Western philosophy from c 1800 Books

Book SynopsisMichel Foucault's death in 1984 coincided with the fading away of the hopes for social transformation that characterized the postwar period. In the decades following his death, neoliberalism has triumphed and attacks on social rights have become increasingly bold. If Foucault was not a direct witness of these years, his work on neoliberalism is nonetheless prescient: the question of liberalism occupies an important place in his last works. Since his death, Foucault's conceptual apparatus has acquired a central, even dominant position for a substantial segment of the world's intellectual left. However, as the contributions to this volume demonstrate, Foucault's attitude towards neoliberalism was at least equivocal. Far from leading an intellectual struggle against free market orthodoxy, Foucault seems in many ways to endorse it. How is one to understand his radical critique of the welfare state, understood as an instrument of biopower? Or his support for the pandering anti-Marxism of the so-called �new philosophers�? Is it possible that Foucault was seduced by neoliberalism? This question is not merely of biographical interest: it forces us to confront more generally the mutations of the left since May 1968, the disillusionment of the years that followed and the profound transformations in the French intellectual field over the past thirty years. To understand the 1980s and the neoliberal triumph is to explore the most ambiguous corners of the intellectual left through one of its most important figures.Trade Review"In recent years, Michel Foucault has garnered a reputation as a fierce critic of the neoliberal order, especially through his analyses of micro-politics and governmentality. But the essays in this terrific collection raise important questions about Foucault�s relation to neoliberalism. They show that Foucault himself was quite sympathetic to some of its core elements, and, more importantly, that his theory has in many ways diluted the intellectual resources that might enable more successful resistance to it. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in critical social theory and in contemporary political culture." Vivek Chibber, New York University �Michel Foucault was a far-sighted theorist, but also a creature of his time. This superlative collection moves beyond early polemics in order to force reflection on the uses and limits of the great philosopher�s now celebrated investigation of neoliberalism – in part by providing a reminder of how it fit in the various contexts of French intellectual life in the 1970s that informed it. Michael Behrent and Daniel Zamora deserve credit for offering precautions, rather than �burning� Foucault, as the next stage of his reception unfolds.� Samuel Moyn, Harvard University �The antistatist turn of much of the global left has disturbing but largely unexamined affinities with neoliberalism. Michel Foucault, for all his greatness, is a key figure in this turn. This collection is a stimulating exploration of those affinities, and, to put it provocatively, but not inaccurately, Foucault's commonalities with the likes of Gary Becker and Friedrich Hayek. This excellent book will annoy many, but it has the potential, for those with sufficiently open minds, of being a productive annoyance.� Doug Henwood, The Nation �Foucault and Neoliberalism has already begun to launch a crucial historical and political debate. Its critique and historical contextualization of Foucault�s late work open up new perspectives on the rise of neoliberalism in France and the general evolution of the intellectual left since the 1980s. From the retreat of class analysis to the triumph both of identity politics and of a conception of social justice limited to equality of opportunity, Foucault and Neoliberalism helps us first to understand and then to imagine an alternative to the political dead end of the contemporary left.� Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois at ChicagoTable of ContentsList of endorsers Title page Copyright page Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction 1: Foucault and New Philosophy: Why Foucault Endorsed André Glucksmann's The Master Thinkers 2: Liberalism without Humanism: Michel Foucault and the Free-Market Creed, 1976–1979 3: Foucault, the Excluded, and the Neoliberal Erosion of the State 4: Foucault, Ewald, Neoliberalism, and the Left 5: Bourdieu, Foucault, and the Penal State in the Neoliberal Era 6: The Unfulfilled Promises of the Late Foucault and Foucauldian "Governmentality Studies" 7: Michel Foucault and the Spiritualization of Philosophy 8: The Great Rage of Facts Conclusion: The Strange Failure (and Peculiar Success) of Foucault's Project Notes Index End User License Agreement

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Book SynopsisThis the first of a new three-part series in which Antonio Negri, a leading political thinker of our time, explores key ideas that have animated radical thought and examines some of the social and economic forces that are shaping our world today. In this first volume Negri shows how the thinking of Marx and Foucault were brought together to create an original theoretical synthesis - particularly in the context of Italy from May ’68 onwards. At around that time, the structures of industry and production began to change radically, with the emergence of new producer-subjects and new fields of capitalist value creation. New concepts and theories were developed by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and others to help make sense of these and related developments - concepts such as biopower and biopolitics, subjectivation and subsumption, public and common, power and potentiality. These concepts and theories are examined by Negri within the broader context of the development of European philosophical discourse in the twentieth century. Marx and Foucault provides a unique account of the development of radical thought in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and will be a key text for anyone interested in radical politics today.Table of ContentsChapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 1. Why Marx? 2. Reflections on the use of dialectics 3. Thoughts regarding �critical foresight� in the unpublished Chapter VI of Marx�s Capital Vol. 1 4. Acting in common, and the limits of capital 5. Is it possible to be communists without Marx? Chapter 3 1. An Italian breakpoint: production versus development 2. On �Italian Theory� 3. The constitution of the common and the logics of the left 4. On the future of the European social democracies 5. Let�s start reading Gramsci again 6. Biopower / biopolitics Ð subjectivities in struggle Chapter 4 1. On the method of political critique 2. How and when I read Foucault 3. Gilles Felix Ð the how and when of Deleuze-Guattari 4. Observations on the �production of subjectivity�: on an intervention by Pierre Macherey 5. Marx after Foucault: the subject refound Origin of the Texts

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Book SynopsisThis the first of a new three-part series in which Antonio Negri, a leading political thinker of our time, explores key ideas that have animated radical thought and examines some of the social and economic forces that are shaping our world today. In this first volume Negri shows how the thinking of Marx and Foucault were brought together to create an original theoretical synthesis - particularly in the context of Italy from May ’68 onwards. At around that time, the structures of industry and production began to change radically, with the emergence of new producer-subjects and new fields of capitalist value creation. New concepts and theories were developed by Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and others to help make sense of these and related developments - concepts such as biopower and biopolitics, subjectivation and subsumption, public and common, power and potentiality. These concepts and theories are examined by Negri within the broader context of the development of European philosophical discourse in the twentieth century. Marx and Foucault provides a unique account of the development of radical thought in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and will be a key text for anyone interested in radical politics today.Table of ContentsChapter 1 Introduction Chapter 2 1. Why Marx? 2. Reflections on the use of dialectics 3. Thoughts regarding �critical foresight� in the unpublished Chapter VI of Marx�s Capital Vol. 1 4. Acting in common, and the limits of capital 5. Is it possible to be communists without Marx? Chapter 3 1. An Italian breakpoint: production versus development 2. On �Italian Theory� 3. The constitution of the common and the logics of the left 4. On the future of the European social democracies 5. Let�s start reading Gramsci again 6. Biopower / biopolitics Ð subjectivities in struggle Chapter 4 1. On the method of political critique 2. How and when I read Foucault 3. Gilles Felix Ð the how and when of Deleuze-Guattari 4. Observations on the �production of subjectivity�: on an intervention by Pierre Macherey 5. Marx after Foucault: the subject refound Origin of the Texts

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Book SynopsisPhilosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time.For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy.Trade Review"Donatella Di Cesare's book restores philosophical balance to the debate on Heidegger and the Jews. It is a tour de force combining intellectual history and philosophical reflection on both the man and the thinker that goes well beyond the all-too-routine alternative of rabid condemnation or doggedly blinkered defense."Babette Babich, Fordham University "... a fastidious forensic investigation."Review 31Table of ContentsForeword page vii I Between Politics and Philosophy 1 1. A Media Affair 1 2. A Nazi by Chance . . . 3 3. Biographical Detail, or Philosophical Nexus? 4 4. Heidegger, an Anti-Semite? 6 5. What Has Been Left Unsaid about the Jewish Question 8 6. The Black Notebooks 9 7. Reductio ad Hitlerum: On the Posthumous Trial of Heidegger 11 8. A Calling to Account? 13 9. From Derrida to Schürmann: Toward an Anarchic Reading 14 10. Taming Heidegger 18 11. The Exclusion of Nazism from Philosophy 19 12. Philosophical Commitment and Political Decision 20 II Philosophy and Hatred of the Jews 22 1. Luther, Augustine, and “the Jews and Their Lies” 22 2. The “Jewish Question” in Philosophy 26 3. Kant and the “Euthanasia of Judaism” 32 4. Hegel and the Jew without Property 36 5. “Anti-anti-Semite?” Nietzsche, the Antichrist, and the Falsification of Values 46 6. Lies and Fakery: The Non-being of the Jew in Mein Kampf 59 III The Question of Being and the Jewish Question 65 1. The Night of Being 65 2. In An Esoteric Tone . . . 68 3. Anti-Semitism and Never-dispelled Doubts 69 4. Metaphors of an Absence 75 5. The Jew and the Oblivion of Being 77 6. The Greeks, the Germans – and the Jews 80 7. The Rootless Agents of Acceleration 84 8. Against the Jewish Intellectuals 88 9. Geist and ruach: The “Original Fire” and the Spectral Breath 93 10. Machination and Power 96 11. The Desertification of the Earth 99 12. The Apocalyptic and the “Prince of This World” 101 13. The Deracification of Peoples 103 14. Race or Rank? 106 15. The Metaphysics of Blood 110 16. “My ‘Attack’ on Husserl” 115 17. Heidegger, Jünger, and the Topology of the Jew 123 18. The Enemy: Heidegger versus Schmitt 129 19. Polemos and Total War 142 20. Weltjudentum: The Jewish World Conspiracy 148 21. Judeo-Bolshevism 154 22. Weltlos – Without World: The Jew and the Stone 161 23. Metaphysical Anti-Semitism 164 24. The Jew and the “Purification” of Being 169 25. “What Is It about No-thing?” 172 IV After Auschwitz 175 1. Bellum judaicum 175 2. To Abdicate to Silence? 178 3. “The Production of Corpses” and Ontic Indifference 184 4. The Ontological Massacre: Parmenides and Auschwitz 188 5. “Do They Die? They Do Not Die, They Are Liquidated. . .” 191 6. Positionality, Technology, Crime 193 7. The Northeast Wind: Heading Toward Defeat 196 8. Selbstvernichtung: The Shoah and the “Self-Annihilation” of the Jews 199 9. The Betrayal of the “German Essence” 202 10. If Germany is a Lager, Then Who Is the Victim? 206 11. The “Question of Guilt” and the Crime Against the Germans 211 12. The “Note for Jackasses”: Against the Jewish Prophecy 212 13. World Democracy and the Dictatorship of Monotheism 218 14. “An Old Spirit of Revenge Makes its Way upon the Earth” 220 15. Whether It Is Possible to Forgive a Rabbi 223 16. Cousin Gross and Cousin Klein: Jews and Family Resemblances 224 17. The Oblivion of the Jew: The Hidden Debt 229 18. Where Paul is Hidden 233 19. The Future of Being and the Hebrew Name 238 20. A Pagan Landscape 240 21. The Other Beginning, the Beginning of the Other: Anarchy, Birth 241 22. An Angel in the Black Forest: Apocalypse and Revolution 243 Notes 248 Index 303

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Book SynopsisPhilosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger's involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher's exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time.For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger's "metaphysical anti-Semitism" was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews' own "self-destruction": a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger's anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger's life, work, and legacy.Trade Review"Donatella Di Cesare's book restores philosophical balance to the debate on Heidegger and the Jews. It is a tour de force combining intellectual history and philosophical reflection on both the man and the thinker that goes well beyond the all-too-routine alternative of rabid condemnation or doggedly blinkered defense."Babette Babich, Fordham University "... a fastidious forensic investigation."Review 31

