Ugly, Useless, Unstable Architectures traces productive intersections between architecture and the discourses of Post-Structuralism and New Materialism. It investigates how their unique 'ontological regimes' can be mobilised to supersede the classical framework that still informs both the production and the evaluation of architecture. Throughout its three main chapters, this enquiry challenges one of the most prevalent tropes of architectural assessment: Beauty, Utility and Stability. Author Miguel Paredes Maldonado critically unpacks the spatial and operational qualities of these three idealised concepts, before setting out an alternative framework of spatial practice that draws from Gilles Deleuze's post-structuralist take on the production of the real and Manuel DeLanda's model-based branch of New Materialism. This book reads and situates a series of spatial works through the lens of this critical methodology to contest the conceptual aspects traditionally underpinning architectural 'value'. It posits that architecture can operate as a continuous, generative spectrum encompassing a broad range of potential configurations. Written for academics and students in architectural theory, design and contemporary philosophical thought alike, this book should appeal to a wide audience.

Jacques Derrida said that deconstruction "takes place everywhere." Derridada reexamines the work of artist Marcel Duchamp as one of these places. Tucker suggests that Duchamp belongs to deconstruction as much as deconstruction belongs to Duchamp. Both bear the infra-thin mark of the other. He explores these marks through the themes of time and differance, language and the readymade, and the construction of self-identity through art. This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in Modernism and the avant-garde. It will be useful for undergraduate students of art history, modernism, and critical theory, as well as for graduate students of philosophy, visual culture studies, and art theory.

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.

Badiou's Deleuze presents the first thorough analysis of one of the most significant encounters in contemporary thought: Alain Badiou's summary interpretation and rejection of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Badiou's reading of Deleuze is largely laid out in his provocative book, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, a highly influential work of considerable power. Badiou's Deleuze presents a detailed examination of Badiou's reading and argues that, whilst it fails to do justice to the Deleuzean project, it invites us to reconsider what Deleuze's philosophy amounts to, to reassess Deleuze's power to address the ultimate concerns of philosophy. Badiou's Deleuze analyses the differing metaphysics of two of the most influential of recent continental philosophers, whose divergent views have helped to shape much contemporary thought.

Foucault's Law is the first book in almost fifteen years to address the question of Foucault's position on law. Many readings of Foucault's conception of law start from the proposition that he failed to consider the role of law in modernity, or indeed that he deliberately marginalized it. In canvassing a wealth of primary and secondary sources, Ben Golder and Peter Fitzpatrick rebut this argument. They argue that rather than marginalize law, Foucault develops a much more radical, nuanced and coherent theory of law than his critics have acknowledged. For Golder and Fitzpatrick, Foucault's law is not the contained creature of conventional accounts, but is uncontainable and illimitable. In their radical re-reading of Foucault, they show how Foucault outlines a concept of law which is not tied to any given form or subordinated to a particular source of power, but is critically oriented towards alterity, new possibilities and different ways of being. Foucault's Law is an important and original contribution to the ongoing debate on Foucault and law, engaging not only with Foucault's diverse writings on law and legal theory, but also with the extensive interpretive literature on the topic. It will thus be of interest to students and scholars working in the fields of law and social theory, legal theory and law and philosophy, as well as to students of Foucault's work generally.

Claude Levi-Strauss and the style of thinking known as 'structuralism, ' with which his work is conventionally associated, is widely recognized as having made a seminal contribution to the discipline of anthropology. More generally, his writings register the turn to language in social theory in the 1960s, and are marked by the influence of Kant, Rousseau, Saussurian linguistics, Marx and Freud. In turn, Levi-Strauss is recognized as having been a key influence on thinkers such as Althusser, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. This volume seeks to address a key gap in the burgeoning secondary literature about Levi-Strauss: his importance to the study of religions. This volume pays particular attention to Levi-Strauss' writings on totemism, myth and "la pensee sauvage," situating these writings both in terms of previous theories of religion and in terms of the wider influences that informed his work. This volume provides an accessible and comprehensive overview of Levi-Strauss' life and work, the thinkers and theories that informed his writings, and his contribution to the study of religions.

Jacques Derrida's revolutionary approach to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, linguistics, and indeed the entire European tradition of philosophy-called deconstruction-changed the face of criticism. It provoked a questioning of philosophy, literature, and the human sciences that these disciplines would have previously considered improper. Forty years after Of Grammatology first appeared in English, Derrida still ignites controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's careful translation, which attempted to capture the richness and complexity of the original. This fortieth anniversary edition, where a mature Spivak retranslates with greater awareness of Derrida's legacy, also includes a new afterword by her which supplements her influential original preface. Judith Butler has added an introduction. All references in the work have been updated. One of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works, Of Grammatology is made even more accessible and usable by this new release.

