In a political climate increasingly characterised by hostility towards constructed others, Steven Gormley answers the question: what does it mean, and how can we respond to the demand, to do justice to the other? He pursues this question by developing a critical, but productive, dialogue between deliberative theory and deconstruction. Two key claims emerge from this: doing justice to the other demands that we maintain an ethos of interruption; and, such an ethos requires a democratic form of politics. In developing this account, Gormley places deliberative theory and deconstruction into critical conversation with the work of Mouffe, Aristotle, Rorty, Laclau and different traditions of critical theory.

This book brings to light Derrida's rich and thought-provoking discussions of Shakespearean drama. Contextualising Derrida's readings of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear within his wider philosophical project, Alfano explores what draws Derrida to Shakespeare and what makes him particularly suitable for philosophical thought. The author also makes the case for Derrida's singular understanding of the relationship between philosophy and Shakespeare and his radical idea of what literary genius is.

A new conceptual diagram of Foucault's original vision of the biopolitical order The history around the critical reception of Michel Foucault's published writings is troubled, according to Gregg Lambert, especially in light of the controversy surrounding his late lectures on biopolitics and neoliberal governmentality. In this book, Lambert's unique approach distills Foucault's thought into its most basic components in order to more fully understand its method and its own immanent rules of construction. The Elements of Foucault presents a critical study of Foucault's concept of method from the earlier History of Sexuality, Volume 1, to his later lectures. Lambert breaks down Foucault's post-1975 analysis of the idea of biopower into four elements: the method, the conceptual device (i.e., dispositif), the grid of intelligibility, and the notion of "milieu." Taken together, these elements compose the diagram of Foucault's early analysis and the emergence of the neoliberal political economy. Lambert further delves into how Foucault's works have been used and misused over time, challenging the periodization of Foucault's later thought in scholarship as well as the major and most influential readings of Foucault by other contemporary philosophers-in particular Gilles Deleuze and Giorgio Agamben. The Elements of Foucault is the first generally accessible, yet rigorous and comprehensive, discussion of lectures and major published works of Foucault's post-1975 theory of biopower and of the major innovation of the concept of dispositif. It is also the first critical work to address the important influence of French philosopher Georges Canghuilhem on Foucault's thought.

Gavin Rae offers us a new evaluation of poststructuralist thought. This involves a re-conception of the embodied subject as a continual process within and defined by ever-changing configurations of the social, the symbolic and the psychic.He shows that the question of the subject is central for poststructuralist thinkers, that they are aware of the problematic status of agency that arises from their decentring of the subject and that they offer heterogeneous solutions to resolve it. First, showing how this plays out in the thinking of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, Rae subsequently demonstrates that it is with those poststructuralists associated with and influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis that this issue most clearly comes to the fore. He goes on to reveal that the conceptual schema of Cornelius Castoriadis best explains how the founded subject is capable of agency.

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original. This is made possible primarily by conveying the syntax word-for-word; and this demonstrates that the word, not the sentence, is translations original element. For the sentence is the wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering the arcade. (Walter Benjamin, The Translators Task) The book centers on Walter Benjamins revolutionary essay The Translators Task (1923) which subverts some widespread assumptions concerning translation: that it serves for communication, that it transfers meaning, that it must not distort the translators own language, and that it is inferior to the original. Benjamin overturns these assumptions by replacing the concept of translation as a merely linguistic operation with a metaphysical or theological concept of the same, derived from Jewish Kabbala and French Symbolisme. In The Translators Task, as well as his earlier essay On Language as such and the Language of Man, he delineates a cosmic linguistic cycle of descent from, and ascent back to, God. The translators task is to promote this ascent by deconstructing his own language in order to advance it towards a final Pure Language. Following an analysis of Benjamins approach, some of its affiliates are discussed in texts by Franz Rosenzweig, Paul Celan (as explicated by Peter Szondi) and Jacques Derrida. Rosenzweig, a translator like Benjamin, is shown to be concerned with more concrete aspects of translation, whereas Derridas autobiographical Monolingualism of the Other, though not focussing on translation, is shown to be an innovative contribution to the metaphysics of translation. Finally, an attempt is made to deal with the question of whether and how this abstract approach can be of help for the concrete practice of Poetry translation. The great poet Hoelderlins German translations of Sophocles testify to the clear, though elusive, practical contribution of this approach and to the importance of Benjamins legacy.

The discussions about the ethical, political and human implications of the postmodernist condition have been raging for longer than most of us care to remember. They have been especially fierce within feminism. After a brief flirtation with postmodern thinking in the 1980s, mainstream feminist circles seem to have turned their back on the staple notions of poststructuralist philosophy. "Metamorphoses" takes stock of the situation and attempts to reset priorities within the poststructuralist feminist agenda.

