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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > Postmodernism
Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to understand and respond to this failure is complex and contested. Against both the radical orthodox attempt to return to a time before the theology's failure and the deconstructive theological attempt to open theology up to the hope of a future beyond failure, Rose proposes an account of Christian identity as constituted by, not despite, failure. Understanding failure as central to theology opens up new possibilities for confronting Christianity's violent and kyriarchal history and abandoning the attempt to discover a pure Christ outside of the grotesque materiality of the church. The Christian mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite's uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to Dionysius's legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological thought but also in much twentieth century continental philosophy as it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Zizek represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire, and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical theological engagement with Zizek's account of social and political transformation, showing how Zizek's work makes possible a materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity.
Lacan postulated that the psyche can be understood by means of certain structures, which control our lives and our desires, and which operate differently at different logical moments or stages of formation. Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure offers us a reading of the major concepts of Lacan in terms of his later topological theory and aims to show how this was always a concern for Lacan and not only an issue in the last seminars. Ellie Ragland discusses how various stages of formation can be uncovered topologically within language itself, and operate to place certain properties - fantasy, the drive, jouissance, discourse and ethics in language itself. In this way she explores not only how language actually works in tandem with the properties, but also gives a different idea of what knowledge actually is and what implications that may have for reimagining and reworking differential/diagnostic structures. Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure is a compelling exponent of the innovative approaches Lacan takes to rethinking what psychoanalysis is and what it can do to enlighten psychoanalysts and treat patients. It will be essential reading to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists training graduate students in the fields of film, literary, gender and cultural studies.
Sophistry, since Plato and Aristotle, has been philosophy's negative alter ego, its bad other. Yet sophistry's emphasis on words and performativity over the fetishization of truth makes it an essential part of our world's cultural, political, and philosophical repertoire. In this dazzling book, Barbara Cassin, who has done more than anyone to reclaim a mode of thought that traditional philosophy disavows, shows how the sophistical tradition has survived in the work of psychoanalysis. In a highly original rereading of the writings and seminars of Jacques Lacan, together with works of Freud and others, Cassin shows how psychoanalysis, like the sophists, challenges the very foundations of scientific rationality. In taking seriously equivocations, jokes, and unfinishable projects of interpretation, the analyst, like the sophist, allows performance, signifier, and inconsistency to reshape truth. This witty, brilliant tour de force celebrates how psychoanalysts have become our culture's key dissidents and register, in Lacan's words, "the presence of the sophist in our time."
Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring Poststructuralism challenges traditional ways of thinking about human beings and our relation to the world. Language, meaning, and culture are all reappraised, and with them assumptions about what it's possible for us to know. More interested in posing sharply focused questions than in reassuring with certainties, its theorists tend to clarify the options, while leaving them open to debate. At once sceptical towards inherited authority and positive about future possibilities, poststructuralism asks above all that we reflect on its findings. In this Very Short Introduction, Catherine Belsey traces the key arguments that have led poststructuralists to challenge traditional theories of language and culture. In this new edition, such well-known figures as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are joined by less famous theorists, and examples are drawn from both high art and popular culture. Shakespeare features alongside advertising and Christmas cards, as well as Lewis Carroll, Marcel Duchamp, Toni Morrison, and the tantalizing lithographs of M. C. Escher. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.
The Technological Introject explores the futures opened up across the humanities and social sciences by the influential media theorist Friedrich Kittler. Joining the German tradition of media studies and systems theory to the Franco-American theoretical tradition marked by poststructuralism, Kittler's work has redrawn the boundaries of disciplines and of scholarly traditions. The contributors position Kittler in relation to Marshall McLuhan, Jacques Derrida, discourse analysis, film theory, and psychoanalysis. Ultimately, the book shows the continuing relevance of the often uncomfortable questions Kittler opened up about the cultural production and its technological entanglements.
