Search results for ""fordham university press""

Decolonizing Epistemologies builds upon the contributions of liberation and postcolonial theories in both philosophy and theology. Gathering the work of three generations of Latina/o theologians and philosophers who have taken up the task of transforming their respective disciplines, it seeks to facilitate the emergence of new knowledge by reflecting on the Latina/o reality in the United States as an epistemic locus: a place from which to start as well as the source of what is known and how it is known. The task of elaborating a liberation and decolonial epistemology emerges from the questions and concerns of Latina/os as a minoritized and marginalized group. Refusing to be rendered invisible by the dominant discourse, the contributors to this volume show the unexpected and original ways in which U.S. Latina/o social and historical loci are generative places for the creation of new matrices of knowledge. Because the Latina/o reality is intrinsically connected with that of other oppressed groups, the volume articulates a new point of departure for the self-understanding not only of Latina/os but also possibly for other marginalized and oppressed groups, and for all those seeking to engage in the move beyond coloniality as it is present in this age of globalization.

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The history of tropical medicine is as dramatic as the story of humankind. It has its own myths and legends, including tales of epidemics that destroyed whole civilizations. Today, with silent stealth, tropical diseases still claim more lives than all the current wars combined. Having had the privilege of working throughout Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as in the great medical centers of Europe and the United States, the author presents the details essential for understanding pathogenesis, clinical manifestations, therapy, and prevention of the major tropical diseases. The text, now in its eighth edition, has been used for half a century by medical students, practicing physicians, and public health workers around the world. This fascinating book should also be of interest to a broad, nonmedical readership interested in world affairs. All royalties from the sale of this book go to the training of humanitarian workers.

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What is it about irony—as an object of serious philosophical reflection and a literary technique of considerable elasticity—that makes it an occasion for endless critical debate? This book responds to this question by focusing on several key moments in German Romanticism and its afterlife in twentieth-century French thought and writing. It includes chapters on Friedrich Schlegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Jean Paulhan, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man. A coda traces the way unresolved tensions inherited from Romanticism resurface in a novelist like J. M. Coetzee. But this book is neither a historical nor a thematic study of irony. To the degree that irony initiates a deflection of meaning, it also entails a divergence from historical and thematic models of understanding. The book therefore aims to respect irony's digressive force by allowing it to emerge from questions that sometimes have little or nothing to do with the ostensible topic of irony. For if irony is the possibility that whatever is being said does not coincide fully with whatever is being meant, then there is no guarantee that the most legitimate approach to the problem would proceed directly to those places where "irony" is named, described, or presumed to reside. Rather than providing a history of irony, then, this book examines particular occasions of ironic disruption. It thus offers an alternative model for conceiving of historical occurrences and their potential for acquiring meaning.

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What is it about irony—as an object of serious philosophical reflection and a literary technique of considerable elasticity—that makes it an occasion for endless critical debate? This book responds to this question by focusing on several key moments in German Romanticism and its afterlife in twentieth-century French thought and writing. It includes chapters on Friedrich Schlegel, Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, Thomas Mann, Jean Paulhan, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Paul de Man. A coda traces the way unresolved tensions inherited from Romanticism resurface in a novelist like J. M. Coetzee. But this book is neither a historical nor a thematic study of irony. To the degree that irony initiates a deflection of meaning, it also entails a divergence from historical and thematic models of understanding. The book therefore aims to respect irony's digressive force by allowing it to emerge from questions that sometimes have little or nothing to do with the ostensible topic of irony. For if irony is the possibility that whatever is being said does not coincide fully with whatever is being meant, then there is no guarantee that the most legitimate approach to the problem would proceed directly to those places where "irony" is named, described, or presumed to reside. Rather than providing a history of irony, then, this book examines particular occasions of ironic disruption. It thus offers an alternative model for conceiving of historical occurrences and their potential for acquiring meaning.

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The Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine community was founded in 1910 by marion gurney, who adopted the religious name Mother Marianne of Jesus. A graduate of Wellesley College and a convert to Catholicism, Gurney had served as head resident at St. Rose’s Settlement, the first Catholic settlement house in New York City. She founded the Sisters of Christian Doctrine when other communities of women religious appeared uninterested in a ministry of settlement work combined with religious education programs for children attending public schools. The community established two settlement houses in New York City—Madonna House on the Lower East Side in 1910, followed by Ave Maria House in the Bronx in 1930. Alongside their classes in religious education and preparing children and adults to receive the sacraments, the Sisters distributed food and clothing, operated a bread line, and helped their neighbors in emergencies. In 1940 Mother Marianne and the Sisters began their first major mission outside New York when they adapted the model of the urban Catholic social settlement to rural South Carolina. They also served at a number of parishes, including several in South Carolina and Florida, where they ministered to both black and white Catholics. In Neighbors and Missionaries, Margaret M. McGuinness, who was given full access to the archives of the Sisters of Christian Doctrine, traces in fascinating detail the history of the congregation, from the inspiring story of its founder and the community’s mission to provide material and spiritual support to their Catholic neighbors, to the changes and challenges of the latter half of the twentieth century. By 1960, settlement houses had been replaced by other forms of social welfare, and the lives and work of American women religious were undergoing a dramatic change. McGuinness explores how the Sisters of Christian Doctrine were affected and how they adapted their own lives and work to reflect the transformations taking place in the Church and society. Neighbors and Missionaries examines a distinctive community of women religious whose primary focus was neither teaching nor nursing/hospital administration. The choice of the Sisters of Christian Doctrine to live among the poor and to serve where other communities were either unwilling or unable demonstrates that women religious in the United States served in many different capacities as they contributed to the life and work of the American Catholic Church.