Cross-referring in a creative way to Deleuze's and Irigaray's respective philosophies of difference, the book addresses key notions such as embodiment, immanence, sexual difference, nomadism and the materiality of the subject. "Metamorphoses" also focuses on the implications of these theories for cultural criticism and a redefinition of politics. It provides a vivid overview of contemporary culture, with special emphasis on technology, the monstrous imaginary and the recurrent obsession with 'the flesh' in the age of techno-bodies.

This highly original contribution to current debates is written for those who find changes and transformations challenging and necessary. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, feminist theory, gender studies, sociology, social theory and cultural studies.

Antonia Pont shows us how to identify when practising is happening and explains, using the early philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, how it fosters transformation, and gives us access to deep memory and rest, while also cultivating stability and responsiveness in the present. Practising, in other words, gives us three kinds of time instead of one. Practising involves an interweaving of differences expressing themselves among intentional repetitions. By engaging in practising, we open times other than our habitual presents, we slip the binds of identity and we thin out our relation with behaviours that shut out the future.Whether you practise already, are curious about embarking, or are a reader of Deleuze, this book for makers, thinkers, lovers and activists is a rigorous account of why practising is hard to say, why it works and why it matters.

Perhaps more than any other philosopher, Deleuze has been pivotal for the recent 'affective turn' in philosophy and the humanities at large. Critics and proponents alike, however, have yet to appreciate the extent to which Deleuze himself remains profoundly ambivalent toward affect and embodiment in general. D. J. S. Cross argues that this ambivalence and its longevity have been overlooked because they only become apparent through a systematic analysis of affect throughout Deleuze's work. By outlining the ways in which, from beginning to end, Deleuze's system of thought both ruptures and complies with the tradition, Cross recalibrates Deleuze's philosophy and the recent 'affective turn' that hinges upon it.

'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

Paul Virilio puts art back where it matters - at the centre of politics. Art used to be an engagement between artist and materials. But in our new media world art has changed, its very materials have changed and have become technologized. This change reflects a broader social shift. Speed and politics - what Virilio defined as the key characteristics of the twentieth century - have been transformed in the twenty-first century to speed and mass culture. And the defining characteristic of mass culture today is panic. This induced panic relies on a new, all-seeing technology. And the first casualty of this is the human response. What we are losing is the very human 'art of seeing', one individual's engagement with another or with an event, be that political or artistic. What we are losing is our sense of the aesthetic. Where art used to talk of the aesthetics of disappearance, it must now confront the disappearance of the aesthetic.

But where do these ideas come from and how have they impacted on the world? In his brilliant history of a dangerous idea, Stuart Jeffries tells a narrative that starts in the early 1970s and continue to today. He tells this history through a riotous gallery that includes, amongst others: David Bowie * the Ipod * Frederic Jameson * the demolition of Pruit-Igoe * Madonna * Post-Fordism * Jeff Koon's 'Rabbit' * Deleuze and Guattari * the Nixon Shock * The Bowery series * Judith Butler * Las Vegas * Margaret Thatcher * Grand Master Flash * I Love Dick * the RAND Corporation * the Sex Pistols * Princess Diana * the Musee D'Orsay * Grand Theft Auto* Perry Anderson * Netflix * 9/11 We are today scarcely capable of conceiving politics as a communal activity because we have become habituated to being consumers rather than citizens. Politicians treat us as consumers to whom they must deliver. Can we do anything else than suffer from buyer's remorse?

Our political climate is increasingly characterised by hostility towards constructed others. Steven Gormley answers the question: what does it mean to do justice to others? He pursues this question by developing a critical, but productive, dialogue between deliberative theory and deconstruction. Two key claims emerge from this. First: doing justice to the other demands that we maintain an ethos of interruption. And secondly: Such an ethos requires a democratic form of politics. In developing this account, Gormley places deliberative theory and deconstruction into critical conversation with the work of Mouffe, Aristotle, Rorty, Laclau and different traditions of critical theory.

Finalist, French-American Foundation Translation Prize In an age that prizes political and personal transparency, In Defense of Secrets champions the secret as what permits relation and ensures our humanity. Psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle drowned in 2017 in an attempt to rescue two children caught in the ocean. Her work lives on, though, in this provocative and necessary book. Through etymologies and case studies, personal history and incisive commentary on contemporary society, In Defense of Secrets returns us to the fundamental psychic scene of the secret. The secret, for Dufourmantelle, is not a code to be cracked or a firewall to be penetrated but a dynamic and powerful entity that permits relation and that ensures our humanity. Tracking the secret though art and literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology, from the Inquisition to the present, Dufourmantelle's writing spirals around the question of the secret's value. In our age, when political and personal transparency seem to be prized above all-lives posted on the Internet, information leaked, whistles blown, taboos absent except with respect to the secret itself-In Defense of Secrets champions what remains hidden, private, veiled, hushed, just out of sight. The secret is on the side of nature, not science; organic growth, not technology; love's generosity, not knowledge's grasp. For Dufourmantelle, the secret is a powerful and dynamic thing: deadly if unheard or misused, perhaps, but equally the source of creativity and of ethics. An ethics of the secret, we can hear her say, means listening hard and sensitively, respecting the secret in its secret essence, unafraid of it and open to what it has to say.