Reified Life addresses the most pressing political question of the 21st century: what forms of life are free and what forms are perceived legally and economically as surplus or expendable, human and otherwise. The 2008 economic crisis solidified the dominion of neoliberal and financial capital to organize human societies much to the detriment of the world's populations. Reified Life theorizes the dangerous social implications of a posthuman future, whereby human agency is secondary to algorithmic processes, digital protocols, speculative financial instruments, and nonhuman market and technological forces. Employing new readings of Deleuze, Guattari, Foucault, Marx, Vico, Gramsci, Berardi, and Gilbert Simondon, Narkunas contends that it is premature to speak of a posthuman or inhuman future, or employ an 'ism, given how dynamic and contingent human practices and their material figurations can be. Over several chapters he diagnoses the rise of "market humans," the instrumentalization of culture to decide the life worth living along utilitarian categories, and the varied ways human rights and humanitarianism actually throw members of the species like refugees outside the human order. To combat this, Reified Life argues against Reified Life calls to abandon the human and humanism, and instead proposes the ahuman to think alongside the human, what philosopher Gilbert Simondon calls the transindividuation of ontogentic processes rather than subjectivity. To aid the "figurating animal," Reified Life elaborates speculative fictions as critical mechanisms for envisioning alternative futures and freedoms from the domineering forces of speculative capital, whose fictions have become our realities. Narkunas offers, to that end, a novel interpretation of the post-anthropocentric turn in the humanities by linking the diminished centrality of humanism to the waning dominion of nation-states over their populations and the intensification of financial capitalism, which reconfigures politics along economic categories of risk management.
What imaginaries, tropes, and media have shaped how we theorize? The Mark of Theory argues that inscription constitutes one of the master metaphors of contemporary theory. As a trope that draws on a wide array of practices of marking, from tattooing to circumcision, from photographic imprints and phonographic grooves to marks on a page, inscription provides an imaginary that orients and irritates theoretical thought. Tracing inscriptive imaginaries from the late nineteenth century to today, The Mark of Theory offers a wide-ranging conceptual genealogy of contemporary thought. Navigating poststructuralism's attention to figurative language as well as media theory's attention to objects, phenomena, and practices of mediation, the book works through core questions for how we theorize. Across a range of disciplines and scholarly conversations-from literature and media to anthropology, race and gender, art, psychoanalysis, sound, and ultimately ethics-sites of inscription come to constitute the past legacy of a thought to come, a prehistory of our current moment. In focusing on materiality and mediation The Mark of Theory shows how inscriptive practices shape conceptual thought, as well as political and ethical choices. By contextualizing the fraught relationship between materiality and signification, The Mark of Theory lays the ground for a politics of theory that begins there where theory and politics are no longer conflated.
What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us in an age of rapidly evolving, hard-to-categorize ideas of sexuality and the self? Should we abandon Freud's theories completely or adapt them to new findings and the new relationships taking shape in modern liberal societies? In a remarkably prescient series of lectures delivered in the early 1960s, the French philosopher Louis Althusser anticipated the challenges that psychoanalytic theory would face as politics moved away from structuralist frameworks and toward the elastic possibilities of anthropological and sociological thought. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences translates Althusser's remarkable seminars into English for the first time, making available to a wider audience the origins and potential future of radical political theory. Althusser takes the important step in these lectures of distinguishing psychoanalysis from psychology and especially psychiatry, which long resisted Freud's analytical concepts of the unconscious and overdetermination. By freeing psychoanalysis from this bind, Althusser can then apply these analytical concepts to the social and the political, integrated with Marxist theory. The result is an enlivened methodology for comprehending social organization and change that had a profound influence on the Frankfurt School and scholars who continue to work at the forefront of radical thought today: Judith Butler, Etienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou.
Contemporary Capitalism, Crisis, and the Politics of Fiction: Literature Beyond Fordism proposes a fresh approach to contemporary fictional engagements with the idea of crisis in capitalism and its various social and economic manifestations. The book investigates how late-twentieth and twenty-first-century Anglophone fiction has imagined, interpreted, and in most cases resisted, the collapse of the socio-economic structures built after the Second World War and their replacement with a presumably immaterial order of finance-led economic development. Through a series of detailed readings of the words of authors Martin Amis, Hari Kunzru, Don DeLillo, Zia Haider Rahman, John Lanchester, Paul Murray and Zadie Smith among others, this study sheds light on the embattled and decidedly unstable nature of contemporary capitalism.
