Search results for ""fordham university press""

The German occupation of France put an end to Maurice Blanchot’s career as a political journalist. In April 1941, he began to publish a weekly column of literary criticism in the Journal des Débats, which became the source for his first critical work, Faux pas (1943). As well as providing a unique perspective on cultural life during the occupation, these pieces offer crucial insights into the mind and art of a writer who was to become one of the most influential figures on the French literary scene in the second half of the twentieth century. In addition to laying the basis for the career of one France’s most original writers and thinkers, these articles offer a reminder that Blanchot’s political awareness remains undimmed, through clear if sometimes coded acts of criticism or defiance of the prevailing order.

Read more less

Since the Second World War, dignity has increasingly been recognized as an important moral and legal value. Although important examples of dignity-based arguments can be found in western European and North American case law and legal theory, the dignity jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court of South African is widely considered to be the most sweeping in the world. In part, this is related to the unique provisions of the South African Constitution in areas such as socioeconomic rights and allowing dignity to be taken into the sphere of economic justice as well as that of human rights. This book brings together the first sixteen years of constitutional jurisprudence addressing the meaning, role, and reach of dignity in the law of South Africa as a multiracial democracy. The case law is coupled with analysis from a range of selected contributors. The book will therefore be a crucial source for anyone seeking to evaluate dignity, whether in law or in human life more broadly.

Read more less

This book argues that time travel fiction is a narrative “laboratory,” a setting for thought experiments in which essential theoretical questions about storytelling—and, by extension, about the philosophy of temporality, history, and subjectivity—are represented in the form of literal devices and plots. Drawing on physics, philosophy, narrative theory, psychoanalysis, and film theory, the book links innovations in time travel fiction to specific shifts in the popularization of science, from evolutionary biology in the late 1800s, through relativity and quantum physics in the mid–20th century, to more recent “multiverse” cosmologies. Wittenberg shows how increasing awareness of new scientific models leads to surprising innovations in the literary “time machine,” which evolves from a “vehicle” used chiefly for sociopolitical commentary into a psychological and narratological device capable of exploring with great sophistication the temporal structure and significance of subjects, viewpoints, and historical events. The book covers work by well-known time travel writers such as H. G. Wells, Edward Bellamy, Robert Heinlein, Samuel Delany, and Harlan Ellison, as well as pulp fiction writers of the 1920s through the 1940s, popular and avant-garde postwar science fiction, television shows such as “The Twilight Zone” and “Star Trek,” and current cinema. Literature, film, and TV are read alongside theoretical work ranging from Einstein, Schrödinger, and Stephen Hawking to Gérard Genette, David Lewis, and Gilles Deleuze. Wittenberg argues that even the most mainstream audiences of popular time travel fiction and cinema are vigorously engaged with many of the same questions about temporality, identity, and history that concern literary theorists, media and film scholars, and philosophers.

Read more less

The goal of this book is to shed psychoanalytic light on a concept—informed consent—that has transformed the delivery of health care in the United States. Examining the concept of informed consent in the context of psychoanalysis, the book first summarizes the law and literature on this topic. Is informed consent required as a matter of positive law? Apart from statutes and cases, what do the professional organizations say about this? Second, the book looks at informed consent as a theoretical matter. It addresses such questions as: What would be the elements of a robust informed consent in psychoanalysis? Is informed consent even possible here? Can patients really understand, say, transference or regression before they experience them, and is it too late once they have? Is informed consent therapeutic or countertherapeutic? Can a “process view” of informed consent make sense here? Third, the book reviews data on the topic. A lengthy questionnaire answered by sixty-two analysts reveals their practices in this regard. Do they obtain a statement of informed consent from their patients? What do they disclose? Why do they disclose it? Do they think it is possible to obtain informed consent in psychoanalysis at all? Do they think the practice is therapeutic or countertherapeutic, and in what ways? Do they think there should or should not be an informed consent requirement for psychoanalysis? The book should appeal above all to therapists interested in the ethical dimensions of their practice.

Read more less

The book aims at a new exposition of the basic idea of modern aesthetics by way of a reconstruction of its genesis in the 18th century, between Baumgarten’s Aesthetics and Kant’s Critique of Judgment. The claim is that the historical invention of aesthetics was not about expanding the range of legitimate objects of philosophical inquiry—these objects all existed before aesthetics. Rather, aesthetics, by introducing the category of the “aesthetic,” fundamentally redefined these objects. But most importantly, the reconstruction of the historical genesis of aesthetics shows that the introduction of the category of the “aesthetic” required nothing less than a transformation of the fundamental terms of philosophy. What begins in—or as—aesthetics is modern philosophy. More precisely, Force shows that in—or as—aesthetics modern philosophy began twice, in two different, even opposite forms. On the one hand, Baumgarten’s Aesthetics is organized around the new concept of the “subject”: the concept of the subject as the totality of faculties, as the agent defined by his capabilities; of the subject as one who is able. By conceiving sensible cognition and (re)presentation as the exercise of subjective faculties acquired in practice, Baumgarten has framed the modern conception of human practices (and of philosophy as the inquiry into the conditions that enable the success of these practices). That is why aesthetics, the reflection upon the aesthetic, is a central pillar of modern philosophy: in aesthetics, the philosophy of the subject or of the subject’s faculties assures itself of its own possibility. Yet here, in the aesthetic and the reflection on it, the aesthetics “in the Baumgartian manner” (Herder), as the theory of the sensible faculties of the subject, at once faces a different aesthetics: the aesthetics of force, which conceives the aesthetic not as sensible cognition but instead as a play of expression—propelled by a force that, rather than being exercised, like a faculty, in practices, realizes itself; a force that does not recognize or represent anything because it is “obscure” and unconscious; a force not of the subject but of man as distinct from the same man as subject. The aesthetics of force is a science of the nature of man: of his aesthetic nature as distinct from the culture, acquired by practice, of his practices. That is the hypothesis the six chapters of Force intend to unfold. The first chapter, analyzing the rationalist concept of the sensible, recollects the point of departure of aesthetics: the sensible is that which is without determinable definition or measure. The second chapter reconstructs Baumgarten’s aesthetics of sensible cognition as a theory of the subject and its faculties. The third and fourth chapters draw on writings by Herder, Sulzer, and Mendelssohn to develop the basic motifs of a counter-model, an aesthetics of force: the aesthetic, as the operation of an “obscure” force, is a performance without generality, divorced from all norm, law, and purpose—a play. And the aesthetic, as the pleasure of self-reflection, is a process of the transformation of the subject, of its faculties and practices—a process of aestheticization. The aesthetics of force founds an anthropology of difference: between force and faculty, between man and subject. The two concluding chapters explore the consequences: for the idea of philosophical aesthetics; and for ethics as the theory of the good. The fifth chapter engages Kant to show that an aesthetics conceived as an aesthetics of force is the scene of an irresolvable contention: aesthetics unfolds within philosophy the contention between philosophy and aesthetic experience. The sixth chapter draws on Nietzsche to demonstrate the ethical import of aesthetic experience as the experience of the play of force: it teaches us to distinguish between action and life; it teaches the other good of life. – “The last word of aesthetics is human freedom.”