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Book SynopsisRoland Barthes (1915-1980) was a central figure in the thought of his time, but he was also something of an outsider. His father died in the First World War, he enjoyed his mother’s unfailing love, he spent long years in the sanatorium, and he was aware of his homosexuality from an early age: all this soon gave him a sense of his own difference. He experienced the great events of contemporary history from a distance. However, his life was caught up in the violent, intense sweep of the twentieth century, a century that he helped to make intelligible. This major new biography of Barthes, based on unpublished material never before explored (archives, journals and notebooks), sheds new light on his intellectual positions, his political commitments and his ideas, beliefs and desires. It details the many themes he discussed, the authors he defended, the myths he castigated, the polemics that made him famous and his acute ear for the languages of his day. It also underscores his remarkable ability to see which way the wind was blowing Ð and he is still a compelling author to read in part because his path-breaking explorations uncovered themes that continue to preoccupy us today. Barthes’s life story gives substance and cohesion to his career, which was guided by desire, perspicacity and an extreme sensitivity to the material from which the world is shaped Ð as well as a powerful refusal to accept any authoritarian discourse. By allowing thought to be based on imagination, he turned thinking into both an art and an adventure. This remarkable biography enables the reader to enter into Barthes’s life and grasp the shape of his existence, and thus understand the kind of writer he became and how he turned literature into life itself.Trade Review"Barthes, like no other modern writer, invented a critical form that was “live” in every sense, where the labor of writing criticism acquired animate breath and pulse as it entered Barthes’ chronicle of aesthetic preparation for a Vita Nova, a new life, a novel, a reading of ideologies, images, voices, cultural myths and above all literary texts. Such a self-writing subject poses a daunting challenge to the biographer. But Tiphaine Samoyault has risen to it, with a magisterial life of Roland Barthes, enriched by new archival material and her own peerless talents as both writer and literary critic." - Emily Apter, New York University "Tiphaine Samoyault’s outstanding biography of Roland Barthes allows us to meet him in person, as it were, as a lively, seductive French intellectual. At the same time, Samoyault offers us a splendid introduction to Barthes’ ground-breaking writings in so many fields, from literary theory to meditations about the meaning of human existence." - Thomas Pavel, The University of Chicago ‘While offering the most detailed and elegantly written interpretation to date of the life and works of its remarkable subject, this book is much more than a traditional intellectual biography. Typhaine Samoyault’s masterful, multilayered and, at times, lyrical narrative captures Roland Barthes the person and writer, essayist and scholar, and depicts him in his time and with his contemporaries, family and friends, colleagues and lovers, to be sure. Her phenomenal study tracks the doing and undoing of a great writer and thinker, a witness of what is still, in spite of all appearances to the contrary, very much our own time and cultural, indeed, political predicament. In so doing, she offers a valuable testimony of a person facing opportunities and challenges whose enduring lesson and bitter sweetness we have all learned to appreciate and savour.’ - Hent de Vries, The Humanities Center, Johns Hopkins University‘superb’ The New York Review of Books

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Book SynopsisThis book is a foundational text for our understanding of François Laruelle, one of France's leading thinkers, whose ideas have emerged as an important touchstone for contemporary theoretical discussions across multiple disciplines. One of Laruelle’s first systematic elaborations of his ethical and "non-philosophical" thought, this critical dialogue with some of the dominant voices of continental philosophy offers a rigorous science of individuals as minorities or as separated from the World, History, and Philosophy. Through novel theorizations of finitude and determination in the last instance, Laruelle develops a thought "of the One" as a "minoritarian" paradigm that resists those paradigms that foreground difference as the conceptual matrix for understanding the status of the minority. The critique of the "unitary illusion" of philosophy developed here stands at the foundation of Laruelle’s approach to "uni-lateralizing" the power of philosophy and the universals with which it has always thought, and thereby acts as a basis for his subsequent investigations of victims, mysticism, and Gnosticism. This book will appeal to students and scholars of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, aesthetics, and cultural theory.Trade Review"What would it mean to craft a rigorous science of humanity based on minority rather than authority? In one of his earliest complete expressions of non-philosophy, Laruelle offers a compelling formula for generic humanity – dubbed here ordinary man – rooted not in philosophical or social difference but in real, ordinary identity, the identity of minority. The result is a form of life without authority, without state, without world, in other words, truly glorious." Alexander R. Galloway, New York University "A Biography of Ordinary Man shows how non-philosophy can be understood as the ongoing discovery of the human, of the ordinary, and of the lived, without recourse to the ‘totalitarian spirit’ of authoritarian thought. This is a science of the ordinary life that undoes what we think we know about the human." John Ó Maoilearca, Kingston University, LondonTable of ContentsTranslators' Introduction Foreword Introduction: A Rigorous Science of Man 1) From the Sciences of Man to the Science of Men Five human theorems. The Sciences of Man are not sciences and man is not their object. Heterogeneous sciences, not specific, not theoretically justified, and devoid of humanity. Critique of difference and of anthropo-logical parallelism. The essence of man is "theoretical," not anthropo-logical. 2) Man as Finite or Ordinary Individual Man is not visible within the horizon of Greek ontological presuppositions. Man is really distinct from the World and from the All. Man as finite transcendental experience of the One. The finite subject, without universal or authoritarian predicates. Human Solitudes. Man is out (of) the question. 3) From Philosophy to Theory: the Science of Ordinary Man The characteristics of the science of men and what distinguishes it from philosophy: 1) naïve and not reflexive; 2) real or absolute and not hypothetical; 3) essentially theoretical and not practical or technical; 4) descriptive and not constructive; 5) human rather than anthropological. 4) The Scientific and Positive Meaning of Transcendental Naiveté Thinking outside of all representation or ob-jectivation. Finite individuals are absolutely invisible to unitary philosophy, though thinkable. The unitary field and its two parameters. Man outside-the-field and his radically immanent essence that is non-positional (of) itself. The minoritarian is not the micro-. No "example" of minorities. Rigorous science of the invisible. Against the fantasy of philo-centrism. 5) Towards a Critique of (Political, etc.) Reason Ordinary man and his precedence over the "new logics." A possible political version of minorities. Critique of the stato-minoritarian concept of the individual. Transcendental and real criteria of minorities. From the statist hypothesis on minorities to the minoritarian thesis on the State. Political forgetting and non-forgetting of the essence of the State CHAPTER I: Who Are Minorities? 6) The Two Sources of Minoritarian Thought The stato-minoritarian or effective minorities as "difference." The properly minoritarian or the real individual before the World and the State. How minorities determine Authorities in the last instance. Determination in the last instance: irreversible or uni-lateral causality of the individual. The One rather than Being: real foundation of the minoritarian individual. 7) How to Think Individuals? Individuals are not modes of transcendence or of the beyond (of power), margins or remainders, or the Other of history. The individual is not beyond the World; it is the World that is beyond the individual. Minorities do not fall under the human and social sciences. Conditions of a radical thought of individuals (term, object of immediate experience before any relation; real or unreflective rather than remainder of exteriority). Apriori of the individual and of the multiple. Two criteria of the individual (its essence or the One; its causality as unilateralization of the World). 8) Theory of Uni-laterality Real uni-laterality is not a "difference" or a logical asymmetry, a relation in general, but precedes any relation (of predication, of power, etc.). Uni-lateral: a single side, a primitive asymmetry induced by the One. The One is not unilateral but affects the World with a unilateriality or determines it in the last instance. Uni-lateral: the specific form of order of the real and the non-philosophical. Uni-lateral and unitary forms of order: the relational, the transversal, the differential, the logo-centric. Specific causality of ordinary or finite man. 9) The Essence of the One or of the Finite Subject The forgetting of the essence of the One is not the forgetting of Being. The experience (of) indivision precedes that of division or transcendence. It is given (to) itself in a mode that is non-positional (of) itself, in an unreflective experience. The difference between the One and Unity: The One does not divide into two or synthesize a manifold. The real is not dialectical, but determines the dialectic in the last instance. The One is the element of the mystical and grounds an "ordinary mysticism." 10) Minorities and Authorities Minority: unreflective transcendental experience, real phenomenal content of techno-political universals. Individual and individuel. Individual and relation. Against the equation: minoritarian = relative, minoritarian = different. Individuals are invisible in the unitary horizon. Uncountable and politically and ontologically unspeakable. They refuse to be compatibilized in the revolutionary calculation. CHAPTER II: Who Are Authorities? 11) Individuals and the World The finite subject, without ob-jets, is the real critique of the Copernican Revolution. Contingent experience of the World and Authorities. The One does not negate the World but lets it affect man from its unilaterality. Authoritarian denial of the One. Experience of being remote-in-Theworld and what distinguishes it from being-in-the-world. 12) The Absolute Science of the World and of Authorities The mystical and its effect, the As It Is, precede unitary "existence" or Being. Individuals are the absolute science of the World and Authorities because they do not objectivate them. Absolute science of Wholes or Mixtures as they are. 13) On Authority as Individuel Causality Authority: political concept and ontological concept. Authorities, aprioristic structures of all experience in the World. From ontological concept to individual experience. Individuel or universal causality, individual or finite causality. Authority: transcendent form of human causality. Its two complementary forms. The authoritarian mixture precedes its terms and is not created by the One, which it follows as a "second principle." Authorities, irreducible and non-deficient mode of reality. The One does not alienate itself in the World: autonomy of the World. CHAPTER III: Ordinary Mysticism SECTION I: The Unitary Illusion 14) The Possibility of a Unitary Illusion The dual, the order of successive givenness of the One, the World, and the (non-)One, is not a new unity. Unitary falsification and denial of the One by the World. The two aspects of the Unitary Illusion or of the authoritarian resistance to individuals. 15) The Transcendental Nature of the Unitary Illusion Unitary mechanism and transcendental meaning of the illusion. Confusion of the real and the logico-real. Positivity of the mixture: uncreatable from the One and anterior to its components. The dual against the unitary experience of the fall. The law of the real: neither alienation, nor procession, nor topology, but determination in the last instance. 16) On Illusion as Hallucination The type of reality of the illusion in relation to the World and the One. How the forgetting of the One is different from the forgetting of Being. Content of the illusion: belief that the One is object of forgetting or real repression, like an unconscious. Unitary resistance: hallucination and magic rather than symptom. SECTION II: Finite Topics 17) The Finite Subject and the Critique of the Copernican Revolution Finite man without vis-à-vis or neighborhood. The World is neither an ob-ject nor an objectivation. Dualyzation as destruction of the Copernican Revolution. Irreversible or real thought, circular or philosophical thought. 18) The "Chora" In the Transcendental Sense The (non-)One: de-distancing or indifference without proximity; primitive and unique place that em-places the World. Exteriority or the "chora" in their real phenomenal content and as correlate of the One. Chora: without opening, distance or jection; without horizon; as non-positional site. 19) Critique of Topology (Logic of Places and Logic of Forces) Dialectical and topological forgetting of the primitive place and of its essence. Unitary place as topological and positional continuum. Western topo-logical amphibology. Logic of places and its complement: the logic of forces. Finite place and infinite force. Confusion of force and real. Critique of topological distance: the World is not the great Neighbor of man. Irreversible de-distancing or uni-laterality of the World. 20) The Phenomenal Content of Uni-laterality Laterality and positionality. Phenomenal content of uni-laterality. Brushing aside with the back of the hand; opposing an end of non-receiving to affection by the World. Passivity without reception. The true outside-without-inside: what the One determines in the last instance. Finitude as Occam's razor. Human philosophy and the ordinary as irreversible order. Irreversibility and remoteness. The ordinary and the principles of reason. SECTION III: Determination in the Last Instance and the (Non-)One 21) Thinking the (non-)One Transcendental truth of the (non-)One, content of determination in the last instance. The (non-)One as immediate given excluding transcendence. Dual, element of the (non-)One. 22) The Causality of the "Last Instance" or of Finitude Neither absent cause nor present cause. Exclusion of the four metaphysical causes and the causality of the Other. Specific causality of finitude. Sufficiency and non-alienation (in action) as that which determines in the last instance. 23) Transcendental Deduction of the (Non-)One or of the "Chora" The (non-)One is required by the finitude of the One to determine the World. The non- of the (non-)One: indifference or defense a priori. Positivity of the non-. Indifference that is not passive but through passivity. SECTION IV: Real Critique and Philosophical Critique 24) The Affect of Real Critique Real critique: passage from the real to the illusion. What distinguishes philosophical critique: as unilateralization rather than as limitation. The affect of critique is the affect of the "chora." Real and transcendental meaning of the dual. Dual as non-unitary element of critique. The dual and the World "in itself." 25) The Positivity of Real Critique Real critique is not a philosophical operation (reduction, nihilation, limitation, destruction). Nor an operation of the Other. A priori indifference of the One and contingency of the World. Its em-placement as it is. The symptom, unitary concept. From the symptom to the hallucination. Real critique eliminates unitary philosophy's resentment against the World. Real critique has no stakes: the real is not at stake. SECTION V: The Science of the World and of Authorities 26) The Reality of an Absolutely Subjective Science of the World The idea of "absolute science." Philosophy is only a relative-absolute science, the finite subject is an absolute science of the World. The World is not an ob-jet. Philosophy has ob-jects, but science does not, or is not a part of its objects. It excludes the unitary circle. Absolute science is contemplation of the in itself. It excludes temporality. 27) The Absolute Science of Mixtures or of "Postdicates" The content of science: the As It Is rather than the As Such. The World unilateralized or the contingency of the too-much. The ante-predicative to the "postdicative:" The World, Language, etc. as "postdicates." Absolute Science of mixtures, totalities, and universals. Absolute and relative science. Absolute science belongs to ordinary man rather than to the philosopher. 28) Critique of the Unitary Transcendental Deduction The Unitary Operation of the Deduction is a supposition of the real, an auto-requirement of the logico-real mixture. Illusory character of the problem of representation and of its juridico-rational form. Unthought essence of transcendental Unity. Real right of the Deduction. Mysticism and Pragmatics as real content of the Deduction. CHAPTER IV: Ordinary Pragmatics SECTION I: Critique of Pragmatic Reason 29) Pragmatics as Real Critique of Philosophy The pragmatic critique of philosophy presumes a non-philosophical experience of pragmatics as finite or real. "Language games, " vicious and shameful critique of philosophy. Unitary pragmatics: residual and substituve. Dissociating the logico-pragmatic mixture, dissolving the linguistic image of use and of the ordinary, returning them to their individual or finite structures. 30) Use as Apriori of Pragmatics Use, concrete a priori of pragmatics; the ordinary, concrete a priori of philosophy. Use, real rather than possible, excludes language, the transcendence of rules and their "application" (surjectivation), and the models of production of logico-linguistic meaning. Essence of use: unthought of pragmatic philosophy. Transcendental truth of the "ordinary" or the finite-real. 31) Philosophical Pragmatics and Real Pragmatics Real distinction of use and the World. Finite or inalienable use: an individual or immanent causality. Non-Copernican subjectivity of action. Four "extensions" of the concept of performativity. SECTION II: The Essence of Pragmatic Causality 32) From the Mystical to the Pragmatic Pragmatic causality, concept acquired a priori starting from the finite subject. Subjective order: essence precedes existent, existent precedes existence. Pragmatics, the recognition of the reality of the World. 33) The Finitude of Pragmatics Distinction between (unitary) autonomy and finitude. Effective sterility of finite pragmatics that does not transform raw material. Breaking the pragmateia/pragmata parallelism. Non-positional (of) itself use and its immanent givens: neither continuous nor alienated in the World. Unitary falsification of operativity (obscurity, unconscious). Positive interpretation of practical obscurity as unreflective. 34) The Essence of Pragmatics: 1) The Finite Drive Acting is not a scission, it attains the World without transcending towards it as towards an ob-ject. Finite or indivisible non-thetic drive of action. Agito: I act, I exist. Unitary falsification of the drive into an unconscious. Absolute practice: without ob-ject, but with occasional material. 35) The Essence of Pragmatics: 2) The Immediate Givenness of the Other Real correlate of use: not pragmata, but a non-thetic Other. Unitary forgetting of the essence of the Other, its philosophical requisition against philosophy. Immediate givenness of the Other and its phenomenal givens. The drive reveals a Transcendent towards which it does not transcend. 36) The Essence of Pragmatics: 3) The Other, The Signal, and The Pragmatic Foundation of Communication The Other: a priori or real resistance, not a posteriori or possible resistance. The finite Other does not limit the World, it proceeds neither by Reversal nor by Displacement, but rather uni-lateralizes according to the mode of the Support or the Signal. Pragmatic foundation of communication. Meaning/Signal system: real phenomenal givens of all possible communication. Dual and dualism: genesis of duality. Finitude of terms or their "autonomy" before the Unity-of-Contraries. The Other partially legitimates the Unitary Illusion. 37) Meaning and the Rigorous Science of the Unitary Structures of the World Breaking the parallelism of meaning and logico-linguistic signification. The pragmatic and the symbolic. The scientific criteria of the unitary and the philosophical cannot be unitary or philosophical. From the unitary to the "expanded:" non-thetic meaning as expanded criterion of the unitary. Authorities, legitimated as object of rigorous science of man. Notes Index

