material for those interested in Rawls, liberalism, and political philosophy in general. This is one of those volumes that every university library should own. Summing Up: Highly recommended.” – Choice, October 2014 "The editors aim to produce “not so much a summary of past scholarly work as a serviceable roadmap for current and future work on Rawls” (1). It is a high ambition which raises high expectations which are, happily, lived up to." - Dialogue "This Companion to Rawls is a rich collection of stimulating and critical essays, which provides us with more than a state of the art volume. The textual interpretations, contextual elucidations and illuminating connections with diverse disciplines invite the reader to explore new paths and perspectives. For students of (political) philosophy the volume will be more than a thorough introduction to the philosophy of Rawls. For well-grounded scholars, who are fully acquainted with Rawls’s works, it will open up new insights and subtleties and offer them inspiration for future research. The Companion to Rawls is a welcome contribution to Rawls scholarship, which looks beyond A Theory of Justice and does justice to the versatility and ingenuity of Rawls’s works and thoughts" - DialogueTable of ContentsNotes on Contributors ix Introduction 1 Jon Mandle and David A. Reidy Part I Ambitions 7 1 From Philosophical Theology to Democratic Theory: Early Postcards from an Intellectual Journey 9 David A. Reidy 2 Does Justice as Fairness Have a Religious Aspect? 31 Paul Weithman Part II Method 57 3 Constructivism as Rhetoric 59 Anthony Simon Laden 4 Kantian Constructivism 73 Larry Krasnoff 5 The Basic Structure of Society as the Primary Subject of Justice 88 Samuel Freeman 6 Rawls on Ideal and Nonideal Theory 112 Zofia Stemplowska and Adam Swift 7 The Choice from the Original Position 128 Jon Mandle Part III A Theory of Justice 145 8 The Priority of Liberty 147 Robert S. Taylor 9 Applying Justice as Fairness to Institutions 164 Colin M. Macleod 10 Democratic Equality as a Work-in-Progress 185 Stuart White 11 Stability, a Sense of Justice, and Self-Respect 200 Thomas E. Hill, Jr 12 Political Authority, Civil Disobedience, Revolution 216 Alexander Kaufman Part IV A Political Conception 233 13 The Turn to a Political Liberalism 235 Gerald Gaus 14 Political Constructivism 251 Aaron James 15 On the Idea of Public Reason 265 Jonathan Quong 16 Overlapping Consensus 281 Rex Martin 17 Citizenship as Fairness: John Rawls’s Conception of Civic Virtue 297 Richard Dagger 18 Inequality, Difference, and Prospects for Democracy 312 Erin I. Kelly Part V Extending Political Liberalism: International Relations 325 19 The Law of Peoples 327 Huw Lloyd Williams 20 Human Rights 346 Gillian Brock 21 Global Poverty and Global Inequality 361 Richard W. Miller 22 Just War 378 Darrel Moellendorf Part VI Conversations with Other Perspectives 395 23 Rawls, Mill, and Utilitarianism 397 Jonathan Riley 24 Perfectionist Justice and Rawlsian Legitimacy 413 Steven Wall 25 The Unwritten Theory of Justice: Rawlsian Liberalism versus Libertarianism 430 Barbara H. Fried 26 The Young Marx and the Middle-Aged Rawls 450 Daniel Brudney 27 Challenges of Global and Local Misogyny 472 Claudia Card 28 Critical Theory and Habermas 487 Kenneth Baynes 29 Rawls and Economics 504 Daniel Little 30 Learning from the History of Political Philosophy 526 S.A. Lloyd 31 Rawls and the History of Moral Philosophy: The Cases of Smith and Kant 546 Paul Guyer Index 567
£161.06
Duke University Press The Deconstruction of Sex
Book SynopsisJean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh discuss how a deconstructive approach to sex helps us negotiate discourses about sex and reconsider our relations to ourselves and others through sex.Trade Review“Happily, no one will leave this book with an understanding of sex. To the contrary, these trenchant and provocative dialogues challenge any construction of sex that relies on a copular verb. As astutely as Irving Goh places sex in a politicophilosophical framework, just as astutely does Jean-Luc Nancy lay out how sex exceeds it. This results in an exemplary enactment of the becoming-word of sex, ‘leaving in us,’ to quote Nancy, ‘a sort of dizziness and bedazzlement’ by comparison with which ‘understanding’ sex can only seem delusional.” -- Lee Edelman, author of * No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive *“In this fascinating dialogue between the renowned continental thinker Jean-Luc Nancy and the critic Irving Goh, the foundational terms of sex are brilliantly deconstructed in ways directly relevant to sensual experience, modalities of affect, intimate co-relationality and the fluid subjects of contemporary gender self-identification. Sexual philosophy, post-Foucault and post-Irigaray, gains a new classic with this indispensable text, topped by the bonus of Claire Colebrook's trenchant afterword on killjoy sex.” -- Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Sex "Is" Deconstruction / Irving Goh 1 0. The Deconstruction of Sex: Opening Questions 16 1. Troubling Thought(s): Sex and Deconstruction 20 2. On Touching—Sex 35 3. Who Comes before/after Sex? 53 4. S/exscription 70 Afterword: Sex and the Killjoy / Claire Colebrook 83 Acknowledgments 93 Notes 95 Bibliography 105 Index 109
£62.90
Duke University Press The Deconstruction of Sex
Book SynopsisJean-Luc Nancy and Irving Goh discuss how a deconstructive approach to sex helps us negotiate discourses about sex and reconsider our relations to ourselves and others through sex.Trade Review“Happily, no one will leave this book with an understanding of sex. To the contrary, these trenchant and provocative dialogues challenge any construction of sex that relies on a copular verb. As astutely as Irving Goh places sex in a politicophilosophical framework, just as astutely does Jean-Luc Nancy lay out how sex exceeds it. This results in an exemplary enactment of the becoming-word of sex, ‘leaving in us,’ to quote Nancy, ‘a sort of dizziness and bedazzlement’ by comparison with which ‘understanding’ sex can only seem delusional.” -- Lee Edelman, author of * No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive *“In this fascinating dialogue between the renowned continental thinker Jean-Luc Nancy and the critic Irving Goh, the foundational terms of sex are brilliantly deconstructed in ways directly relevant to sensual experience, modalities of affect, intimate co-relationality and the fluid subjects of contemporary gender self-identification. Sexual philosophy, post-Foucault and post-Irigaray, gains a new classic with this indispensable text, topped by the bonus of Claire Colebrook's trenchant afterword on killjoy sex.” -- Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction: Sex "Is" Deconstruction / Irving Goh 1 0. The Deconstruction of Sex: Opening Questions 16 1. Troubling Thought(s): Sex and Deconstruction 20 2. On Touching—Sex 35 3. Who Comes before/after Sex? 53 4. S/exscription 70 Afterword: Sex and the Killjoy / Claire Colebrook 83 Acknowledgments 93 Notes 95 Bibliography 105 Index 109
£18.04
Duke University Press Uncanny Rest
Book SynopsisFocusing on his personal day to day experiences of the shelter-in-place period during the first months of the coronavirus pandemic, Alberto Moreiras offers a meditation on intellectual life and the nature of thought under the suspension of time and conditions of isolation.Table of ContentsPreface ix March 20, 2020 3 Remark 1: The Path of the Goddess March 27, 2020 7 March 29, 2020 7 April 1, 2020 A.M. 8 Remark 2: The Pandemic and the Event April 1, 2020 P.M. 15 April 3, 2020 17 April 4, 2020 18 April 9, 2020 21 April 12, 2020 23 Remark 3: Self-precursion April 15, 2020 26 April 16, 2020 30 April 18, 2020 32 April 24, 2020 35 April 25, 2020 38 April 28, 2020 39 May 2, 2020 39 May 5, 2020 41 May 6, 2020 43 May 7, 2020 47 May 9, 2020 48 May 10, 2020 50 Remark 4: Fools and Free Spirits May 11, 2020 57 May 12, 2020 A.M. 59 May 12, 2020 P.M. 61 May 13, 2020 A.M. 62 May 13, 2020 P.M. 64 May 14, 2020 68 May 15, 2020 72 May 16, 2020 A.M. 73 May 16, 2020 P.M. 78 May 17, 2020 84 May 18, 2020 88 May 19, 2020 88 Remark 5: The Fourth Position May 20, 2020 A.M. 98 Remark 6: An Invitation to Social Death May 20, 2020 P.M. 106 Remark 7: Infracendence: Unpublished Fragments from Fernando Pessoa’s (Posthumous?) Milieu Notebook of Alberto Moreira, Heteronym Appendix 1. More Questions for Jorge Alemán: A Presentation for 17 Instituto de Estudios Críticos, Ciudad de México, May 25, 2020 123 Appendix 2. From a Conversation with Jaime 127 Appendix 3. From a Conversation with Gerardo 131 Appendix 4. Alain Badiou's Age of the Poets 139 Notes 165 Bibliography 183 Index 189
£18.99
Duke University Press The Anarchy of Black Religion
Book SynopsisIn The Anarchy of Black Religion, J. Kameron Carter examines the deeper philosophical, theological, and religious history that animates our times to advance a new approach to understanding religion. Drawing on the black radical tradition and black feminism, Carter explores the modern invention of religion as central to settler colonial racial technologies wherein antiblackness is a founding and guiding religious principle of the modern world. He therefore sets black religion apart from modern religion, even as it tries to include and enclose it. Carter calls this approach the black study of religion. Black religion emerges not as doctrinal, confessional, or denominational but as a set of poetic and artistic strategies for improvisatory living and gathering. Potentiating non-exclusionary belonging, black religion is anarchic, mystical, and experimental: it reveals alternative relationalities and visions of matter that can counter capitalism’s extractive, individualisTrade Review“J. Kameron Carter’s claim that the modern western formulations of racial capitalism and religion go hand in hand renders it impossible to think the one without the other. His interventions in this ambitious, rich, and imaginative book have the power to change the study of religion as a whole and in tremendously salutary, necessary ways.” -- Amy Hollywood, author of * Acute Melancholia and Other Essays: Mysticism, History, and the Study of Religion *"In our racially segregated world, this diffunity is crucial to explore, especially as a Christian. As Carter describes it, Christianity helped create a religiopolitical regime of antiblack exclusion and racial capitalist extraction. But with Carter, I too am dreaming of an alternative social order—one that is not predicated on exclusion and instead chooses to embrace difference and learn from Indigenous ways of living in harmony with all creatures." -- Yanan Rahim Navarez Melo * Sojourners *"In many ways, [J. Kameron Carter's] book is a prayer that brings about a childlike sense of imagination. It becomes more than an intellectual work and something I view as deeply pastoral." -- Jordan Burton * Presbyterian Outlook *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments xi An Anarchic Introduction (Antiblackness as Religion) 1 1. Black (Feminist) Anarchy 27 2. The Matter of Anarchy 47 3. Anarchy and the Fetish 63 4. The Anarchy of Black Religion 75 5. Anarchy Is a Poem, Is a Song . . . 106 An Anarchic Coda (A Mystic Song) 132 Notes 139 Bibliography 171 Index
£70.55
Duke University Press Archaism and Actuality
Book SynopsisIn Archaism and Actuality eminent Marxist historian Harry Harootunian explores the formation of capitalism and fascism in Japan as a prime example of the uneven development of capitalism. He applies his theorization of subsumption to examine how capitalism integrates and redirects preexisting social, cultural, and economic practices to guide the present. This subsumption leads to a global condition in which states and societies all exist within different stages and manifestations of capitalism. Drawing on Japanese philosophers Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun, Marxist theory, and Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution, Harootunian shows how the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and its program dedicated to transforming the country into a modern society exemplified a unique path to capitalism. Japan’s capitalist expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rise as an imperial power, and subsequent transition to fascism signal a wholly distinct trajectory into modernity thaTrade Review“In a masterful discourse about historical time, Harry Harootunian brings to light the ways in which the past attends the present, producing uneven temporalities in three seminal moments: the Meiji Restoration, fascism, and the postwar. This book changed my understanding of modern Japanese history and indeed of history itself.” -- Carol Gluck, Columbia University“Harry Harootunian’s analysis is rooted in the history of modern Japan, but the interest of this book extends well beyond. From that ground he is able to launch a series of fascinating arguments regarding capitalist modernity’s uses of the past and its temporal heterogeneity. Particularly timely and valuable is his investigation of how the invocation of an archaic past serves as a primary trope of twentieth- and twenty-first-century fascisms.” -- Michael Hardt, author of * The Subversive Seventies *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xix 1. In the Zone of Occult Instability 1 2. Restoration 36 3. Capitalism and Fascism 99 4. Actuality and the Archaic Mode of Cognition 145 5. Epilogue: Déjà Vu 223 Notes 245 Bibliography 261 Index 269