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It is a truism that history is written by the victors, and perhaps this is doubly so of military history, where the tendency is to relate the biggest battles, the most victorious and heroic deeds, the very best (or worst) of men. This book stands as a corrective to this belief. Scraping the Barrel covers ten cases of armies’ using substandard manpower in wars from 1860 to the 1960s. Dennis Showalter and André Lambelet look at the changing standards in Germany and France leading up to World War I, while Peter Simkins chronicles what happened with the “Bantams,” special units of short men used by Britain in the Great War. Often the use of substandard men was to answer the sheer need for manpower in brutal, lasting conflicts, as Paul A. Cimbala writes of the U.S. Veteran Reserve Corps in the Civil War, or to keep war-damaged men active; sometimes this ethos was used to include men who wanted to fight but who otherwise would have been excluded, as Steven W. Short writes of the U.S. “colored troops” in World War I. In the second World War it was to answer more dire exigencies, as David Glantz relates how the USSR, having suffered enormous losses, threw away many pre-war standards, reaching for women, ethnic/national minorities, and political prisoners alike to fill units. Likewise, Nazi Germany, facing many fronts and a finite manpower pool, was compelled to relax both physical and racial standards, and Walter Dunn and Valdis Lumans look at these changing policies as well as the battlefield performance of these men. In relating the stories of the substandard (for the military), Scraping the Barrel is also a humanist history of the military, of the more average men who have served their countries and how they were put to use. It throws light on how militaries’ ideas of fitness reflect the underlying views of their societies. The idea of “disability” has been constructed based on a variety of physical, yes, but also social standards: as a value judgment on groups viewed as lesser—the aged, the lower classes, and those of different races and ethnic identities. From the American Civil War, through World Wars I and II, through the U.S. Project 100,000 in the Cold War, substandard men have been mobilized, have served, and have fought for their countries. These men are the inverse of the elites who get the lion’s share of our attention. This is their untold history.

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This book presents Daniel Berrigan’s contribution and challenge to catholic social thought. His contribution lies in his consistent, comprehensive, theoretical, and practical approach to issues of social justice and peace over the past fifty years. His challenge lies in his critique of capitalism, imperialism, and militarism, inviting Catholic activists and thinkers to undertake not just a reformist but a radical critique of and alternative to these realities. The aim of this book is, for the first time, to make Berrigan’s thought and life available to the academic Catholic community, so that a fruitful interaction takes place. How does this work enlighten and challenge such a community? To these ends, the editors have recruited scholars and thinker-activists already familiar with and sympathetic to Berrigan’s work and those who are less so identified. The result is a rich, engaging, and critical treatment of the meaning and impact of his work. What kind of challenge does he present to academic-business-as-usual in Catholic universities? How can the life and work of individual Catholic academics be transformed if such persons took Berrigan’s work seriously—theoretically and practically? Do Catholic universities need Berrigan’s vision to fulfill more integrally and completely their own missions? Does the self-knowing subject and theorist need to become a radical subject and theorist? Even though the appeal of academics is important and perhaps primary, because of the range and depth of Berrigan’s work and thought and the power of his writing there is a larger appeal to the Catholic community and to activists working for social justice and peace. This book has, therefore, not only a theoretical and academic appeal but also a popular and grassroots appeal. Given the current and ongoing U.S. military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, Berrigan’s work invites us to think about the justice of such interventions or, given the destructiveness of modern weapons, whether the notion of just war makes any sense. Given the recent crisis on Wall Street, does it make sense any longer to talk about the possibility of a just capitalism? Given the most recent revelations about Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram, is it not imperative to think about how torture, preventative detention, and extraordinary rendition serve the ends of empire? In light of all of this, doesn’t Berrigan’s call for a pacific, prophetic community of justice rooted in the Good News of the Gospel make compelling sense?

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This book brings together process and postmodern theologians to reflect on the crucial topic of energy, asking: What are some of the connections between energy and theology? How do ideas about humanity and divinity interrelate with how we live our lives? Its contributors address energy in at least three distinct ways. First, in terms of physics, the discovery of dark energy in 1998 uncovered a mysterious force that seems to be driving the expansion of the universe. Here cosmology converges with theological reflection about the nature and origin of the universe. Second, the social and ecological contexts of energy use and the current energy crisis have theological implications insofar as they are caught up with ultimate human meanings and values. Finally, in more traditional theological terms of divine spiritual energy, we can ask how human conceptions of energy relate to divine energy in terms of creative power.

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In these pages Jonathan Boyarin invites us to share the intimate life of the Stanton Street Shul, one of the last remaining Jewish congregations on New York’s historic Lower East Side. This narrow building, wedged into a lot designed for an old-law tenement, is full of clamorous voices—the generations of the dead, who somehow contrive to make their presence known, and the newer generation, keeping the building and its memories alive and making themselves Jews in the process. Through the eyes of Boyarin, at once a member of the congregation and a bemused anthropologist, the book follows this congregation of “year-round Jews” through the course of a summer during which its future must once again be decided. The Lower East Side, famous as the jumping off point for millions of Jewish and other immigrants to America, has recently become the hip playground of twenty-something immigrants to the city from elsewhere in America and from abroad. Few imagine that Jewish life there has stubbornly continued through this history of decline and regeneration. Coming inside with Boyarin, we see the congregation’s life as a combination of quiet heroism, ironic humor, disputes for the sake of Heaven and perhaps otherwise, and—above all—the ongoing search for ways to connect with Jewish ancestors while remaining true to oneself in the present. Mornings at the Stanton Street Shul illustrates in poignant and humorous ways the changes in a historic neighborhood facing the challenges of gentrification. It offers readers with no prior knowledge of Judaism and synagogue life a portrait that is at once intimate and intelligible. Most important, perhaps, it shows the congregation’s members to be anything but a monochromatic set of uniform “believers” but rather a gathering of vibrant, imperfect, indisputably down-to-earth individuals coming together to make a community.

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The Interval offers the first sustained analysis of the concept grounding Irigaray’s thought: the constitutive yet incalculable interval of sexual difference. In an extension of Irigaray’s project, Hill takes up her formulation of the interval as a way of rereading Aristotle’s concept of topos and Bergson’s concept of duration. Hill diagnoses a sexed hierarchy at the heart of Aristotle’s and Bergson’s presentations. Yet beyond that phallocentrism, she points out how Aristotle’s theory of topos as a sensible relation between two bodies that differ in being and Bergson’s intuition of duration as an incalculable threshold of becoming are indispensable to the feminist effort to think about sexual difference. Reading Irigaray with Aristotle and Bergson, Hill argues that the interval cannot be grasped as a space between two identities; it must be characterized as the sensible threshold of becoming, constitutive of the very identity of beings. The interval is the place of the possibility of sexed subjectivity and intersubjectivity; the interval is also a threshold of the becoming of sexed forces.