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Book SynopsisAt first glance, Theodor W. Adorno’s critical social theory and Gershom Scholem’s scholarship of Jewish mysticism could not seem farther removed from one another. To begin with, they also harbored a mutual hostility. But their first conversations in 1938 New York were the impetus for a profound intellectual friendship that lasted thirty years and produced more than 220 letters. These letters discuss the broadest range of topics in philosophy, religion, history, politics, literature, and the arts – as well as the life and the work of Adorno and Scholem’s mutual friend Walter Benjamin. Unfolding with the dramatic tension of a historic novel, the correspondence tells the story of these two intellectuals who faced tragedy, destruction, and loss, but also participated in the efforts to reestablish a just and dignified society after World War II. Scholem immigrated to Palestine before the war and developed his pioneering scholarship of Jewish mysticism before and during the problematic establishment of a Jewish state. Adorno escaped Germany to England, and then to America, returning to Germany in 1949 to participate in the efforts to rebuild and democratize German society. Despite the differences in the lifepaths and worldviews of Adorno and Scholem, their letters are evidence of mutual concern for intellectual truth and hope for a more just society in the wake of historical disaster. The letters reveal for the first time the close philosophical proximity between Adorno’s critical theory and Scholem’s scholarship of mysticism and messianism. Their correspondence touches on questions of reason and myth, progress and regression, heresy and authority, and the social dimensions of redemption. Above all, their dialogue sheds light on the power of critical, materialistic analysis of history to bring about social change and prevent repetition of the disasters of the past.Trade Review“The correspondence between Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem reveals an intriguing friendship and one of the most important philosophical genealogies of the twentieth century. The relation between critical theory and Jewish mysticism comes to life in their exchange, clarifying how these mammoth intellectuals illuminated each other’s scholarship. Asaf Angermann’s Introduction to the volume is brilliant and insightful.”Susannah Heschel, Dartmouth College “Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno were an odd couple: the first a Zionist and scholar of Kabbalah, the second a neo-Marxist philosopher who returned to Germany after the war. Yet their surprising thirty-year friendship, wonderfully expressed in this correspondence, reveals the broad horizons of these two towering intellectuals of the twentieth century.”David Biale, University of California – Davis “Brought together by their mutual regard for Walter Benjamin and shared grief at his death, Gershom Scholem and Theodor Adorno began an unlikely, yet increasingly intense epistolary friendship. Scrupulously annotated and masterfully introduced by Asaf Angermann, their letters open a window letting in the twilight glow of a once vibrant German-Jewish culture before its passing into history.”Martin Jay, University of California – Berkeley “The friendship between Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem was as fascinating as it was improbable. Dialectics came into explosive contact with the history of mysticism, sending sparks of light in a thousand directions. Their correspondence, now available in English with a superb editorial apparatus, ranks as one of the most exhilarating documents in the entire history of twentieth-century thought.”Peter Gordon, Harvard University"Theodor Adorno said of Walter Benjamin’s correspondence: 'The level and quality of letters is always also determined by its addressee.' The quality of the Adorno-Scholem correspondence, intelligently introduced by Asaf Angermann and elegantly translated by Sebastian Truskolaski and Paula Schwebel (with assistance from Stepahie Graf), is correspondingly high. It’s well worth lifting our eyes to see it."Jewish Review of Books"The correspondence of Theodor Adorno and Gershom Scholem reveals that despite their intellectual differences, their shared mission to preserve Walter Benjamin’s work led to a genuine fondness between them."Adam Kirsch, The New York Review of Books

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Book SynopsisWhy bother to praise mathematics when you claim, as Alain Badiou does, that philosophy is first and foremost a metaphysics of happiness, or else it’s not worth an hour of trouble? What possible relationship can there be between mathematics and happiness? That is precisely the issue at stake in this dialogue, which serves as a very accessible introduction to what mathematics is and an exploration of the crucial influence it has always exerted on the greatest philosophers. Far from the thankless, pointless exercises they are often thought to be, mathematics and logic are indispensable guides to ridding ourselves of dominant opinions and making possible an access to truths, or to a human experience of the utmost value. That is why mathematics may well be the shortest path to the true life, which, when it exists, is characterized by an incomparable happiness.Trade Review�Badiou allows not only those in the know, but also those ignorant of geometry to enter here into his enchanting defense of mathematics. Packed with a variety of pleasures, this brief text introduces readers to brilliantly quirky mathematicians; philosophical problems with mathematical underpinnings; tricks of the trade, such as how to use the false to snare the truth; the passion of form; and the exquisite joy of the QED.� Joan Copjec, Brown UniversityTable of Contents Contents I Mathematics Must be Saved II Philosophy and Mathematics, or the Story of an Old Couple III What is Mathematics About? IV An Attempt at a Mathematics-based Metaphysics V Does Mathematics Bring Happiness? Conclusion

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Book SynopsisWhy bother to praise mathematics when you claim, as Alain Badiou does, that philosophy is first and foremost a metaphysics of happiness, or else it’s not worth an hour of trouble? What possible relationship can there be between mathematics and happiness? That is precisely the issue at stake in this dialogue, which serves as a very accessible introduction to what mathematics is and an exploration of the crucial influence it has always exerted on the greatest philosophers. Far from the thankless, pointless exercises they are often thought to be, mathematics and logic are indispensable guides to ridding ourselves of dominant opinions and making possible an access to truths, or to a human experience of the utmost value. That is why mathematics may well be the shortest path to the true life, which, when it exists, is characterized by an incomparable happiness.Trade Review�Badiou allows not only those in the know, but also those ignorant of geometry to enter here into his enchanting defense of mathematics. Packed with a variety of pleasures, this brief text introduces readers to brilliantly quirky mathematicians; philosophical problems with mathematical underpinnings; tricks of the trade, such as how to use the false to snare the truth; the passion of form; and the exquisite joy of the QED.� Joan Copjec, Brown UniversityTable of ContentsContentsI Mathematics Must be SavedII Philosophy and Mathematics, or the Story of an Old CoupleIII What is Mathematics About?IV An Attempt at a Mathematics-based MetaphysicsV Does Mathematics Bring Happiness?Conclusion

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Book SynopsisOn April 27, 2007, the first Speculative Realism (SR) workshop was held at Goldsmiths, University of London, featuring four young philosophers whose ideas were loosely allied. Over the ensuing decade, the ideas of SR spread from philosophy to the arts, architecture, and numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. SR has been arguably the most influential new current in continental philosophy since the works of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari found their second wind in the 1990s. But what is SR? This book is the first general overview by one of its original members, focusing on the aesthetic, ethical, ontological, and political themes of greatest importance to the movement. Graham Harman provides a balanced but critical assessment of his original SR colleagues – Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, and Quentin Meillassoux – along with a clear summary of his own Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO). A number of central philosophical questions tie the four chapters together: What exactly is "correlationism," the chief enemy of SR? What are the stakes of philosophical realism, and is such realism better served by mathematics and the natural sciences, or by a broader model of cognitive activity that includes aesthetics? This book covers both the historical and conceptual development of the movement, providing a first-rate introduction for students, aided by helpful end-of-chapter study questions chosen by Harman himself. SR, Harman shows, is a vital and fast-developing field in contemporary philosophy.Trade Review"An essential guide by the foremost philosopher of our age. This book will educate and delight both aficionados and those unfamiliar with the first major philosophical movement of the twenty-first century."—Timothy Morton, Rice University "Harman presents a clear overview of the development of Speculative Realism's core debates. He not only reconstructs its genealogy but offers a remarkably concise introduction to his own ontology by putting it in its larger context."—Markus Gabriel, University of Bonn "A unique contribution to the growing literature on [Speculative Realism] and ... a go-to text for anyone looking for an efficient and nuanced introduction to its subject, from undergraduate students to curious readers outside of academe."—Tom Sparrow, Notre Dame Philosophical ReviewTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Prometheanism A. Brassier at Goldsmiths B. Brassier's Nihilism C. The Path Ahead 2. Vitalist Idealism A. Grant at Goldsmiths B. Philosophies of Nature After Schelling C. A New Sense of Idealism 3. Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) A. OOO at Goldsmiths B. The Withdrawn C. Objects and Their Qualities D. Vicarious Causation E. The Crucial Place of Aesthetics 4. Speculative Materialism A. Meillassoux at Goldsmiths B. After Finitude C. Glimpses of the Divine Inexistence Conclusion: The Two Axes of Speculative Realism Notes References Index