£75.65
Duke University Press Brutalism
Book SynopsisIn Brutalism, eminent social and critical theorist Achille Mbembe invokes the architectural aesthetic of brutalism to describe our moment, caught up in the pathos of demolition and production on a planetary scale. Just as brutalist architecture creates an affect of overwhelming weight and destruction, Mbembe contends that contemporary capitalism crushes and dominates all spheres of existence. In our digital, technologically focused era, capitalism has produced a becoming-artificial of humanity and the becoming-human of machines. This blurring of the natural and artificial presents a planetary existential threat in which contemporary society’s goal is to precipitate the mutation of the human species into a condition that is at once plastic and synthetic. Mbembe argues that Afro-diasporic thought presents the only solution for breaking the totalizing logic of contemporary capitalism: repairing that which is broken, developing a new planetary consciousness, and reforming a coTrade Review“In an argument both elegant and urgent, Achille Mbembe focuses our attention on the African continent, which is not only where the forms of domination and deprivation that increasingly affect the entire globe are most fully deployed but also where the forms of reparation necessary for a future world can be glimpsed.” -- Michael Hardt, author of * The Subversive Seventies *“This is a fantastic translation of a vital text. The poetry, intensity, complexity, and subtlety that we have come to expect from Achille Mbembe’s work are all here in Brutalism.” -- Laurent Dubois, translator of * Critique of Black Reason *Table of ContentsPreface xi Acknowledgments xvii Introduction 1 1. Universal Domination 9 2. Fracturing 27 3. Animism and Viscerality 40 4. Virilism 58 5. Border-Bodies 78 6. Circulations 91 7. The Community of Captives 105 8. Potential Humanity and the Politics of the Living 125 Conclusion 147 Notes 151 Index 179
£74.70
Duke University Press SARS Stories
Book SynopsisIn SARS Stories, Belinda Kong delves into the cultural archive of the 2003 SARS pandemic, examining Chinese-language creative works and social practices at the epicenters of the outbreak in China and Hong Kong. As the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted issues of anti-Asian racism and sinophobia, Kong traces how Chinese people navigated the SARS pandemic and created meaning amid crisis through cultures of epidemic expression. From sentimental romances and Cantopop songs to raunchy sex comedies and crowdsourced ghost tales, unexpected and minor genres and creators of Chinese popular culture highlight the resilience and humanity of those living through the pandemic. Rather than narrating pandemic life in terms of crisis and catastrophe, Kong argues that these works highlight Chinese practices of community, care, and love amid disease. She also highlights the persistence of orientalism in anglophone accounts of SARS index patients and global reporting on COVID-era China. Kong shows hTrade Review“As we still come to grips with the COVID-19 pandemic, Belinda Kong’s SARS Stories provides a powerful testament to the ways in which cultural discourse—fiction, film, and digital media—shape our understanding of pandemic narratives. In the process, Kong reveals the often tenuous line between the truths conveyed through ‘fiction’ and the lies that sometimes haunt the ‘facts.’” -- Michael Berry, author of * Translation, Disinformation, and Wuhan Diary: Anatomy of a Transpacific Cyber Campaign *“As our contemporary pandemic commonsense swings from jingoism to denialism, reading Belinda Kong’s incredibly learned and daring book has been not just enlightening but, dare I say, therapeutic. Kong has taught me to think anew about pandemic epistemologies in relation to race, empire, and power while giving name to my own desire for ‘pandemic prosociality.’ Written with warmth, curiosity, and verve, SARS Stories will speak to anyone and everyone who has tried to make sense of the past several years of pandemic life.” -- Sunny Xiang, author of * Tonal Intelligence: The Aesthetics of Asian Inscrutability During the Long Cold War *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Pandemic Ordinariness: Epidemic Romances and Female Sentiments 33 2. Pandemic Humor: Digital Prosociality for the Epidemic Socius 77 3. Pandemic Resilience: Deextinction and the Hong Kong Cantophone 112 4. Pandemic First Patients: Deperilizing the Anglophone SARS Archive 180 Afterword 238 Notes 241 Bibliography 267 Index 285
£75.65
Duke University Press Archaism and Actuality
Book SynopsisIn Archaism and Actuality eminent Marxist historian Harry Harootunian explores the formation of capitalism and fascism in Japan as a prime example of the uneven development of capitalism. He applies his theorization of subsumption to examine how capitalism integrates and redirects preexisting social, cultural, and economic practices to guide the present. This subsumption leads to a global condition in which states and societies all exist within different stages and manifestations of capitalism. Drawing on Japanese philosophers Miki Kiyoshi and Tosaka Jun, Marxist theory, and Gramsci’s notion of passive revolution, Harootunian shows how the Meiji Restoration of 1868 and its program dedicated to transforming the country into a modern society exemplified a unique path to capitalism. Japan’s capitalist expansion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, rise as an imperial power, and subsequent transition to fascism signal a wholly distinct trajectory into modernity thaTrade Review“In a masterful discourse about historical time, Harry Harootunian brings to light the ways in which the past attends the present, producing uneven temporalities in three seminal moments: the Meiji Restoration, fascism, and the postwar. This book changed my understanding of modern Japanese history and indeed of history itself.” -- Carol Gluck, Columbia University“Harry Harootunian’s analysis is rooted in the history of modern Japan, but the interest of this book extends well beyond. From that ground he is able to launch a series of fascinating arguments regarding capitalist modernity’s uses of the past and its temporal heterogeneity. Particularly timely and valuable is his investigation of how the invocation of an archaic past serves as a primary trope of twentieth- and twenty-first-century fascisms.” -- Michael Hardt, author of * The Subversive Seventies *Table of ContentsPreface ix Acknowledgments xix 1. In the Zone of Occult Instability 1 2. Restoration 36 3. Capitalism and Fascism 99 4. Actuality and the Archaic Mode of Cognition 145 5. Epilogue: Déjà Vu 223 Notes 245 Bibliography 261 Index 269
£20.69
University of Toronto Press The Time of Enlightenment
Book SynopsisThe Time of Enlightenment investigates how a new idea of the future emerged with the development of modern practices in France from 1750 to Year One, the first year of the Republican calendar that marked the Revolutionary caesura in time.Trade Review“Scholars interested in the growing literature on the history of time, progress, and the future will find this book valuable reading. It is a careful but clear work on intellectual history, one with particular relevance for understanding the significance of the French Revolution.” -- Meghan K. Roberts, Bowdoin College * H-France Review *“In this insightful, richly researched, and theoretically astute work, William Max Nelson views the Enlightenment not as era, movement, or project, but as ‘attempts to develop new ways of being in the world that could come to grips with the erosion of traditional notions of God and legitimating narratives of political authority and social hierarchy.’ … This book is a valuable and thought-provoking contribution to that process.” -- Daniel Brewer, University of Minnesota * French Studies *“This wide-ranging book makes a valuable contribution to a still fragmentary field of historical time studies.” -- Sanja Perovic, King’s College London * American Historical Review *Table of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction 1. Making Time Different: Historical Change and the Laws of Nature 2. Living the Future: Ideas of Progress and Uncanny Temporality 3. “The Explosion of Light”: The Economic Order and the Scientific Revelation of the Future 4. Generating Time: Buffon and the Biological Instruments of Futurity 5. The Time of Regeneration: Renewal, Rupture, and Beginning Anew in the French Revolution Conclusion: Colonizing the Future Notes Index
£46.80
University of Toronto Press Five Groundbreaking Moments in Heideggers
Book SynopsisAn unconventional introduction to Heidegger's thinking, this book reads like a very personal and meaningful encounter with Heidegger's major contributions to philosophy.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Admonitions, Reminders 1. The Conditions in Which We Find Ourselves 2. Setting the Stage 3. Guideposts for This Work 4. First Moment: Heidegger and Nondual Thinking, Inseparable Phenomenon 5. Second Moment: Heidegger and Nonconceptual Language as Saying 6. Third Moment: Heidegger and the Symbiosis of Translation and Thinking, from Saying 7. Fourth Moment: Heidegger and Engaging in the Retrieval of Greek Thinking-Saying 8. Fifth Moment: Time-Space as Ab-Ground
£45.90
University of Toronto Press The Ethics of Discernment
Book SynopsisIn The Ethics of Discernment, Patrick H. Byrne presents an approach to ethics that builds upon the cognitional theory and the philosophical method of self-appropriation that Bernard Lonergan introduced in his book Insight, as well as upon Lonergan’s later writing on ethics and values.Extending Lonergan’s method into the realm of ethics, Byrne argues that we can use self-appropriation to come to objective judgements of value. The Ethics of Discernment is an introspective analysis of that process, in which sustained ethical inquiry and attentiveness to feelings as “intentions of value” leads to a rich conception of the good.Written both for those with an interest in Lonergan’s philosophy and for those interested in theories of ethics who have only a limited knowledge of Lonergan’s work, Byrne’s book is the first detailed exposition of an ethical theory based on Lonergan’s philosophical method.Trade Review"Byrne is a clear and engaging writer and a lifelong teacher who respects the needs of the reader for illustrative examples that bring to life the theoretical ideas explored in his book. Especially compelling are the illustrations of moral decisions drawn from his own life and the extended examples drawn from the work of novelists. The book as a whole seems aimed at scholars and graduate students, but because of its wide range of concerns and topics and its inclusion of extended examples much of it is accessible and should prove of great value to the educated public and the advanced undergraduates." -- Paulette W. Kidder, Seattle University * Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society, December 2018 *"This is a remarkable book. Patrick Byrne’s goal is modest: to answer some difficult questions about ethics left unanswered in the writings of Canadian Jesuit philosopher, Bernard Lonergan. But, as the chapters unfold, the attentive reader finds striking analyses that address major challenges arising in ethics today: subjectivity and objectivity, reason and religion, rationality and affectivity." -- Kenneth R. Melchin, Saint Paul University * University of Toronto Quarterly, vol 87 3, Summer 2018 *“Patrick Byrne’s elaborate and complex book is the fruit of a lifetime of reflection and teaching, and a significant and singular contribution to the field of Lonergan studies.” -- Ivo Coelho * Divyadaan: Journal of Philosophy and Education *Table of ContentsPreface Introduction Part I: Preliminaries Chapter 1: Discernment and Self-Appropriation Chapter 2: Objectivity and Factual Knowing: Lonergan's Three Questions Chapter 3: Self-Appropriation, Part I: Self-Affirmation of Cognitional Structure Part II: What Are We Doing When We Are Being Ethical? Chapter 4: The Structure of Ethical Intentionality: Three More Questions Chapter 5: Kinds of Feelings Chapter 6: Feelings as Intentional Responses and Horizons of Feelings Chapter 7: Feelings and Value Reflection Part III: Why is Doing That Being Ethical? Chapter 8: Horizons of Feelings, Conversion, and Objectivity Chapter 9: Judgments of Comparative Value and the Scale of Value Preference Chapter 10: Self-Appropriation, Part II: Why is Doing that Being Ethical? Part IV: What Is Brought About By Doing That? Chapter 11: The Human Good Described Chapter 12: The Human Good: Explanatory Foundations Chapter 13: The Notion and the Ontology of the Good Chapter 14: Explanatory Genera and the Objective Scale of Values: A Preliminary Grounding Part V: Method in Ethics Chapter 15: Method in Ethics I: Preliminaries Chapter 16: Method in Ethics II: Dialectic and Foundations
