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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Modern Western philosophy, c 1600 to the present > Western philosophy, from c 1900 - > General
This collection of essays takes up the most famous feminist
sentence ever written, Simone de Beauvoir's "On ne nait pas femme:
on le devient," finding in it a flashpoint that galvanizes feminist
thinking and action in multiple dimensions. Since its publication,
the sentence has inspired feminist thinking and action in many
different cultural and linguistic contexts. Two entangled
controversies emerge in the life of this sentence: a controversy
over the practice of translation and a controversy over the nature
and status of sexual difference. Variously translated into English
as "One is not born, but rather becomes a woman" (Parshley, 1953),
"one is not born but rather becomes woman" (Borde and
Malovany-Chevallier, 2010), and "women are made, not born" (in
popular parlance), the conflict over the translation crystallizes
the feminist debate over the possibilities and limitations of
social construction as a theory of sexual difference. When Sheila
Malovany-Chevallier and Constance Borde (contributors to this
volume), translated Le Deuxieme Sexe into English in 2010, their
decision to alter the translation of the famous sentence by
omitting the "a" ignited debate that has not yet exhausted itself.
The controversy over the English translation has opened a
conversation about translation practices and their relation to
meaning more generally, and broadens, in this volume, into an
examination of the life of Beauvoir's key sentence in other
languages and political and cultural contexts as well. The
philosophers, translators, literary scholars and historian who
author these essays take decidedly different positions on the
meaning of the sentence in French, and thus on its correct
translation in a variety of languages-but also on the meaning and
salience of the question of sexual difference as it travels between
languages, cultures, and political worlds.
Bare Architecture: a schizoanalysis, is a poststructural
exploration of the interface between architecture and the body.
Chris L. Smith skilfully introduces and explains numerous concepts
drawn from poststructural philosophy to explore the manner by which
the architecture/body relation may be rethought in the 21st
century. Multiple well-known figures in the discourses of
poststructuralism are invoked: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari,
Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jorges Luis
Borges and Michel Serres. These figures bring into view the
philosophical frame in which the body is formulated. Alongside the
philosophy, the architecture that Smith comes to refer to as 'bare
architecture' is explored. Smith considers architecture as a
complex construction and the book draws upon literature, art and
music, to provide a critique of the limits, extents and
opportunities for architecture itself. The book considers key works
from the architects Douglas Darden, Georges Pingusson, Lacatan and
Vassal, Carlo Scarpa, Peter Zumthor, Marco Casagrande and Sami
Rintala and Raumlabor. Such works are engaged for their capacities
to foster a rethinking of the relation between architecture and the
body.
Feminist Theory After Deleuze addresses the encounter between one
of the 20th century's most important philosophers, Gilles Deleuze,
and one of its most significant political and intellectual
movements, feminism. Feminist theory is a broad, contradictory, and
still evolving school of thought. This book introduces the key
movements within feminist theory, engaging with both Anglo-American
and French feminism, as well as important strains of feminist
thought that have originated in Australia and other parts of
Europe. Mapping both the feminist critique of Deleuze's work and
the ways in which it has brought vitality to feminist theory, this
book brings Deleuze into dialogue with significant thinkers such as
Simone de Beauvoir, Rosi Braidotti, Judith Butler, Elizabeth Grosz
and Luce Irigaray. It takes key terms in feminist theory such as,
'difference', 'gender', 'bodies', 'desire' and 'politics' and
approaches them from a Deleuzian perspective.
This volume traces the topic of affect across Lyotard's corpus and
accounts for Lyotard's crucial and original contribution to the
thinking of affect. Highlighting the importance of affect in
Lyotard's philosophy, this work offers a unique contribution to
both affect theory and the reception of Lyotard. Affect indeed
traverses Lyotard's philosophical corpus in various ways and under
various names: "figure" or "the figural" in Discourse, Figure,
"unbound intensities" in his "libidinal" writings, "the feeling of
the differend" in The Differend, "affect" and "infantia" in his
later writings. Across the span of his work, Lyotard insisted on
the intractability of affect, on what he would later call the
"differend" between affect and articulation. The singular awakening
of sensibility, affect both traverses and escapes articulation,
discourse, and representation. Lyotard devoted much of his
attention to the analysis of this traversal of affect in and
through articulation, its transpositions, translations, and
transfers. This volume explores Lyotard's account of affect as it
traverses the different fields encompassed by his writings
(philosophy, the visual arts, the performing arts, literature,
music, politics, psychoanalysis as well as technology and
post-human studies).