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Since the mid-1970s, Lebanon has been at the center of the worldwide rise in sectarian extremism. Its cultural output has both mediated and resisted this rise. Standing by the Ruins reviews the role of culture in supporting sectarianism, yet argues for the emergence of a distinctive aesthetic of resistance to it. Focusing on contemporary Lebanese fiction, film, and popular culture, this book shows how artists reappropriated the twin legacies of commitment literature and the ancient topos of “standing by the ruins” to form a new “elegiac humanism” during the tumultuous period of 1975 to 2005. It redirects attention to the critical role of culture in conditioning attitudes throughout society and is therefore relevant to other societies facing sectarian extremism. Standing by the Ruins is also a strong intervention in the burgeoning field of World Literature. Elaborating on the great Arabist Hilary Kilpatrick’s crucial insight that ancient Arabic forms and topoi filter into modern literature, the author details how the “standing by the ruins” topos—and the structure of feeling it conditions—has migrated over time. Modern Arabic novels, feature films, and popular culture, far from being simply cultural imports, are hybrid forms deployed to respond to the challenges of contemporary Arab society. As such, they can take their place within a World Literature paradigm: they are cultural products that travel and intervene in the world.

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In this book, the author argues that certain modern literary texts have apocalyptic futures. Rather than claim that great writers have clairvoyant powers, he examines the ways in which a text incorporates an apocalyptic event into its future reception. He is thus concerned with the way in which apocalyptic works solicit their future receptions. Apocalyptic Futures also sets out to articulate a new theory and textual practice of the relation between literary reception and embodiment. Deploying the double register of “marks” to show how a text both codes and targets mutilated bodies, the author focuses on how these bodies are incorporated into texts by Kafka, Conrad, Coetzee, and Spiegelman. Situating “In the Penal Colony” in relation to the Holocaust, Heart of Darkness to the Rwandan genocide, and Waiting for the Barbarians to the revelations of torture in apartheid South Africa and contemporary Iraq, the author argues for the ethical and political importance of reading these literary works’ “apocalyptic futures” in our own urgent and perilous situations. The book concludes with a reading of Spiegelman's Maus that offers a messianic counter-time to the law of apocalyptic incorporation.

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One of the most complicated and ambiguous tendencies in contemporary western societies is the phenomenon referred to as the “turn to religion.” In philosophy, one of the most original thinkers critically questioning this “turn” is Jean-Luc Nancy. Re-treating Religion is the first volume to analyze his long-term project “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” especially his major statement of it in Dis-Enclosure. Nancy conceives monotheistic religion and secularization not as opposite worldviews that succeed each other in time but rather as springing from the same history. This history consists in a paradoxical tendency to contest one’s own foundations—whether God, truth, origin, humanity, or rationality—as well as to found itself on the void of this contestation. Nancy calls this unique combination of self-contestation and self-foundation the “self-deconstruction” of the Western world. The book includes discussion with Nancy himself, who contributes a substantial “Preamble” and a concluding dialogue with the volume editors. The contributions follow Nancy in tracing the complexities of Western culture back to the persistent legacy of monotheism, in order to illuminate the tensions and uncertainties we face in the twenty-first century.

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The Animal Side is a manifesto on the importance of animals for human thought. It attempts to characterize the importance, for human beings, of the fact that animals exist. Adopting a philosophical and poetic approach, the book seeks to show that animals’ ways of inhabiting the earth are, for human consciousness, an expansion and an exploration of what philosophers and poets have tried to name by speaking of the Open. Beginning with the story of an encounter with a deer on a road at night, the book proceeds by showing that, beyond the diversity of animal life and the ways animals differ from human beings, there is a “layer of the perceptible” on which we all draw, humans and animals alike, in our own ways. At present, however, this layer itself is at risk. Thus the book can also be read as a defense and illustration of animals’ modes of being, and as a plea for their survival.

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The four talks collected here transcribe lectures delivered to an audience of children between the ages of ten and fourteen, under the auspices of the “little dialogues” series at the Montreuil’s center for the dramatic arts. Modeled on Walter Benjamin’s “Aufklärung für Kinder” radio talks, this series aims to awaken its young audience to pressing philosophical concerns. Each talk in God, Justice, Love, Beauty explores what is at stake in these topics as essential moments in human experience. (Indeed, the book argues that they are constitutive of human experience.) Following each, Nancy’s audience is given a chance to engage with him in a process of philosophical questioning; the texts of these touching and probing exchanges are included in the volume. Despite the fact that these lectures were delivered to an audience of children, the intellectual level they achieve—while remaining easily comprehensible—is astounding. No attempt is made to simplify Nancy’s positions or to resolve the complexities that arise in the course of the talks or the question periods that follow. The work of opening performed here is fully in keeping with the strategy of Nancy’s philosophy as a whole. Thus, for readers unfamiliar with his work, God, Justice, Love, Beauty will function as an excellent introduction to Nancy’s larger corpus. As varied as the individual talks are, they share the motif of incalculability or the immeasurable. Broadly speaking, one could say that the various ways in which Nancy approaches this motif exemplify his deconstructive approach to think of human existence. As well, those treatments exemplify his conviction that the task of thinking is to develop original ways of communicating the incalculable. God, Justice, Love, Beauty is thus a skillful reminder that philosophy is important to all of us. The book is also a model of intellectual generosity and openness. Seamlessly moving from Schwarzenegger to Plato, from Kant, Roland Barthes, and Caravaggio to Caillou, Harry Potter, and the pages of Gala magazine, Nancy’s wide-ranging references bear witness to his commitment to think of “culture” in its broadest sense.

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The living and the dead cohabited Paris until the late eighteenth century, when, in the name of public health, measures were taken to drive the latter from the city. Cemeteries were removed from urban space, and corpses started to be viewed as terrifyingly noxious substances. The dead had fallen victim to a sustained reflection on the notions of life and death that emerged from the two new medical fields of biology and hygiene. In large part, the Paris of the nineteenth century—the Paris of modernity—arose, both theoretically and physically, out of this concern over the relations between the animate and the inanimate. As the dead became a source of pervasive and intense anxiousness, they also became an object of fascination that at once exceeded and guided the medical imagination attempting to control them. Human Remains examines that exuberant anxiety to discover the irrational, indeed erotic, forces motivating the medicalization of death. Working across a broad range of disciplines, including history, literature, the visual arts, philosophy, and psychoanalysis, the book seeks to understand the meaning of the dead and their role in creating one of the most important cities of the contemporary world.

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What are the sources of the commonly held presumption that reading literature should make people more just, humane, and sophisticated? Rendering literary history responsive to the cultural histories of reading, publishing, and education, The Pleasures of Memory illuminates the ways in which Dickens’s serial fiction shaped not only the popular practice of reading for pleasure and instruction but also the school subject we now know as “English.” Winter shows how Dickens’s serial fiction instigated specific reading practices by reworking the conventions of religious didactic tracts from which most Victorians learned to read. Incorporating an influential associationist psychology of learning founded on the cumulative functioning of memory, Dickens’s serial novels consistently led readers to reflect on their reading as a form of shared experience. Dickens’s celebrity authorship, Winter argues, represented both a successful marketing program for popular fiction and a cultural politics addressed to a politically unaffiliated, social-activist Victorian readership. As late-nineteenth century educational reforms consolidated British and American readers into “mass” populations served by state school systems, Dickens’s beloved novels came to embody the socially inclusive and humanizing goals of democratic education.

