The current rise in new religions and the growing popularity of New Ageism is concomitant with an increasingly anti-philosophical sentiment marking our contemporary situation. More specifically, it is philosophical and psychoanalytic reason that has lost standing faced with the triumph of post-secular "spirituality". Combatting this trend, this treatise develops a theoretical apparatus based on Hegelian speculative reason and Lacanian psychoanalysis. With the aid of this theoretical apparatus, the book argues how certain conceptual pairs appear opposed through an operation of misrecognition christened, following Hegel, as "diremption". The failure to reckon with identities-in-difference relegates the subject to more vicious contradictions that define central aspects of our contemporary predicament. The repeated thesis of the treatise is that the deadlocks marking our contemporary situation require renewed engagement with dialectical thinking beyond the impasses of common understanding. Only by embarking on this philosophical-psychoanalytic "path of despair" (Hegel) will we stand a chance of achieving "joyful wisdom" (Nietzsche). Developing a unique dialectical theory based on readings of Hegel, Lacan and Zizek, in order to address various philosophical and psychoanalytic questions, this book will be of great interest to anyone interested in German idealism and/or psychoanalytic theory.

Violence has long been noted to be a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Traditionally, however, philosophical discussions have tended to approach it through the lens of warfare and/or limit it to physical forms. This changed in the twentieth century as the nature and meaning of 'violence' itself became a conceptual problem. Guided by the contention that Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 'Critique of Violence' essay inaugurated this turn to an explicit questioning of violence, this collection brings together an international array of scholars to engage with how subsequent thinkers-Agamben, Arendt, Benjamin, Butler, Castoriadis, Derrida, Fanon, Gramsci, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, and Schmitt-grappled with the meaning and place of violence. The aim is not to reduce these multiple responses to a singular one, but to highlight the heterogeneous ways in which the concept has been inquired into and the manifold meanings of it that have resulted. To this end, each chapter focuses on a different approach or thinker within twentieth and twenty-first century European philosophy, with many of them tackling the issue through the mediation of other topics and disciplines, including biopolitics, epistemology, ethics, culture, law, politics, and psychoanalysis. As such, the volume will be an invaluable resource for those interested in Critical Theory, Cultural Studies, History of Ideas, Philosophy, Politics, Political Theory, Psychology, and Sociology.

This volume brings together an international array of scholars to reconsider the meaning and place of poststructuralism historically and demonstrate some of the ways in which it continues to be relevant, especially for debates in aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The book's chapters focus on the works of Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard-in combination with those of Agamben, Luhman, Nancy, and Nietzsche-and examine issues including biopolitics, culture, embodiment, epistemology, history, music, temporality, political resistance, psychoanalysis, revolt, and the visual arts. The contributors use poststructuralism as a hermeneutical strategy that rejects the traditional affirmation of unity, totality, transparency, and representation to instead focus on the foundational importance of open-ended becoming, difference, the unknowable, and expression. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of poststructuralism and helps demonstrate how it has contributed to debates across philosophy and other disciplines. Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, aesthetics, feminist theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, psychoanalysis, and sociology.

"There is always an atheism to be extracted from a religion," Deleuze and Guattari write in their final collaboration, What Is Philosophy? Their claim that Christianity "secretes" atheism "more than any other religion," however, reflects the limits of their archive. Theological projects seeking to engage Deleuze remain embedded within Christian theologies and intellectual histories; whether they embrace, resist, or negotiate with Deleuze's atheism, the atheism in question remains one extracted from Christian theology, a Christian atheism. In Sufi Deleuze, Michael Muhammad Knight offers an intervention, engaging Deleuzian questions and themes from within Islamic tradition. Even if Deleuze did not think of himself as a theologian, Knight argues, to place Deleuze in conversation with Islam is a project of comparative theology and faces the challenge of any comparative theology: It seemingly demands that complex, internally diverse traditions can speak as coherent, monolithic wholes. To start from such a place would not only defy Islam's historical multiplicity but also betray Deleuze's model of the assemblage, which requires attention to not only the organizing and stabilizing tendencies within a structure but also the points at which a structure resists organization, its internal heterogeneity, and unpredictable "lines of flight." A Deleuzian approach to Islamic theology would first have to affirm that there is no such thing as a universal "Islamic theology" that can speak for all Muslims in all historical settings, but rather a multiplicity of power struggles between major and minor forces that contest each other over authenticity, authority, and the making of "orthodoxy." The discussions in Sufi Deleuze thus highlight Islam's extraordinary range of possibilities, not only making use of canonically privileged materials such as the Qur'an and major hadith collections, but also exploring a variety of marginalized resources found throughout Islam that challenge the notion of a singular "mainstream" interpretive tradition. To say it in Deleuze's vocabulary, Islam is a rhizome.