£33.30
University of Toronto Press Five Groundbreaking Moments in Heideggers
Book SynopsisFive Groundbreaking Moments in Heidegger’s Thinking presents a fresh interpretation of some of Heidegger’s most difficult but important works, including his second major work, Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) [Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning)]. The careful approach shows how, for Heidegger, the acts of reading, thinking, and saying all move beyond the theoretical/conceptual and become an ongoing experience. In new translations of central texts, Kenneth Maly invites the reader to think along the way by reading, contemplating, and translating Heidegger’s ideas into this context. An introduction to the field of philosophy and more specifically to Heidegger’s thought, Five Groundbreaking Moments in Heidegger’s Thinking asks the reader, in some manner, to actively engage in thinking.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Admonitions, Reminders 1. The Conditions in Which We Find Ourselves 2. Setting the Stage 3. Guideposts for This Work 4. First Moment: Heidegger and Nondual Thinking, Inseparable Phenomenon 5. Second Moment: Heidegger and Nonconceptual Language as Saying 6. Third Moment: Heidegger and the Symbiosis of Translation and Thinking, from Saying 7. Fourth Moment: Heidegger and Engaging in the Retrieval of Greek Thinking-Saying 8. Fifth Moment: Time-Space as Ab-Ground
£20.69
University of Toronto Press Bentham on Liberty
Book SynopsisBentham on Liberty focuses on the crucial formative years, when the English social philosopher Jeremy Bentham was in his twenties and thirties between 1770 and 1790, and draws on the unpublished manuscripts held at University College, London, to throw a new light on his early intellectual development. Using also both private correspondence and published works, it shows how Bentham's legal training and enthusiasm for Enlightenment ideas steadily broadened his horizon from criminal law to constitutional law to social theory. Bentham's desire to create a science of man and society modelled on the physical sciences led his systematic exposition of the conception of utilitarianism. His broad perspective came to encompass aspects of what are now called psychology, sociology, political science, moral philosophy, and jurisprudence. A central theme of this study is the way in which, in Bentham's mind, liberty became subordinated to security as an end of social action. The argum
£27.90
Cornell University Press Seductive Reasoning
Book SynopsisSeductive Reasoning takes a provocative look at contemporary Anglo-American literary theory, calling into question the critical consensus on pluralism''s nature and its status in literary studies. Drawing on the insights of Marxist and feminist critical theory and on the works of Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault, Rooney reads the pluralist's invitation to join in a dialogue as a seductive gesture. Critics who respond find that they must seek to persuade all of their potential readers. Rooney examines pluralism as a form of logic in the work of E. D. Hirsch, as a form of ethics for Wayne Booth, as a rhetoric of persuasion in the books of Stanley Fish. For Paul de Man, Rooney argues, pluralism was a rhetoric of tropes just as it was, for Fredric Jameson, a form of politics.Trade Review"Difference excludes. On this irreducible principle of irreducibility much literary theory is founded. With its internal drive to system and purity, theory enacts the necessity of exclusion; and so an appeal to theory often prefigures a justification of exclusion. The only contemporary movement whose relation to theory might seem ambivalent is pluralism, which, insofar as it insists on anything, insists on repressing its own exclusions. Ellen Rooney argues in her new book that pluralism maintains its identity by rigorous exclusion-'the exclusion of exclusion' itself."-Modern PhilologyTable of Contents1. Reading Pluralism Symptomatically2. Persuasion and the Production of Knowledge3. The Limits of Pluralism Are Not Plural4. "Not to Worry": The Therapeutic Rhetoric of Stanley Fish5. Not Taking Sides: Reading the Rhetoric of Persuasion6. This Politics Which Is Not One
£16.13
Cornell University Press The Discourse of Modernism
Book SynopsisTimothy J. Reiss perceives a new mode of discourse emerging in early seventeenth-century Europe; he believes that this form of thought, still our own, may itself soon be giving way. In The Discourse of Modernism, Reiss sets up a theoretical model to describe the process by which one dominant class of discourse is replaced by another. He seeks to demonstrate that each new mode does not constitute a radical break from the past but in fact develops directly from its predecessor.Trade ReviewThis is a difficult book which makes an interesting contribution to the history of ideas. It should be valued by those whose special field is seventeenth- or eighteenth- century literature and rhetoric, as well as by scholars of epistemology of aesthetic theory. Timothy J. Reiss is an erudite and provocative scholar. -- Kirsty Cochrane * Review of English Studies *
£15.99
Cornell University Press No Spiritual Investment in the World
Book SynopsisThroughout the twentieth century, German writers, philosophers, theologians, and historians turned to Gnosticism to make sense of the modern condition. While some saw this ancient Christian heresy as a way to rethink modernity, most German intellectuals questioned Gnosticism''s return in a contemporary setting. In No Spiritual Investment in the World, Willem Styfhals explores the Gnostic worldview''s enigmatic place in these discourses on modernity, presenting a comprehensive intellectual history of Gnosticism''s role in postwar German thought. Establishing the German-Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes at the nexus of the debate, Styfhals traces how such figures as Hans Blumenberg, Hans Jonas, Eric Voegelin, Odo Marquard, and Gershom Scholem contended with Gnosticism and its tenets on evil and divine absence as metaphorical detours to address issues of cultural crisis, nihilism, and the legitimacy of the modern world. These concerns, he argues, centered on the difficulty Trade ReviewNo Spiritual Investment in the World is an extraordinary and seminal work of outstanding scholarship that is unreservedly recommended for college and university library Contemporary Philosophy collections and supplemental studies curriculum textbook lists. * Midwest Book Review *
£97.20
Cornell University Press No Spiritual Investment in the World
Book SynopsisThroughout the twentieth century, German writers, philosophers, theologians, and historians turned to Gnosticism to make sense of the modern condition. While some saw this ancient Christian heresy as a way to rethink modernity, most German intellectuals questioned Gnosticism''s return in a contemporary setting. In No Spiritual Investment in the World, Willem Styfhals explores the Gnostic worldview''s enigmatic place in these discourses on modernity, presenting a comprehensive intellectual history of Gnosticism''s role in postwar German thought. Establishing the German-Jewish philosopher Jacob Taubes at the nexus of the debate, Styfhals traces how such figures as Hans Blumenberg, Hans Jonas, Eric Voegelin, Odo Marquard, and Gershom Scholem contended with Gnosticism and its tenets on evil and divine absence as metaphorical detours to address issues of cultural crisis, nihilism, and the legitimacy of the modern world. These concerns, he argues, centered on the difficulty Trade ReviewNo Spiritual Investment in the World is an extraordinary and seminal work of outstanding scholarship that is unreservedly recommended for college and university library Contemporary Philosophy collections and supplemental studies curriculum textbook lists. * Midwest Book Review *
£24.80
Cornell University Press The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages
Book SynopsisThis book assess the relationship of literature to various other cultural forms in the Middle Ages. Jesse M. Gellrich uses the insights of such thinkers as Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida to explore the continuity of medieval ideas about speaking, writing, and texts.Trade ReviewOne of the most successful attempts yet to apply contemporary literary theory to medieval poetry. -- A.J. Minnis * Times Literary Supplement *
£15.99
Cornell University Press Unfelt
Book SynopsisUnfelt offers a new account of feeling during the British Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness, and patriotic ardor, James Noggle explores literary evocations of imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the period''s understanding of sensibility.Each of the four sections of Unfelton philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political economycharts the development of these idioms from early in the long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith, Noggle''s exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the scope of affect in the pTrade ReviewNoggle's superlative study traces unfelt tributaries of affect that, though not immediately perceptible, nevertheless flow together into the kinds of sea-changes that we might call identity formation, character development, or, on a much larger scale, social evolution writ large.... Precise, forthright, and circumspect... Unfelt is a book for scholars of the long eighteenth century, and it unquestionably succeeds as such. * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *James Noggle's Unfelt offers both genealogy and endorsement. Unfelt is a densely theorized book. * Modern Language Quarterly *Noggle's account certainly represents one of the most careful dialogues I've seen yet between eighteenth-century literary studies and the broader Spinozist paradigm of affect theory. * Eighteenth-Century Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Unfelt Affect 1. Philosophy: Affective Nonconsciousness 1.1. The Insensible Parts of Locke's Essay 1.2. David Hartley's Ghost Matter 1.3. Vivacity and Insensible Association: Condillac and Hume 1.4. Sentiment and Secret Consciousness: Haywood and Smith 2. Fiction: Unfelt Engagement 2.1. Unfeeling before Sensibility 2.2. External and Invisible 2.3. Insensible against Involuntary in Burney 2.4. Austen as Coda 3. Historiography: Insensible Revolutions 3.1. The Force of the Thing: Unfelt Moeurs in French Historiography 3.2. The Insensible Revolution and Scottish Historiography 3.3. Gibbon in History 3.4. The Embrace of Unfeeling 4. Political Economy: Moving with Money 4.1. Mandeville and the Other Happiness 4.2. Feeling Untaxed 4.3. The Money Flow 4.4. Invisible versus Insensible Epilogue: Insensible Emergence of Ideology
£36.10
Cornell University Press Toward a Concrete Philosophy
Book SynopsisToward a Concrete Philosophy explores the reactions of Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse to Martin Heidegger prior to their dismissal of him once he turned to the Nazi party in 1933. Mikko Immanen provides a fascinating glimpse of the three future giants of twentieth-century social criticism when they were still looking for their philosophical voices. By reconstructing their overlooked debates with Heidegger and Heideggerians, Immanen argues that Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse saw Heidegger''s 1927 magnum opus, Being and Time, as a serious effort to make philosophy relevant for life again and as the most provocative challenge to their nascent materialist diagnoses of the discontents of European modernity. Our knowledge of Adorno''s Frankfurt discussion with Frankfurt Heideggerians remains anecdotal, even though it led to a proto-version of Dialectic of Enlightenment''s idea of the entwinement of myth and reason. Similarly, Horkheimer''sTrade ReviewThe variety of responses to Heidegger may be said to be the theme of a new history of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, Toward a Concrete Philosophy: Heidegger and the Emergence of the Frankfurt School This impressive account by Mikko Immanen leads us into a vanished world of high culture, learning, and urbane civility—and its ruins, as these great European minds fled to the New World when the Nazis seized power in Germany. * The Review of Politics *There are many more biographical, culture-historical, and thematic connections between Heidegger and the Frankfurt School than the quasi-official story of mutual hostility recognizes. In Toward a Concrete Philosophy, Mikko Immanen takes significant steps to set the record straight. * Constellations: An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Making Good on Heidegger's Promise Part I: Who Owns the Copyright to the Problematic of "Being and Time"? Marcuse, Heidegger, and the Legacy of Hegel 1. The Un-Heideggerian Core of Marcuse's Most Heideggerian Text: The Lukács Question 2. The Hegel Debate: The Pinnacle of Marcuse's Freiburg Years 3. Stakes of the Hegel Debate: Davos, Marxism, and the Black Notebooks Part II: The Frankfurt Discussion: Adorno, Heidegger, and the Frankfurt Heideggerians 4. The Frankfurt Discussion: A Sequel to the Epochal Davos Disputation 5. "What Is the Human Being?" Thrown Dasein or Cura Posterior? 6. Demythologizing Heidegger's Thrownness: Toward Dialectic of Enlightenment Part III: The Young Horkheimer on Heidegger: From Guarded Enthusiasm to Determined Opposition 7. Being and Time: The Primacy of Practical Reason Misunderstood 8. Critical Theory as a Reply to Heidegger, Scheler, and the Frankfurt Heideggerians Conclusion