Read more less

The apostle Paul has reemerged as a force on the contemporary philosophical scene. Some of the most powerful recent affirmations of nonrepresentational, materialist, and event-oriented philosophies repeat topics and tropes of the ancient apostle. Paul is appropriated both for and against Kantian cosmopolitanism, psychoanalytic models of subjectivity and power, Schmittian political theologies, Derridean messianism, political universalism, and an ongoing refashioning of identity politics within postsecular contexts. This book provides the most comprehensive constellation to date of current thinking about Paul and his cultural or philosophical “afterlives” in ancient, modern, and contemporary contexts.

Read more less

The influence of the Spanish Jesuit Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) on 17th-century philosophy, theology, and law can hardly be underestimated. In this groundbreaking book, Daniel D. Novotný explores one of the most controversial topics of Suárez’s philosophy: “beings of reason.” Beings of reason are impossible intentional objects, such as blindness and square-circle. The first part of this book is structured around a close reading of Suárez’s main text on the subject, namely Disputation 54. The second part centers on texts on this topic by other outstanding philosophers of the time, such as the Spanish Jesuit Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641), the Italian Franciscan Bartolomeo Mastri (1602–73), and the Spanish-Bohemian-Luxembourgian polymath Juan Caramuel de Lobkowitz (1606–82). The book should be of interest not just to those concerned with beings of reason but also for all those with a broader interest in the history of the period. It is written in a clear style that will make it appealing both to historians of philosophy and to anyone interested in applying analytical tools to the history of philosophy.

Read more less

What does the infamous face transplant in France in 2005 share with the examination of “swollen faces” in Latin America in the 1930s? What does blood transfusion in Europe during the 17th century have in common with the discovery of mosquitoes as parasitic vectors in China at the close of the 19th century? And, last, how does the reconstruction of noses using skin flaps in Bologna in the 16th century relate to the opening of a forehead cyst in Guatemala in 1916? The six essays that form Figures of Medicine present a wealth of symmetries. François Delaporte shows that each epistemological concern demands its own mode of engagement; problems reside not only in their objects but also in the historical situations in which they emerge. Focusing on efforts to resolve medical problems that are particular and nonetheless exemplary, Delaporte unpacks these separate cases to show how multiple actors—over long periods of time and across different geographies—must be taken into account to remove epistemological blockages that stand in the way of understanding. A remarkable contribution to the history of science and medicine, this book shows the value of historical epistemology from philosophical, historical, and anthropological perspectives.

Read more less

This second volume in Nancy’s The Deconstruction of Christianity explores the stance or bearing that would be appropriate for us now, in the wake of the dis-enclosure of religion and the retreat of God: that of adoration. Adoration is stretched out toward things, but without phenomenological intention. In our present historical time, we have come to see relation itself as the divine. The address and exclamation--the salut!--that constitutes adoration celebrates this relation: both the relation among all beings that the world is and what is beyond relation, the outside of the world that opens us in the midst of the world. A major contribution to the contemporary philosophy of religion, Adoration clarifies and builds upon not only Dis-Enclosure, the first volume in this project, but also Nancy’s other previous writings on sense, the world, and the singular plurality of being.

Read more less

As a virtue, loyalty has an ambiguous place in our thinking about moral judgments. We lauded the loyalty of firefighters who risked their lives to save others on 9/11 while condemning the loyalty of those who perpetrated the catastrophe. Responding to such uneasiness and confusion, Loyalty to Loyalty contributes to ongoing conversation about how we should respond to conflicts in loyalty in a pluralistic world. The lone philosopher to base an ethical theory on the virtue of loyalty is Josiah Royce. Loyalty to Loyalty engages Royce’s moral theory, revealing how loyalty, rather than being just one virtue among others, is central to living a genuinely moral and meaningful life. Mathew A. Foust shows how the theory of loyalty Royce advances can be brought to bear on issues such as the partiality/impartiality debate in ethical theory, the role of loyalty in liberatory struggle, and the ethics of whistleblowing and disaster response.

Read more less

Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics presents a decade of thought about the origins and possibilities of political theory from one of contemporary Italy’s most prolific and engaging political theorists, Roberto Esposito. He has coined a number of critical concepts in current debates about the past, present, and future of biopolitics—from his work on the implications of the etymological and philosophical kinship of community (communitas) and immunity (immunitas) to his theorizations of the impolitical and the impersonal. Taking on interlocutors from throughout the Western philosophical tradition, from Aristotle and Augustine to Weil, Arendt, Nancy, Foucault, and Agamben, Esposito announces the eclipse of a modern political lexicon—“freedom,” “democracy,” “sovereignty,” and “law”—that, in its attempt to protect human life, has so often produced its opposite (violence, melancholy, and death). Terms of the Political calls for the opening of political thought toward a resignification of these and other operative terms—such as “community,” “immunity,” “biopolitics,” and “the impersonal”—in ways that affirm rather than negate life. An invaluable introduction to the breadth and rigor of Esposito’s thought, the book will also welcome readers already familiar with Esposito’s characteristic skill in overturning and breaking open the language of politics.

Read more less

This book argues that we can no longer envision a political system that might practically displace democracy or, more accurately, global democratic state capitalism. Democracy has become fundamental: It extends deeper and deeper into everyday life; it grounds and limits our political thought and values. That is the sense in which we do indeed live at history’s end. But this end is not a happy one, because the system that we now have does not satisfy tests that we can legitimately put to it. In this situation, it is important to come to new terms with the fact that literature, at least until about 1945, was predominantly hostile to political democracy. Literature’s deep-seated conservative, counterdemocratic tendencies, along with its capacity to make important distinctions among political, cultural, and experiential democracies and its capacity to uncover hidden, nonpolitical democracies in everyday life, is now a resource not just for cultural conservatives but for all those who take a critical attitude toward the current political, cultural, and economic structures. Literature, and certain novelists in particular, helps us not so much to imagine social possibilities beyond democracy as to understand how life might be lived both in and outside democratic state capitalism. Drawing on political theory, intellectual history, and the techniques of close reading, Against Democracy offers new accounts of the ethos of refusing democracy, of literary criticism’s contribution to that ethos, and of the history of conservatism, as well as innovative interpretations of a range of writers, including Tocqueville, Disraeli, George Eliot, E. M. Forster, and Saul Bellow.