The current rise in new religions and the growing popularity of New Ageism is concomitant with an increasingly anti-philosophical sentiment marking our contemporary situation. More specifically, it is philosophical and psychoanalytic reason that has lost standing faced with the triumph of post-secular "spirituality". Combatting this trend, this treatise develops a theoretical apparatus based on Hegelian speculative reason and Lacanian psychoanalysis. With the aid of this theoretical apparatus, the book argues how certain conceptual pairs appear opposed through an operation of misrecognition christened, following Hegel, as "diremption". The failure to reckon with identities-in-difference relegates the subject to more vicious contradictions that define central aspects of our contemporary predicament. The repeated thesis of the treatise is that the deadlocks marking our contemporary situation require renewed engagement with dialectical thinking beyond the impasses of common understanding. Only by embarking on this philosophical-psychoanalytic "path of despair" (Hegel) will we stand a chance of achieving "joyful wisdom" (Nietzsche). Developing a unique dialectical theory based on readings of Hegel, Lacan and Zizek, in order to address various philosophical and psychoanalytic questions, this book will be of great interest to anyone interested in German idealism and/or psychoanalytic theory.

Winner of the Canadian Society for Continental Philosophy 2020 Annual Symposium Book Award Stella Gaon provides the first fully philosophical account of the critical nature of deconstruction, and she does so by turning in an original way to psychoanalysis. Drawing on close readings of Freud and Laplanche, Gaon argues that Derridean deconstruction is driven by a normative investment in reason's psychological force. Indeed, deconstruction is more faithful to the principle of reason than the various forms of critical theory prevalent today. For if one pursues the classical demand for rational grounds vigilantly, one finds that claims to ethical or political legitimacy cannot be rationally justified, because they are undone by logical undecidability. Gaon's argument is borne out in the cases of Kantian deontology, Deweyan pragmatism, progressive pedagogy, Habermasian moral theory, Levinasian ethics and others. What emerges is the groundbreaking demonstration that deconstruction is impelled by a quasi-ethical critical drive, and that to read deconstructively is to radicalize the emancipatory practice of reason as self-critique. This important volume will be of great value to critical theorists as well as to Derrida scholars and researchers in social and political thought.

Theories of justice often fixate on purely normative, abstract principles unrelated to real-world situations. The philosopher and theorist Axel Honneth addresses this disconnect, and constructs a theory of justice derived from the normative claims of Western liberal-democratic societies and anchored in morally legitimate laws and institutionally established practices. Honneth's paradigm-which he terms "a democratic ethical life"-draws on the spirit of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and his own theory of recognition, demonstrating how concrete social spheres generate the tenets of individual freedom and a standard for what is just. Using social analysis to re-found a more grounded theory of justice, he argues that all crucial actions in Western civilization, whether in personal relationships, market-induced economic activities, or the public forum of politics, share one defining characteristic: they require the realization of a particular aspect of individual freedom. This fundamental truth informs the guiding principles of justice, enabling a wide-ranging reconsideration of its nature and application.