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Book SynopsisMartin Heidegger is one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century philosophy but his reputation was tainted by his associations with Nazism. The posthumous publication of the Black Notebooks, which reveal the shocking extent of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, has only cast further doubt on his work. Now more than ever, a new introduction to Heidegger is needed to reassess his work and legacy. This book by the world-leading Heidegger scholar Peter Trawny is the first introduction to take into account the new material made available by the explosive publication of the Black Notebooks. Seeking neither to condemn nor excuse Heidegger’s views, Trawny directly confronts and elucidates the most problematic aspects of his thought. At the same time, he provides a comprehensive survey of Heidegger’s development, from his early writings on phenomenology and his magnum opus, Being and Time, to his later writings on poetry and technology. Trawny captures the extraordinary significance and breadth of fifty years of philosophical production, all against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. This concise introduction will be required reading for the many students and scholars in philosophy and critical theory who study Heidegger, and it will be of great interest to general readers who want to know more about one of the major figures of contemporary philosophy.Trade Review“Focusing on Heidegger’s ‘metapolitical’ texts from the 1930s, Trawny exposes the good, the bad, and the ugly of Heidegger’s middle period, and especially his tortured efforts to conjugate ‘the end of metaphysics’ with his commitment to Hitler and Nazism. Trawny emphasizes what still remains valuable in Heidegger’s reflections on art, language, Ereignis, and poetry, even as he ruthlessly dissects the supinely stupid ‘metaphysical anti-Semitism’ of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks.” Thomas Sheehan, Stanford UniversityTable of Contents Preface to the English Edition Introduction 1. The “Facticity of Life” Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. The “Primordial Christian Facticity of Life” Inceptions: Plato and Aristotle 2. The “Meaning of Being” The Analytic of “Dasein” or Existence as “Being-Toward-Death” The “Ontological Difference” The “Historicity” of “Dasein” 3. The “History of Being” Hitler and the “Other Inception” “Hölderlin and the Germans” Philosophy and Anti-Semitism On the Structure of the “Event of Appropriation” Art and the “Struggle between World and Earth” “Overcoming Metaphysics” Language as the “House of Being” God and “The Gods” 4. The “Essence of Technology” Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger “Machination” and “Positionality” Arrival in the “Fourfold”? Reverberations Biographical Facts in Historical Context Bibliography for Further Study Notes Index

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Book SynopsisMartin Heidegger is one of the most influential figures of twentieth-century philosophy but his reputation was tainted by his associations with Nazism. The posthumous publication of the Black Notebooks, which reveal the shocking extent of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism, has only cast further doubt on his work. Now more than ever, a new introduction to Heidegger is needed to reassess his work and legacy. This book by the world-leading Heidegger scholar Peter Trawny is the first introduction to take into account the new material made available by the explosive publication of the Black Notebooks. Seeking neither to condemn nor excuse Heidegger’s views, Trawny directly confronts and elucidates the most problematic aspects of his thought. At the same time, he provides a comprehensive survey of Heidegger’s development, from his early writings on phenomenology and his magnum opus, Being and Time, to his later writings on poetry and technology. Trawny captures the extraordinary significance and breadth of fifty years of philosophical production, all against the backdrop of the tumultuous events of the twentieth century. This concise introduction will be required reading for the many students and scholars in philosophy and critical theory who study Heidegger, and it will be of great interest to general readers who want to know more about one of the major figures of contemporary philosophy.Trade Review“Focusing on Heidegger’s ‘metapolitical’ texts from the 1930s, Trawny exposes the good, the bad, and the ugly of Heidegger’s middle period, and especially his tortured efforts to conjugate ‘the end of metaphysics’ with his commitment to Hitler and Nazism. Trawny emphasizes what still remains valuable in Heidegger’s reflections on art, language, Ereignis, and poetry, even as he ruthlessly dissects the supinely stupid ‘metaphysical anti-Semitism’ of Heidegger’s Black Notebooks.” Thomas Sheehan, Stanford UniversityTable of Contents Preface to the English Edition Introduction 1. The “Facticity of Life” Phenomenology and Hermeneutics. The “Primordial Christian Facticity of Life” Inceptions: Plato and Aristotle 2. The “Meaning of Being” The Analytic of “Dasein” or Existence as “Being-Toward-Death” The “Ontological Difference” The “Historicity” of “Dasein” 3. The “History of Being” Hitler and the “Other Inception” “Hölderlin and the Germans” Philosophy and Anti-Semitism On the Structure of the “Event of Appropriation” Art and the “Struggle between World and Earth” “Overcoming Metaphysics” Language as the “House of Being” God and “The Gods” 4. The “Essence of Technology” Friedrich Nietzsche and Ernst Jünger “Machination” and “Positionality” Arrival in the “Fourfold”? Reverberations Biographical Facts in Historical Context Bibliography for Further Study Notes Index

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Book SynopsisGeorges Canguilhem (1904–95) was an influential historian and philosopher of science, as renowned for his teaching as for his writings. He is best known for his book The Normal and the Pathological, originally his doctoral thesis in medicine, but he also wrote a thesis in philosophy on the concept of the reflex, supervised by Gaston Bachelard. He was the sponsor of Michel Foucault’s doctoral thesis on madness. However, his work extends far beyond what is suggested by his association with these thinkers. Canguilhem also produced a series of important works on the natural sciences, including studies of evolution, psychology, vitalism and mechanism, experimentation, monstrosity and disease. Stuart Elden discusses the whole of this important thinker’s complex work, including recently rediscovered texts and archival materials. Canguilhem always approached questions historically, examining how it was that we came to a significant moment in time, outlining tensions, detours and paths not taken. The first comprehensive study in English, this book is a crucial guide for those coming to terms with Canguilhem’s important contributions, and will appeal to researchers and students from a range of fields.Trade Review‘The patience, clarity and erudition we expect of Stuart Elden's books are on full display in this exceptional work. More than a simple introduction, Canguilhem enables readers to see the outlines, stakes and details of the works of an important thinker.’John Protevi, Louisiana State University ‘This impressive and meticulously researched volume which includes a wealth of references to archival material provides the first comprehensive introduction in English to a figure recognized as a seminal influence by postwar French thinkers, including Foucault and Althusser.’Clare O’Farrell, Queensland University of TechnologyTable of Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations 1 Foundations 2 The Normal and the Pathological 3 Philosophy of Biology 4 Physiology and the Reflex 5 Regulation and Psychology 6 Evolution and Monstrosity 7 Philosophy of History 8 Writings on Medicine 9 Legacies Timeline Notes Index

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Book SynopsisGeorges Canguilhem (1904–95) was an influential historian and philosopher of science, as renowned for his teaching as for his writings. He is best known for his book The Normal and the Pathological, originally his doctoral thesis in medicine, but he also wrote a thesis in philosophy on the concept of the reflex, supervised by Gaston Bachelard. He was the sponsor of Michel Foucault’s doctoral thesis on madness. However, his work extends far beyond what is suggested by his association with these thinkers. Canguilhem also produced a series of important works on the natural sciences, including studies of evolution, psychology, vitalism and mechanism, experimentation, monstrosity and disease. Stuart Elden discusses the whole of this important thinker’s complex work, including recently rediscovered texts and archival materials. Canguilhem always approached questions historically, examining how it was that we came to a significant moment in time, outlining tensions, detours and paths not taken. The first comprehensive study in English, this book is a crucial guide for those coming to terms with Canguilhem’s important contributions, and will appeal to researchers and students from a range of fields.Trade Review‘The patience, clarity and erudition we expect of Stuart Elden's books are on full display in this exceptional work. More than a simple introduction, Canguilhem enables readers to see the outlines, stakes and details of the works of an important thinker.’John Protevi, Louisiana State University ‘This impressive and meticulously researched volume which includes a wealth of references to archival material provides the first comprehensive introduction in English to a figure recognized as a seminal influence by postwar French thinkers, including Foucault and Althusser.’Clare O’Farrell, Queensland University of Technology

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Book SynopsisWritings on History brings together a selection of texts by Louis Althusser dating from 1963 to 1986, including essays, a lecture, notes to his collaborators, and the transcript of an informal 1963 discussion of literary history. The centrepiece of this collection is Althusser’s previously unpublished Book on Imperialism, a theorization of globalized capitalism that remained unfinished. All these writings are concerned with the place of history in Marxist theory and, in particular, on what Althusser considered to be the mortal danger of historicism haunting the revolutionary reading of the present. They testify to his continuing dialogue with the historiography of his day, several of whose representatives were engaged in discussion and debate with him. Deeply interested in history but intent on avoiding the kind of interpretation that would transform it into a deterministic force, Althusser never ceased to reflect on the equilibrium between the historical and the concept in Marxist historiography, an equilibrium that he sought to reinvent for his time. The traces of that undertaking, which continues to generate debate throughout the world today, are brought together in this volume.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Note on the Text A Conversation on Literary History (1963) Supplementary Note on History (1965–1966?) On Genesis (1966) How Can Something Substantial Change? (1970) To Gretzky (1973) (extract) Draft of a Reply to Pierre Vilar (1973?) Book on Imperialism (1973) (selections) Marx and History (1975) On History (1986) Notes

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Book SynopsisWritings on History brings together a selection of texts by Louis Althusser dating from 1963 to 1986, including essays, a lecture, notes to his collaborators, and the transcript of an informal 1963 discussion of literary history. The centrepiece of this collection is Althusser’s previously unpublished Book on Imperialism, a theorization of globalized capitalism that remained unfinished. All these writings are concerned with the place of history in Marxist theory and, in particular, on what Althusser considered to be the mortal danger of historicism haunting the revolutionary reading of the present. They testify to his continuing dialogue with the historiography of his day, several of whose representatives were engaged in discussion and debate with him. Deeply interested in history but intent on avoiding the kind of interpretation that would transform it into a deterministic force, Althusser never ceased to reflect on the equilibrium between the historical and the concept in Marxist historiography, an equilibrium that he sought to reinvent for his time. The traces of that undertaking, which continues to generate debate throughout the world today, are brought together in this volume.Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Note on the Text A Conversation on Literary History (1963) Supplementary Note on History (1965–1966?) On Genesis (1966) How Can Something Substantial Change? (1970) To Gretzky (1973) (extract) Draft of a Reply to Pierre Vilar (1973?) Book on Imperialism (1973) (selections) Marx and History (1975) On History (1986) Notes

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Book SynopsisThe work of Michel Houellebecq – one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time – is marked by the thought of Schopenhauer. When Houellebecq came across a copy of Schopenhauer's Aphorisms in a library in his mid-twenties, he was bowled over by it and he hunted down a copy of his major philosophical work, The World as Will and Representation. Houellebecq found in Schopenhauer – the radical pessimist, the chronicler of human suffering, the lonely misanthrope – a powerful conception of the human condition and of the future that awaits us, and when Houellebecq’s first writings appeared in the early 1990s, the influence of Schopenhauer was everywhere apparent. But it was only much later, in 2005, that Houellebecq began to translate and write a commentary on Schopenhauer’s work. He thought of turning it into a book but soon abandoned the idea and the text remained unpublished until 2017. Now available in English for the first time, In the Presence of Schopenhauer is the story of a remarkable encounter between a novelist and a philosopher and a testimony to the deep and enduring impact of Schopenhauer’s philosophy on one of France’s greatest living writers.Trade Review‘So when I borrowed “Aphorisms on the Wisdom of Life” from the municipal library of the seventh arrondissement in Paris (more specifically, its annex in the Latour-Maubourg district), I may have been aged twenty-six, but equally possibly twenty-five, or twenty-seven. In any case, this is very late in life for such a major discovery. At the time, I already knew Baudelaire, Dostoevsky, Lautréamont, Verlaine, almost all the Romantics; a lot of science fiction, too. I had read the Bible, Pascal’s Pensées, Clifford D. Simak’s City, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. I wrote poems; I already had the impression I was rereading, rather than really reading; I thought I had at least completed one period in my discovery of literature.’ ‘And then, in a few minutes, everything dramatically changed.’"In the Presence of Schopenhauer is a profound tribute that illuminates the French novelist’s own work."Times Literary SupplementTable of ContentsPreface by Agathe Novak-Lechevalier Leave childhood behind, my friend, and wake up! Chapter One: The world is my representation Chapter Two: Look at things attentively Chapter Three: In this way the will to live objectifies itself Chapter Four: The theatre of the world Chapter Five: The conduct of life: what we are Chapter Six: The conduct of life: what we have Notes