Most texts claiming to trace the evolution of metaphysics do so according to the analytical tradition, which understands metaphysics as a reflection of different categories of reality. Incorporating the perspectives of Continental theory does little to expand this history, as the Continental tradition remains largely hostile to such metaphysical claims. The first history of metaphysics to respect both the analytical and Continental schools while also transcending the theoretical limitations of each, this compelling overview restores the value of metaphysics to contemporary audiences. Beginning with the Greeks and concluding with present day philosophers, Jean Grondin reviews seminal texts by the Presocratic Parmenides, Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Augustine. He follows the theological turn in metaphysical thought during the middle ages and reads Avicenna, Anselm, Aquinas, and Duns Scot. Grondin revisits Descartes and the cogito; Spinoza and Leibniz's rationalist approaches; Kant's reclaiming of the metaphysical tradition; and postkantian practice up to Hegel. He engages with the twentieth-century innovations that shook the discipline, particularly Heidegger's notion of Being and the rediscovery of the metaphysics of existence (Sartre and the Existentialists), language (Gadamer and Derrida), and transcendence (Levinas). Metaphysics is often dismissed as a form or epoch of philosophy that must be overcome, yet a full understanding of its platform and processes reveal a cogent approach to reality, and its reasoning has been foundational to modern philosophy and science. Grondin reacquaints readers with the rich currents and countercurrents of metaphysical thinking and muses on where it may be headed in the twenty-first century.
In Turning Emotion Inside Out, Edward S. Casey challenges the commonplace assumption that our emotions are to be located inside our minds, brains, hearts, or bodies. Instead, he invites us to rethink our emotions as fundamentally, although not entirely, emerging from outside and around the self, redirecting our attention from felt interiority to the emotions located in the world around us, beyond the confines of subjectivity. This book begins with a brief critique of internalist views of emotion that hold that feelings are sequestered within a subject. Casey affirms that while certain emotions are felt as resonating within our subjectivity, many others are experienced as occurring outside any such subjectivity. These include intentional or expressive feelings that transpire between ourselves and others, such as an angry exchange between two people, as well as emotions or affects that come to us from beyond ourselves. Casey claims that such far?out emotions must be recognized in a full picture of affective life. In this way, the book proposes to "turn emotion inside out."
In Modernism and Subjectivity: How Modernist Fiction Invented the Postmodern Subject, Adam Meehan argues that theories of subjectivity coming out of psychoanalytic, poststructuralist, and adjacent lateA -twentieth-A century intellectual traditions had already been articulated in modernist fiction before 1945. Offering a bold new genealogy for literary modernism, Meehan finds versions of a postmodern subject embodied in works by authors who intently undermine attempts to stabilize conceptions of identity and who draw attention to the role of language in shaping conceptions of the self. Focusing on the philosophical registers of literary texts, Meehan traces the development of modernist attitudes toward subjectivity, particularly in relation to issues of ideology, spatiality, and violence. His analysis explores a selection of works published between 1904 and 1941, beginning with Joseph Conrad's prescient portrait of the subject interpolated by ideology and culminating with Samuel Beckett's categorical disavowal of the subjective ""I."" Additional close readings of novels by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Nathanael West, and Virginia Woolf establish that modernist texts conceptualize subjectivity as an ideological and linguistic construction that reverberates across understandings of consciousness, race, place, and identity. By reconsidering the movement's function and scope, Modernism and Subjectivity charts how profoundly modernist literature shaped the intellectual climate of the twentieth century.
"This book features a CD of rarely performed music, including a specially commissioned rap by Erik Weiner of Walter Benjamin's "Thesis on the Philosophy of History." " Theodor W. Adorno was the prototypical German Jewish non-Jew, Walter Benjamin vacillated between German Jew and Jewish German, Gershom Scholem was a committed Zionist, and Arnold Sch?nberg converted to Protestantism for professional reasons but later returned to Judaism. Carl Djerassi, himself a refugee from Hitler's Austria, dramatizes a dialogue between these four men in which they discuss fraternity, religious identity, and legacy as well as reveal aspects of their lives-notably their relations with their wives-that many have ignored, underemphasized, or misrepresented. The desire for canonization and the process by which it is obtained are the underlying themes of this dialogue, with emphasis on Paul Klee's "Angelus Novus "(1920), a canonized work that resonated deeply with Benjamin, Adorno, and Scholem (and for which Djerassi and Gabrielle Seethaler present a revisionist and richly illustrated interpretation). Basing his dialogue on extensive archival research and interviews, Djerassi concludes with a daring speculation on the putative contents of Benjamin's famous briefcase, which disappeared upon his suicide.