£97.20
Cornell University Press Unfelt
Book SynopsisUnfelt offers a new account of feeling during the British Enlightenment, finding that the passions and sentiments long considered as preoccupations of the era depend on a potent insensibility, the secret emergence of pronounced emotions that only become apparent with time. Surveying a range of affects including primary sensation, love and self-love, greed, happiness, and patriotic ardor, James Noggle explores literary evocations of imperceptibility and unfeeling that pervade and support the period''s understanding of sensibility.Each of the four sections of Unfelton philosophy, the novel, historiography, and political economycharts the development of these idioms from early in the long eighteenth century to their culmination in the age of sensibility. From Locke to Eliza Haywood, Henry Fielding, and Frances Burney, and from Dudley North to Hume and Adam Smith, Noggle''s exploration of the insensible dramatically expands the scope of affect in the pTrade ReviewNoggle's superlative study traces unfelt tributaries of affect that, though not immediately perceptible, nevertheless flow together into the kinds of sea-changes that we might call identity formation, character development, or, on a much larger scale, social evolution writ large.... Precise, forthright, and circumspect... Unfelt is a book for scholars of the long eighteenth century, and it unquestionably succeeds as such. * Eighteenth-Century Fiction *James Noggle's Unfelt offers both genealogy and endorsement. Unfelt is a densely theorized book. * Modern Language Quarterly *Noggle's account certainly represents one of the most careful dialogues I've seen yet between eighteenth-century literary studies and the broader Spinozist paradigm of affect theory. * Eighteenth-Century Studies *Table of ContentsIntroduction: Unfelt Affect 1. Philosophy: Affective Nonconsciousness 1.1. The Insensible Parts of Locke's Essay 1.2. David Hartley's Ghost Matter 1.3. Vivacity and Insensible Association: Condillac and Hume 1.4. Sentiment and Secret Consciousness: Haywood and Smith 2. Fiction: Unfelt Engagement 2.1. Unfeeling before Sensibility 2.2. External and Invisible 2.3. Insensible against Involuntary in Burney 2.4. Austen as Coda 3. Historiography: Insensible Revolutions 3.1. The Force of the Thing: Unfelt Moeurs in French Historiography 3.2. The Insensible Revolution and Scottish Historiography 3.3. Gibbon in History 3.4. The Embrace of Unfeeling 4. Political Economy: Moving with Money 4.1. Mandeville and the Other Happiness 4.2. Feeling Untaxed 4.3. The Money Flow 4.4. Invisible versus Insensible Epilogue: Insensible Emergence of Ideology
£20.69
Cornell University Press The Limits of Autobiography
Book SynopsisIn The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh Gilmore analyzes texts that depict trauma by combining elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory in ways that challenge the constraints of autobiography. Astute and compelling readings of works by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson explore how each poses the questions How have I lived? and How will I live? in relation to the social and psychic forms within which trauma emerges. First published in 2001, this new edition of one of the foundational texts in trauma studies includes a new preface by the author that assesses the gravitational pull between life writing and trauma in the twenty-first century, a tension that continues to produce innovative and artful means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation.Trade ReviewLeigh Gilmore's The Limits of Autobiography is a fine addition to the body of work in trauma studies, and is highly recommended for all working in the mental health disciplines. The book is a rich cornucopia of literary and psychological analyses, theoretical sophistication, and interdisciplinary connectedness; these treasures can only be suggested here. * Metapsychology Online Review *Through theoretically nuanced, lucid, and insightful readings, Gilmore demonstrates the ability of narrative to transform trauma, to speak to a certain truth about the relationship between trauma and identity that goes beyond the exigencies of accuracy and objectivity that pertain to a juridical contact. Any reader interested in the myriad interpenetrations of violence, the law, identity, family, and life writing will find much to admire in this impressive study. * Biography *Gilmore offers astute and compelling commentaries in relation to the social and psychic forms within which selected autobiographers told their personal stories in literate and unconventional ways. Informative, thought-provoking chapters comprise this unique and highly recommended contribution to the literary study of the autobiography. * The Bookwatch *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Limits of Autobiography 1. Represent Yourself 2. Bastard Testimony: Illegitimacy and Incest in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina 3. There Will Always Be a Father: Transference and the Auto/biographical Demand in Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart 4. There Will Always Be a Mother: Jamaica Kincaid's Serial Autobiography 5. Without Names: An Anatomy of Absence in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body Conclusion: The Knowing Subject and an Alternative Jurisprudence of Trauma
£97.20
Cornell University Press The Limits of Autobiography
Book SynopsisIn The Limits of Autobiography, Leigh Gilmore analyzes texts that depict trauma by combining elements of autobiography, fiction, biography, history, and theory in ways that challenge the constraints of autobiography. Astute and compelling readings of works by Michel Foucault, Louis Althusser, Dorothy Allison, Mikal Gilmore, Jamaica Kincaid, and Jeanette Winterson explore how each poses the questions "How have I lived?" and "How will I live?" in relation to the social and psychic forms within which trauma emerges. First published in 2001, this new edition of one of the foundational texts in trauma studies includes a new preface by the author that assesses the gravitational pull between life writing and trauma in the twenty-first century, a tension that continues to produce innovative and artful means of confronting kinship, violence, and self-representation.Trade ReviewLeigh Gilmore's The Limits of Autobiography is a fine addition to the body of work in trauma studies, and is highly recommended for all working in the mental health disciplines. The book is a rich cornucopia of literary and psychological analyses, theoretical sophistication, and interdisciplinary connectedness; these treasures can only be suggested here. * Metapsychology Online Review *Through theoretically nuanced, lucid, and insightful readings, Gilmore demonstrates the ability of narrative to transform trauma, to speak to a certain truth about the relationship between trauma and identity that goes beyond the exigencies of accuracy and objectivity that pertain to a juridical contact. Any reader interested in the myriad interpenetrations of violence, the law, identity, family, and life writing will find much to admire in this impressive study. * Biography *Gilmore offers astute and compelling commentaries in relation to the social and psychic forms within which selected autobiographers told their personal stories in literate and unconventional ways. Informative, thought-provoking chapters comprise this unique and highly recommended contribution to the literary study of the autobiography. * The Bookwatch *Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Limits of Autobiography 1. Represent Yourself 2. Bastard Testimony: Illegitimacy and Incest in Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina 3. There Will Always Be a Father: Transference and the Auto/biographical Demand in Mikal Gilmore's Shot in the Heart 4. There Will Always Be a Mother: Jamaica Kincaid's Serial Autobiography 5. Without Names: An Anatomy of Absence in Jeanette Winterson's Written on the Body Conclusion: The Knowing Subject and an Alternative Jurisprudence of Trauma
£20.39
Cornell University Press The Counterhuman Imaginary
Book SynopsisThe Counterhuman Imaginary proposes that alongside the historical, social, and institutional structures of human reality that seem to be the sole subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is everywhere in evidence. Laura Brown finds that within eighteenth-century British literature, the human cultural imaginary can be seen, equally, as a counterhuman imaginaryan alternative realm whose scope and terms exceed human understanding or order.Through close readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, along with lapdog lyrics, circulation narratives that give agency to inanimate objects like coins and carriages, and poetry about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Brown traces the ways presence and power of the nonhumanweather, natural disasters, animals, even the concept of lovenot only influence human creativity, subjectivity, and history but are inseparable from them. Traversing literary theory, animal studies, new materiali
£97.20
Cornell University Press Shapes of Time
Book SynopsisShapes of Time explores how concepts of time and history were spatialized in early twentieth-century German thought. Michael McGillen locates efforts in German modernism to conceive of alternative shapes of timebeyond those of historicism and nineteenth-century philosophies of historyat the boundary between secular and theological discourses. By analyzing canonical works of German modernismthose of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musilhe identifies the ways in which spatial imagery and metaphors were employed to both separate the end of history from a narrative framework and to map the liminal relation between history and eschatology.Drawing on theories and practices as disparate as constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, photography, and urban architecture, Shapes of Time presents original connections between modernism, theology, and mathematics as played out within the canon of twentieth-century German letters. Concep
£97.20
Cornell University Press Shapes of Time
Book SynopsisShapes of Time explores how concepts of time and history were spatialized in early twentieth-century German thought. Michael McGillen locates efforts in German modernism to conceive of alternative shapes of timebeyond those of historicism and nineteenth-century philosophies of historyat the boundary between secular and theological discourses. By analyzing canonical works of German modernismthose of Karl Barth, Franz Rosenzweig, Siegfried Kracauer, and Robert Musilhe identifies the ways in which spatial imagery and metaphors were employed to both separate the end of history from a narrative framework and to map the liminal relation between history and eschatology.Drawing on theories and practices as disparate as constructivism, non-Euclidean geometry, photography, and urban architecture, Shapes of Time presents original connections between modernism, theology, and mathematics as played out within the canon of twentieth-century German letters. Concep
£23.39
Cornell University Press The Counterhuman Imaginary
Book SynopsisThe Counterhuman Imaginary proposes that alongside the historical, social, and institutional structures of human reality that seem to be the sole subject of the literary text, an other-than-human world is everywhere in evidence. Laura Brown finds that within eighteenth-century British literature, the human cultural imaginary can be seen, equally, as a counterhuman imaginaryan alternative realm whose scope and terms exceed human understanding or order.Through close readings of works by Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope, along with lapdog lyrics, circulation narratives that give agency to inanimate objects like coins and carriages, and poetry about the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, Brown traces the ways presence and power of the nonhumanweather, natural disasters, animals, even the concept of lovenot only influence human creativity, subjectivity, and history but are inseparable from them. Traversing literary theory, animal studies, new materiali
£16.14
Stanford University Press Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary
Book SynopsisAn internationally famous philosopher and best-selling author during his lifetime, Georg Simmel has been marginalized in contemporary intellectual and cultural history. This neglect belies his pathbreaking role in revealing the theoretical significance of phenomena—including money, gender, urban life, and technology—that subsequently became established arenas of inquiry in cultural theory. It further ignores his philosophical impact on thinkers as diverse as Benjamin, Musil, and Heidegger. Integrating intellectual biography, philosophical interpretation, and a critical examination of the history of academic disciplines, this book restores Simmel to his rightful place as a major figure and challenges the frameworks through which his contributions to modern thought have been at once remembered and forgotten.Trade Review"The most important study of philosopher George Simmel to ever appear in English, this book does more than contribute to our understanding of a major modern thinker: it offers a fascinating analysis of knowledge formation at the turn of the twentieth century and is a crucial addition to our understanding of Western modernity itself." -- Michael Jennings * Princeton University *"Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary is remarkable for its breadth of knowledge, its philosophical discernment, and its sophisticated approach to the complexity of both Simmel's work and our own contemporary existence." -- Patrice Petro * UC Santa Barbara. *"Anyone interested in understanding the character – and especially the fate – of Simmel's thought would do well to consult Elizabeth Goodstein's Georg Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary." -- Paul Reitter * Times Literary Supplement *"Goodstein has written a truly important book on Simmel and his place on the margins of the discipline of sociology, but beyond this I think she has also produced an equally important work on the need to think differently in a world defined by hyper-connectivity and what Simmel called infinite reciprocity." -- Mark Featherstone * Theory, Culture and Society *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsPrologue: Modernist Philosophy and the History of Theory chapter abstractThe Prologue sets out the challenge of understanding a thinker who does not fit comfortably into disciplinary categories, presenting Simmel, who was known as a sociologist, a neo-Kantian, and a philosopher of life, as a liminal thinker whose fame and subsequent marginalization index a theoretically significant illegibility. Embracing this marginality and foregrounding the complexity and multiplicity of his oeuvre, it argues, can render Simmel's historical and theoretical significance visible, helping establish critical perspective on contemporary modes of thought by exposing the intertwined genealogies of the academic disciplines of philosophy and sociology and of the metadisciplinary divisions between the humanities and natural and social sciences. Approaching Simmel as modernist philosopher suggests a strategy for rereading the intellectual history of the twentieth century that recognizes his inter- and trans-disciplinary theoretical contributions even as it identifies unrealized possibilities in the liminal space before the modern disciplinary ordering of inquiry was naturalized. 1Introduction: Simmel's Modernity chapter abstractDrawing on primary sources that attest to Simmel's wide-ranging impact on modernist cultural and intellectual life, but also to his checkered academic career, Chapter 1 situates the world-famous philosopher, sociologist, and public intellectual in the historical and cultural milieu of fin-de-siècle Berlin. It introduces the problem of disciplinarity: Simmel's contributions to social science were initially regarded as philosophical innovations, and his self-understanding as a thinker changed over time. Thinking back beyond the naturalized bifurcation of reflection on social and cultural life into humanistic and social scientific disciplines by exploring the meaning of Simmel's shifting self-definition can disclose new resources for cultural theory. Although Simmel's conceptual and methodological role in helping reframe the philosophical inheritance goes largely unrecognized today, terms and concepts with important histories in twentieth-century theory—including constellation, condensation, configuration, form of life, and life-world—may be traced to his work. 2Simmel as Classic: Representation and the Rhetoric of Disciplinarity chapter abstractExploring the relations between Simmel's evolving self-understanding and the paradigm shift that brought the modern social sciences into being, this chapter focuses on the relativistic or perspectivist rethinking of concepts underpinning his mature, modernist approach to philosophizing. Presenting Simmel as a mostly forgotten founding father of modern cultural and critical theory whose work anticipated and influenced subsequent thinkers in many different fields, it begins a critical genealogy of his canonization that uncovers the distorting effects of Simmel's own self-representations. Arguing that he has been systematically misrepresented as an unsystematic thinker through his reception as a sociologist, it places him in the dialectical philosophical tradition, foregrounding Simmel's distinctive conception of form and underlining the importance of the focus on "super-individual" cultural and linguistic formations he inherited from Lazarus and Steinthal's Völkerpsychologie (cultural psychology). 3Memory/Legacy: Georg Simmel as (Mostly) Forgotten Founding Father chapter abstractThis chapter considers how Simmel has been represented and read into the disciplinary canon and history of sociology. Centered on a close examination of the American reception that played a decisive role in establishing, but also marginalizing Simmel as a canonical sociologist, it foregrounds the repeated failures of efforts to overcome the clichés and misrepresentations that have shaped his reception. The hermeneutically questionable reading practices that have facilitated the entry of Simmel's ideas into social science have simultaneously rendered them fertile and obscured the larger philosophical horizons of his thinking. The combination of institutional and disciplinary liminality during his lifetime and a reception marked by ambivalence is historically and theoretically significant: Simmel's apparent illegibility, the chapter argues, can become a site for reflection on constitutive features of the modern disciplinary imaginary that do not form part of methodological self-consciousness and thereby disclose new theoretical resources for today. 4Style as Substance: Simmel's Modernism and the Disciplinary Imaginary chapter abstractThis chapter begins (re)reading key Simmelian texts for still-urgent theoretical and methodological concerns, presenting a work considered the first sociology of modernity, his 1900 Philosophy of Money, as a masterpiece of modernist philosophy and the twentieth century's most significant mostly unread theoretical text. Arguing that its highly selective reception in sociology has obscured the philosophical import of Simmel's approach to everyday social and cultural phenomena, it foregrounds the philosophical and methodological ambition of the work to render visible the contours of an influential modernist style of thought that helped reorient philosophy toward historically and culturally situated, lived experience. The chapter concludes with an examination of Simmel's rethinking of the concepts of culture and spirit, underlining the philosophical significance of the famous discussion of "The Style of Life" that concludes a work that "aspires to be a philosophy of historical and social life as a whole." 5Performing Relativity: Money and Modernist Philosophy chapter abstractFramed by a close reading of the Preface to the Philosophy of Money, this chapter interrogates the tensions between Simmel's methodological ambition and his avowed relativism. Tracing how the project initially conceived as a "psychology of money" took on philosophical contours, it examines how thinking money led Simmel to redefine his disciplinary identity. It then brings the Philosophy of Money's frequently misconstrued effort to create a "new story beneath historical materialism" into conversation with Simmel's conception of the value-, meaning-, and knowledge-generating "cultural process" in and through which, on his post-Nietzschean view, subjectivity and objectivity evolve. Finally, the chapter examines his phenomenological method for illuminating the contradictory multiplicity of (historical, spiritual, cultural) life through a systematic use of "phenomenal series" or "arrays of appearances" to perform a modernist affirmation of the complexity and contradiction of lived experience from the perspective of a cogent metaphysical relativism. 6Disciplining the Philosophy of Money chapter abstractUnderstanding Simmel's relativism as modernist method, this chapter considers how the Philosophy of Money destabilizes what have since become very real boundaries between philosophy and social science. It begins by examining early responses to the work, foregrounding the differential reactions to a modernist mode of theorizing that intervenes in multiple discourses without becoming part of the disciplines that generate them, then considers how the disciplining of Simmel's work as a sociological classic legitimates the very practices of selective reading through which his methodological and theoretical contributions are obscured. Simmel's self-reflexive attempt to illuminate the phenomenon of signification as a dimension of human (collective and individual) life remains liminal for both sociology and philosophy today. Presenting that liminality as a symptom of lacunae constitutive for the modern disciplinary imaginary as a whole, this chapter sets the stage for a return to Simmel's mature Sociology in Part III. 7Thinking Liminality, Rethinking Disciplinarity chapter abstractThis chapter returns to Simmel's disciplinary identity from the perspective of the history of philosophy, attempting to understand a mode of theorizing not just interdisciplinary but preceding, thematizing, and opposing the disciplining of thinking in the early twentieth century. Taking up "the problem of sociology," then returning once again to the Philosophy of Money to consider the account of sciences and disciplines, norms and laws developed there, it asks how the intellectual-cultural and institutional formation of inquiry shapes what can be thought. After foregrounding Simmel's insistence that the cultural-intellectual configurations that organize our modes of inquiry must be grasped in their contingency and specificity, that we need to rethink conceptual consistency by developing "a new concept of cohesion" that refigures thinking about foundations and values in a relativist (historicist, culturalist) key, it returns to Simmel's highly self-reflexive conception of disciplinarity as a historically and culturally contingent formation. 8The Stranger and the Sociological Imagination chapter abstractThis chapter returns to the problem of Simmel's disciplinarity to explore the theoretical potential of his marginality. Examining how his mature reformulation of the "problem of sociology" resituates the figure of the stranger in the dialectical philosophical tradition, it demonstrates that the pervasive troping of Simmel as the stranger he theorized has a symptomatic quality that casts light on the significance of history for theory. Only in light of the ambition and accomplishment of the Philosophy of Money, it argues, do the disciplinary and meta-disciplinary contributions of the Sociology become legible. Here, too, Simmel's modernist reimagining of conceptual consistency is conveyed performatively, via phenomenological series that refigure thinking in a relativist (historicist, culturalist) key. Disclosing new theoretical perspectives on difference and strangeness in (theorizing) culture and society, Simmel's modernist writing transgresses oppositions between humanistic and social scientific, metaphysical and empirical, that are constitutive for the contemporary disciplinary imaginary. Epilogue: Georg Simmel as Modernist Philosopher chapter abstractAs a mature thinker and public intellectual, Simmel strove to foster "philosophical culture" in the face of increasing disciplinary specialization and the professionalization of thought itself in the emergent modern research university. His late work, though frequently misconstrued as turning from sociology to a metaphysical philosophy of life, is continuous with the effort to modernize philosophy in the Philosophy of Money. Considering Simmel's time in Strasbourg and the impact of World War I on his thought and life, the Epilogue briefly discusses his influential late essays on culture and his final masterwork, the View of Life, underlining the significance of his subsequent virtual erasure from intellectual history. Letters written in the weeks before his death attest to Simmel's own insight into the untimeliness of his thought and suggest that his modernist revisioning of the very oldest aims of philosophy and philosophizing may provide a model for theoretical innovation today.