Read more less

Confronting death means looking it squarely in the face. Contemporary society refuses to do so, preferring to hide it and hide from it. Funeral rites no longer function as a way to mediate death or to maintain a link between the living and dead. Today the disappearance of certain funerary practices attests to the denial of death as such. They reflect a preference for focusing on remembering the life of the deceased in order to neutralize death, thus displacing the value of mourning, now viewed as something to be done as quickly as possible. Moreover, science, like religion before it and like the contemporary “cult of the body,” has fed our fantasies about immortality, promising us longer lives of better quality, and even the possibility of conquering death altogether. Despite all these attempts to overcome or neutralize death, humanity has been unable to eliminate its anxiety about death and nothingness. True to her roots in phenomenology, Dastur not only examines these contemporary tendencies with a critical eye but also argues that we must once again learn to assume death, to become mortal, to learn how to die. Death is not the last moment of human life, but rather its essential attribute. Dastur’s skill as a “translator” of phenomenology into accessible and clear prose is nowhere more apparent than in her “little book on death”—indeed, the intended audience is less those who specialize in phenomenology or academic philosophy than a nonspecialist public hungry for philosophical reflection on what is closest to us. And nothing is closer to us than the ever-present possibility of our own imminent death. As its subtitle suggests, this book is an “introduction to philosophy,” one that obliges the reader to ask what it means to be human and to embrace death and mortality as the defining essence of our humanity.

Read more less

This monograph explores the ethics and religious sensibilities of a group of the hibakusha (survivors) of 1945’s atomic bombings. Unfortunately, their ethic of “not retaliation, but reconciliation” has not been widely recognized, perhaps obscured by the mushroom cloud—symbol of American weaponry, victory, and scientific achievement. However, it is worth examining the habakushas’ philosophy, supported by their religious sensibilities, as it offers resources to reconcile contested issues of public memories in our contemporary world, especially in the post 9-11 era. Their determination not to let anyone further suffer from nuclear weaponry, coupled with critical self-reflection, does not encourage the imputation of responsibility for dropping the bombs; rather, hibakusha often consider themselves “sinners” (as with the Catholics in Nagasaki; or bonbu—unenlightened persons in the context of True Pure Land Buddhism in Hiroshima). For example, Nagai Takashi in Nagasaki’s Catholic community wrote, “How noble, how splendid was that holocaust of August 9, when flames soared up from the cathedral, dispelling the darkness of war and bringing the light of peace!” He even urges that we “give thanks that Nagasaki was chosen for the sacrifice.” Meanwhile, Koji Shigenobu, a True Pure Land priest, says that the atomic bombing was the result of errors on the part of the Hiroshima citizens, the Japanese people, and the whole of human kind. Based on the idea of acknowledging one’s own fault, or more broadly one’s sinful nature, the hibakusha’s’ ethic provides a step toward reconciliation, and challenges the foundation of ethics by obscuring the dichotomyies of right and the wrong, forgiver and forgiven, victim and victimizer. To this end, the methodology Miyamoto employs is moral hermeneutics, interpreting testimonies, public speeches, and films as texts, with interlocutors such as Avishai Margalit (philosopher), Sueki Fumihiko (Buddhist philosopher), Nagai Takashi (lay Catholic thinker), and Shinran (the founder of True Pure Land Buddhism).

Read more less

Genealogies of Fiction is a study of gender, dynastic politics, and intertextuality in medieval and renaissance chivalric epic, focused on Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando furioso. Relying on the direct study of manuscripts and incunabula, this project challenges the fixed distinction between medieval and early modern texts and reclaims medieval popular epic as a key source for the Furioso. Tracing the formation of the character of the warrior woman, from the Amazon to Bradamante, the book analyzes the process of gender construction in early modern Italy. By reading the tension between the representations of women as fighters, lovers, and mothers, this study shows how the warrior woman is a symbolic center for the construction of legitimacy in the complex web of fears and expectations of the Northern Italian Renaissance court.

Read more less

Thinking about Thinking examines philosophy from a variety of perspectives as a practice realized by persons who communicate with one another while reflecting about the meaning of human life and thought. Without forgetting the logical and methodological conditions of systematic thought, the author insists on the intimate connections that tie all philosophical texts and conversations to the lives from which they emerge. As product of an individual thinker, who, thanks to individual teachers, has been familiarized with particular traditions of a particular culture, each philosophy is unique. If it is a good one, it is also revealing for many—perhaps even for all—other philosophers. At the same time, all thinking is addressed to individual interlocutors, each of whom responds to it by transforming it into a different philosophy. This fact invites us to explore the dialogical dimension of thinking, which, in turn, refers us to the communitarian and historical contexts from which solitude, as well as solidarity, competition, alliances, and friendships in thought, emerge.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Voices of Italian America presents a top-rate authoritative study and anthology of the italian-language literature written and published in the United States from the heydays of the Great Migration (1880–1920) to the almost definitive demise of the cultural world of the first generation soon before and after World War II. The volume resurrects the neglected and even forgotten territory of a nationwide “Little Italy” where people wrote, talked, read, and consumed the various forms of entertainment mostly in their native Italian language, in a complex interplay with native dialects and surrounding American English. The anthological sections include excerpts from the ethnically tinged thrillers by Tuscan-born first-comer Bernardino Ciambelli, as well as the first short stories by Italian American women, set in the Gilded Age. The fiction of political activists such as Carlo Tresca coexists with the hardboiled autobiography of Italian American cop Mike Fiaschetti, fighting against the Mafia. Voices of Italian America presents new material by English-speaking classics such as Pietro di Donato and John Fante, and a selection of poetry by a great bilingual voice, the champion of the “masses” and Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) poet Arturo Giovannitti, and by a lesserknown, self-taught, satirical versifier, Riccardo Cordiferro/Ironheart. Controversial documents on the difficult interracial relations between Italian Americans and African Americans live side by side with the first poignant chronicles from Ellis Island. This study sheds light on the “fabrication” of a new culture of immigrant origins—pliable, dynamic, constantly shifting and transforming itself—while focusing on stories, genres, rhythms, the “human touch” contributed by literature in its wider sense. Ultimately, through a rich sample of significant texts covering various aspects of the immigrant experience, Voices of Italian America offers the reader a literary history of Italian American culture.

Read more less

This book consists of essays and reviews that address social, political, and cultural issues which arose in connection with literature broadly conceived in the wake of the First World War, and extending throughout the twentieth century.