Blossoming from a correspondence between Luce Irigaray and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being is an intense personal, philosophical, and political meditation on the significance of the vegetal for our lives, our ways of thinking, and our relations with human and nonhuman beings. The vegetal world has the potential to rescue our planet and our species and offers us a way to abandon past metaphysics without falling into nihilism. Luce Irigaray has argued in her philosophical work that living and coexisting are deficient unless we recognize sexuate difference as a crucial dimension of our existence. Michael Marder believes the same is true for vegetal difference. Irigaray and Marder consider how plants contribute to human development by sustaining our breathing, nourishing our senses, and keeping our bodies and minds alive. They note the importance of returning to ancient Greek tradition and engaging with Eastern teachings to revive a culture closer to nature. As a result, we can reestablish roots when we are displaced and recover the vital energy we need to improve our sensibility and relation to others. This generative discussion points toward a more universal way of becoming human that is embedded in the vegetal world.
'Bristles with provocative insights into the tangled liaisons of sex and self' Times Higher Education In the third volume of his acclaimed examination of sexuality in modern Western society, Foucault investigates the Golden Age of Rome to reveal a decisive break from the classical Greek version of sexual pleasure. Exploring the moral reflections of philosophers and physicians of the era, he identifies a growing anxiety over sexual activity and its consequences. At the core of this transformation Foucault found the principles of the 'care of the self': the belief that the self is an object of knowledge to be cultivated over time, and the implications this has for ethics and behaviour. 'Magnificent ... Foucault's great achievement is to illuminate an entire and cohesive body of thought. It is brilliantly done' Daily Telegraph
'No brief survey can do justice to the richness, complexity and detail of Foucault's discussion' New York Review of Books The second volume of Michel Foucault's pioneering analysis of the changing nature of desire explores how sexuality was perceived in classical Greek culture. From the stranger byways of Greek medicine (with its advice on the healthiest season for sex, as well as exercise and diet) to the role of women, The Use of Pleasure is full of extraordinary insights into the differences - and the continuities - between the Ancient, Christian and Modern worlds, showing how sex became a moral issue in the west. 'Required reading for those who cling to stereotyped ideas about our difference from the Greeks in terms of pagan license versus Christian austerity' Los Angeles Times Book Review
Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself. Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called "sciences of the mind" reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling-which is also the fear of giving in to the temptation to let oneself fall-has long been understood as a destabilizing yet intoxicating element without which consciousness itself was inconceivable. Some went so far as to induce it in patients through frightening rotational therapies. In a less cruel but no less radical way, vertigo also staked its claim in philosophy. If Montaigne and Pascal could still consider it a perturbation of reason and a trick of the imagination which had to be subdued, subsequent thinkers stopped considering it an occasional imaginative instability to be overcome. It came, rather, to be seen as intrinsic to reason, such that identity manifests itself as tottering, kinetic, opaque and, indeed, vertiginous. Andrea Cavalletti's stunning book sets this critique of stable consciousness beside one of Hitchcock's most famous thrillers, a drama of identity and its abysses. Hitchcock's brilliant combination of a dolly and a zoom to recreate the effect of falling describes that double movement of "pushing away and bringing closer" which is the habitual condition of the subject and of intersubjectivity. To reach myself, I must see myself from the bottom of the abyss, with the eyes of another. Only then does my "here" flee down there and, from there, attract me. From classical medicine and from the role of imagination in our biopolitical world to the very heart of philosophy, from Hollywood to Heidegger's "being-toward-death," Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature of identity.
Postmodernity has matured. But the challenge of navigating our contemporary culture remains. In order for Christians to make wise decisions, we first need to understand the many facets of our postmodern context. If Rene Descartes is often identified as the first truly modern philosopher in light of his confidence in human reason, then postmodernism has taken Descartes to the woodshed. Stewart Kelly and James Dew detail the litany of concerns that postmodernism has raised: overconfidence in human reason, the limitations of language, the relativity of truth, the lack of a truly objective view, the inherently oppressive nature of metanarratives, the instability of the human self, and the absence any moral superiority. With wisdom and care, Kelly and Dew compare these postmodern principles with the gospel of Jesus Christ and the Christian faith. What emerges is neither a rejection of everything postmodernism is concerned with nor a wholesale embrace of all that it affirms. Instead, we are encouraged to understand the postmodern world as we seek to mature spiritually in Christ.