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Book SynopsisExpanding the insights of Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault’s Disorderly Families into policing, public order, (in)justice, and daily life What might it mean for ordinary people to intervene in the circulation of power between police and the streets, sovereigns and their subjects? How did the police come to understand themselves as responsible for the circulation of people as much as things—and to separate law and justice from the maintenance of a newly emergent civil order? These are among the many questions addressed in the interpretive essays in Archives of Infamy.Crisscrossing the Atlantic to bring together unpublished radio broadcasts, book reviews, and essays by historians, geographers, and political theorists, Archives of Infamy provides historical and archival contexts to the recent translation of Disorderly Families by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault. This volume includes new translations of key texts, including a radio address Foucault gave in 1983 that explains the writing process for Disorderly Families; two essays by Foucault not readily available in English; and a previously untranslated essay by Farge that describes how historians have appropriated Foucault.Archives of Infamy pushes past old debates between philosophers and historians to offer a new perspective on the crystallization of ideas—of the family, gender relations, and political power—into social relationships and the regimes of power they engender. Contributors: Roger Chartier, Collège de France; Stuart Elden, U of Warwick; Arlette Farge, Centre national de recherche scientifique; Michel Foucault (1926–1984); Jean-Philippe Guinle, Catholic Institute of Paris; Michel Heurteaux; Pierre Nora, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales; Michael Rey (1953–1993); Thomas Scott-Railton; Elizabeth Wingrove, U of Michigan.Trade Review"Listening to the voices rising from the archives, grasping the distant echoes of confrontations with power, exhuming the tenuous grain of tiny existences—this is what Michel Foucault chose to do. Does the philosopher’s gesture conflict with the historical understanding of archival material? This look back at an exciting debate asks: is it possible to build together a concern for anonymous lives, a literary passion for documentary fragments, and the desire to make a history of the discourses and practices of power?" —Judith Revel, Université Paris Nanterre"The book should be of interest to Foucault scholars, political scientists, historians of eighteenth century France, as well as general readers."—Foucault Studies

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Book SynopsisA groundbreaking volume introduces the unique feminist thought of the longstanding Italian group known as Diotima Introducing Anglophone readers to a potent strain of Italian feminism known to French, Spanish, and German audiences but as yet unavailable in English, Another Mother argues that the question of the mother is essential to comprehend the matrix of contemporary culture and society and to pursue feminist political projects. Focusing on Diotima, a community of women philosophers deeply involved in feminist politics since the 1960s, this volume provides a multifaceted panorama of its engagement with currents of thought including structuralism, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Marxism. Starting from the simple insight that the mother is the one who gives us both life and language, these thinkers develop concepts of the mother and sexual difference in contemporary society that differ in crucial ways from both French and U.S. feminisms. Arguing that Diotima anticipates many of the themes in contemporary philosophical discourses of biopolitics—exemplified by thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito—Another Mother opens an important space for reflections on the past history of feminism and on feminism’s future. Contributors: Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Paris 8 U–Vincennes Saint-Denis; Ida Dominijanni; Luisa Muraro; Diana Sartori, U of Verona; Chiara Zamboni, U of Verona.Trade Review"To those of us who teach, study, and value activist feminist thought, this collection is a gift. It makes accessible to Anglophone readers Italian feminist philosopher-activists’ radical theorization and practice of sexual difference and establishes that concept not as a relic of the ‘Second Wave’ but as a vital resource for theorizing biopolitics, for fighting violence against ‘the feminine,’ and for envisioning and practicing anti-racist political projects."—Lisa Disch, University of MichiganTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Another Mother, Another IntroductionCesare Casarino and Andrea RighiPart One: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Politics of Sexual Difference1. The Contact WordIda Dominijanni2. To Knit or to Crochet: A Political-Linguistic Tale on the Enmity between Metaphor and MetonymyLuisa Muraro3. On the Relation between Words and Things as FrequentationLuisa Muraro Part Two: On the Maternal Symbolic and Its Language4. Maternal Language between Limit and Infinite OpeningChiara Zamboni5. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Dead Mother ComplexLuisa MuraroPart Three: The Mother and The Negative6. With the Maternal SpiritDiana Sartori7. The Undecidable ImprintIda DominijanniPart Four: Thinking with Diotima8. And Yet She Speaks!: “Italian Feminism” and LanguageAnne Emmanuelle Berger9. Origin and Dismeasure: The Thought of Sexual Difference in Luisa Muraro and Ida Dominijanni, and the Rise of Post-Fordist PsychopathologyAndrea Righi10. Mother Degree Zero; or, of Beginnings: An Afterword on Luisa Muraro’s Feminist Inaptitude for PhilosophyCesare Casarino Index

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Book SynopsisA groundbreaking volume introduces the unique feminist thought of the longstanding Italian group known as Diotima Introducing Anglophone readers to a potent strain of Italian feminism known to French, Spanish, and German audiences but as yet unavailable in English, Another Mother argues that the question of the mother is essential to comprehend the matrix of contemporary culture and society and to pursue feminist political projects. Focusing on Diotima, a community of women philosophers deeply involved in feminist politics since the 1960s, this volume provides a multifaceted panorama of its engagement with currents of thought including structuralism, psychoanalysis, linguistics, and Marxism. Starting from the simple insight that the mother is the one who gives us both life and language, these thinkers develop concepts of the mother and sexual difference in contemporary society that differ in crucial ways from both French and U.S. feminisms. Arguing that Diotima anticipates many of the themes in contemporary philosophical discourses of biopolitics—exemplified by thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, and Roberto Esposito—Another Mother opens an important space for reflections on the past history of feminism and on feminism’s future. Contributors: Anne Emmanuelle Berger, Paris 8 U–Vincennes Saint-Denis; Ida Dominijanni; Luisa Muraro; Diana Sartori, U of Verona; Chiara Zamboni, U of Verona.Trade Review"To those of us who teach, study, and value activist feminist thought, this collection is a gift. It makes accessible to Anglophone readers Italian feminist philosopher-activists’ radical theorization and practice of sexual difference and establishes that concept not as a relic of the ‘Second Wave’ but as a vital resource for theorizing biopolitics, for fighting violence against ‘the feminine,’ and for envisioning and practicing anti-racist political projects."—Lisa Disch, University of MichiganTable of ContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Another Mother, Another IntroductionCesare Casarino and Andrea RighiPart One: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Politics of Sexual Difference1. The Contact WordIda Dominijanni2. To Knit or to Crochet: A Political-Linguistic Tale on the Enmity between Metaphor and MetonymyLuisa Muraro3. On the Relation between Words and Things as FrequentationLuisa Muraro Part Two: On the Maternal Symbolic and Its Language4. Maternal Language between Limit and Infinite OpeningChiara Zamboni5. Feminism and Psychoanalysis: The Dead Mother ComplexLuisa MuraroPart Three: The Mother and The Negative6. With the Maternal SpiritDiana Sartori7. The Undecidable ImprintIda DominijanniPart Four: Thinking with Diotima8. And Yet She Speaks!: “Italian Feminism” and LanguageAnne Emmanuelle Berger9. Origin and Dismeasure: The Thought of Sexual Difference in Luisa Muraro and Ida Dominijanni, and the Rise of Post-Fordist PsychopathologyAndrea Righi10. Mother Degree Zero; or, of Beginnings: An Afterword on Luisa Muraro’s Feminist Inaptitude for PhilosophyCesare Casarino Index

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Book SynopsisA unique rereading of Lacan’s theory of desire and its link to masochism, joy, mysticism, death, and feminine jouissance Of all of Lacan’s reconceptualizations of Freudian psychoanalytic discourse, the most misunderstood are those concerning human beings’ relation to the unconscious play of desire and the neurosis stemming from their attachment to the phallic function. An interpretive tour de force that engages works by surrealists such as André Breton, canonical writers like William Faulkner and James Joyce, and the philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Baruch Spinoza, The Decision of Desire is groundbreaking in its proposal that each of us can seek out and reimagine our relation to the infinite aporias of desire and thereby detach from its destructive, repetitive forms in favor of joy and affirmation. Providing insight to the lay reader of psychoanalytic theory as much as to practicing psychoanalysts, The Decision of Desire is a bold reengagement with the legacy of the notion of desire within psychoanalysis and the quandary of how to assume responsibility for desires. For if desire is always already that of the Other and the unconscious, and also a decision that escapes our consciousness of ourselves, how can we assume an ethical relation to it that avoids the vicious circle of disappointment, neurosis, and destruction? Such is the decision of desire attempted within Silvia Lippi’s profound development of a contemporary psychoanalytic thought.Table of ContentsContentsPreface to the American EditionPrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Desire—Between Alterity and DecisionI. Finite Desire, Infinite Desire1. Desire, Squeezed between Signifiers2. Desire, Perverse and Perverted3. Gap, Distance, and Lack in DesireII. The Painful Dialectic of the Object4. The Object Slips Off, a Signifier Takes Its Place5. That Singular Cause of Desire6. “Oneself” as Object of Desire, and LoveIII. Desire and Beyond Desire7.Conatus and/or the Death Drive8. The Laws of Desire9. Enjoyment All and Not-allConclusion: From Double Alienation to JoyNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisThinking judgment in relation to the work of Jean-François Lyotard “How to judge—Jean-François Lyotard?” It is from this initial question that one of France’s most heralded philosophers of the twentieth century begins his essay on the origin of the law, of judgment, and the work of his colleague Jean-François Lyotard. If Jacques Derrida begins with the term préjugés, it is in part because of its impossibility to be rendered properly in other languages and also contain all its meanings: to pre-judge, to judge before judging, to hold prejudices, to know “how to judge,” and more still, to be already prejudged oneself. Striving to contain that which comes before the law, that is in front of the law and also prior to it, how to judge Jean-François Lyotard then becomes perhaps a beneficial attempt for Derrida to explore humanity’s rapport with judgment, origins, and naming. For how does one come to judge the author of the Differend? How does one abstain from judgment to accept the term préjugés as suspending judgment and at once as taking into account the impossibility of speaking before the law, prior to naming or judging? If this task indeed seems insurmountable, it is the site where Lyotard’s work itself is played out. Hence this sincere and intriguing essay presented by Jacques Derrida, published here for the first time in English.Trade Review"This excellent translation gives the whole text, parts of which had remained untranslated into English. It has discreet and careful annotation, giving full details for the references and quotations, something the original publication did not do, thus pinning down what was being encouraged to slip away."—French Studies