Read more less

What could it mean to speak of philosophy as “the education of grownups”? This book takes Stanley Cavell’s much-quoted, yet enigmatic phrase as the provocation for a series of explorations into themes of education that run throughout his work – through his response to Wittgenstein, Austin and ordinary language philosophy, through his readings of Thoreau and of the moral perfectionism he identifies with Emerson, through his discussions of literature and film. Hilary Putnam has described Cavell not only as one of the most creative thinkers of today but as amongst the few contemporary philosophers to explore the territory of philosophy as education. Yet in mainstream philosophy his work is apt to be referred to rather than engaged with, and the full import of his writings for education is still to be appreciated. Cavell engages in a sustained exploration of the nature of philosophy, and this is not separable from his preoccupation with what it is to teach and to learn, with the kinds of transformation these might imply, and with the significance of these things for our language and politics, for our lives as a whole. In recent years Cavell’s work has been the subject of a number of books of essays, but this is the first to address directly the importance of education in his work. Such matters cannot fail to be of significance not only for the disciplinary fields of philosophy and education, but in politics, literature, and film studies – and in the humanities as a whole. A substantial introduction provides an overview of the philosophical purchase of questions of education in his work, while the essays are framed by two new pieces by Cavell himself. The book shows what it means to read Cavell, and simultaneously what it means to read philosophically, in itself a part of our education as grownups.

Read more less

This book seeks to develop a novel approach to literature beyond the conventional divide between realism/formalism and history/aestheticism. It accomplishes this not only through a radical reassessment of the specificity of literature in distinction from one of its others—namely, philosophy—but above all by taking critical issue with the venerable concept of the “text” and its association with the artisanal techniques of weaving and interlacing. This conception of the text as an artisanal fabric is, the author holds, the unreflected presupposition of both realist, or historicist, and reflective, or “deconstructive,” criticism. Gasché argues that “the scenes of production” within literary works, created by their authors yet independent of those authors’ intentions, stage a work’s own production in virtual fashion and thus accomplish for those works a certain ideal ontological status that allows for both historical endurance and creative interpretation. In Gasché’s construction of these scenes, in which literary works render visible within their own fabric the invisible conditions of their autonomous existence, certain images prevail: the fold, the star, the veil. By showing that these literary images are not simply the opposites of concepts, he not only puts into question the common opposition between literature and philosophy but shows that literary works perform a way of “argumentation” that, in spite of all its difference from philosophical conceptuality, is on a par with it. The argument progresses through close readings of literary works by Lautréamont, Nerval, de l’Isle Adam, Huysman, Flaubert, Artaud, Blanchot, Defoe, and Melville.

Read more less

Mourning Modernism: Literature, Catastrophe, and the Politics of Consolation examines the writing of catastrophe, mass death, and collective loss in 20th-century literature and criticism. With particular focus on texts by Virginia Woolf, Walter Benjamin, and W.G. Sebald, Mourning Modernism engages the century’s signal preoccupation with “world-ending,” a mixed rhetoric of totality and rupture, finitude and survival, the end and its posthumous remainders. Fascinated with the threat of apocalypse, the century proliferates the spectacle of world-ending as a form of desire, an ambivalent compulsion to consume and outlive the “end of all.” In conversation with recent discussions of the century’s passion for the real, and taking on the century’s late aesthetics of subtraction, Mourning Modernism reads the century’s obsession with negative forms of ending and outcome. Drawing connections between the current interest in the category of trauma and the tradition of the sublime, Mourning Modernism reframes the terms of the modernist experiment and its aesthetics of the breaking-point from the lens of a late sublime.

Read more less

In 1996, with the publication of Southern Thought, Italian writer Franco Cassano became widely recognized as one of the most important voices in the contemporary Italian and European intellectual scene. In this engaging and provocative book, which ranges effortlessly between the fields of sociology, political science, philosophy, cultural anthropology, and literature, Cassano offers a critique of normative models of modernization derived from Eurocentric and North Atlantic paradigms, while claiming that autonomous paths to modernity exist in the Mediterranean and the so-called Global Souths. Cassano’s rethinking of the South seeks nothing less than to reverse the North-South relationship: “not to think of the South in light of modernity, but rather to think of modernity in light of the South.” In this work, the South is no longer a belated, imperfect, incomplete, and not-yet North but the space of a differential, autonomous identity to be recovered and rediscovered. Thus, Southern Thought not only exemplifies a brilliant critique of Occidentalism but represents a valiant attempt to restore agency and dignity to the heritage and legacies of Southern civilizations and cultures. Four additional essays supplement this English translation of the original Italian book.

Read more less

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.

Read more less

Sunday dinners, basement kitchens, and backyard gardens are everyday cultural entities long associated with Italian Americans, yet the general perception of them remains superficial and stereotypical at best. For many people, these scenarios trigger ingrained assumptions about individuals’ beliefs, politics, aesthetics, values, and behaviors that leave little room for nuance and elaboration. This collection of essays explores local knowledge and aesthetic practices, often marked as “folklore,” as sources for creativity and meaning in Italian-American lives. As the contributors demonstrate, folklore provides contemporary scholars with occasions for observing and interpreting behaviors and objects as part of lived experiences. Its study provides new ways of understanding how individuals and groups reproduce and contest identities and ideologies through expressive means. Italian Folk offers an opportunity to reexamine and rethink what we know about Italian Americans. The contributors to this unique book discuss historic and contemporary cultural expressions and religious practices from various parts of the United States and Canada to examine how they operate at local, national, and transnational levels. The essays attest to people’s ability and willingness to create and reproduce certain cultural modes that connect them to social entities such as the family, the neighborhood, and the amorphous and fleeting communities that emerge in large-scale festivals and now on the Internet. Italian Americans abandon, reproduce, and/or revive various cultural elements in relationship to ever-shifting political, economic, and social conditions. The results are dynamic, hybrid cultural forms such as valtaro accordion music, Sicilian oral poetry, a Columbus Day parade, and witchcraft (stregheria). By taking a closer look and an ethnographic approach to expressive behavior, we see that Italian-American identity is far from being a linear path of assimilation from Italian immigrant to American of Italian descent but is instead fraught with conflict, negotiation, and creative solutions. Together, these essays illustrate how folklore is evoked in the continual process of identity revaluation and reformation.

Read more less

In the century between 1870 and 1970, about twenty-seven million migrants left Italy to work and live abroad. As a result, the worldwide Italian diaspora reportedly numbers more than sixty million people. Until now, however, there has not been an anthology devoted to the literature of the Italian diaspora that places it in a global context. This landmark volume presents a truly international selection of works by more than seventy Italian-language poets who are writing in countries from Australia to Venezuela. Their poetry is collected here into eleven geographical regions. The history and current state of Italian-language poetry in each region receives a critical overview by a knowledgeable scholar, who also introduces each poet and provides a bibliography of his or her work. All poems appear on facing pages in both Italian and English. Poets of the Italian Diaspora is part of a long-range project, by the editors and contributors, to expand the boundaries of the Italian literary canon.