£26.99
Stanford University Press Theory of the Earth
Book SynopsisWe need a new philosophy of the earth. Geological time used to refer to slow and gradual processes, but today we are watching land sink into the sea and forests transform into deserts. We can even see the creation of new geological strata made of plastic, chicken bones, and other waste that could remain in the fossil record for millennia or longer. Crafting a philosophy of geology that rewrites natural and human history from the broader perspective of movement, Thomas Nail provides a new materialist, kinetic ethics of the earth that speaks to this moment. Climate change and other ecological disruptions challenge us to reconsider the deep history of minerals, atmosphere, plants, and animals and to take a more process-oriented perspective that sees humanity as part of the larger cosmic and terrestrial drama of mobility and flow. Building on his earlier work on the philosophy of movement, Nail argues that we should shift our biocentric emphasis from conservation to expenditure, flux, and planetary diversity. Theory of the Earth urges us to rethink our ethical relationship to one another, the planet, and the cosmos at large.Trade Review"One of the most remarkable books I've read in some time. Thomas Nail forges a mode of materialist philosophy in conversation with recent, cross-disciplinary movements in the environmental humanities, generating a mode of thinking and theorizing that moves beyond the scale of human life." -- Claire Colebrook * Pennsylvania State University *"Thomas Nail has developed a much-needed, and previously underrepresented philosophy of geology. In elaborating a process theory of a kinetic earth, this book helps us imagine our planet as neither a static place of habitation nor a protective Mother Earth." -- Matthias Fritsch * Concordia University *"Is ecocide, unconsciously practiced by industrio-techno-capitalist humans to their own detriment and potential extinction, a direct result of the reduction and destruction of Earth's complex energy dissipation? In an ambitious and fabulous synthesis, with a Lucretian sensibility and deep scientific rapprochement, Thomas Nail gives us back a real Earth, where life is part of a planetary more-than-human dissipative system and humans better get with the flow. A fascinating, difficult, needed scientifico-philosophical document, Theory of the Earth should interest and irritate scientists as it provides a needed provocation to much modern environmental philosophy." -- Dorion Sagan * author of Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science *"While Anthropocene ideology focuses on the destructive action of humans on a passive Earth, Nail posits that conceptual refocusing—away from conservation toward an ethics of energy transformation—can help address the serious environmental problems we face. Though chiefly a work of philosophy, this text is accessible for any advanced reader interested in environmental meta issues. Recommended." -- E. Kincanon * CHOICE *Table of ContentsContents and AbstractsIntroduction chapter abstractWe are witnessing a second Copernican revolution, in which the earth is not just moving around the sun but is itself internally on the move. Terrestrial events that we could in the past only have imagined taking place over huge time scales are now happening before our eyes. Flora and fauna are headed north in mass migrations, throwing tens of thousands of species into motion around the world. Today, half of all species on earth are on the move, including insects, viruses, and microbes. However, since not all species are moving at the same rate or in the same way, species are coming into contact with one another in new ways and producing new hybrids. A new history of the earth is necessary in order to understand the immanent conditions of the present and the kind of earth that we are. 1The Flow of Matter chapter abstractThe earth flows because the matter of the cosmos flows through it. It is not an unchanging or even uniformly changing substance following its own autonomous processes. Geology is also cosmology, and the cosmos flows. Flows of matter continually compose, cycle through, and flow out of the earth. The earth is only a regional circulation of a much larger kinetic and entropic process. Historically, however, philosophy, politics, and much of geology have not taken the ongoing flow of cosmic matter seriously. This has led to a complete inversion of what the earth is and the human relationship to it. The earth is not a planet, but rather a process of terrestrialization. 2The Fold of Elements chapter abstractThe pedetic flow and fluctuation of matter is constitutive of the earth and its elemental body. The word "earth" designates not only a planet and its soil but also one of the four classical elements. The earth is elemental and elementary only because the universe is—and the latter is the key to understanding the former. If the element "earth" is mineral, then the earth must share its elemental namesake with the mineral bodies of the cosmos. In this sense, earth is not just on the earth, but in the universe and from the universe. In other words, the universe was already earthly before the earth was terrestrialized. 3The Planetary Field chapter abstractMatter flows and folds into elements, but these elements are in turn distributed into celestial and planetary fields. Elements are conjoined into atomic and molecular composites that in turn are arranged and ordered together in a field of celestial and planetary circulation. This is the third core concept of geokinetics. If matter flows and elements fold into periodic cycles, planetary fields organize them all in a continuous feedback loop. This chapter provides a geokinetic theory of how conjoined flows become organized according to distinct regimes or planetary fields. 4Centripetal Minerality chapter abstractThe earth is material, kinetic, and thus historical; it is possible for different, coexisting, and mixed planetary fields to emerge. In other words, it is possible for matter to distribute itself differently over time into different patterns or orders of arrangement. There is no way to know what the earth is without understanding its historical process of becoming. If this is the case then it is possible to study this material history and to discern the planetary regimes or fields along with the different elements and beings that are distributed there: minerals, atmosphere, plants, and animals. What this means is that the contemporary earth is not defined by a single geokinetic field or pattern of motion, but is composed of a motley mixture of everything that has ever been. 5Hadean Earth chapter abstractIn this chapter we look closely at the kinetic patterns produced by three major geokinetic phenomena that define the Hadean earth: meteors, the moon, and water. The argument of this chapter is that each of these major phenomena is defined predominately by a distinctly centripetal pattern of motion and a geokinetics of mineralization. Centripetal mineralization was the first major transcendental kinetic regime invented by the earth. This first movement inward toward the center from the periphery along differentiated layers continues today as the immanent condition of planetary life and mineral-based technologies. 6Centrifugal Atmospherics chapter abstractThe second major geokinetic field to rise to dominance in the earth's history was the atmospheric field. This second type of field became increasingly prevalent over the course of the Archean Eon, from about 4 billion years ago to about 2.5 billion years ago. Three major events define this transition: the end of heavy meteor bombardment, the emergence of living organisms, and the rise of a highly oxygenated atmosphere. These events were the cause of a dramatic historical shift in the earth's pattern of motion, from one of largely centripetal accretion and crystallization to one of increasingly centrifugal movements of outward expansion, respiration, and reproduction. 7Archean Earth I: Pneumatology chapter abstractDuring the Archean Eon (4 to 2.5 billion years ago), the entire planet began to move in an increasingly centrifugal pattern of motion from the center out to the periphery (and back). This chapter argues that the emergence of a prevailing centrifugal pattern of motion occurs increasingly over the course of the Archean Eon. The deep history of atmospherization is the material condition of terrestrial motion for all subsequent eons, up to the present. In this chapter we look closely at the kinetic patterns produced by four major geokinetic phenomena that define the Archean earth: sky, clouds, mountains, and life. The argument of this chapter is that each of these major phenomena is defined predominately by a distinctly centrifugal pattern of motion and a geokinetics of atmospherics. 8Archean Earth II: Biogenesis chapter abstractThe second major historical event of the Archean Eon was the emergence of living organisms (prokaryotic bacteria and archaea) with metabolism, genetic multiplication, and natural selection. Organisms are dissipative or vortical systems that have the distinct ability to remember and reproduce the material kinetic patterns that produced them. During the Archean, the entire earth erupted into centrifugal motion. Volcanoes blasted themselves into the air, the ocean evaporated into the clouds, and organisms released an incredible amount of volatiles and stored energy. However, by the end of the Archean Eon, around 2.5 billion years ago, a new form of life emerged that would change the motion of the planet yet again: plants. 9Tensional Vegetality chapter abstractThe third major geokinetic planetary field to rise to dominance in the earth's history was the vegetal field. Over the course of the Proterozoic Eon, the longest eon in the earth's history, from about 2.5 billion years ago to 541 million years ago, three major events occurred: the emergence of eukaryotes (cells with a nucleus and organelles), the development of multicellular organisms (such as protozoa, fungi, and plants), and the arrival of life on land. All these events were defined by a new kind of tensional motion inside, between, and through these organisms. But this new pattern of motion defined by a system of held contrasts was not limited to life alone. Life, like mineral and atmospheric flows, is not just one discrete region among others, in isolation. Vegetal life completed, saturated, and transformed all planetary processes. 10Proterozoic Earth chapter abstractDuring the Proterozoic Eon, the entire life-saturated planet began to fold itself up into a vast knotwork of cellularized tensions. The birth of cellular and complex cellular life was not just the birth of a new type of substance "on" the earth but a new kinetic relation of the earth to itself. This chapter argues that the emergence of a prevailing tensional pattern of motion occurred increasingly over the course of the Proterozoic Eon. I argue that the deep history of phytality is the material condition of terrestrial motion for all subsequent eons, up to the present. In this chapter we look closely at the increasingly tensional kinetic patterns produced by vegetal bodies and that eventually defined the Proterozoic and early Phanerozoic earth: thallus, stem, leaf, root, seed, and flower. 11Elastic Animality chapter abstractAnimality is the fourth major geokinetic planetary pattern of motion. The rise of animality overlapped with the end of the Proterozoic Eon as vegetality slowly dovetailed into the Phanerozoic Eon, from 541 million years ago to the present. The Phanerozoic Eon began with the Cambrian explosion of diverse animal and plant life. This explosion was itself made possible by increased oxygen in the atmosphere and mineral-rich soils produced by vegetal life across the continents. The emergence and proliferation of animals on the earth was the source of a radical new regime of elastic motion defined by the ability of living matter to expand, contract, stretch and oscillate back and forth to a degree never before seen on the earth. 12Phanerozoic Earth I: Kinomorphology chapter abstractThe Phanerozoic Eon (541 million years ago to the present) is our geological eon. It began with the Cambrian explosion of living forms, the greatest number of evolving creatures in a a single period in the history of the earth. During the Phanerozoic, the entire planet became increasingly elastic as the proliferation of life forms expanded, contracted, and mutated more rapidly than ever before. The more new organisms emerged, the faster they changed their environment. This chapter argues that the emergence of a prevailing elastic pattern of motion occurred increasingly over the course of the Phanerozoic Eon. In this chapter we look closely at the increasingly elastic kinetic structures produced by animal bodies that eventually saturated the late Proterozoic and early Phanerozoic Earth: body, head, and tail. 13Phanerozoic Earth II: Terrestrialization chapter abstractThe third major historico-morphological event of the Phanerozoic Eon was the explosion of elastic sensory organs and limbs in the animal body. With the evolution of mollusks, arthropods, and vertebrates, an enormous transformation occurred as animal life in the seas spread to the land and the skies. The process of terrestrial animality saturated the untapped energy of these new regions—completing the transformation of the earth into its full animality. The material evolution of animal morphology is also a kinetic evolution toward the increasingl elasticity, mobility, sensitivity, and energy expenditure of the earth more broadly. Animals are not on the earth but aspects of the earth itself—the becoming animal and becoming elastic of the earth. 14Kinocene Earth chapter abstractToday, the earth is in increasingly unstable motion. The earth, as we have seen in this book, has always been in motion, but today these four major patterns of geological motion have become increasingly disrupted due to the coordinated efforts of certain human groups. What I am calling the "Kinocene" in the final Part of this book is a new geological period not because motion is new to the earth, as we have seen, but because of the increasing mobility of the earth's geological strata, described in Parts I and II. At the same time, however, we are also witnessing for the first time in a long time a significant reduction in the net kinetic expenditure of the planet as a whole. 15Kinocene Ethics chapter abstractThe ethics of kinetic expenditure is not a universal ethical ground but a hypothetical ethical ground that allows us to say not only that capitalism is descriptively wrong about nature but that it is unethical (assuming we want to survive), on the grounds that it leads to the reduction of planetary expenditure (including the reduction of human and ecological diversity). Furthermore, the ethics of expenditure relates to the material conditions of all human society as such. If we even want to have humanist ethics in the first place, there must be humans alive to practice it. Thus, implicit in all humanist ethics is the assumption of planetary existence and survival. In short: If we want human ethics, then we need to be alive and survive, and if we want to survive then we need to try to increase planetary expenditure (with all that entails). Conclusion: The Future chapter abstractEverything is in motion. The earth is in motion because so is the cosmos. The West's historically mistaken belief in a static or stable earth is one of the biggest mistakes ever made. This mistake is symptomatic of a similar belief in stasis in politics, ontology, science, and the arts. Together, the belief in stasis of one form or another across the major domains of human knowledge and activity is the source of our contemporary world crisis. Movement and expenditure had always been primary. Human history was not the progressive realization of static forms. Progress and development in the Western tradition are dead. Human history can now be seen for what it is: a series of kinetic patterns iterated in the material diffusion of the cosmos itself.