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Hart Crane's long poem The Bridge has steadily grown in stature since it was published in 1930. At first branded a noble failure by a few influential critics— a charge that became conventional wisdom—this panoramic work is now widely regarded as one of the finest achievements of twentieth-century American poetry. It unites mythology and modernity as a means of coming to terms with the promises, both kept and broken, of American experience. The Bridge is also very difficult. It is well loved but not well understood. Obscure and indirect allusions abound in it, some of them at surprisingly fine levels of detail. The many references to matters of everyday life in the 1920s may baffle or elude today’s readers. The elaborate compound metaphors that distinguish Crane’s style bring together diverse sources in ways that make it hard to say what, if anything, is “going on” in the text. The poem is replete with topical and geographical references that demand explication as well as identification. Many passages are simply incomprehensible without special knowledge, often special knowledge of a sort that is not readily available even today, when Google and Wikipedia are only a click away. Until now, there has been no single source to which a reader can go for help in understanding and enjoying Crane’s vision. There has been no convenient guide to the poem’s labyrinthine complexities and to its dense network of allusions—the “thousands of strands” that, Crane boasted, “had to be sorted out, researched, and interwoven” to compose the work. This book is that guide. Its detailed and far-reaching annotations make The Bridge fully accessible, for the first time, to its readers, whether they are scholars, students, or simply lovers of poetry.

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Paul Ricoeur's entire philosophical project narrates a "passion for the possible" expressed in the hope that in spite of death, closure, and sedimentation, life is opened by superabundance, by how the world gives us much more than is possible. Ricoeur's philosophical anthropology is a phenomenology of human capacity, which gives onto the groundless ground of human being, namely, God. Thus the story of the capable man, beginning with original goodness held captive by a servile will and ending with the possibility of liberation and regeneration of the heart, underpins his passion for the more than possible. The essays in this volume trace the fluid movement between phenomenological and religious descriptions of the capable self that emerges across Ricoeur's oeuvre and establish points of connection for future developments that might draw inspiration from this body of thought.

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Amid radical transformation and rapid mutation in the nature, transmission, and deployment of information and communications, Around the Book offers a status report and theoretically nuanced update on the traditions and medium of the book. What, it asks, are the book’s current prospects? The study highlights the most radical experiments in the book’s history as trials in what the author terms the “Prevailing Operating System” at play within the fields of knowledge, art, critique, and science. The investigations of modern systems theory, as exemplified by Gregory Bateson, Anthony Wilden, and Niklas Luhmann, turn out to be inseparable from theoretically astute inquiry into the nature of the book. Sussman’s primary examples of such radical experiments with the history of the book are Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book (both the text and Peter Greenaway’s screen adaptation), Stéphane Mallarmé’s “Un coup de dés,” Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, Jacques Derrida’s Glas, Maurice Blanchot’s Death Sentence, and Franz Kafka’s enduring legacy within the world of the graphic novel. In the author’s hands, close reading of these and related works renders definitive proof of the book’s persistence and vitality. The book medium, with its inbuilt format and program, continues, he argues, to supply the tablet or screen for cultural notation. The perennial crisis in which the book seems to languish is in fact an occasion for readers to realize fully their role as textual producers, to experience the full range of liberty in expression and articulation embedded in the irreducibly bookish process of textual display.

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Memory has never been closer to us, yet never more difficult to understand. In the more than thirty specially commissioned essays that make up this book, leading scholars survey the histories, the theories, and the faultlines that compose the field of memory research. The volume reconstructs the work of the great philosophical and literary figures of the last two centuries who recast the concept of memory and brought it into the forefront of the modernist and postmodernist imagination—among them, Bergson, Halbwachs, Freud, Proust, Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, and Deleuze. Drawing on recent advances in the sciences and in the humanities, the contributors address the question of how memory works, highlighting transactions between the interiority of subjective memory and the larger fields of public or collective memory. The public, political life of memory is an increasingly urgent issue in the societies we now inhabit, while the category of memory itself seems to become ever more capacious. Asking how we might think about the politics of memory, the closing chapters explore a number of defining instances in which the troubled phenomenon of memory has entered and reshaped our very conception of what makes and drives the domain of politics. These include issues of slavery, the Soviet experience, the Holocaust, feminism and recovered memory, and memory in post-apartheid South Africa.

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The initial provocation for The Truth of Democracy was the fortieth anniversary of May ’68 and the recent criticism (some by French President Nicolas Sarkozy himself) leveled against the ideals and actors at the center of this important but still misunderstood moment in French history. Nancy here defends what he calls simply “68” without apology or equivocation, calling it an essential stage in the search for the “truth of democracy.” Less a period within time than a critical moment or interruption of time, 68 needs to be understood, Nancy argues, as an “event” that provided a glimpse into the very “spirit of democracy,” a spirit that is linked not to some common vision, idea, or desire (such as the nation, the republic, the people, or humanity) but to an incommensurability (the infinity of man or man’s exceeding of himself ) at the origin of democracy. Written in a direct and accessible, almost manifesto-like style, The Truth of Democracy presents a forceful plea that we rethink democracy not as one political regime or form among others but as that which opens up the very experience of being in common. By rearticulating many of the themes and terms he has developed elsewhere (from community and being in common to the singular plural) in relationship to an original analysis of what was and still is at stake in May ’68, The Truth of Democracy is at once an eloquent summary of much of Nancy’s work and a significant development of it. It is as if, forty years after being first scrawled across university walls and storefronts in France, one of the most famous slogans of May ’68 has received in The Truth of Democracy its most eloquent and poignant theoretical elaboration: “Be realistic, demand the impossible!”