Agamben's thought has been viewed as descending primarily from the work of Heidegger, Benjamin, and, more recently, Foucault. This book complicates and expands that constellation by showing how throughout his career Agamben has consistently and closely engaged (critically, sympathetically, polemically, and often implicitly) the work of Derrida as his chief contemporary interlocutor.
The book begins by examining the development of Agamben's key concepts infancy, Voice, potentiality from the 1960s to approximately 1990 and shows how these concepts consistently draw on and respond to specific texts and concepts of Derrida. The second part examines the political turn in Agamben's and Derrida's thinking from about 1990 onward, beginning with their investigations of sovereignty and violence and moving through their parallel treatments of juridical power, the relation between humans and animals, and finally messianism and the politics to come.

Deleuze's thought on the nature of temporality developed throughout his career in reference to a complex array of concepts, thinkers and artistic works as well as natural and social phenomena. In this collection, leading international scholars elaborate on Deleuze's modification of the thought of historical figures, from the ancients - Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Lucretius - through to the moderns - Spinoza Kant, Husserl, Nietzsche, Bergson, Simondon, Negri - as well as his use of scientific fields such as complexity theory and thermodynamics. The book shows that the philosophy of time was central to the development of Deleuze's work. In addition to discussing how time is conceptualized in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, this collection stands out for its elucidation of Deleuze's modification of the concept in his two books on cinema.

Three years before his death, Michel Foucault delivered a series of lectures at the Catholic University of Louvain that until recently remained almost unknown. These lectures--which focus on the role of avowal, or confession, in the determination of truth and justice--provide the missing link between Foucault's early work on madness, delinquency, and sexuality and his later explorations of subjectivity in Greek and Roman antiquity. Ranging broadly from Homer to the twentieth century, Foucault traces the early use of truth-telling in ancient Greece and follows it through to practices of self-examination in monastic times. By the nineteenth century, the avowal of wrongdoing was no longer sufficient to satisfy the call for justice; there remained the question of who the "criminal" was and what formative factors contributed to his wrong-doing. The call for psychiatric expertise marked the birth of the discipline of psychiatry in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well as its widespread recognition as the foundation of criminology and modern criminal justice. Published here for the first time, the 1981 lectures have been superbly translated by Stephen W. Sawyer and expertly edited and extensively annotated by Fabienne Brion and Bernard E. Harcourt. They are accompanied by two contemporaneous interviews with Foucault in which he elaborates on a number of the key themes. An essential companion to Discipline and Punish, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling will take its place as one of the most significant works of Foucault to appear in decades, and will be necessary reading for all those interested in his thought.

Has the passing of the old God paved the way for a new kind of religious project, a more responsible way to seek, sound, and love the things we call divine? Has the suspension of dogmatic certainties and presumptions opened a space in which we can encounter religious wonder anew? Situated at the split between theism and atheism, we now have the opportunity to respond in deeper, freer ways to things we cannot fathom or prove.

Distinguished philosopher Richard Kearney calls this condition "ana-theos," or God after God-a moment of creative "not knowing" that signifies a break with former sureties and invites us to forge new meanings from the most ancient of wisdoms. Anatheism refers to an inaugural event that lies at the heart of every great religion, a wager between hospitality and hostility to the stranger, the other--the sense of something "more." By analyzing the roots of our own anatheistic moment, Kearney shows not only how a return to God is possible for those who seek it but also how a more liberating faith can be born.

Kearney begins by locating a turn toward sacred secularity in contemporary philosophy, focusing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Paul Ricoeur. He then marks "epiphanies" in the modernist masterpieces of James Joyce, Marcel Proust, and Virginia Woolf. Kearney concludes with a discussion of the role of theism and atheism in conflict and peace, confronting the distinction between sacramental and sacrificial belief or the God who gives life and the God who takes it away. Accepting that we can never be sure about God, he argues, is the only way to rediscover a hidden holiness in life and to reclaim an everyday divinity.