Today, anti-humanism is a dominant, even definitive, feature of contemporary theory. Setting out to challenge this tendency, editors David Alderson and Kevin Anderson argue that the political moment demands a reappraisal of the humanist tradition. Humanism, in all its diversity and complexity, may facilitate the renewal of progressive theory through the championing of human subjectivity, agency and freedom. Across four extended essays, David Alderson, Kevin Anderson, Barbara Epstein and Robert Spencer engage critically with the Marxist tradition, recent developments in poststructuralism, postcolonialism and queer theory. Incorporating an overview of the historical context that resulted in socialist humanism's eclipse in the 1950s and '60s, and a strident critique of anti-humanism, For Humanism offers a coherent and compelling argument for the rehabilitation of a much maligned tradition.
Having lost much of its political clout and theoretical power, communism no longer represents an appealing alternative to capitalism. In its original Marxist formulation, communism promised an ideal of development, but only through a logic of war, and while a number of reformist governments still promote this ideology, their legitimacy has steadily declined since the fall of the Berlin wall. Separating communism from its metaphysical foundations, which include an abiding faith in the immutable laws of history and an almost holy conception of the proletariat, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala recast Marx's theories at a time when capitalism's metaphysical moorings -- in technology, empire, and industrialization -- are buckling. While Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri call for a return of the revolutionary left, Vattimo and Zabala fear this would lead only to more violence and failed political policy. Instead, they adopt an antifoundationalist stance drawn from the hermeneutic thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Richard Rorty.Hermeneutic communism leaves aside the ideal of development and the general call for revolution; it relies on interpretation rather than truth and proves more flexible in different contexts. Hermeneutic communism motivates a resistance to capitalism's inequalities yet intervenes against violence and authoritarianism by emphasizing the interpretative nature of truth. Paralleling Vattimo and Zabala's well-known work on the weakening of religion, Hermeneutic Communism realizes the fully transformational, politically effective potential of Marxist thought.
The Hegelian-Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor after the postmetaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views of human nature. In this book Rahel Jaeggi draws on the Hegelian philosophical tradition, phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency, and recent work in the analytical tradition to reconceive alienation as the absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and others, which manifests in feelings of helplessness and the despondent acceptance of ossified social roles and expectations. A revived approach to alienation helps critical social theory engage with phenomena such as meaninglessness, isolation, and indifference. By severing alienation's link to a problematic conception of human essence while retaining its social-philosophical content, Jaeggi provides resources for a renewed critique of social pathologies, a much-neglected concern in contemporary liberal political philosophy. Her work revisits the arguments of Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, placing them in dialogue with Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, and Charles Taylor.
Antoinette Fouque cofounded the Mouvement de Lib?ration des Femmes (MLF) in France in 1968 and spearheaded its celebrated "Psychanalyse et Politique," a research group that informed the cultural and intellectual heart of French feminism. Rather than reject Freud's discoveries on the pretext of their phallocentrism, Fouque sought to enrich his thought by more clearly defining the difference between the sexes and affirming the existence of a female libido. By recognizing women's contribution to humanity, Fouque hoped "uterus envy," which she saw as the mainspring of misogyny, could finally give way to gratitude, and by associating procreation with women's liberation, she advanced the goal of a parity-based society in which men and women could write a new human contract. The essays, lectures, and dialogues in this volume finally allow English-speaking readers access to the breadth of Fouque's creativity and activism. Touching on issues in history and biography, politics and psychoanalysis, Fouque recounts her experiences running the first women's publishing house in Europe; supporting women under threat, such as Aung San Suu Ki, Taslima Nasrin, and Nawal El Saadaoui; and serving as deputy in the European Parliament. Her theoretical explorations discuss the ongoing development of "feminology," a field she initiated, and while she celebrates the progress women have made over the past four decades, she also warns against the trends of counter-liberation: the feminization of poverty, the persistence of sexual violence, and the rise of religious fundamentalism. |
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