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My book aims to help readers understand and appreciate O'Connor's novels and short stories. It weaves together her "place"-Milledgeville, Georgia; her purpose-to write a good story; and her preoccupations-belief, death, grace, and the devil. I explicate the influences that give depth to her fiction: her understanding and respect for the mores of the South ( including relationships between races), the books she read and marked that reveal links to her own philosophy and literary skill, and her deep religious convictions. Today, our encounters with the "other," the different one, elicit fear and lead to violence from us, as individuals and as nations. For O'Connor, the "other" is a distorted image of God. Her stories show how this distortion calls forth God's grace, and the violence in her stories enables her characters to discover their true selves. Her unique blend of talent and convictions allows her to create stories with long extensions of meaning. In our era of "quick reads," O'Connor's fiction leads us to a more contemplative mode of reading. When we finish one of her stories, we have experienced the intellectual pleasure of a finely-wrought artifact, and we also have much to think about: belief, death, grace, and the devil. Not a bad combination, that!

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Children have a fundamental right to education, and to the protection that schools uniquely provide in the chaos that characterizes life for refugees and internally displaced persons. This book is grounded in the personal experiences of children, aid workers, and national leaders involved in post-conflict resolution. Experts from many troubled parts of the world consider the scope of the problem, as well as the tools needed to address the crisis.

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Augustine’s Confessions is a text that seduces. But how often do its readers respond in kind? Here three scholars who share a longstanding fascination with sexuality and Christian discourse attempt to do just that. Where prior interpreters have been inclined either to defend or to criticize Augustine’s views, Virginia Burrus, Mark Jordan, and Karmen MacKendrick set out both to seduce and to be seduced by his text. Often ambivalent but always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions center on four sets of intertwined themes—secrecy and confession, asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and eternity. Rather than expose Augustine’s sexual history, they explore how the Confessions conjoins the erotic with the hidden, the imaginary, and the fictional. Rather than bemoan the repressiveness of his text, they uncover the complex relationship between seductive flesh and persuasive words that pervades all of its books. Rather than struggle to escape the control of the author, they embrace the painful pleasure of willed submission that lies at the erotic heart not only of the Confessions but also of Augustine’s broader understanding of sin and salvation. Rather than mourn the fateful otherworldliness of his theological vision, they plumb the bottomless depths of beauty that Augustine discovers within creation, thereby extending desire precisely by refusing satisfaction. In unfolding their readings, the authors draw upon other works in Augustine’s corpus while building on prior Augustinian scholarship in their own overlapping fields of history, theology, and philosophy. They also press well beyond the conventional boundaries of scholarly disciplines, conversing with such wide-ranging theorists of eroticism as Barthes, Baudrillard, Klossowski, Foucault, and Harpham. In the end, they offer not only a fresh interpretation of Augustine’s famous work but also a multivocal literary-philosophical meditation on the seductive elusiveness of desire, bodies, language, and God.

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This book, the first themed volume in the series The Future of the Religious Past, elaborates the manifold and fascinating interconnections between power and religion. It carries forward the work of the series in bringing together scholars from many disciplines and countries to research forms of religion in a way unfettered by the idea that religion is solely or even primarily a matter of belief in specific tenets or intellectual systems—it is also a matter of multiple particulars in individual and social life, such as powers, things, gestures, and words. Dealing with the nexus of religion and power, the present volume radically undermines the idea that the political relevance of religion is a thing of the past. Its essays treat power as a central aspect of religion on many levels, from that of macro-politics through the links between religion and nationhood to the level of personal empowerment or its obverse, disempowerment. Power and religion are both omnipresent in human action and interaction. There is no human act that does not include some kind of faith in a positive outcome and no deed in which power does not play some role. People obviously can attempt to use religion as an instrument to enhance their power or improve their status, whether personally or at the level of the nationstate. Yet religion is in principle ambiguous in relation to power: It can disempower as well as empower, and it can even function as a critique of existing power relations. Moreover, there is the consolatory function of religion, offering ways of compensation, of healing, and of enduring feelings of powerlessness. Like the first volume in the series, Religion: Beyond a Concept, the essays in this volume strike a balance between broad analyses of the nature of religion and power in their modes of emergence today and specific case studies from anthropology, sociology, and the arts. It is noteworthy for the breadth of the material it treats and its reach outside the Christian West, while not taking anything in that Western tradition for granted, given the astonishing changes of supposedly familiar religious phenomena we are viewing in the contemporary world.

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The ancient doctrine of negative theology or apophasis—the attempt to describe God by speaking only of what cannot be said about the divine perfection and goodness—has taken on new life in the concern with language and its limits that preoccupies much postmodern philosophy, theology, and related disciplines. How does this mystical tradition intersect with the concern with material bodies that is simultaneously a focus in these areas? This volume pursues the unlikely conjunction of apophasis and the body, not for the cachet of the “cutting edge” but rather out of an ethical passion for the integrity of all creaturely bodies as they are caught up in various ideological mechanisms—religious, theological, political, economic—that threaten their dignity and material well-being. The contributors, a diverse collection of scholars in theology, philosophy, history, and biblical studies, rethink the relationship between the concrete tradition of negative theology and apophatic discourses widely construed. They further endeavor to link these to the theological theme of incarnation and more general issues of embodiment, sexuality, and cosmology. Along the way, they engage and deploy the resources of contextual and liberation theology, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, process thought, and feminism. The result not only recasts the nature and possibilities of theological discourse but explores the possibilities of academic discussion across and beyond disciplines in concrete engagement with the well-being of bodies, both organic and inorganic. The volume interrogates the complex capacities of religious discourse both to threaten and positively to draw upon the material well-being of creation.

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The metaphor of the Church as a "body" has shaped Catholic thinking since the Second Vatican Council. Its influence on theological inquiries into Catholic nature and practice is well-known; less obvious is the way it has shaped a generation of Catholic imaginative writers. Cathedrals of Bone is the first full-length study of a cohort of Catholic authors whose art takes seriously the themes of the Council: from novelists such as Mary Gordon, Ron Hansen, Louise Erdrich, and J. F. Powers, to poets such as Annie Dillard, Mary Karr, Lucia Perillo, and Anne Carson, to the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley. Motivated by the inspirational yet thoroughly incarnational rhetoric of Vatican II, each of these writers encourages readers to think about the human body as a site-perhaps the most important site-of interaction between God and human beings. Although they represent the body in different ways, these late-twentieth-century Catholic artists share a sense of its inherent value. Moreover, they use ideas and terminology from the rich tradition of Catholic sacramentality, especially as it was articulated in the documents of Vatican II, to describe that value. In this way they challenge the Church to take its own tradition seriously and to reconsider its relationship to a relatively recent apologetics that has emphasized a narrow view of human reason and a rigid sense of orthodoxy.