In popularizing the term 'speaking truth to power', now widely used throughout the world, Michel Foucault established the basis upon which a new ethics can be constructed. This is the thesis that Mark Olssen advances in Constructing Foucault's ethics. Olssen not only 'speaks truth' to existing moral and ethical theories that have dominated western philosophy since Plato, but also shows how, by using Foucault's insights, an alternative ethical and moral theory can be established that both avoids the pitfalls of postmodern relativism and simultaneously grounds ethical, moral, and political discourse for the present age. Taking the late 'ethical turn' in the philosopher's thought as its starting point, this ambitious study seeks to construct an ethics beyond anything Foucault ever attempted while remaining consistent with his core postulates. In doing so it advances the concept of 'life continuance', which expresses a normative orientation to the future in terms of the quest for survival and well-being, giving rise to irreducible normative values as part of the discursive order of events. This approach is explored in contrast with a range of other, established systems, from the Kantian to the Marxist to contract ethics and utilitarianism. -- .

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.

The apostle Paul deals extensively with gender, embodiment, and desire in his authentic letters, yet many of the contemporary philosophers interested in his work downplay these aspects of his thought. Christ Without Adam is the first book to examine the role of gender and sexuality in the turn to the apostle Paul in recent Continental philosophy. It builds a constructive proposal for embodied Christian theological anthropology in conversation with -- and in contrast to -- the Paulinisms of Stanislas Breton, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj i ek. Paul's letters bequeathed a crucial anthropological aporia to the history of Christian thought, insofar as the apostle sought to situate embodied human beings typologically with reference to Adam and Christ, but failed to work out the place of sexual difference within this classification. As a result, the space between Adam and Christ has functioned historically as a conceptual and temporal interval in which Christian anthropology poses and re-poses theological dilemmas of embodied difference.This study follows the ways in which the appropriations of Paul by Breton, Badiou, and i ek have either sidestepped or collapsed this interval, a crucial component in their articulations of a universal Pauline subject. As a result, sexual difference fails to materialize in their readings as a problem with any explicit force. Against these readings, Dunning asserts the importance of the Pauline Adam--Christ typology, not as a straightforward resource but as a witness to a certain necessary failure -- the failure of the Christian tradition to resolve embodied difference without remainder. This failure, he argues, is constructive in that it reveals the instability of sexual difference, both masculine and feminine, within an anthropological paradigm that claims to be universal yet is still predicated on male bodies.

Contemporary philosophical pluralism recognizes the inevitability and legitimacy of multiple ethical perspectives and values, making it difficult to isolate the higher-order principles on which to base a theory of justice. Rising up to meet this challenge, Rainer Forst, a leading member of the Frankfurt School's newest generation of philosophers, conceives of an "autonomous" construction of justice founded on what he calls the basic moral right to justification.

Forst begins by identifying this right from the perspective of moral philosophy. Then, through an innovative, detailed critical analysis, he ties together the central components of social and political justice--freedom, democracy, equality, and toleration--and joins them to the right to justification. The resulting theory treats "justificatory power" as the central question of justice, and by adopting this approach, Forst argues, we can discursively work out, or "construct," principles of justice, especially with respect to transnational justice and human rights issues.

As he builds his theory, Forst engages with the work of Anglo-American philosophers such as John Rawls, Ronald Dworkin, and Amartya Sen, and critical theorists such as J?rgen Habermas, Nancy Fraser, and Axel Honneth. Straddling multiple subjects, from politics and law to social protest and philosophical conceptions of practical reason, Forst brilliantly gathers contesting claims around a single, elastic theory of justice.

Finalist, French-American Foundation Translation Prize In an age that prizes political and personal transparency, In Defense of Secrets champions the secret as what permits relation and ensures our humanity. Psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle drowned in 2017 in an attempt to rescue two children caught in the ocean. Her work lives on, though, in this provocative and necessary book. Through etymologies and case studies, personal history and incisive commentary on contemporary society, In Defense of Secrets returns us to the fundamental psychic scene of the secret. The secret, for Dufourmantelle, is not a code to be cracked or a firewall to be penetrated but a dynamic and powerful entity that permits relation and that ensures our humanity. Tracking the secret though art and literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology, from the Inquisition to the present, Dufourmantelle's writing spirals around the question of the secret's value. In our age, when political and personal transparency seem to be prized above all-lives posted on the Internet, information leaked, whistles blown, taboos absent except with respect to the secret itself-In Defense of Secrets champions what remains hidden, private, veiled, hushed, just out of sight. The secret is on the side of nature, not science; organic growth, not technology; love's generosity, not knowledge's grasp. For Dufourmantelle, the secret is a powerful and dynamic thing: deadly if unheard or misused, perhaps, but equally the source of creativity and of ethics. An ethics of the secret, we can hear her say, means listening hard and sensitively, respecting the secret in its secret essence, unafraid of it and open to what it has to say.

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.