The book offers a new introduction to Jacques Derrida and to Deconstruction as an important strand of Continental Philosophy. From his early writings on phenomenology and linguistics to his later meditations on war, terrorism, and justice, Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) achieved prominence on an international scale by addressing as many different audiences as he did topics. Yet despite widespread acclamation, his work has never been considered easy. Rendering accessible debates that marked more than four decades of engagement and inquiry, Susanne Ludemann traces connections between the philosopher's own texts and those of his many interlocutors, past and present.
Unlike conventional introductions, "Politics of Deconstruction" offers a number of personal approaches to reading Derrida and invites readers to find their own. Emphasizing the relationship between philosophy and politics, it shows that, with Deconstruction, there is much more at stake than an "academic" discussion, for Derrida's work deals with all the burning political and intellectual challenges of our time. The author's own professional experience in both the United States and in Europe, which particularly inform her chapter on Derrida's reception in the United States, opens a unique perspective on a unique thinker, one that rewards specialists and newcomers alike.

Modern/Postmodern: Society, Philosophy, Literature offers new definitions of modernism and postmodernism by presenting an original theoretical system of thought that explains the differences between these two key movements. Taking a contrastive approach, Peter V. Zima identifies three key concepts in the relationship between modernism and postmodernism - ambiguity, ambivalence and indifference. Zima defines modernism and postmodernism as problematics, as opposed to aesthetics, stylistics or ideologies. Unlike modernism, which is grounded in an increasing ambivalence towards social norms and values, postmodernity is presented as an era of indifference, i.e. of interchangeable norms, values and perspectives. Taking an historical, interdisciplinary and intercultural approach that engages with Anglo-American and European debates, the book describes the transition from late modernist ambivalence to postmodern indifference in the contexts of philosophy, literature and sociology. This is the ideal guide to the relationship between modernism and postmodernism for students and scholars throughout the humanities.

The work of Michel Foucault has been influential in the analysis of space in a variety of disciplines, most notably in geography and politics. This collection of essays is the first to focus on what Foucault termed 'heterotopias', spaces that exhibit multiple layers of meaning and reveal tensions within society.

This book recovers a sense of the high stakes of Shakespearean comedy, arguing that the comedies, no less than the tragedies, serve to dramatize responses to the condition of being human, responses that invite scholarly investigation and explanation. Taking its cue from Stanley Cavell's influential readings of Othello and Lear, the book argues that exposure or vulnerability to others is the source of both human happiness and human misery; while the tragedies showcase attempts at the evasion of such vulnerability through the self-defeating pursuit of epistemological certainty, the comedies present the drama and the difficulty of turning away from an epistemological register in order to productively respond to the fact of our humanity. Where Shakespeare's tragedies might be viewed in Cavellian terms as the drama of skepticism, Shakespeare's comedies then exemplify the drama of acknowledgement. As a parallel and a preamble, Gottlieb suggests that the field of literary studies is itself a site of such revealing responses: where competing research methods strive to foreclose upon (or, alternatively, rejoice in) epistemological uncertainty, such commitments bespeak an urge to avoid or circumvent the human in the practice of scholarship. Reading Shakespeare's comedies in tandem with a "defactoist" view of teaching and learning points in the direction of a new humanism, one that eschews both the relativism of old deconstruction and contemporary Presentism and the determinism of various kinds of structural accounts. This book offers something new in scholarly and popular understanding of Shakespeare's work, doing so with both philosophical rigor and literary attention to the difficult work of reading.

This work advances a theory in the metaphysics of phenomenal consciousness, which the author labels "e-physicalism". Firstly, he endorses a realist stance towards consciousness and physicalist metaphysics. Secondly, he criticises Strong AI and functionalist views, and claims that consciousness has an internal character. Thirdly, he discusses HOT theories, the unity of consciousness, and holds that the "explanatory gap" is not ontological but epistemological. Fourthly, he argues that consciousness is not a supervenient but an emergent property, not reducible and endowed with original causal powers, with respect to the micro-constituents of the conscious entity. Fifthly, he addresses the "zombie argument" and the "supervenience argument" within the e-physicalism framework. Finally, he elaborates on the claim that phenomenal properties are physical and discusses the "knowledge argument".