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We are exorbitant, and rightly so, when we cut any link we may have to cosmological powers. Levinas invites us to be exorbitant by distancing ourselves from visions of metaphysics, epistemology, and theology. We begin to listen well to Levinas when we hear him inviting us to break completely with the pagan world in which the gods are simply the highest beings in the cosmos and learn to practice an adult religion in which God is outside cosmology and ontology. God comes to mind neither in our attempts to think him as the creator of the cosmos nor in moments of ecstasy but in acts of genuine holiness, such as sharing a piece of bread with someone in a time of desperate need. Levinas, in short, enjoins us to be exorbitant in our dealings with one another. This book asks how the "between" of Levinas's thinking facilitates a dialogue between Jews and Christians. In one sense, Levinas stands exactly between Jews and Christians: ethics, as he conceives it, is a space in which religious traditions can meet. At the same time, his position seems profoundly ambivalent. No one can read a page of his writings without hearing a Jewish voice as well a a philosophical one. Yet his talk of substitution seems to resonate with Christological themes. On occasion, Levinas himself sharply distinguishes Judaism from Christianity--but to what extent can his thinking become the basis for a dialogue between Christians and Jews? This book, with a stellar cast of contributors, explores these questions, thereby providing a snapshot of the current state of Jewish-Christian dialogue.

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The "place" in the title of Claudia Brodsky's remarkable new book is the intersection of language with building, the marking, for future reference, of material constructions in the world. The "referent" Brodsky describes is not something first found in nature and then named but a thing whose own origin joins language with materiality, a thing marked as it is made to begin with. In the Place of Language: Literature and the Architecture of the Referent develops a theory of the "referent" that is thus also a theory of the possibility of historical knowledge, one that undermines the conventional opposition of language to the real by theories of nominalism and materialism alike, no less than it confronts the mystical conflation of language with matter, whether under the aegis of the infinite reproducibility of the image or the identification of language with "Being." Challenging these equally naive views of language - as essentially immaterial or the only essential matter - Brodsky investigates the interaction of language with the material that literature represents. For literature, Brodsky argues, seeks no refuge from its own inherently iterable, discursive medium in dreams of a technologically-induced freedom from history or an ontological history of language-being. Instead it tells the complex story of historical referents constructed and forgotten, things built into the earth upon which history "takes place" and of which, in the course of history, all visible trace is temporarily effaced. Literature represents the making of history, the building and burial of the referent, the present world of its oblivion and the future of its unearthing, and it can do this because, unlike the historical referent, it literally takes no place, is not tied to any building or performance in space. For the same reason literature can reveal the historical nature of the making of meaning, demonstrating that the shaping and experience of the real, the marking of matter that constitutes historical referents, also defers knowledge of the real to a later date. Through close readings of central texts by Goethe, Plato, Kant, Heidegger, and Benjamin, redefined by the interrelationship of building and language they represent, In the Place of Language analyzes what remains of actions that attempt to take the place of language: the enduring, if intermittently obscured bases, of theoretical reflection itself.

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How have we thought “the body”? How can we think it anew? The body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, the “mystical body of Christ”—all these (and others) are incorporated in the word Corpus, the title and topic of Jean-Luc Nancy’s masterwork. Corpus is a work of literary force at once phenomenological, sociological, theological, and philosophical in its multiple orientations and approaches. In thirty-six brief sections, Nancy offers us at once an encyclopedia and a polemical program—reviewing classical takes on the “corpus” from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Paul to Descartes, Hegel, Husserl, and Freud, while demonstrating that the mutations (technological, biological, and political) of our own culture have given rise to the need for a new understanding of the body. He not only tells the story of this cultural change but also explores the promise and responsibilities that such a new understanding entails. The long-awaited English translation is a bold, bravura rendering. To the title essay are added five closely related recent pieces—including a commentary by Antonia Birnbaum—dedicated in large part to the legacy of the “mind-body problem” formulated by Descartes and the challenge it poses to rethinking the ancient problems of the corpus. The last and most poignant of these essays is “The Intruder,” Nancy’s philosophical meditation on his heart transplant. The book also serves as the opening move in Nancy’s larger project called “The deconstruction of Christianity.”

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True disagreements are hard to achieve, and even harder to maintain, for the ghost of final agreement constantly haunts them. The Babylonian Talmud, however, escapes from that ghost of agreement, and provokes unsettling questions: Are there any conditions under which disagreement might constitute a genuine relationship between minds? Are disagreements always only temporary steps toward final agreement? Must a community of disagreement always imply agreement, as in an agreement to disagree? What is Talmud? rethinks the task of philological, literary, historical, and cultural analysis of the Talmud. It introduces an aspect of this task that has best been approximated by the philosophical, anthropological, and ontological interrogation of human being in relationship to the Other-whether animal, divine, or human. In both engagement and disengagement with post-Heideggerian traditions of thought, Sergey Dogopolski complements philological-historical and cultural approaches to the Talmud with a rigorous anthropological, ontological, and Talmudic inquiry. He redefines the place of the Talmud and its study, both traditional and academic, in the intellectual map of the West, arguing that Talmud is a scholarly art of its own and represents a fundamental intellectual discipline, not a mere application of logical, grammatical, or even rhetorical arts for the purpose of textual hermeneutics. In Talmudic intellectual art, disagreement is a fundamental category. What Is Talmud? rediscovers disagreement as the ultimate condition of finite human existence or co-existence.

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Jewishness and the Human Dimension is a leading scholar’s progress report on an effort to bring Jewishness broadly construed into dialogue with a wide range of thought in contemporary criticism, while linking those themes in turn to the question of planetary crisis. Each chapter emerges from and addresses the circumstances of its composition; a talk to New Jersey undergraduates inviting them to contemplate their lifespans vis-à-vis the life history of the species; a meeting to contemplate Jewish memory outside Europe and after 1945; an inaugural address as the author sought to make sense of leaving his home on the Lower East Side and making a new one in Kansas. Two chapters on research and teaching in Jewish cultural studies as academic practice develop the notion of Jewish studies as a human science and examine how Jewish historiography, once a deeply conservative discipline, has integrated insights from anthropology and literary cultural studies. Boyarin also shares a dialogue with the Jerusalem-based physicist Martin Land on physical and cultural ideas of futurity and redemption. The book ends with a stark challenge to those who work in the contemporary humanities and social sciences: in order to be able to contribute to the possibility of sustained human life on Earth, we need to interrogate rigorously now the status of human differences. Neither ethnography (though it relishes the particular), memoir (though a personal voice is readily audible), nor criticism (though the work and figures of Jacques Derrida and especially Walter Benjamin are indispensable to its project), this book attempts to put in place words of the late Moishe Fogel, vice president of the Eighth Street Shul, that have long stood as a watchword for the author’s writing: “Everything what you know you gotta use!”