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Book SynopsisAn appeal for the importance of theory, utopia, and close consideration of our contemporary dark times What does any particular theory allow us to do? What is the value of doing so? And who benefits? In Invoking Hope, Phillip E. Wegner argues for the undiminished importance of the practices of theory, utopia, and a deep and critical reading of our current situation of what Bertolt Brecht refers to as finsteren Zeiten, or dark times.Invoking Hope was written in response to three events that occurred in 2016: the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia; the one hundredth anniversary of the founding text in theory, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics; and the rise of the right-wing populism that culminated in the election of Donald Trump. Wegner offers original readings of major interventions in theory alongside dazzling utopian imaginaries developed from classical Greece to our global present—from Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Sarah Ahmed, Susan Buck-Morss, and Jacques Lacan to such works as Plato’s Republic, W. E. B. Du Bois’s John Brown, Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, and more. Wegner comments on an expansive array of modernist and contemporary literature, film, theory, and popular culture.With Invoking Hope, Wegner provides an innovative lens for considering the rise of right-wing populism and the current crisis in democracy. He discusses challenges in the humanities and higher education and develops strategies of creative critical reading and hope against the grain of current trends in scholarship.Trade Review"This is a book that banishes intellectual lethargy forever, so dazzling are the close readings that flesh out its world-scale philosophy and so forceful is its polemic—a polemic on behalf of knowledge itself as much as theory, commitment, and a responsibly grounded, even necessary, account of hope."—Bruce Robbins, author of The Beneficiary"With originality and humor, Phillip E. Wegner extends Fredric Jameson’s tradition of dialectically reappropriating formalisms, showing how even the most seemingly static structures can be deployed to think diachronically and reinvigorate our abilities to historicize. This fearless book is exactly what we need now."—Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago"Invoking Hope is a major intervention by our leading theorist of utopia—a manifesto for the crisis of the present and the possibility of a better future. Drawing on a mix of Western Marxism and Badiou, Phillip E. Wegner argues for the necessity of a positive hermeneutics and the imagination of possible futures. In the Pandora’s box of the present, Wegner finds the hope that emerges last but promises everything."—Christopher Breu, Illinois State University"An uplifting (and very welcome) message that should appeal to everyone."—Science Fiction Studies Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Reading in Dark TimesPart I. Reading Theory1. Reading the Event of the New Criticism and the Fate of the Republic2. Toward Nonreading Utopia3. Beyond Ethical Reading; or, Reading Again the James-Wells DebatePart II. Reading Utopia4. John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Universal History5. Politics, Art, and Utopia in “Babette’s Feast”6. Repetition, Love, and Concrete Utopia in 50 First Dates7. Conditions of Utopia in 2312 and The Best of All Possible WorldsConclusion: Optimism and Pessimism in Cloud AtlasAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisAn appeal for the importance of theory, utopia, and close consideration of our contemporary dark times What does any particular theory allow us to do? What is the value of doing so? And who benefits? In Invoking Hope, Phillip E. Wegner argues for the undiminished importance of the practices of theory, utopia, and a deep and critical reading of our current situation of what Bertolt Brecht refers to as finsteren Zeiten, or dark times.Invoking Hope was written in response to three events that occurred in 2016: the five hundredth anniversary of the publication of Thomas More’s Utopia; the one hundredth anniversary of the founding text in theory, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics; and the rise of the right-wing populism that culminated in the election of Donald Trump. Wegner offers original readings of major interventions in theory alongside dazzling utopian imaginaries developed from classical Greece to our global present—from Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, Fredric Jameson, Sarah Ahmed, Susan Buck-Morss, and Jacques Lacan to such works as Plato’s Republic, W. E. B. Du Bois’s John Brown, Isak Dinesen’s “Babette’s Feast,” Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2312, and more. Wegner comments on an expansive array of modernist and contemporary literature, film, theory, and popular culture.With Invoking Hope, Wegner provides an innovative lens for considering the rise of right-wing populism and the current crisis in democracy. He discusses challenges in the humanities and higher education and develops strategies of creative critical reading and hope against the grain of current trends in scholarship.Trade Review"This is a book that banishes intellectual lethargy forever, so dazzling are the close readings that flesh out its world-scale philosophy and so forceful is its polemic—a polemic on behalf of knowledge itself as much as theory, commitment, and a responsibly grounded, even necessary, account of hope."—Bruce Robbins, author of The Beneficiary"With originality and humor, Phillip E. Wegner extends Fredric Jameson’s tradition of dialectically reappropriating formalisms, showing how even the most seemingly static structures can be deployed to think diachronically and reinvigorate our abilities to historicize. This fearless book is exactly what we need now."—Sianne Ngai, University of Chicago"Invoking Hope is a major intervention by our leading theorist of utopia—a manifesto for the crisis of the present and the possibility of a better future. Drawing on a mix of Western Marxism and Badiou, Phillip E. Wegner argues for the necessity of a positive hermeneutics and the imagination of possible futures. In the Pandora’s box of the present, Wegner finds the hope that emerges last but promises everything."—Christopher Breu, Illinois State University"An uplifting (and very welcome) message that should appeal to everyone."—Science Fiction Studies Table of ContentsContentsIntroduction: Reading in Dark TimesPart I. Reading Theory1. Reading the Event of the New Criticism and the Fate of the Republic2. Toward Nonreading Utopia3. Beyond Ethical Reading; or, Reading Again the James-Wells DebatePart II. Reading Utopia4. John Brown, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Universal History5. Politics, Art, and Utopia in “Babette’s Feast”6. Repetition, Love, and Concrete Utopia in 50 First Dates7. Conditions of Utopia in 2312 and The Best of All Possible WorldsConclusion: Optimism and Pessimism in Cloud AtlasAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA groundbreaking look at Gaia theory’s intersections with neocybernetic systems theory Often seen as an outlier in science, Gaia has run a long and varied course since its formulation in the 1970s by atmospheric chemist James Lovelock and microbiologist Lynn Margulis. Gaian Systems is a pioneering exploration of the dynamic and complex evolution of Gaia’s many variants, with special attention to Margulis’s foundational role in these developments.Bruce Clarke assesses the different dialects of systems theory brought to bear on Gaia discourse. Focusing in particular on Margulis’s work—including multiple pieces of her unpublished Gaia correspondence—he shows how her research and that of Lovelock was concurrent and conceptually parallel with the new discourse of self-referential systems that emerged within neocybernetic systems theory. The recent Gaia writings of Donna Haraway, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour contest its cybernetic status. Clarke engages Latour on the issue of Gaia’s systems description and extends his own systems-theoretical synthesis under what he terms “metabiotic Gaia.” This study illuminates current issues in neighboring theoretical conversations—from biopolitics and the immunitary paradigm to NASA astrobiology and the Anthropocene. Along the way, he points to science fiction as a vehicle of Gaian thought. Delving into many issues not previously treated in accounts of Gaia, Gaian Systems describes the history of a theory that has the potential to help us survive an environmental crisis of our own making.Trade Review"Where William Blake found the world in a grain of sand, Gaia finds the planet in a bacterial cell. Bruce Clarke, eminent scholar of literature and science, leads us through the evolution and elaboration of the notion—where complex systems can easily get complicated and cybernetics loopy—with sustained precision and clarity. The necessity to understand is evident throughout."—Douglas Kahn, author of Earth Sound Earth Signal: Energies and Earth Magnitude in the Arts"Gaian Systems is a brilliant labor of love. Intellectual love for a major system of thought and for those who have built it, especially the towering figure of Lynn Margulis. But also profound love for our living planet as a whole, for the complexity and subtlety of the complex assemblages that compose it. Combining rigor with generosity, Bruce Clarke explores the genealogy, the key concepts, and the major implications of a symbiogenetic vision of our planetary system. Humble and yet visionary, this remarkable study instructs, illuminates, and gives us hope."—Rosi Braidotti, Utrecht UniversityTable of ContentsContentsIntroduction: An Epistemological TransitionPart I. Gaia Discourse1. A Paradigm Shift2. Thinkers of Gaia3. Neocybernetics of GaiaPart II. The Systems Counterculture4. The Whole Earth Network5. The Lindisfarne Connection6. Margulis and AutopoiesisPart III. Gaian Enquiries7. The Planetary Imaginary8. Planetary Immunity9. Astrobiology and the AnthropoceneAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

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Book SynopsisA powerful new examination of the performative that asks “what’s next?” for this well-worn concept From its humble origins in J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory of the 1950s, the performative has grown to permeate wildly diverse scholarly fields, ranging from deconstruction and feminism to legal theory and even theories about the structure of matter. Here Jeffrey T. Nealon discovers how the performative will remain vital in the twenty-first century, arguing that it was never merely concerned with linguistic meaning but rather constitutes an insight into the workings of immaterial force.Fates of the Performative takes a deep dive into this “performative force” to think about the continued power and relevance of this wide-ranging concept. Offering both a history of the performative’s mutations and a diagnosis of its present state, Nealon traces how it has been deployed by key writers in the past sixty years, including foundational thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and Judith Butler; contemporary theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Antonio Negri; and the “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith.Ultimately, Nealon’s inquiry is animated by one powerful question: what’s living and what’s dead in performative theory? In deconstructing the reaction against the performative in current humanist thought, Fates of the Performative opens up important conversations about systems theory, animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and the digital humanities. Nealon’s stirring appeal makes a necessary declaration of the performative’s continued power and relevance at a time of neoliberal ascendancy.Trade Review "What is 'the performative,' and why is it everywhere in contemporary thought? Jeffrey T. Nealon answers that question in this enlightening and witty book. In search of appropriate responses to our fact-free politics, Nealon offers sharp diagnoses of ‘post-critique’ and the ‘new materialism’ on the way to describing a resistant rhetoric to meet the challenges we face."—John McGowan, University of North Carolina "Fates of the Performative is a major intervention in the theory of the performative. Although performativity is not severed from language, in Jeffrey T. Nealon's view it is persuasively linked to the biopolitical. No theorist invested in the question of the biopolitical has gone down the path Nealon is following by proposing that we understand the embodied and the material, or the agency of the material, as a version of the performative. The idea that life doesn't adapt but performs—that it is distanced from itself by staging what it is—is a novel proposition, which means that this book will reorient theoretical debate about what the performative is and productively complicate our understanding of it."—Branka Arsić, Columbia University "Irreverent, funny and fast-paced, combative without being crabby, this book recycles its basic claims in a way that, against all odds, makes the book cohere."—American Literary History Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsPreface: Why the Performative?Part I. Genealogy of the Performative1. The Truth Is a Joke? Performatives in Austin and Derrida2. Two Paths You Can Go By: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick3. The Bodacious Era: Thoreau and New Materialism; or, What’s Wrong with the Anthropocene?Part II. Performativity and/as/into Biopolitics4. Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century5. What Is a Lecturer? Performative, Parrhesia, and the Author-Function in Foucault’s Lecture Courses6. Literary RealFeel: Banality, Fatality, and Meaning in Kenneth Goldsmith’s The WeatherConclusion: On the Returns of Realism and the (Supposed) Exhaustion of CritiqueNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA powerful new examination of the performative that asks “what’s next?” for this well-worn concept From its humble origins in J. L. Austin’s speech-act theory of the 1950s, the performative has grown to permeate wildly diverse scholarly fields, ranging from deconstruction and feminism to legal theory and even theories about the structure of matter. Here Jeffrey T. Nealon discovers how the performative will remain vital in the twenty-first century, arguing that it was never merely concerned with linguistic meaning but rather constitutes an insight into the workings of immaterial force.Fates of the Performative takes a deep dive into this “performative force” to think about the continued power and relevance of this wide-ranging concept. Offering both a history of the performative’s mutations and a diagnosis of its present state, Nealon traces how it has been deployed by key writers in the past sixty years, including foundational thinkers like Jacques Derrida, Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick, and Judith Butler; contemporary theorists such as Thomas Piketty and Antonio Negri; and the “conceptual poetry” of Kenneth Goldsmith.Ultimately, Nealon’s inquiry is animated by one powerful question: what’s living and what’s dead in performative theory? In deconstructing the reaction against the performative in current humanist thought, Fates of the Performative opens up important conversations about systems theory, animal studies, object-oriented ontology, and the digital humanities. Nealon’s stirring appeal makes a necessary declaration of the performative’s continued power and relevance at a time of neoliberal ascendancy.Trade Review "What is 'the performative,' and why is it everywhere in contemporary thought? Jeffrey T. Nealon answers that question in this enlightening and witty book. In search of appropriate responses to our fact-free politics, Nealon offers sharp diagnoses of ‘post-critique’ and the ‘new materialism’ on the way to describing a resistant rhetoric to meet the challenges we face."—John McGowan, University of North Carolina "Fates of the Performative is a major intervention in the theory of the performative. Although performativity is not severed from language, in Jeffrey T. Nealon's view it is persuasively linked to the biopolitical. No theorist invested in the question of the biopolitical has gone down the path Nealon is following by proposing that we understand the embodied and the material, or the agency of the material, as a version of the performative. The idea that life doesn't adapt but performs—that it is distanced from itself by staging what it is—is a novel proposition, which means that this book will reorient theoretical debate about what the performative is and productively complicate our understanding of it."—Branka Arsić, Columbia University "Irreverent, funny and fast-paced, combative without being crabby, this book recycles its basic claims in a way that, against all odds, makes the book cohere."—American Literary History Table of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsPreface: Why the Performative?Part I. Genealogy of the Performative1. The Truth Is a Joke? Performatives in Austin and Derrida2. Two Paths You Can Go By: Judith Butler and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick3. The Bodacious Era: Thoreau and New Materialism; or, What’s Wrong with the Anthropocene?Part II. Performativity and/as/into Biopolitics4. Biopolitics, Marxism and Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century5. What Is a Lecturer? Performative, Parrhesia, and the Author-Function in Foucault’s Lecture Courses6. Literary RealFeel: Banality, Fatality, and Meaning in Kenneth Goldsmith’s The WeatherConclusion: On the Returns of Realism and the (Supposed) Exhaustion of CritiqueNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisA timely and trenchant commentary on the centrality of Nietzsche’s thought for our time While many posthumanists claim Nietzsche as one of their own, rarely do they engage his philosophy in any real depth. Nietzsche’s Posthumanism addresses this need by exploring the continuities and disagreements between Nietzsche’s philosophy and contemporary posthumanism. Focusing specifically on Nietzsche’s reception of the life sciences of his day and his reflections on technology—research areas as central to Nietzsche’s work as they are to posthumanism—Edgar Landgraf provides fresh readings of Nietzsche and a critique of post- and transhumanist philosophies. Through Landgraf’s inquiry, lesser-known aspects of Nietzsche’s writings emerge, including the neurophysiological basis of his epistemology (which anticipates contemporary debates on embodiment), his concerns with insects and the emergent social properties they exhibit, and his reflections on the hominization and cultivation effects of technology. In the process, Landgraf challenges major commonplaces about Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the idea that his social theory asserts the rights of “the strong” over “the weak.” The ethos of critical posthumanism also offers a new perspective on key ethical and political contentions of Nietzsche’s writings. Nietzsche’s Posthumanism presents a uniquely framed introduction to tenets of Nietzsche’s thought and major trends in posthumanism, making it an essential exploration for anyone invested in Nietzsche and his contemporary relevance, and in posthumanism and its genealogy. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.Trade Review "Nietzsche’s Posthumanism is a timely, lucid, and incisive commentary on the problematic centrality of Nietzsche’s thought for our time. It shows the continued potential that Nietzsche’s writings have for navigating a way through the dangers and excesses of contemporary posthumanist politics. In doing so, Edgar Landgraf’s critical posthumanist stance produces fresh readings of both Nietzsche and posthumanist philosophies."—Stefan Herbrechter, University of Heidelberg "Edgar Landgraf’s Nietzsche’s Posthumanism is a fantastic book. Through the lens of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Landgraf offers a fresh perspective on contemporary debates on posthumanism and its many variants, engaging with key thinkers in science and technology studies, new materialism, and biopolitics, including Foucault, Maturana and Varela, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, Braidotti and Esposito. Landgraf draws on thorough research and engagement with Nietzsche's texts, shedding new light on aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that are perhaps less known, such as his writing on insects. Nietzsche's Posthumanism asks what we can learn from swarms and hives about human ethics and politics. I highly recommend it!"—Vanessa Lemm, author of Homo Natura and Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. Posthumanism and Its Nietzsches 2. Posthumanist Epistemology 3. Insect Sociality 4. Instinct, Will, and the Will to Power 5. Media Technologies of Hominization 6. Cultivating the Sovereign Individual 7. The Ethics and Politics of Nietzschean Posthumanism Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisA timely and trenchant commentary on the centrality of Nietzsche’s thought for our time While many posthumanists claim Nietzsche as one of their own, rarely do they engage his philosophy in any real depth. Nietzsche’s Posthumanism addresses this need by exploring the continuities and disagreements between Nietzsche’s philosophy and contemporary posthumanism. Focusing specifically on Nietzsche’s reception of the life sciences of his day and his reflections on technology—research areas as central to Nietzsche’s work as they are to posthumanism—Edgar Landgraf provides fresh readings of Nietzsche and a critique of post- and transhumanist philosophies. Through Landgraf’s inquiry, lesser-known aspects of Nietzsche’s writings emerge, including the neurophysiological basis of his epistemology (which anticipates contemporary debates on embodiment), his concerns with insects and the emergent social properties they exhibit, and his reflections on the hominization and cultivation effects of technology. In the process, Landgraf challenges major commonplaces about Nietzsche’s philosophy, including the idea that his social theory asserts the rights of “the strong” over “the weak.” The ethos of critical posthumanism also offers a new perspective on key ethical and political contentions of Nietzsche’s writings. Nietzsche’s Posthumanism presents a uniquely framed introduction to tenets of Nietzsche’s thought and major trends in posthumanism, making it an essential exploration for anyone invested in Nietzsche and his contemporary relevance, and in posthumanism and its genealogy. Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.Trade Review "Nietzsche’s Posthumanism is a timely, lucid, and incisive commentary on the problematic centrality of Nietzsche’s thought for our time. It shows the continued potential that Nietzsche’s writings have for navigating a way through the dangers and excesses of contemporary posthumanist politics. In doing so, Edgar Landgraf’s critical posthumanist stance produces fresh readings of both Nietzsche and posthumanist philosophies."—Stefan Herbrechter, University of Heidelberg "Edgar Landgraf’s Nietzsche’s Posthumanism is a fantastic book. Through the lens of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Landgraf offers a fresh perspective on contemporary debates on posthumanism and its many variants, engaging with key thinkers in science and technology studies, new materialism, and biopolitics, including Foucault, Maturana and Varela, Deleuze and Guattari, Haraway, Braidotti and Esposito. Landgraf draws on thorough research and engagement with Nietzsche's texts, shedding new light on aspects of Nietzsche’s philosophy that are perhaps less known, such as his writing on insects. Nietzsche's Posthumanism asks what we can learn from swarms and hives about human ethics and politics. I highly recommend it!"—Vanessa Lemm, author of Homo Natura and Nietzsche's Animal Philosophy Table of Contents Contents Acknowledgments Abbreviations Introduction 1. Posthumanism and Its Nietzsches 2. Posthumanist Epistemology 3. Insect Sociality 4. Instinct, Will, and the Will to Power 5. Media Technologies of Hominization 6. Cultivating the Sovereign Individual 7. The Ethics and Politics of Nietzschean Posthumanism Notes Bibliography Index