Few studies of Foucault have examined his thought from a sustained interdisciplinary perspective. Through the interpretative prism of the concept of the 'Totality of Reason', this book suggests an original analytical reading of Foucault's thought. This book addresses Foucault's characterizations of the Enlightenment, asking whether the developmental history of the modern conception of knowledge - from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment - warrants the conclusion he draws. From the perspective of a critical evaluation of Foucault's thesis on 'the crisis of modernity', the book examines whether Foucault, the philosophical and social critic, truly belongs to those intellectual trends known as a 'deconstruction' and 'post-modernism' that advocate a wholesale rejection of the project of modernity, demonstrating how a classification of this kind contributes to an impoverishment of our understanding of Foucault's thought. This book will attract the attention of readers interested in Foucault, and what is broadly perceived to be the 'crisis of modernity'. It will appeal to scholars and advanced students of sociology, political philosophy and political science, psychology, philosophy, interdisciplinary studies and cultural studies.

This book investigates what Bataille, in The Pineal Eye, calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and philosophical) anthropology. Gasch(r) probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud. He begins by showing what Bataille's understanding of the mythological owes to Schelling. Drawing on Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud, he then explores the notion of image that constitutes the sort of representation that Bataille's innovative approach entails. Gasch(r) concludes that Bataille's mythological anthropology takes on Hegel's phenomenology in a systematic fashion. By reading it backwards, he not only dismantles its architecture, he also ties each level to the preceding one, replacing the idealities of philosophy with the phantasmatic representations of what he dubs low materialism. Phenomenology, Gasch(r) argues, thus paves the way for a new science of phantasms.

This introduction to the politics of poststructuralism focuses on two interrelated themes: the culture of Western Marxism and contemporary neoliberal capitalism. Poststructuralism is not a form of anti-Marxism, Peters argues; indeed, poststructural philosophers view themselves in some kind of relationship to the legacy of Marx. Either they have been Marxist or still view themselves as Marxist. In a post-Marxist era they have invented new ways of reading and writing Marx. Peters critically engages neoliberalism, an ideology that is committed to the revitalization of homo economicus and neoclassical economics. This book is a deconstruction of neoliberalism, considered as a world-historical political project aimed at a form of globalisation.

This volume is based on the first set of formal conversations which brings together the dynamic philosophies of two eminent thinkers: Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead. Each has drawn from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. In bringing together internationally renowned interpreters of Butler and Whitehead from a variety of fields and disciplines philosophy, rhetoric, gender and queer studies, religion, literary and political theory the editors hope to set a standard for the relevance of interdisciplinary philosophical discourse today. This volume offers a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts, by reaching beyond their closed circles toward understandings that may serve as the basis for the activation of humanity today. Considered together, Butler and Whitehead delineate a whole new cadre of approaches to long-standing problems as well as never-before asked questions in the humanities.

A. Kiarina Kordela steps beyond extant commentaries on Marx's theory of commodity fetishism-from A. Sohn-Rethel to L. Althusser, E. Balibar, Slavoj Zizek, and others-to show that in capitalism value is the manifestation of the homology between thought and being, while their other aspect-power-is foreclosed and becomes the object of biopower. Using monistic Marxian/Lacanian structuralism as an alternative to dominant models from Plato and Kant to phenomenological accounts, deconstruction, and other contemporary approaches, Kordela expertly argues that Marx's theory of commodity fetishism is a reformulation of the Spinozian thesis that thought (mind) and things (bodies or extension) are manifestations of one and the same being or substance. Kordela's link between Spinoza and Marx shows that being consists of two aspects, value and power, the former leading to structuralist thought, the latter becoming the object of contemporary biopower. Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan intervenes between two dominant lines of thought in the reception of Marx today: on the one hand, an approach that relates Marxian thought to psychoanalysis from a Hegelian/dialectical perspective and, on the other hand, an approach that links Marxism to Spinozian monism, at the total exclusion of psychoanalysis. This book will interest scholars and researchers who study Marxism, (post)structuralism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, ontology, epistemology and theories of representation, theoreticians of cultural studies and comparative literature, aesthetic theory, including the relation of art to economy and politics, and biopolitics.