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This book brings together an international roster of renowned scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity? The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, the notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays discuss a wide range of key figures (e.g., Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray), problems (e.g., becoming, kinship and the foreign, "disposable populations" within a global political economy, queerness and the death drive, the parapoetic, electronic textuality, invention and accountability, political and social reform in Latin America), disciplines and methodologies (philosophy, art and art history, visuality, political theory, criticism and critique, psychoanalysis, gender analysis, architecture, literature, art). The volume should be required reading for all who feel a deep commitment to the humanities, its practices, and its future.

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Derrida and Lacan have long been viewed as proponents of two opposing schools of thought. This book argues, however, that the logical structure underpinning Lacanian psychoanalytic theory is a complex, paradoxical relationality that corresponds to Derrida's "plural logic of the aporia." Andrea Hurst begins by linking this logic to a strand of thinking (in which Freud plays a part) that unsettles philosophy's transcendental tradition. She then shows that Derrida is just as serious and careful a reader of Freud's texts as Lacan. Interweaving the two thinkers, she argues that the Lacanian Real is another name for Derrida's différance and shows how Derrida's writings on Heidegger and Nietzsche embody an attitude toward sexual difference and feminine sexuality that matches Lacanian insights. Derrida's "plural logic of the aporia," she argues, can serve as a heuristic for addressing prominent themes in Lacanian psychoanalysis: subjectivity, ethics, and language. Finally, she takes up Derrida's prejudicial reading of Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,'" which was instrumental in the antagonism between Derrideans and Lacanians. Although acknowledging the injustice of Derrida's reading, the author brings out the deep theoretical accord between thinkers that both recognize the power of psychoanalysis to address contemporary political and ethical issues.

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From Dr. Moreau’s Beast People to David Cronenberg’s Brundlefly, Stanislaw Lem’s robot constructors in the Cyberiad to Octavia Butler’s human/alien constructs in the Xenogenesis trilogy, Posthuman Metamorphosis examines modern and postmodern stories of corporeal transformation through interlocking frames of posthumanism, narratology, and second-order systems theory. New media generate new metamorphs. New stories have emerged from cybernetic displacements of life, sensation, or intelligence from human beings to machines. But beyond the vogue for the cyborg and the cybernetic mash-up of the organic and the mechanical, Posthuman Metamorphosis develops neocybernetic systems theories illuminating alternative narratives that elicit autopoietic and symbiotic visions of the posthuman. Systems theory also transforms our modes of narrative cognition. Regarding narrative in the light of the autopoietic systems it brings into play, neocybernetics brings narrative theory into constructive relation with the systemic operations of observation, communication, and paradox. Posthuman Metamorphosis draws on Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Niklas Luhmann, Cary Wolfe, Mieke Bal, Katherine Hayles, Friedrich Kittler, and Lynn Margulis to read narratives of bodily metamorphosis as allegories of the contingencies of systems. Tracing the posthuman intuitions of both pre- and post-cybernetic metamorphs, it demonstrates the viability of second-order systems theories for narrative theory, media theory, cultural science studies, and literary criticism.

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We hope—even as we doubt—that the environmental crisis can be controlled. Public awareness of our species’ self-destructiveness as material beings in a material world is growing—but so is the destructiveness. The practical interventions needed for saving and restoring the earth will require a collective shift of such magnitude as to take on a spiritual and religious intensity. This transformation has in part already begun. Traditions of ecological theology and ecologically aware religious practice have been preparing the way for decades. Yet these traditions still remain marginal to society, academy, and church. With a fresh, transdisciplinary approach, Ecospirit probes the possibility of a green shift radical enough to permeate the ancient roots of our sensibility and the social sources of our practice. From new language for imagining the earth as a living ground to current constructions of nature in theology, science, and philosophy; from environmentalism’s questioning of postmodern thought to a garden of green doctrines, rituals, and liturgies for contemporary religion, these original essays explore and expand our sense of how to proceed in the face of an ecological crisis that demands new thinking and acting. In the midst of planetary crisis, they activate imagination, humor, ritual, and hope.

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In this most recent of his seminal studies on Descartes, Jean-Luc Marion brings together essays on the topics of the ego and of God, most of them previously unavailable in English. More than any other of Marion’s works, the book illustrates the profound connection between his phenomenological concerns and his writings on Descartes. Liberating God and the self from the constrictions of metaphysics are fundamental tenets of Marion’s theological and phenomenological work. This book highlights the same topics in the philosophy of Descartes. In Part I (On the Ego), Marion explores the alterity of the Cartesian ego, arguing that it is not as solitary as has often been assumed, and shows how Descartes’ writings themselves are framed by dialogue. He explicates the status of the “rule of truth” in the Meditations, on the one hand highlighting how Descartes’ argument is not circular, on the other hand showing how Pascal responds to and alters Descartes. He also elucidates the ambivalent status of the concept of substance in Descartes by returning to its roots in the philosophy of Suarez. In Part II (On God), Marion returns to the important Cartesian thesis of the creation of the eternal truths, setting it in the context of the claims of earlier thinkers and showing its demise in philosophies following Descartes. The study closes with a careful delineation of the concept of causa sui and a detailed survey of the idea of God in seventeenth-century thought.

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Whether Aligned with the mechanism whereby the spirit is borne aloft through song comes again the question: whether. And not soothed so much as opened by the boy soprano’s Sanctus, what moves in the mind as the throat constricts in sympathy, one note peeled from the last, fine as paper slipped from a garlic bulb, veined, translucent, is whether—as if wound through the spiraling amplitude, purpled, fretted, one voice suspended in concentration of prayer or terror wills itself above faltering, more perfect since time must soon break it. And made it. Whether and by whatever impossible arrangement of stars, harmonies, correspondences through which the music finds the spirit and like a blade slits and releases, circulates the question through the phrase, the delicate engine—as if it matters: the song rises, everything goes with it. The poems in Crocus take as their starting points the interior universes created by myth, art, and memory, and through the exploration of these terrains create new ways of understanding the ordinary.