Read more less

In dialogue with afro-caribbean philosophy, this book seeks in Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms a new vocabulary for approaching central intellectual and political issues of our time. For Cassirer, what makes humans unique is that we are symbolizing creatures destined to come into a world through varied symbolic forms; we pluralistically work with and develop these forms as we struggle to come to terms with who we are and our place in the universe. This approach can be used as a powerful challenge to hegemonic modes of study that mistakenly place the Western world at the center of intellectual and political life. Indeed, the authors argue that the symbolic dimension of Cassirer’s thinking of possibility can be linked to a symbolic dimension in revolution via the ideas of Frantz Fanon, who argued that revolution must be a thoroughgoing cultural process, in which what is at stake is nothing less than how we symbolize a new humanity and bring into being a new set of social institutions worthy of that new humanity.

Read more less

Things That No Longer Delight Me is a collection of poems about family and memory. This book is filled with objects. The author writes: I like objects for company, to decorate the plainest spaces, decorum and I amass details, jade bracelet, her animal-print dresses, an oval coral cameo. How do objects counter loneliness, she asks, and speak to us of how to behave? In Things That No Longer Delight Me, lyric is driven by a compulsion or need to collect, in order to make sense of the past and stay connected to it. And what if that connection were to be lost? Confronting loss, the book pieces together a family history from stories fragmented and overheard. It asks: What is hearsay and what is history? It seeks to embody story, or historical detail, in lyric form. Resisting nostalgia, its poems respect what is diminished by grief or loss yet reveal details that hold sway over us and give us continuing pleasure.

Read more less

Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew speaks to a contemporary world about, human rights, religious tolerance, international peace, environmental protection, and more. In the World, Yet Not of the World represents a selection of major addresses and significant messages as well as public statements by His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, "first among equals" and spiritual leader of the world's 300 million Orthodox Christians. The Patriarch is as comfortable preaching about the spiritual legacy of the Orthodox Church as he is promoting sociopolitical issues of his immediate cultural environment and praying for respect toward Islam or for global peace. As the documents reveal, the tenure of the Ecumenical Patriarch has been characterized by inter-Orthodox cooperation, inter-Christian dialogue and interreligious understanding. He has traveled more extensively than any other Orthodox Patriarch in history, exchanging official visitations with numerous ecclesiastical and state dignitaries. In particular, because he is a citizen of Turkey and the leader of a Christian minority in a predominantly Muslim nation, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew's personal experience endows him with a unique perspective on religious tolerance and interfaith dialogue. These documents are drawn from his prominent leadership roles as primary spiritual leader of the Orthodox Christian world and transnational figure of global significance - influential roles that become more vital each day. Published together here for the first time, the writings reveal the Ecumenical Patriarch as a bridge builder and peacemaker. One of his catchphrases is "War in the name of religion is war against religion." Over the past eighteen years, Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew's inclination and intention have been to address the most difficult issues facing the world-the deep and increasing mistrust between East and West, the decay and widening destruction of the natural environment, as well as the sharp divisions among the various Christian confessions and diverse faith communities-whether on religious, racial, or cultural levels. He regards being a servant of reconciliation as a primary obligation of his spiritual ministry to. This book reveals the powerful influence of a spiritual institution from the unique perspective of a Christian leader in the world, and yet not of the world. Some of the topics covered: oFaith and freedom oRacism and fundamentalism oMutual respect and tolerance oEcology and poverty oHuman rights and freedom oRacial and religious discrimination oChurch and state oTerrorism and corruption oFreedom of conscience oEurope, Turkey and the world oReligion and politics oChristians and Muslims oChristians and Jews

Read more less

Not Even Past highlights references to nineteenth-century U.S. slavery and anti-Black racism in literary and photographic projects begun during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including novels by William Faulkner and Nella Larsen, and portraits by Carl Van Vechten. These texts share a representational crisis, in which distinctions between present, quotidian racism and a massive, fully racialized historical trauma disappear. All identify persistent historical traumatization with intense subjective states (including madness, religious ecstasy, narcissism, and fetishistic enjoyment), and each explores the conservative, even coercive social character of such links between psyche and history. When the past of enslavement is "not even past," narration freezes, black and white women lose their capacity to question or resist social and domestic violence, and racial politics fail. Anticipating contemporary trauma studies by decades, these disparate modernists' works constitute not an expounded or avowed but an interstitial trauma theory, which finds its shape in the spaces left by conventional public discourse. Their works parallel important essays by psychoanalytic thinkers of the same era, including Joan Riviere, Sigmund Freud, Melanie Klein, and Walter Benjamin, and their joint explication of relationships among psyche, history, and race offers important resources for psychoanalytic approaches to racial difference today. Despite their analytic acuity, however, Faulkner, Larsen, and Van Vechten also themselves carry the traumatic past forward into the future. Indeed, the two novelists' tragic depictions of a triumphant color line and the photographer's insistence on an idiom of black primitivism lent support to white supremacy in the twentieth century. Yet even in their very failure, three U.S. modernists tell us that it is not enough simply to exercise critical acuity on the marks of past violence. Reading, however masterly, cannot interrupt a history in the midst of repeating itself; it can only itself reiterate the disaster.

Read more less

Drawing together two critical moments in the history of European Jewry-its entrance as a participant in the Enlightenment project of religious and political reform and its involvement in the traumatic upheavals brought on by the Great War-this book offers a reappraisal of the intersection of culture, politics, theology, and philosophy in the modern world through the lens of two of the most important thinkers of their day, Moses Mendelssohn and Franz Rosenzweig. Their vision of the place of the Jewish people not only within German society but also within the unfolding history of humankind as a whole challenged the reigning cultural assumptions of the day and opened new ways of thinking about reason, language, politics, and the sources of ethical obligation. In making the "Jewish question" serve as a way of reflecting upon the "human question" of how we can live together in acknowledgment of our finitude, our otherness, and our shared hope for a more just future, Mendelssohn and Rosenzweig modeled a way of doing philosophy as an engaged intervention in the most pressing existential issues confronting us all. In the final chapters of the book, the path beyond Mendelssohn and Rosenzweig is traced out in the work of Hannah Arendt and Stanley Cavell. In light of Arendt's and Cavell's reflections about the foundations of democratic sociality, Rosenstock offers a portrait of an "immigrant Rosenzweig" joined in conversation with his American "cousins."

Read more less

Philosophers have largely ignored sleep, treating it as a useless negativity, mere repose for the body or at best a source for the production of unconscious signs out of the night of the soul. In an extraordinary theoretical investigation written with lyric intensity, The Fall of Sleep puts an end to this neglect by providing a deft yet rigorous philosophy of sleep. What does it mean to "fall" asleep? Might there exist something like a "reason" of sleep, a reason at work in its own form or modality, a modality of being in oneself, of return to oneself, without the waking "self" that distinguishes "I" from "you" and from the world? What reason might exist in that absence of ego, appearance, and intention, in an abandon thanks to which one is emptied out into a non-place shared by everyone? Sleep attests to something like an equality of all that exists in the rhythm of the world. With sleep, victory is constantly renewed over the fear of night, an a confidence that we will wake with the return of day, in a return to self, to us--though to a self, an us, that is each day different, unforeseen, without any warning given in advance. To seek anew the meaning stirring in the supposed loss of meaning, of consciousness, and of control that occurs in sleep is not to reclaim some meaning already familiar in philosophy, religion, progressivism, or any other -ism. It is instead to open anew a source that is not the source of a meaning but that makes up the nature proper to meaning, its truth: opening, gushing forth, infinity. This beautiful, profound meditation on sleep is a unique work in the history of phenomenology--a lyrical phenomenology of what can have no phenomenology, since sleep shows itself to the waking observer, the subject of phenomenology, only as disappearance and concealment.