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Book Synopsis“The likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences,” writes the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa around 1906, “renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy.” If Babel Had a Form asks not if his claim may be true, but what its phantasmic surprise may yet do. In twentieth-century intersections of China and Asia with the United States, translations did more than communicate meaning across politicized and racializing differences of language and nation. Transpacific translation breached the regulative protocols that created those very differences of human value and cultural meaning. The result, Tze-Yin Teo argues, saw translators cleaving to the sounds and shapes of poetry to imagine a translingual “likeness of form” but not of meaning or kind. At stake in this form without meaning is a startling new task of equivalence. As a concept, equivalence has been rejected for its colonizing epistemology of value, naming a broken promise of translation and false premise of comparison. Yet the writers studied in this book veered from those ways of knowing to theorize a poetic equivalence: negating the colonial foundations of the concept, they ignited aporias of meaning into flashpoints for a radical literary translation. The book’s transpacific readings glean those forms of equivalence from the writing of Fenollosa, the vernacular experiments of Boxer Scholar Hu Shi, the trilingual musings of Shanghai-born Los Angeles novelist Eileen Chang, the minor work of the Bay Area Korean American transmedial artist Theresa Cha, and a post-Tiananmen elegy by the exiled dissident Yang Lian. The conclusion returns to the deconstructive genealogy of recent debates on translation and untranslatability, displacing the axiom of radical alterity for a no less radical equivalence that remains—pace Fenollosa—far from easy or exceptional. Ultimately, If Babel Had a Form illuminates the demanding force of even the slightest sameness entangled in the translator’s work of remaking our differences.Table of ContentsNote on Translation, Transliteration, and Transcription | vii Introduction: Equivalence beyond Value | 1 1 Transpacific Abstraction | 31 2 Sound Translation: Eileen Chang | 67 3 Concrete Translation: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha | 95 4 Translingual Erasure: Yang Lian | 126 Conclusion: If Babel Had a Form | 151 Acknowledgments | 165 Notes | 167 Works Cited | 205 Index | 219

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Book Synopsis“The likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences,” writes the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa around 1906, “renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy.” If Babel Had a Form asks not if his claim may be true, but what its phantasmic surprise may yet do. In twentieth-century intersections of China and Asia with the United States, translations did more than communicate meaning across politicized and racializing differences of language and nation. Transpacific translation breached the regulative protocols that created those very differences of human value and cultural meaning. The result, Tze-Yin Teo argues, saw translators cleaving to the sounds and shapes of poetry to imagine a translingual “likeness of form” but not of meaning or kind. At stake in this form without meaning is a startling new task of equivalence. As a concept, equivalence has been rejected for its colonizing epistemology of value, naming a broken promise of translation and false premise of comparison. Yet the writers studied in this book veered from those ways of knowing to theorize a poetic equivalence: negating the colonial foundations of the concept, they ignited aporias of meaning into flashpoints for a radical literary translation. The book’s transpacific readings glean those forms of equivalence from the writing of Fenollosa, the vernacular experiments of Boxer Scholar Hu Shi, the trilingual musings of Shanghai-born Los Angeles novelist Eileen Chang, the minor work of the Bay Area Korean American transmedial artist Theresa Cha, and a post-Tiananmen elegy by the exiled dissident Yang Lian. The conclusion returns to the deconstructive genealogy of recent debates on translation and untranslatability, displacing the axiom of radical alterity for a no less radical equivalence that remains—pace Fenollosa—far from easy or exceptional. Ultimately, If Babel Had a Form illuminates the demanding force of even the slightest sameness entangled in the translator’s work of remaking our differences.Table of ContentsNote on Translation, Transliteration, and Transcription | vii Introduction: Equivalence beyond Value | 1 1 Transpacific Abstraction | 31 2 Sound Translation: Eileen Chang | 67 3 Concrete Translation: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha | 95 4 Translingual Erasure: Yang Lian | 126 Conclusion: If Babel Had a Form | 151 Acknowledgments | 165 Notes | 167 Works Cited | 205 Index | 219

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

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Book SynopsisA beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental Europe This landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy’s last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy’s account becomes more vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into language that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood’s intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our world—a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction to mere objects. The exceptional writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition—on Freud, Nietzsche, and others—with rich poetic language and an actual poem. Nancy’s thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of language. Whereas in earlier texts Nancy has referred to this excess as poetry, here he performs it in the form of a poem, in the extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While the publication of a poem by Nancy is a notable event, equally noteworthy is a remarkable essay entitled “Scandalous Death,” in which Nancy meditated on a subject that was to come to him too soon after. Above all, the book is crucial for bringing into English Cruor, the very last book Nancy completed before his death, an evocative meditation offered by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own—and our—singular survival.Table of ContentsPart I : Cruor, with Longing for the Father Introduction | 3 Cruor | 7 1. Drive (Pulsion), 7 • 2. Rhythm, 8 • 3. Self (Soi), 9 • 4. You (Toi), 11 • 5. Instance, 13 • 6. Glorious Body, 15 • 7. Matrix, 17 • 8. It/Self (Erudite Interlude), 19 • 9. Extension, 21 • 10. Self/Same, 22 • 11. Excitation, 24 • 12. For, 25 • 13. Myth, 26 • 14. Sacrifice, 29 • 15. Torture, 31 • 16. Embrace, 33 • 17. Justice, 35 • 18. Sublime, 36 • 19. But Still Again, 37 • 20. Life Is Cruel, 38 • 21. Eros, Thanatos, Cosmos, 39 • 22. Drives without Objects, 41 Longing for the Father | 45 Lesson | 58 Part II : Stoma Hymne Stomique / Stoma: A Hymn | 62 Afterword to Stoma, by Andrea Gyenge and John Paul Ricco | 97 Part III : Scandalous Death | 109 Notes | 117

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Book SynopsisA beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental Europe This landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy’s last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy’s account becomes more vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into language that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood’s intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our world—a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction to mere objects. The exceptional writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition—on Freud, Nietzsche, and others—with rich poetic language and an actual poem. Nancy’s thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of language. Whereas in earlier texts Nancy has referred to this excess as poetry, here he performs it in the form of a poem, in the extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While the publication of a poem by Nancy is a notable event, equally noteworthy is a remarkable essay entitled “Scandalous Death,” in which Nancy meditated on a subject that was to come to him too soon after. Above all, the book is crucial for bringing into English Cruor, the very last book Nancy completed before his death, an evocative meditation offered by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own—and our—singular survival.Table of ContentsPart I : Cruor, with Longing for the Father Introduction | 3 Cruor | 7 1. Drive (Pulsion), 7 • 2. Rhythm, 8 • 3. Self (Soi), 9 • 4. You (Toi), 11 • 5. Instance, 13 • 6. Glorious Body, 15 • 7. Matrix, 17 • 8. It/Self (Erudite Interlude), 19 • 9. Extension, 21 • 10. Self/Same, 22 • 11. Excitation, 24 • 12. For, 25 • 13. Myth, 26 • 14. Sacrifice, 29 • 15. Torture, 31 • 16. Embrace, 33 • 17. Justice, 35 • 18. Sublime, 36 • 19. But Still Again, 37 • 20. Life Is Cruel, 38 • 21. Eros, Thanatos, Cosmos, 39 • 22. Drives without Objects, 41 Longing for the Father | 45 Lesson | 58 Part II : Stoma Hymne Stomique / Stoma: A Hymn | 62 Afterword to Stoma, by Andrea Gyenge and John Paul Ricco | 97 Part III : Scandalous Death | 109 Notes | 117