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“Our lives are Swiss,” Emily Dickinson wrote in 1859, “So still—so cool.” But over the Alps, “Italy stands the other side.” For Dickinson, as for many other writers and artists, Italy has been the land of light, a seductive source of invention, enchantment, and freedom. So it was for Helen Barolini, who, as a student in Rome after World War II, wrote her first poetry and gave birth to her own creative life, reinvigorating her mother tongue. In this book, Barolini celebrates the lives of other women whose imaginations succumbed to the lure of Italy. Here Barolini profiles six gifted women transformed by Italy’s mythic appeal. Unlike Barolini herself, they were not daughters of the great Italian diaspora. Rather, they were drawn to an idea of “Italy” and its gifts—in whose welcome a new self could be created. Or discovered. Emily Dickinson traveled to Italy only in the imaginative genius of her verse. Margaret Fuller struggled alongside her Italian lover in the political revolutions that gave birth to the Italian Republic, while the novelist and short-story writer Constance Fennimore Woolson found her home in Venice and Florence. Here, too, is the flamboyant artist Mabel Dodge Luhan, entertaining at her villa near Florence; and Marguerite Chapin of Connecticut, who married an Italian prince and in Rome founded the premier literary review of the mid-century, Botteghe Oscure. Finally, here is Iris Cutting Origo, the Anglo-American heiress who, with her Italian nobleman husband, built a Tuscan estate, where she wrote acclaimed biographies—and created a refuge from Mussolini’s fascism. Linking these lives, Barolini shows, is the transforming catalyst of change in a new land. Their Other Side is a wise, warm, and deeply felt literary journey that brilliantly captures the enduring effects of Italy as a place, a culture, and an experience.

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Exploring the risks, ambiguities, and unstable conceptual worlds of contemporary thought, Crossover Queries brings together the wide-ranging writings, across twenty years, of one of our most important philosophers. Ranging from twentieth-century European philosophy—the thought of Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, Janicaud, and others—to novels and artworks, music and dance, from traditional Jewish thought to Jain and Buddhist metaphysics, Wyschogrod’s work opens radically new vistas while remaining mindful that the philosopher stands within and is responsible to a philosophical legacy conditioned by the negative. Rather than point to a Hegelian dialectic of overcoming negation or to a postmetaphysical exhaustion, Wyschogrod treats negative moments as opening novel spaces for thought. She probes both the desire for God and an ethics grounded in the interests of the other person, seeing these as moments both of crossing over and of negation. Alert to the catastrophes that have marked our times, she exposes the underlying logical structures of nihilatory forces that have been exerted to exterminate whole peoples. Analyzing the negations of biological research and cultural images of mechanized and robotic bodies, she shows how they contest the body as lived in ordinary experience. “Crossover Queries brings together important essays on a remarkable range of topics by one of our most insightful cultural critics. Commenting on philosophical and theological issues that have shaped the recent past as well as scientific and technological questions that will preoccupy us in the near future, Wyschogrod consistently alerts us to the urgency of problems whose importance few recognize. To avoid the challenge these essays pose is to avoid responsibility for a future that appears to be increasingly fragile.”—Mark C. Taylor, Columbia University

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If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. Mistrusted by philosophy, forbidden and embraced by religions, manipulated as “spectacle” and proliferated in the media, images never cease to present their multiple aspects, their paradoxes, their flat but receding spaces. What is this power that lies in the depths and recesses of an image—which is always only an impenetrable surface? What secrets are concealed in the ground or in the figures of an image—which never does anything but show just exactly what it is and nothing else? How does the immanence of images open onto their unimaginable others, their imageless origin? In this collection of writings on images and visual art, Jean-Luc Nancy explores such questions through an extraordinary range of references. From Renaissance painting and landscape to photography and video, from the image of Roman death masks to the language of silent film, from Cleopatra to Kant and Heidegger, Nancy pursues a reflection on visuality that goes far beyond the many disciplines with which it intersects. He offers insights into the religious, cultural, political, art historical, and philosophical aspects of the visual relation, treating such vexed problems as the connection between image and violence, the sacred status of images, and, in a profound and important essay, the forbidden representation of the Shoah. In the background of all these investigations lies a preoccupation with finitude, the unsettling forces envisaged by the images that confront us, the limits that bind us to them, the death that stares back at us from their frozen traits and distant intimacies. In these vibrant and complex essays, a central figure in European philosophy continues to work through some of the most important questions of our time.

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This is the first full-length book in English on the noted French philosopher Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Martis introduces the range of Lacoue-Labarthe’s thinking, demonstrating the systematic nature of his philosophical project. Focusing in particular on the dynamic of the loss of the subject and its possible post-deconstructive recovery, he places Lacoue-Labarthe’s achievements in the context of related philosophers, most importantly Nancy, Derrida, and Blanchot.

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This volume offers original studies on the subject of medieval education, not only in the formal academic sense typical of schools and universities but also in a broader cultural sense that includes law, liturgy, and the new religious orders of the high Middle Ages. Its essays explore the transmission of knowledge during the middle ages in various kinds of educational communities, including schools, scriptoria, universities, and workshops.

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Does the philosophy of Martin Heidegger represent the emergence of a secular anthropology that requires religious thought to redefine the religious dimension in human existence? In this critical response, Lacoste confronts the ultimate definition of human nature, the humanity of the human. He explores that definition through an analysis of the “absolute” as a phenomenological datum. Lacoste establishes a conception of human nature that opens possibilities for religious experience and religious identity in view of Heidegger’s profound challenge. He develops a phenomenology of the liturgy, and subjects the categories of “experience,” “place,” and “human existence” to careful examination. Making a strong case for the affective nature of religious experience, he sides with Schleiermacher against Hegel in associating religion with affectivity rather than logic. Such affectivity, he claims, can be more rational than reason as framed in Hegelian logic.

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In the aptly titled The Call and the Response, renowned philosopher and theologian Jean-Louis Chrétien revisits a favorite theme: how human life is shaped by the experience of call and response, explored using art as a context. For Chrétien, art is about acts in response to what the artist sees or hears and how these acts provoke responses from viewers. Deeply spiritual and intellectual without being academic, his arguments are unique, in both style and content.

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Brian Cudahy offers a fascinating tribute to the world the subway created. Taking a fresh look at one of the marvels of the 20th century, Cudahy creates a vivid sense of this extraordinary achievement—how the city was transformed once New Yorkers started riding in a hole in the ground.

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Probably no theologian has exercised so profound an influence on Catholic theology during the last half century as Karl Rahner. Patrick Burke examines the structure of dialectical analogy as it appears in each of the major themes of Rahner’s theology—as an indispensable key to the correct interpretation of his thought. He also exposes a tension within the system that needs to be addressed if the complex balance of Rahner’s vision is to be fully understood

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