Read more less

Musically Sublime rewrites musically the history and philosophy of the sublime. Music enables us to reconsider the traditional course of sublime feeling on a track from pain to pleasure. Resisting the notion that there is a single format for sublime feeling, Wurth shows how, from the mid eighteenth century onward, sublime feeling is, instead, constantly rearticulated in a complex interaction with musicality. Wurth takes as her point of departure Immanuel Kant's Critique of Judgment and Jean-François Lyotard's aesthetic writings of the 1980s and 1990s. Kant framed the sublime narratively as an epic of self-transcendence. By contrast, Lyotard sought to substitute open immanence for Kantian transcendence, yet he failed to deconstruct the Kantian epic. The book performs this deconstruction by juxtaposing eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptions of the infinite, Sehnsucht, the divided self, and unconscious drives with contemporary readings of instrumental music. Critically assessing Edmund Burke, James Usher, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Novalis, Friedrich Hölderlin, Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche, this book re-presents the sublime as a feeling that defers resolution and hangs suspended between pain and pleasure. Musically Sublime rewrites the mathematical sublime as différance, while it redresses the dynamical sublime as trauma: unending, undetermined, unresolved. Whereas most musicological studies in this area have focused on traces of the Kantian sublime in Handel, Haydn, and Beethoven, this book calls on the nineteenth-century theorist Arthur Seidl to analyze the sublime of, rather than in, music. It does so by invoking Seidl's concept of formwidrigkeit ("form-contrariness") in juxtaposition with Romantic piano music, (post)modernist musical minimalisms, and Lyotard's postmodern sublime. It presents a sublime of matter, rather than form-performative rather than representational. In doing so, Musically Sublime shows that the binary distinction Lyotard posits between the postmodern and romantic sublime is finally untenable.

Read more less

This book explores the significance of human animality in the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche and provides the first systematic treatment of the animal theme in Nietzsche's corpus as a whole Lemm argues that the animal is neither a random theme nor a metaphorical device in Nietzsche's thought. Instead, it stands at the center of his renewal of the practice and meaning of philosophy itself. Lemm provides an original contribution to on-going debates on the essence of humanism and its future. At the center of this new interpretation stands Nietzsche's thesis that animal life and its potential for truth, history, and morality depends on a continuous antagonism between forgetfulness (animality) and memory (humanity). This relationship accounts for the emergence of humanity out of animality as a function of the antagonism between civilization and culture. By taking the antagonism of culture and civilization to be fundamental for Nietzsche's conception of humanity and its becoming, Lemm gives a new entry point into the political significance of Nietzsche's thought. The opposition between civilization and culture allows for the possibility that politics is more than a set of civilizational techniques that seek to manipulate, dominate, and exclude the animality of the human animal. By seeing the deep-seated connections of politics with culture, Nietzsche orients politics beyond the domination over life and, instead, offers the animality of the human being a positive, creative role in the organization of life. Lemm's book presents Nietzsche as the thinker of an emancipatory and affirmative biopolitics. This book will appeal not only to readers interested in Nietzsche, but also to anyone interested in the theme of the animal in philosophy, literature, cultural studies and the arts, as well as those interested in the relation between biological life and politics.

Read more less

The 2009 quadricentennial celebrations commemorating the discovery of the Hudson River by Henry Hudson will also spotlight one of our deepest and most enduring national legacies—the Dutch presence that has shaped not just the Hudson Valley but four centuries of American life. This lavishly illustrated book, a companion to the exhibition opening in June 2009 at the Hudson River Museum, takes needed stock of the remarkable past created by the settlers of New Netherlands. Although the Dutch controlled the Hudson Valley only until ceding it to the British in 1664, the Dutch established the towns and cities that today define the region—from New Amsterdam upriver to Fort Orange, today’s Albany. The Dutch heritage lives on, not only in historic estates or Dutch-named places like the Bronx or Yonkers but also in commerce, law, politics, religion, art, and culture. In thirteen original essays, this book traverses those four centuries to enrich and expand our understanding of America’s origins. The essays, written by a superb team of distinguished scholars, are grouped into five chronological frames—1609, 1709, 1809, 1909, and 2009—each marking a key point in the history of the Dutch in the valley. The topics range widely, from patterns of settlement and the Dutch encounter with slavery and Native America to Dutch influences in everything from architecture and religion to material culture, language, and literature. Based on fresh research, this book is at once a fascinating introduction to a remarkable past and a much-needed new look at the Dutch role in the region, in the story of America’s origins, and in creating the habits, styles, and practices identified as quintessentially New York’s.

Read more less

Musical understanding has evolved dramatically in recent years, principally through a heightened appreciation of musical meaning in its social, cultural, and philosophical dimensions. This collection of essays by leading scholars addresses an aspect of meaning that has not yet received its due: the relation of meaning in this broad humanistic sense to the shaping of fundamental values. The volume examines the open and active circle between the values and valuations placed on music by both individuals and societies, and the discovery, through music, of what and how to value. With a combination of cultural criticism and close readings of musical works, the contributors demonstrate repeatedly that to make music is also to make value, in every sense. They give particular attention to values that have historically enabled music to assume a formative role in human societies: to foster practices of contemplation, fantasy, and irony; to explore sexuality, subjectivity, and the uncanny; and to articulate longings for unity with nature and for moral certainty. Each essay in the collection shows, in its own way, how music may provoke transformative reflection in its listeners and thus help guide humanity to its own essential embodiment in the world. The range of topics is broad and developed with an eye both to the historical specificity of values and to the variety of their possible incarnations. The music is both canonical and noncanonical, old and new. Although all of it is “classical,” the contributors’ treatment of it yields conclusions that apply well beyond the classical sphere. The composers discussed include Gabrieli, Marenzio, Haydn, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, Brahms, Wagner, Puccini, Hindemith, Schreker, and Henze. Anyone interested in music as it is studied today will find this volume essential reading.