What is Philosophy? is the last instalment of a remarkable
twenty-year collaboration between the philosopher Gilles Deleuze
and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari. This hugely important text
attempts to explain the terms of their collaboration and to define
the activity of philosophy in which they have been engaged. A major
contribution to contemporary Continental philosophy, it
nevertheless remains distinctly challenging for readers faced for
the first time with Deleuze and Guattari's unusual and somewhat
allusive style. Deleuze and Guattari's 'What is Philosophy?': A
Reader's Guide offers a concise and accessible introduction to this
hugely important and yet challenging work. Written specifically to
meet the needs of students coming to Deleuze and Guattari for the
first time, the book offers guidance on: - Philosophical and
historical context - Key themes - Reading the text - Reception and
influence - Further reading
In Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed, Peter Mahon goes beyond
recent theoretical approaches to 'the posthuman' to argue for a
concrete posthumanism, which arises as humans, animals and
technology become entangled, in science, society and culture.
Concrete posthumanism is rooted in cutting-edge advances in
techno-science, and this book offers readers an exciting, fresh and
innovative exploration of this undulating, and often unstable,
terrain. With wide-ranging coverage, of cybernetics, information
theory, medicine, genetics, machine learning, politics, science
fiction, philosophy and futurology, Mahon examines how posthumanism
played-and continues to play-a crucial role in shaping how we
understand our world. This analysis of posthumanism centers on
human interactions with tools and technology, the centrality of
science, as well as an understanding of techno-science as a
pharmakon-an ancient Greek word for a substance that is both poison
and cure. Mahon argues that posthumanism must be approached with an
interdisciplinary attitude: a concrete posthumanism is only
graspable through knowledge derived from science and the
humanities. He concludes by sketching a 'post-humanities' to help
us meet the challenges of posthumanism, challenges to which we all
must rise. Posthumanism: A Guide for the Perplexed provides a
concise, detailed and coherent exploration of posthumanism,
introducing key approaches, concepts and themes. It is ideal for
readers of all stripes who are interested in a concrete
posthumanism and require more than just a simple introduction.
Experimental philosophy has blossomed into a variety of
philosophical fields including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics
and philosophy of language. But there has been very little
experimental philosophical research in the domain of philosophy of
religion. Advances in Religion, Cognitive Science, and Experimental
Philosophy demonstrates how cognitive science of religion has the
methodological and conceptual resources to become a form of
experimental philosophy of religion. Addressing a wide variety of
empirical claims that are of interest to philosophers and
psychologists of religion, a team of psychologists and philosophers
apply data from the psychology of religion to important problems in
the philosophy of religion including the psychology of religious
diversity; the psychology of substance dualism; the problem of evil
and the relation between religious belief and empathy; and the
cognitive science explaining the formation of intuitions that
unwittingly guide philosophers of religion when formulating
arguments. Bringing together authors and researchers who have made
important contributions to interdisciplinary research on religion
in the last decade, Advances in Religion, Cognitive Science, and
Experimental Philosophy provides new ways of approaching core
philosophical and psychological problems.
Superficially, Wittgenstein and Heidegger seem worlds apart: they
worked in different philosophical traditions, seemed mostly
ignorant of one another's work, and Wittgenstein's terse aphorisms
in plain language could not be farther stylistically from
Heidegger's difficult prose. Nevertheless, Wittgenstein's
Philosophical Investigations and Heidegger's Being and Time share a
number of striking parallels. In particular, this book shows that
both authors manifest a similar concern with authenticity. David
Egan develops this position in three stages. Part One explores the
emphasis both philosophers place on the everyday, and how this
emphasis brings with it a methodological focus on recovering what
we already know rather than advancing novel theses. Part Two argues
that the dynamic of authenticity and inauthenticity in Being and
Time finds homologies in Philosophical Investigations. Here Egan
particularly articulates and defends a conception of authenticity
in Wittgenstein that emphasizes the responsiveness and reciprocity
of play. Part Three considers how both philosophers' conceptions of
authenticity apply reflexively to their own work: each is concerned
not only with the question of what it means to exist authentically
but also with the question of what it means to do philosophy
authentically. For both authors, the problematic of authenticity is
intimately linked to the question of philosophical method.
This book is an original exploration of Deleuze's dynamic
philosophies of space, time and language, bringing Deleuze and
futurism together for the first time. Helen Palmer investigates
both the potential for creative novelty and the pitfalls of
formalism within both futurist and Deleuzian linguistic practices.
Through creative and rigorous analyses of Russian and Italian
futurist manifestos, the 'futurist' aspects of Deleuze's language
and thought are drawn out. The genre of the futurist manifesto is a
literary and linguistic model which can be applied to Deleuze's
work, not only at times when he writes explicitly in the style of a
manifesto but also in his earlier writings such as "Difference and
Repetition" (1968) and "The Logic of Sense" (1969). The way in
which avant-garde manifestos often attempt to perform and demand
their aims simultaneously, and the problems which arise due to
this, is an operation which can be perceived in Deleuze's writing.
With a particular focus on Russian zaum, the book negotiates the
philosophy behind futurist 'nonsense' language and how Deleuze
propounds analogous goals in The Logic of Sense. This book
critically engages with Deleuze's poetics, ultimately suggesting
that multiple linguistic models operate synecdochically within his
philosophy.
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