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Book SynopsisThis book explores God’s use of violence as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the Pentateuch, it reads biblical narratives and codes of law as documenting formations of theopolitical imagination. Ophir deciphers the logic of divine rule that these documents betray, with a special attention to the place of violence within it. The book draws from contemporary biblical scholarship, while also engaging critically with contemporary political theory and political theology, including the work of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Jan Assmann, Regina Schwartz, and Michael Walzer. Ophir focuses on three distinct theocratic formations: the rule of disaster, where catastrophes are used as means of governance; the biopolitical rule of the holy, where divine violence is spatially demarcated and personally targeted; and the rule of law where divine violence is vividly remembered and its return is projected, anticipated, and yet postponed, creating a prolonged lull for the text’s present. Different as these formations are, Ophir shows how they share an urform that anticipates the main outlines of the modern European state, which has monopolized the entire globe. A critique of the modern state, the book argues, must begin in revisiting the deification of the state, unpacking its mostly repressed theological dimension.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments | vii Introduction | 1 1. Staying with the Violence | 13 Divine Violence—A Trailer, 13 • A Brief Note on Counting and Explaining Away, 21 • Violence, as It Is Unfolding: A Phenomenological Sketch, 24 • Literal Reading and the Biblical Language of Violence, 36 2. Theocracy: The Persistence of an Ancient Lacuna | 45 Theocracy, with and beyond Flavius Josephus, 45 • The Blind Spot: Three Contemporary Readings of Biblical Violence, 53 • On the Attribution of Power and Authority, 74 • Kingship, Anarchy, Theocracy, 79 • Hypothesis, Method, and Stakes, 86 3. The Rule of Disaster: Extinction, Genocides, and Other Calamities | 96 Becoming Political, 96 • From Extinction to Genocide, 99 • Beyond Destruction, 105 • Separation and Disaster, 113 • Violence and Law, 124 • The Sovereign’s Moment, 130 • Scouts in the Land of the Giants: Three Theocratic Formations, 139 4. Holy Power: States of Exception, Targeted Killings, and the Logic of Substitution | 145 Holiness, 145 • Rebellions in the Wilderness, 160 • Substitution and Containment, 178 5. The Time of the Covenant and the Temporalization of Violence | 193 The Experimental Setting: Recalling Violence and Regulating It, 196 • The Covenant and the Curses, 204 • The Weight of the Present, 214 • The Subjects’ Trap, or the People’s Irony, 222 • A Midianite Utopia, 230 Afterword: The Pentateuchal State, and Ours | 241 Notes | 257 Works Cited | 317 Index | 335

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

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

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

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Book SynopsisThe unlivable is the most extreme point of human suffering and injustice. But what is it exactly? How do we define the unlivable? And what can we do to prevent and repair it? These are the intriguing questions Judith Butler and Frédéric Worms discuss in a captivating dialogue situated at the crossroads of contemporary life and politics. Here, Judith Butler criticizes the norms that make life precarious and unlivable, while Frédéric Worms appeals to a “critical vitalism” as a way of allowing the hardship of the unlivable to reveal what is vital for us. For both Butler and Worms, the difference between the livable and the unlivable forms the critical foundation for a contemporary practice of care. Care and support, in all their aspects, make human life livable, that is, “more than living.” To understand it, we must draw on the concrete practices of humans who are confronted with the unlivable: the refugees of today and the witnesses and survivors of past violations and genocide. They teach us what is intolerable but also undeniable about the unlivable, and what we can do to resist it. Crafted with critical rigor, mutual respect, and lively humor, the compelling dialogue transcribed and translated in this book took place at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) on April 11, 2018, at a time when close to two thousand migrants were living in nearby makeshift camps in northern Paris. The Livable and the Unlivable showcases this 2018 dialogue in the context of Butler’s and Worms’s ongoing work and the evolution of their thought, as presented by Laure Barillas and Arto Charpentier in their equally engaging introduction. It concludes with a new afterword that addresses the crises unfolding in our world and the ways a philosophically rigorous account of life must confront them. While this book will be of keen interest to readers of philosophy and cultural criticism, and those interested in vitalism, new materialism, and critical theory, it is a far from merely academic text. In the conversation between Butler and Worms, we encounter questions we all grapple with in confronting the distress and precarity of our times, marked as it is by types of survival that are unlivable, from concentration camps to prisons to environmental toxicity, to forcible displacement, to the Covid pandemic. The Livable and the Unlivable at once considers longstanding philosophical questions around why and how we live, while working to retrieve a philosophy of life for today’s Left.Table of ContentsPreface | vii Introduction By Arto Charpentier and Laure Barillas | 1 The Livable and the Unlivable | 11 Afterword | 43 Notes | 77

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Book SynopsisGlobalization and climate weirding are two of the leading phenomena that challenge and change the way we need to think and act within the planetary community. Modern Western understandings of human beings, animals, and the rest of the natural world and the subsequent technologies built on those understandings have thrown us into an array of social and ecological crises with planetary implications. Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, argues that more immanent or planetary ways of thinking and acting have great potential for re-thinking human-technology-animal-Earth relationships and for addressing problems of global climate weirding and other forms of ecological degradation. Older and often-marginalized forms of thought from animisms, shamanisms, and other religious traditions are joined by more recent forms of thinking with immanence such as the universe story, process thought, emergence theory, the new materialisms (NM’s), object-oriented ontologies (OOO’s), affect theory, and queer theory. This book maps out some of the connections and differences between immanent frameworks to provide some eco-intellectual commons for thinking within the planetary community, with a particular emphasis on making connections between more recent theories and older ideas of immanence found in many of the world’s religious traditions. The authors in this volume met and worked together over five years, so the resulting volume reveals sustained and multifaceted perspectives on “thinking and acting with the planet.”Table of ContentsIntroduction Karen Bray, Heather Eaton, and Whitney Bauman | 1 Confucianism as a Form of Immanental Naturalism Mary Evelyn Tucker | 15 Immanence in Hinduism and Jainism: New Planetary Thinking? Christopher Key Chapple | 31 Mountains Preach the Dharma: Immanence in Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism Christopher Ives | 49 Africana Sacred Matters: Religious Materialities in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas Elana Jefferson-Tatum | 60 We have always been animists . . . Graham Harvey | 74 Indigenous Cosmovisions and a Humanist Perspective on Materialism John Grim | 88 Amorous Entanglements: The Matter of Christian Panentheism Catherine Keller | 99 On the Matter of Hope: Weaving Threads of Jewish Wisdom for the Sake of the Planetary O’neil Van Horn | 111 Oily Animations: On Protestantism and Petroleum Terra Schwerin Rowe | 123 Interreligious Approaches to Sustainability Without a Future: Two New Materialist Proposals for Religion and Ecology Kevin Minister | 136 Which Materialism, Whose Planetary Thinking? Joerg Rieger | 148 Rewilding Religion for a Primeval Future Sarah M. Pike | 161 Planetary Thinking, Agency, and Relationality: Religious Naturalism’s Plea Carol Wayne White | 173 Dancing Immanence: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming Kimerer L. LaMothe | 186 The Animist, Almost Feminist, Quite Nearly Pantheist Old Materialism of Giordano Bruno Mary-Jane Rubenstein | 198 Emergence Theory and the New Materialisms Kevin Schilbrack | 210 New Materialisms and Planetary Persistence, Purpose, and Politics Heather Eaton | 222 Gut Theology: The Peril and Promise of Political Affect Karen Bray | 234 The Entangled Relations of Our Ecological Crisis: Religion, Capitalism’s Logics, and New Forms of Planetary Thinking Matthew R. Hartman | 248 Solidarity with Nonhumans: Being Ecological with Object-Oriented Ontology Sam Mickey | 260 Developing a Critical Romantic Religiosity for a Planetary Community Whitney A. Bauman | 274 Matter Values: Ethics and Politics for a Planet in Crisis Philip Clayton | 289 Acknowledgments | 303 Bibliography | 305 List of Contributors | 335 Index | 341

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Book SynopsisGlobalization and climate weirding are two of the leading phenomena that challenge and change the way we need to think and act within the planetary community. Modern Western understandings of human beings, animals, and the rest of the natural world and the subsequent technologies built on those understandings have thrown us into an array of social and ecological crises with planetary implications. Earthly Things: Immanence, New Materialisms, and Planetary Thinking, argues that more immanent or planetary ways of thinking and acting have great potential for re-thinking human-technology-animal-Earth relationships and for addressing problems of global climate weirding and other forms of ecological degradation. Older and often-marginalized forms of thought from animisms, shamanisms, and other religious traditions are joined by more recent forms of thinking with immanence such as the universe story, process thought, emergence theory, the new materialisms (NM’s), object-oriented ontologies (OOO’s), affect theory, and queer theory. This book maps out some of the connections and differences between immanent frameworks to provide some eco-intellectual commons for thinking within the planetary community, with a particular emphasis on making connections between more recent theories and older ideas of immanence found in many of the world’s religious traditions. The authors in this volume met and worked together over five years, so the resulting volume reveals sustained and multifaceted perspectives on “thinking and acting with the planet.”Table of ContentsIntroduction Karen Bray, Heather Eaton, and Whitney Bauman | 1 Confucianism as a Form of Immanental Naturalism Mary Evelyn Tucker | 15 Immanence in Hinduism and Jainism: New Planetary Thinking? Christopher Key Chapple | 31 Mountains Preach the Dharma: Immanence in Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism Christopher Ives | 49 Africana Sacred Matters: Religious Materialities in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas Elana Jefferson-Tatum | 60 We have always been animists . . . Graham Harvey | 74 Indigenous Cosmovisions and a Humanist Perspective on Materialism John Grim | 88 Amorous Entanglements: The Matter of Christian Panentheism Catherine Keller | 99 On the Matter of Hope: Weaving Threads of Jewish Wisdom for the Sake of the Planetary O’neil Van Horn | 111 Oily Animations: On Protestantism and Petroleum Terra Schwerin Rowe | 123 Interreligious Approaches to Sustainability Without a Future: Two New Materialist Proposals for Religion and Ecology Kevin Minister | 136 Which Materialism, Whose Planetary Thinking? Joerg Rieger | 148 Rewilding Religion for a Primeval Future Sarah M. Pike | 161 Planetary Thinking, Agency, and Relationality: Religious Naturalism’s Plea Carol Wayne White | 173 Dancing Immanence: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming Kimerer L. LaMothe | 186 The Animist, Almost Feminist, Quite Nearly Pantheist Old Materialism of Giordano Bruno Mary-Jane Rubenstein | 198 Emergence Theory and the New Materialisms Kevin Schilbrack | 210 New Materialisms and Planetary Persistence, Purpose, and Politics Heather Eaton | 222 Gut Theology: The Peril and Promise of Political Affect Karen Bray | 234 The Entangled Relations of Our Ecological Crisis: Religion, Capitalism’s Logics, and New Forms of Planetary Thinking Matthew R. Hartman | 248 Solidarity with Nonhumans: Being Ecological with Object-Oriented Ontology Sam Mickey | 260 Developing a Critical Romantic Religiosity for a Planetary Community Whitney A. Bauman | 274 Matter Values: Ethics and Politics for a Planet in Crisis Philip Clayton | 289 Acknowledgments | 303 Bibliography | 305 List of Contributors | 335 Index | 341

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

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

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

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

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Book SynopsisOffering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on “ominous matter” and “thing power.” In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many—more powerful—others. In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgänger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary “nonhuman turn,” expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.Table of ContentsPreface: Three Beginnings | vii Introduction: Ominous Matter | 1 1 Gothic Thing Theory | 19 2 Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism | 41 3 Body-as-Thing | 72 4 Thing-as- Body | 91 5 Book: How to Do Things with Words | 115 6 Building: Bigger on the Inside | 137 Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One’s Ordinary Life | 171 Acknowledgments | 173 Notes | 175 Works Cited | 181 Index | 195

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Book SynopsisOffering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on “ominous matter” and “thing power.” In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among many—more powerful—others. In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgänger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary “nonhuman turn,” expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse. Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditation on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.Table of ContentsPreface: Three Beginnings | vii Introduction: Ominous Matter | 1 1 Gothic Thing Theory | 19 2 Dark Enchantment and Gothic Materialism | 41 3 Body-as-Thing | 72 4 Thing-as- Body | 91 5 Book: How to Do Things with Words | 115 6 Building: Bigger on the Inside | 137 Epilogue: The Ominous Matter of One’s Ordinary Life | 171 Acknowledgments | 173 Notes | 175 Works Cited | 181 Index | 195

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