£86.40
Stanford University Press Religion: Rereading What Is Bound Together
Book SynopsisWith this profound final work, completed in the days leading up to his death, Michel Serres presents a vivid picture of his thinking about religion—a constant preoccupation since childhood—thereby completing Le Grand Récit, the comprehensive explanation of the world and of humanity to which he devoted the last twenty years of his life. Themes from Serres's earlier writings—energy and information, the role of the media in modern society, the anthropological function of sacrifice, the role of scientific knowledge, the problem of evil—are reinterpreted here in the light of the Old Testament accounts of Isaac and Jonah and a variety of Gospel episodes, including the Three Wise Men of the Epiphany, the Transfiguration, Peter's denying Christ, the Crucifixion, Emmaus, and the Pentecost. Monotheistic religion, Serres argues, resembles mathematical abstraction in its dazzling power to bring together the real and the virtual, the natural and the transcendent; but only in its Christian embodiment is it capable of binding together human beings in such a way that partisan attachments are dissolved and a new era of history, free for once of the lethal repetition of collective violence, can be entered into.Trade Review"A stunning book by one of the most profound and original philosophers of science of the twentieth century, written in the final moments that separate life from death. Michel Serres realized that the whole of his thought over the course of an astonishingly prolific career would be incomplete if it did not take into account the indispensable role played by religion in every aspect of human life, and he tells us why in his own inimitable way."—Jean-Pierre Dupuy, Professor Emeritus of Philosophy, École Polytechnique, Paris
£86.40
Stanford University Press Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom
Book SynopsisA monumental new biography of a pivotal yet poorly understood pioneer in modern philosophy. When a painter once told Goethe that he wanted to paint the most celebrated man of the age, Goethe directed him to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel worked from the credo: To philosophize is to learn to live freely. While he was slow and cautious in the development of his philosophy, his intellectual growth was like an odyssey of the mind, and, contrary to popular belief, his life was full of twists and turns, suspense and even danger. In this landmark biography, the philosopher Klaus Vieweg paints a new picture of the life and work of the most important representative of German idealism. His vivid portrait provides readers an intimate account of Hegel's times and the milieu in which he developed his thought, along with detailed, clear-sighted analyses of Hegel's four major works. What results is a new interpretation of Hegel through the lens of reason and freedom. Vieweg draws on extensive archival research that has brought to light a wealth of hitherto undiscovered documents and handwritten notes relating to Hegel's work, touching on Hegel's engagement with the leading thinkers and writers of his age: Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hölderlin, and others. Combatting clichés and misunderstandings about Hegel, Vieweg also offers a sustained defense of the philosopher's more progressive impulses. Highly praised upon its release in Germany as having set the new biographical standard, this monumental work emphasizes Hegel's relevance for today, depicting him as a vital figure in the history of philosophy.Trade Review"Vieweg's biography of Hegel is more than the best work in its field—it sets new standards for a book on Hegel and for a philosopher's biography as such. It magically unites a detailed knowledge about Hegel's life and work with a deep engagement in today's emancipatory struggle. It is not a historicist account of Hegel's work as the result of its time; it makes Hegel our own contemporary."—Slavoj Žižek, author of Hegel in A Wired Brain"This is a landmark in the 200-year literature on Hegel. Skillfully uncovering the complex strands of ideas and influences that the philosopher weaves together, Vieweg takes Hegel seriously as a living presence in our efforts to understand the world today."—James J. Sheehan, author of Where Have All the Soldiers Gone?"In a crystal clear and vivid style, as far as its subject matter allows, one can trace the development of Hegel's thinking, its roots and influences, but also its originality and, above all, its enduring political relevance."—Richard Kämmerlings, Die Welt"An extensive biography of Hegel has been missing for many decades. Thankfully, Klaus Vieweg now offers one that will be standard for years to come."—GNOSTIIKA"The indisputable value of Vieweg's treatment of Hegel is the paraphrastic intellectual history, his 'walk-throughs' of the main works. Each is a tour de force. For the student of any of these Hegelian works, Vieweg provides a reliable and focused guide."—Russell Berman, author of Fiction Sets You Free"In a clever and vivid way, Vieweg combines biographical and anecdotal elements... with systematic considerations, which however always follow Hegel's way of thinking."—Micha Brumlik, Die Tageszeitung"Vieweg's opulent biography sets standards and may remain unmatched for years to come."—Otto A. Böhmer, Frankfurter Rundschau"A great, often surprising biography."—Jens Bisky, Süddeutsche Zeitung"Klaus Vieweg's outstanding biography, based on original research and written with verve and imagination, rightly places freedom and reason at the center of Hegel's thought. It paints an engaging and colorful picture of one of the world's greatest thinkers."—Stephen Houlgate, author of Hegel on Being"Vieweg's new biography makes us understand how, paradoxically and dialectically, Hegel's personal experience of the frustrated early attempts at founding a German Republic can account for a philosophy enabling and encouraging life in freedom, independently of place and time."—Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, author of Prose of the World"In a bravura weaving together of a richly textured narrative of Hegel's incident-packed life, the tumultuous socio-political world in which he lived, and exuberant reconstructions of the four foundational works, Vieweg has produced an all but unanswerable case that Hegel was, from his youth until his last days, a philosopher of the French Revolution, forever loyal to its ideals and promises, and his system, then and now, the most compelling philosophy of freedom, social freedom, we possess. Scintillating and irreplaceable."—Jay Bernstein, author of Political ConceptsTable of ContentsAbbreviations Introduction To Philosophize Is to Think Freely, to Learn to Live Freely 1. The Beloved Hometown: Growing Up in Stuttgart, 1770–1788 2. A Student at the Protestant Seminary:Tübingen, 1788–1793 3. A Private Tutor of a Patrician Family: Switzerland, 1793–1796 4. From a Mosaic of Fragments to the Cornerstone of a System: Frankfurt, 1797–1800 5. The Birth of Absolute Idealism: Jena 1801–1807 6. The Political Journalist: Bamberg, 1807–1808 7. The First Humanistic Gymnasium and the Science of Logic: Nuremberg, 1808–1816 8. The Owl of Minerva on the Neckar: Heidelberg, 1816–1818 9. The "Great Center": Becoming World-Famous in Berlin, 1818–1831 Obituaries Acknowledgments Notes Index of Names
£30.60
Stanford University Press White Musical Mythologies: Sonic Presence in
Book SynopsisIn a narrative that extends from fin de siècle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European and pre-modern cultures as they developed new conceptions of "pure sound." Pairing Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida, White Musical Mythologies offers an ambitious critical history of the ontology of sound, suggesting that the avant-garde ideal of "pure sound" was always an expression of western ethnocentrism. Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie's dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse's experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez's endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would "absorb" the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. These modernist artists believed that the presence effects of sound in their moment were more real and powerful than the outmoded norms of the European musical past. By examining musicians who strove to produce sonic presence, specifically by re-thinking the concept of musical writing (écriture), the book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound.Trade Review"It is not common that a book this elegant and erudite comes around. White Musical Mythologies is beautifully written, evocative, and historically textured. It is an outstanding example of a new generation of research in music and philosophy."—Michael Gallope, University of Minnesota"'How do you write about something that vanishes?,' Edmund Mendelssohn asks in the opening pages of White Musical Mythologies. The question's vulnerability, knowing no answer is waiting in the wings, augurs a beautifully unusual book, and an often unusually beautiful one too. Mendelssohn reframes musical modernism as an epochal tragedy of missed encounter: struggling and failing to source not just sound but the 'now' of presence itself, it seizes Being at beings' cost. But his critique is lighter than tragedy, unfolding patiently, generously, lyrically—the question of musical writing not behind it, but always being reopened and 'to come.'"—Seth Brodsky, University of ChicagoTable of ContentsPrelude: A Silence Filled with Speech 1. The Ontology of the Ineffable: Satie and Bergson 2. Ontological Machines: Varèse and Bataille 3. Ontological Appropriation: Boulez and Artaud 4. The Written Being of Sound: Cage and Derrida Postlude: A Simulacrum of a Presence
£64.80
Stanford University Press Walter Benjamin and the Idea of Natural History