Read more less

Maurice Blanchot is a towering yet enigmatic figure in twentieth-century French thought. A lifelong friend of Levinas, he had a major influence on Foucault, Derrida, Nancy, and many others. Both his fiction and his criticism played a determining role in how postwar French philosophy was written, especially in its intense concern with the question of writing as such. Never an academic, he published most of his critical work in periodicals and led a highly private life. Yet his writing included an often underestimated public and political dimension. This posthumously published volume collects his political writings from 1953 to 1993, from the French-Algerian War and the mass movements of May 1968 to postwar debates about the Shoah and beyond. A large number of the essays, letters, and fragments it contains were written anonymously and signed collectively, often in response to current events. The extensive editorial work done for the original French edition makes a major contribution to our understanding of Blanchot’s work. The political stances Blanchot adopts are always complicated by the possibility that political thought remains forever to be discovered. He reminds us throughout his writings both how facile and how hard it is to refuse established forms of authority. The topics he addresses range from the right to insubordination in the French-Algerian War to the construction of the Berlin Wall and repression in Eastern Europe; from the mass movements of 1968 to personal responses to revelations about Heidegger, Levinas, and Robert Antelme, among others. When read together, these pieces form a testament to what political writing could be: not merely writing about the political or politicizing the written word, but unalterably transforming the singular authority of the writer and his signature. Cet ouvrage, publié dans le cadre d'un programme d'aide à la publication bénéficie du soutien financier du ministère des Affaires étrangès et du Service culturel de l'ambassade de France aux Etats-Unis, ainsi que de l'appui de FACE (French American Cultural Exchange). This work, published as part of a program providing publication assistance, received financial support from the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

Read more less

Recent neuroscience, in replacing the old model of the brain as a single centralized source of control, has emphasized “plasticity,” the quality by which our brains develop and change throughout the course of our lives. Our brains exist as historical products, developing in interaction with themselves and with their surroundings. Hence there is a thin line between the organization of the nervous system and the political and social organization that both conditions and is conditioned by human experience. Looking carefully at contemporary neuroscience, it is hard not to notice that the new way of talking about the brain mirrors the management discourse of the neo-liberal capitalist world in which we now live, with its talk of decentralization, networks, and flexibility. Consciously or unconsciously, science cannot but echo the world in which it takes place. In the neo-liberal world, “plasticity” can be equated with “flexibility”—a term that has become a buzzword in economics and management theory. The plastic brain would thus represent just another style of power, which, although less centralized, is still a means of control. In this book, Catherine Malabou develops a second, more radical meaning for plasticity. Not only does plasticity allow our brains to adapt to existing circumstances, it opens a margin of freedom to intervene, to change those very circumstances. Such an understanding opens up a newly transformative aspect of the neurosciences. In insisting on this proximity between the neurosciences and the social sciences, Malabou applies to the brain Marx’s well-known phrase about history: people make their own brains, but they do not know it. This book is a summons to such knowledge.

Read more less

Reading is good for us. The reading of literature, we are told, enlarges our horizons, extends our experience beyond our own lives. But the moral and political dangers that attend the association of reading with experience have long been understood. And is that association even valid? What if precisely our most important literary texts are constructed so as to challenge or disrupt it? This book is a radical criticism of the concept of "reading," especially of the concept of "the" reader, as commonly used in literary criticism. Bennett starts with the point that "reading" does not name a single, identifiable type of experience or class of experiences. Her then sketches in broad terms the historical provenance of "the" reader, in an argument that includes discussions of Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Marlowe, and German idealist philosophy. In two concluding chapters on modern German novellas, he suggests that most major European literary works since the eighteenth century are written in direct opposition to the central concepts by which criticism has sought to lay hold of them.

Read more less

As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science and French philosophy more generally. In Knowledge of Life, a book that spans twenty years of his essays and lectures, Canguilhem offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. How do transformations in biology and modern medicine shape conceptions of life? How do philosophical concepts feed into biological ideas and experimental practices, and how are they themselves transformed? How does knowledge "undo the experience of life so as to help man remake what life has made without him, in him or outside of him?" Knowledge of Life is Canguilhem's effort to explain how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other. Published at the dawn of the genetic revolution and still pertinent today, the book tackles the history of cell theory, the conceptual moves toward and away from mechanical understandings of the organism, the persistence of vitalism, and the nature of normality in science and its objects.

Read more less

The movies and the masses erupted on the world stage together. In a few decades around the turn of the twentieth century, millions of persons who rarely could afford a night at the theater and had never voted in an election became regular paying customers at movie palaces and proud members of new political parties. The question of how to represent these new masses fascinated and plagued politicians and filmmakers alike. Movies seemed to speak directly to the masses, via a form of crowd psychology that bypassed individual personality. Many political commentators believed that movies were inherently aligned with the new forms of collectivist mass politics—indeed, government control of the movie industry became a cornerstone of Communist and Fascist regimes, new political movements that embraced the crowd as the basis of social order. Michael Tratner examines the representations of masses—the crowd scenes—in Hollywood films from The Birth of a Nation through such popular love stories as Gone with the Wind, The Sound of Music, and Dr. Zhivago. He then contrasts these with similar scenes in early Soviet and Nazi films. What emerges is a political debate being carried out in filmic style. In both sets of films, the crowd is represented as a seething cauldron of emotions. In Hollywood films, this is depicted as molding private loves, while collectivist movies present it as turning into organized mass movements. Crowd scenes do more than provide backgrounds for stories, that is: they also function as models for the crowd in the theater. The book concludes with an examination of the films of Fritz Lang, who first in pre-Nazi Germany, then in Hollywood, created movies that can be seen as meditations on both these ways of using the crowd.

Read more less

In The Visible and the Revealed, Jean-Luc Marion brings together his most significant papers dealing with the relationship between philosophy and theology. Covering the ground from some of his earliest writings on this topic to very recent reflections, they are particularly useful for understanding the progression of Marion’s thought on such topics as the saturated phenomenon and the possibility of something like “Christian Philosophy.” The book contains his seminal pieces on the saturated phenomenon and on the gift, although the essays also explore more recent developments of his thought on these topics. Several chapters explicitly explore the boundary line between philosophy and theology or their mutual enrichment and influence. In one of the final pieces, “The Banality of Saturation,” Marion considers some of the most recent objections brought against his notion of the saturated phenomenon and responds to them in detail, suggesting that saturated phenomena are neither as rare nor as inflexible as often assumed. The work contains two chapters not previously available in English and brings together several other pieces previously translated but now difficult to find. For readers interested in the relation between the two disciplines, this is indispensable reading.