In recent decades, what is known as 'the subject' has been problematized by various old and new materialisms and today appears as decentered in and by language, split by the unconscious, deformed by social forces, governed by ideology and is either seen to have succumbed to the postmodern condition or to never have existed in the first place. Every materialist theory of the subject depends on a conception of materiality, which can delineate the character of what the material reality, which de-centers or constitutes the subject consists of. Materiality and Subject in Marxism, (Post-)Structuralism, and Material Semiotics investigates the relation between materiality and the subject in the materialist approaches of Marxism, (post-)structuralism, and material semiotics. None of these approaches subscribes to a reductionist materialism; rather, they conceive of materiality as multiple, complex, and not reducible to tangible matter. For each approach, the modalities of materiality of the respective materialism are defined. The relationship between the multiple materialities and the subject constituted and decentered in this relationship are presented as specific to the theoretical approaches discussed.

This study, first published in 1998, makes a lively and welcome contribution to the critical analysis of Nietzsche's seminal classic This Spoke Zarathustra. Through a close textual reading of the neglected and ill-understood part four of the text, the author seeks to show that Nietzsche's project of self-overcoming is a failure. Offering herself as a philosopher-priestess of the wisdom of pessimism, Francesca Cauchi invokes a complex of responses in the reader, providing a necessary challenge to any and all advocates of life.

This volume addresses the issue of freedom in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. This is all the more challenging in that Deleuze-Guattari almost never use the term freedom, preferring instead, the concept of the refrain. The essays collected in the volume show that freedom has been understood in a remarkably narrow sense and that in fact freedom operates as the refrain in every realm of thought and creation. The motivating approach in these essays is Deleuze-Guattari's emphasis on the irreality of media and capitalistic sign regimes, which they perceive to have taken over even the practices of philosophy, the arts, and science. By offering a clear and engaging treatment of the underexplored issue of freedom, this volume moves the discussion of Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy forward in ways that will appeal to researchers in Continental philosophy and a wide range of other disciplines.

Why, since the financial crisis of 2008, has neoliberal capitalism remained seemingly impregnable? Why, when it is shown as no longer capable of delivering on its economic promises does its logic pervade all facets of contemporary life? How has it seduced us? This book examines the seductive appeal of neoliberalism by understanding it as a fundamentally counter-cultural logic. Unlike earlier modes of capitalism, neoliberalism is infused by spirit of rebellion and self-creation, with the idealised neoliberal subject overturning traditional morality whilst creating new modes of being based on risk and excess. Tracing the development of the logic of neoliberalism from its beginnings in the thought of Friedrich Hayek in the wake of the post-war period, through the work of neoconservative writers overcoming and moving beyond what they perceived as the nihilism of both the counter-culture and capitalism of the 1960s and 70s, to its establishment as a new moral order underpinning the economic system from the 1980s onwards, the author argues that it is only through a clear understanding of the seduction of neoliberalism that it can be overcome by reimagining our relationships to work and society.

Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot is a new radical departure in psychoanalytic exposition. An attempt is made to convey, in a language accessible for people from different disciplines, some of the most difficult processes that conform our subjectivity and our concept of difference and alterity. Containing both significant theoretical material and applications of the theory to clinical psychoanalytic practice, this book offers the latest thinking on the importance of the body in psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, and cultural theorists.

Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot is a new radical departure in psychoanalytic exposition. An attempt is made to convey, in a language accessible for people from different disciplines, some of the most difficult processes that conform our subjectivity and our concept of difference and alterity. Containing both significant theoretical material and applications of the theory to clinical psychoanalytic practice, this book offers the latest thinking on the importance of the body in psychoanalytic theory. Psychoanalysis, the Body, and the Oedipal Plot will be of interest to psychoanalysts, philosophers, and cultural theorists.

The "structuralist" theories of power show that the subject is produced and reproduced by the investment of power: but how then can we think of the subject's resistance to power? Based on this fundamental question, Power and Resistance interprets critically the (post-)structuralist theory of power and resistance, i.e., the theories of Foucault, Deleuze/Guattari, Derrida and Althusser. It analyses also the mechanism of power and the strategies of resistance in the era of neoliberalism. This meticulous analysis that completely renewed the theory of power is already published in French, Japanese, and Korean with success.