Book SynopsisIn this incisive new work, Eli Friedlander demonstrates that Walter Benjamin's entire corpus, from early to late, comprises a rigorous and sustained philosophical questioning of how human beings belong to nature. Across seemingly heterogeneous writings, Friedlander argues, Benjamin consistently explores what the natural in the human comes to, that is, how nature is transformed, actualized, redeemed, and overcome in human existence. The book progresses gradually from Benjamin's philosophically fundamental writings on language and nature to his Goethean empiricism, from the presentation of ideas to the primal history of the Paris arcades. Friedlander's careful analysis brings out how the idea of natural history inflects Benjamin's conception of the work of art and its critique, his diagnosis of the mythical violence of the legal order, his account of the body and of action, of material culture and technology, as well as his unique vision of historical materialism. Featuring revelatory new readings of Benjamin's major works that differ, sometimes dramatically, from prevailing interpretations, this book reveals the internal coherence and philosophical force of Benjamin's thought.Trade Review"Friedlander's interpretative lens offers his readers a genuinely illuminating and deeply convincing way of appreciating both the local detail and the overarching significance of Benjamin's texts."—Stephen Mulhall, University of Oxford"Friedlander's highly original study resituates the interpretation and evaluation of Benjamin's immensely fecund work within the context of the most advanced contemporary thinking on first and second nature. The book will have a considerable impact across the humanistic disciplines."—David E. Wellbery, University of Chicago"Friedlander succeeds beautifully and convincingly in presenting Benjamin's seemingly heterogeneous oeuvre as a coherent philosophical effort. Timely reading for philosophers, Benjamin scholars, and all readers interested in the question of the human as a life-form in trying times."—Eva Geulen, Leibniz-Zentrum für Literatur- und KulturforschungTable of ContentsAcknowledgments Introduction: The Natural in the Human Part I: Nature in Language 1. God, Nature, and Man in Language 2. Naming Beauty 3. The Life and Afterlife of Words 4. The Life of Forms Part II: Life and Fate 5. The Guilt and Innocence of Life 6. Fate, Redemption, and Hope in Love 7. Myth, Law, and Life in Common Part III: Body and Corporeality 8. The Language of the Body and the Body of Language 9. Acting Naturally Part IV: Primal History 10. "From the Pagan Context of Nature into the Jewish Context of History" 11. Matters of Memory 12. First and Second Nature in Art Part V: The Image of the Contingent 13. Distorted Life Notes Bibliography Index
£92.80
Stanford University Press White Musical Mythologies: Sonic Presence in
Book SynopsisIn a narrative that extends from fin de siècle Paris to the 1960s, Edmund Mendelssohn examines modernist thinkers and composers who engaged with non-European and pre-modern cultures as they developed new conceptions of "pure sound." Pairing Erik Satie with Bergson, Edgard Varèse with Bataille, Pierre Boulez with Artaud, and John Cage with Derrida, White Musical Mythologies offers an ambitious critical history of the ontology of sound, suggesting that the avant-garde ideal of "pure sound" was always an expression of western ethnocentrism. Each of the musicians studied in this book re-created or appropriated non-European forms of expression as they conceived music ontologically, often thinking music as something immediate and immersive: from Satie's dabblings with mysticism and exoticism in bohemian Montmartre of the 1890s to Varèse's experience of ethnographic exhibitions and surrealist poetry in 1930s Paris, and from Boulez's endeavor to theorize a kind of musical writing that would "absorb" the sounds of non-European musical traditions to Cage, who took inspiration from Eastern thought as he wrote about sound, silence, and chance. These modernist artists believed that the presence effects of sound in their moment were more real and powerful than the outmoded norms of the European musical past. By examining musicians who strove to produce sonic presence, specifically by re-thinking the concept of musical writing (écriture), the book demonstrates that we cannot fully understand French theory in its novelty and complexity without music and sound.Trade Review"It is not common that a book this elegant and erudite comes around. White Musical Mythologies is beautifully written, evocative, and historically textured. It is an outstanding example of a new generation of research in music and philosophy."—Michael Gallope, University of Minnesota"'How do you write about something that vanishes?,' Edmund Mendelssohn asks in the opening pages of White Musical Mythologies. The question's vulnerability, knowing no answer is waiting in the wings, augurs a beautifully unusual book, and an often unusually beautiful one too. Mendelssohn reframes musical modernism as an epochal tragedy of missed encounter: struggling and failing to source not just sound but the 'now' of presence itself, it seizes Being at beings' cost. But his critique is lighter than tragedy, unfolding patiently, generously, lyrically—the question of musical writing not behind it, but always being reopened and 'to come.'"—Seth Brodsky, University of ChicagoTable of ContentsPrelude: A Silence Filled with Speech 1. The Ontology of the Ineffable: Satie and Bergson 2. Ontological Machines: Varèse and Bataille 3. Ontological Appropriation: Boulez and Artaud 4. The Written Being of Sound: Cage and Derrida Postlude: A Simulacrum of a Presence
£23.39
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time: I.
Book SynopsisHélène Cixous has dreamed for years of "The Book-I-Don't-Write," but each time she approaches it, it withdraws. The-Book-I-Don't-Write is always just out of reach. When Jacques Derrida told her the Book would get written one day, but differently, Cixous tells us she would see it "shining behind a veil, its indecipherable back, upright on heaven's bookshelf, its elegant silhouette, utterly foreign, utterly familiar, of future revenant. I've always thought it would come, naturally. When? After all my deaths? Just before, or just after, the last of my deaths."One day, when she is no longer expecting it, the Book turns up: "Quickly, without taking my eyes off it, I copied it down, staying scrupulously close to its notations, its rhythms, its moments of silence. I found it. Just as you see it." She calls it Los, meaning "loose, detached" in German, her mother's tongue. Or Los like Carlos, the Latin American friend whose unexpected death in May 2014 takes her back to a life they shared and a time the Book will reconstitute in the present, abolishing time: "Suddenly, that morning, I saw the universe of The-Book-I-Don't-Write: it is an infinity of presents."Los, A Chapter is a marvelous exploration of time and relationships. It reimagines scenes from Paris in the late sixties: its cafés, its debates, its political turmoil. Both playful and serious, it is a book in a long line of novels from Balzac to Proust that create worlds both philosophical and concrete. In Los a lost time is regained.Trade Review"Los, A Chapter is a lyrical meditation on the fragility of the human as well as on the palimpsestic way that our loves and lovers overlay each other in our psyche and repeatedly reappear without clear distinctions. Cixous leads the reader on by her literary indeed semi-Joycean verbal dexterity, while at the same time conveying a strong sense of the personal and emotional side of her experience of love and mourning."Christina Howells, University of Oxford
£33.25
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Abstracts and Brief Chronicles of the Time: I.
Book SynopsisHélène Cixous has dreamed for years of "The Book-I-Don't-Write," but each time she approaches it, it withdraws. The-Book-I-Don't-Write is always just out of reach. When Jacques Derrida told her the Book would get written one day, but differently, Cixous tells us she would see it "shining behind a veil, its indecipherable back, upright on heaven's bookshelf, its elegant silhouette, utterly foreign, utterly familiar, of future revenant. I've always thought it would come, naturally. When? After all my deaths? Just before, or just after, the last of my deaths."One day, when she is no longer expecting it, the Book turns up: "Quickly, without taking my eyes off it, I copied it down, staying scrupulously close to its notations, its rhythms, its moments of silence. I found it. Just as you see it." She calls it Los, meaning "loose, detached" in German, her mother's tongue. Or Los like Carlos, the Latin American friend whose unexpected death in May 2014 takes her back to a life they shared and a time the Book will reconstitute in the present, abolishing time: "Suddenly, that morning, I saw the universe of The-Book-I-Don't-Write: it is an infinity of presents."Los, A Chapter is a marvelous exploration of time and relationships. It reimagines scenes from Paris in the late sixties: its cafés, its debates, its political turmoil. Both playful and serious, it is a book in a long line of novels from Balzac to Proust that create worlds both philosophical and concrete. In Los a lost time is regained.Trade Review"Los, A Chapter is a lyrical meditation on the fragility of the human as well as on the palimpsestic way that our loves and lovers overlay each other in our psyche and repeatedly reappear without clear distinctions. Cixous leads the reader on by her literary indeed semi-Joycean verbal dexterity, while at the same time conveying a strong sense of the personal and emotional side of her experience of love and mourning."Christina Howells, University of Oxford
£11.77
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the
Book SynopsisDeath Shall Be Dethroned is the “shadow book” of Los, a Chapter, Hélène Cixous tells us. It came along after Los, but it was always there "hidden" in her notebooks, in the Beethoven notebook, say, the one Jacques Derrida gave her. But when it tapped at the window, she ignored it until the day she had to let it in. This is just of one the enigmas Death explores as it probes an old relationship between the narrator and “Carlos.” Another is her discovery on the Internet that Carlos’s archives were at Princeton, and that the archive containing their correspondence was closed to the public: “Bluebeard’s closet. The fruit on the tree of Good and Evil. You shall not open.” Death Shall Be Dethroned is the logbook of Los, a Chapter. It owes its life to the death of a lover.Trade Review“Death Shall Be Dethroned sees the welcome translation into English of another instalment of Cixous's ongoing reflection on the profound connection between writing and loss. Part meditation, part diary, part literary comment, this book is wholly Cixous: bittersweet, yet sounding a note of gold. ”Mairéad Hanrahan, University College London“This book is for everyone who can’t forget or always understand the phrase: ‘Love is stronger than death.’ Cixous remembers passion, laughter and shared company, discloses the untimely glories of love, but still gives death its due. This beautiful fear-defying writing stands witness that death in its own way gives life.” Sarah Wood, University of KentTable of Contents Contents Death Shall Be Dethroned Translator’s Notes
£33.25
John Wiley and Sons Ltd Death Shall Be Dethroned: Los, A Chapter, the
Book SynopsisDeath Shall Be Dethroned is the “shadow book” of Los, a Chapter, Hélène Cixous tells us. It came along after Los, but it was always there "hidden" in her notebooks, in the Beethoven notebook, say, the one Jacques Derrida gave her. But when it tapped at the window, she ignored it until the day she had to let it in. This is just of one the enigmas Death explores as it probes an old relationship between the narrator and “Carlos.” Another is her discovery on the Internet that Carlos’s archives were at Princeton, and that the archive containing their correspondence was closed to the public: “Bluebeard’s closet. The fruit on the tree of Good and Evil. You shall not open.” Death Shall Be Dethroned is the logbook of Los, a Chapter. It owes its life to the death of a lover.Table of Contents Contents Death Shall Be Dethroned Translator’s Notes
£11.77