Read more less

Judith H. Anderson conceives the intertext as a relation between or among texts that encompasses both Kristevan intertextuality and traditional relationships of influence, imitation, allusion, and citation. Like the Internet, the intertext is a state, or place, of potential expressed in ways ranging from deliberate emulation to linguistic free play. Relatedly, the intertext is also a convenient fiction that enables examination of individual agency and sociocultural determinism. Anderson’s intertext is allegorical because Spenser’s Faerie Queene is pivotal to her study and because allegory, understood as continued or moving metaphor, encapsulates, even as it magnifies, the process of signification. Her title signals the variousness of an intertext extending from Chaucer through Shakespeare to Milton and the breadth of allegory itself. Literary allegory, in Anderson’s view, is at once a mimetic form and a psychic one—a process thinking that combines mind with matter, emblem with narrative, abstraction with history. Anderson’s first section focuses on relations between Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales and Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, including the role of the narrator, the nature of the textual source, the dynamics of influence, and the bearing of allegorical narrative on lyric vision. The second centers on agency and cultural influence in a variety of Spenserian and medieval texts. Allegorical form, a recurrent concern throughout, becomes the pressing issue of section three. This section treats plays and poems of Shakespeare and Milton and includes two intertextually relevant essays on Spenser. How Paradise Lost or Shakespeare’s plays participate in allegorical form is controversial. Spenser’s experiments with allegory revise its form, and this intervention is largely what Shakespeare and Milton find in his poetry and develop. Anderson’s book, the result of decades of teaching and writing about allegory, especially Spenserian allegory, will reorient thinking about fundamental critical issues and the landmark texts in which they play themselves out.

Read more less

The author of an acclaimed account of the lives of children in the Civil War, Marten here provides a more comprehensive introduction to the civilian history of the Civil War. Concise, vividly written chapters describe the home front through the lives of individuals and the histories of events and institutions in the North and South. The stories are organized around five broad themes: the Northern home front, the Southern home front, children, African Americans, and the war’s aftermath. The case studies feature voices of the famous, like Edmund Riffin and Booker T. Washington, but more often they offer the testimony of ordinary men, women, and children. A superb blend of traditional narrative, case studies, and individual stories, Civil War America is a valuable resource for students and their teachers seeking to understand the many ways in which the Civil War was truly a people’s war.

Read more less

Through a symptomatic reading of Freud’s corpus, from his letters to Fliess through the case of Little Hans to Moses and Montheism, this book demonstrates how “circumcision”—the fetishized signifier of Jewish difference and source of knowledge about Jewish identity—is central to Freud’s construction of psychoanalysis. Jay Geller depicts Freud as an ordinary Viennese Jew making extraordinary attempts to mitigate the trauma of everyday antisemitism. He situates Freud at the nexus of antisemitic, misogynistic, colonialist, and homophobic discourses, both scientific and popular. These held in place the double bind of post-Emancipation and pre-Shoah Viennese Jewish life: the demand for complete assimilation into the dominant culture, accompanied by the assumption that Jews were constitutionally incapable of eliminating their difference. Incarnate in the figure of the circumcised (male) Jew, this difference haunted the Central European cultural imagination and helped create, maintain, and confirm Central European identities and hierarchies. Exploring overlapping layers of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and race in identity construction, theories of trauma, fetishism, and writing, Geller looks at Freud’s representations of the Jewish body—especially circumcised penises and their displacements onto noses. He shows how Freud reinscribed the virile masculine norm and the at once hypervirile and effeminate Jewish other into the discourse of psychoanalysis.

Read more less

In the 1930s, Georges Bataille proclaimed a "ferociously religious" sensibility characterized by simultaneous ecstasy and horror. Ecce Monstrum investigates the content and implications of this religious sensibility by examining Bataille's insistent linking of monstrosity and the sacred. Extending and sometimes challenging major interpretations of Bataille by thinkers like Denis Hollier and Rosalind Krauss the book reveals how his writings betray the monstrous marks of the affective and intellectual contradictions he seeks to produce in his readers. Charting a new approach to recent debates concerning Bataille's formulation of the informe ("formless"), the author demonstrates that the motif of monstrosity is keyed to Bataille's notion of sacrifice--an operation that ruptures the integrality of the individual form. Bataille enacts a "monstrous" mode of reading and writing in his approaches to other thinkers and artists--a mode that is at once agonistic and intimate. Ecce Monstrum examines this monstrous mode of reading and writing through investigations of Bataille's "sacrificial" interpretations of Kojève's Hegel and Friedrich Nietzsche; his contentious relationship with Simone Weil and its implications for his mystical and writing practices; his fraught affiliation with surrealist André Breton and his attempt to displace surrealism with "hyperchristianity"; and his peculiar relations to artist Hans Bellmer, whose work evokes Bataille's "religious sensibility." With its wide-ranging analyses, this book offers insights of interest to scholars of religion, philosophers, art historians, and students of French intellectual history and early modernism.

Read more less

This book is an extended inquiry into the dimension of exteriority constructed by philosophical systems and literary works. Literature has, since its inception, depended on a rogue’s gallery of outsiders—the more outlandish the better, with human attributes optional—as the impetus to its events and the motive for its developments. Philosophers have also vacillated between safeguarding the purity and consistency of their systematic projects and embracing contamination by alien and intransigent elements. The unsettling encounter between interiority and exteriority is a philosophical and literary sideshow not nearly as frivolous as it might seem. Building upon Nietzsche’s fatal confrontation “The Wanderer and His Shadow” and Jacques Derrida’s initiation of the current era in critical theory with the formulation “The outside is the inside,” the author pursues the vicussitudes of the dimensional frontier in a wide range of artifacts and authors. Among these are James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, James Baldwin, and William Faulkner. A welcome is further extended to the peculiar sublime introduced in the Zohar and in the texts of Georg Büchner, Franz Kafka, Bruno Schulz, and Paul Celan.

Read more less

This book weaves together three themes at the intersection of Jacques Lacan and the philosophical tradition. The first is the question of time and memory. How do these problems call for a revision of Lacan’s purported “ahistoricism,” and how does the temporality of the subject in Lacan intersect with the questions of temporality initiated by Heidegger and then developed by contemporary French philosophy? The second question concerns the status of the body in Lacanian theory, especially in connection with emotion and affect, which Lacanian theory is commonly thought to ignore, but which the concept of jouissance was developed to address. Finally, it aims to explore, beyond the strict limits of Lacanian theory, possible points of intersection between psychoanalysis and other domains, including questions of race, biology, and evolutionary theory. By stressing the question of affect, the book shows how Lacan’s position cannot be reduced to the structuralist models he nevertheless draws upon, and thus how the problem of the body may be understood as a formation that marks the limits of language. Exploring the anthropological category of “race” within a broadly evolutionary perspective, it shows how Lacan’s elaboration of the “imaginary” and the “symbolic” might allow us to explain human physiological diversity without reducing it to a cultural or linguistic construction or allowing “race” to remain as a traditional biological category. Here again the questions of history and temporality are paramount, and open the possibility for a genuine dialogue between psychoanalysis and biology. Finally, the book engages literary texts. Antigone, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Hamlet, and even Wordsworth become the muses who oblige psychoanalysis and philosophy to listen once again to the provocations of poetry, which always disrupts our familiar notions of time and memory, of history and bodily or affective experience, and of subjectivity itself.

Read more less