In this urgently needed book, Marc Crepon addresses the nature of hatred and its manifestations in international and domestic terrorism, racism, war and other forms of violence. Looking at the evidence of violence motivated by hatred, including US racial segregation, South African apartheid and the terrorist attacks in New York City in 2001 and in Paris in 2015, Crepon makes a compelling case for why hatred is the burden of our times.With inspiration from the non-violence resistance movements of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., Crepon reveals how philosophy and literature, using courage and a new language, can overcome the many forms of hatred and violence present in our lives today.

Understanding Poststructuralism presents a lucid guide to some of the most exciting and controversial ideas in contemporary thought. This is the first introduction to poststructuralism through its major theorists - Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva - and their central texts. Each chapter takes the reader through a key text, providing detailed summaries of the main points of each and a critical and detailed analysis of their central arguments. Ideas are clearly explained in terms of their value to both critical thinking and to contemporary issues. Criticisms of poststructuralism are also assessed. The aim throughout is to illuminate the main methods of poststructuralism - deconstruction, libidinal economics, genealogy and transcendental empiricism - in context. A balanced and up-to-date assessment of poststructuralism, the book presents the ideal introduction to this most revolutionary of philosophies.

In Meaning and Structure, Peregrin argues that recent and contemporary (post)analytic philosophy, as developed by Quine, Davidson, Sellars and their followers, is largely structuralistic in the very sense in which structuralism was originally tabled by Ferdinand de Saussure. The author reconstructs de Saussure's view of language, linking it to modern formal logic and mathematics, and reveals close analogies between its constitutive principles and the principles informing the holistic and neopragmatistic view of language put forward by Quine and his followers. Peregrin also indicates how this view of language can be made compatible with what is usually called 'formal semantics'. Drawing on both the Saussurean tradition and recent developments in analytic philosophy of language, this book offers a unique study of the ways in which the concept of meaning can be seen as consisting in the concept of structure.

This volume contributes to the growing body of literature exploring the work of contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Through its fifteen contributions, including two previously untranslated essays by Malabou, the volume explores the various ways in which Malabou's thought both performs and furnishes resources for the negotiation of philosophy's attachment and detachment from itself and other disciplines. What kind of interaction can philosophy have with either science or politics without conquering them? How does one carry out philosophy while subverting it, changing it, directing it on or opening it up to different pathways? The chapters explore the detachment of Malabou from her own philosophical training in deconstruction, the theme of habit and the question of new attachments, detachments through the relation of Malabou's thought and science, and the detachments that transpire through philosophy's confrontation with politics. In order to have a future, philosophy must detach from its own tradition and passionately confront questions of race, gender, and colonialism.

"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.

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.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a legal icon. In more than four decades as a lawyer, professor, appellate judge, and Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, Ginsburg influenced the law and society in real and permanent ways. This book chronicles and evaluates the remarkable achievements Ruth Bader Ginsburg made over the last half-century. Including chapters written by prominent court-watchers and leading scholars from law, political science, and history, the book offers diverse perspectives on an array of doctrinal areas and different periods in Ginsburg's career. Together, these perspectives document the impressive legacy of one of the most important figures in modern law. This updated second edition features a new foreword from Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer and a new introduction from the editor Scott Dodson.

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.

Siegfried Kracauer stands out as one of the most significant theorists and critics of the twentieth century, acclaimed for his analyses of film and popular culture. However, his writing on propaganda and politics has been overshadowed by the works of his contemporaries and colleagues associated with the Frankfurt School. This book brings together a broad selection of Kracauer's work on media and political communication, much of it previously unavailable in English. It features writings spanning more than two decades, from studies of totalitarian propaganda written in the 1930s to wartime work on Nazi newsreels and anti-Semitism through to examinations of American and Soviet political messaging in the early Cold War period. These varied texts illuminate the interplay among politics, mass culture, and the media, and they encompass Kracauer's core concerns: the individual and the masses, the conditions of cultural production, and the critique of modernity. The introduction and afterword explore the significance of Kracauer's contributions to critical theory, film and media studies, and the analysis of political communication both in his era and the present day. At a time when demagoguery and bigotry loom over world politics, Kracauer's inquiries into topics such as the widespread appeal of fascist propaganda and the relationship of new media forms and technologies to authoritarianism are strikingly relevant.

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.

The System of Objects is a tour de force-a theoretical letter-in-a-bottle tossed into the ocean in 1968, which brilliantly communicates to us all the live ideas of the day-offering a cultural critique of the commodity in consumer society.

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.

Winner, French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. When it comes to giving, philosophers love to be the most generous. For them, every form of reciprocity is tainted by commercial exchange. In recent decades, such thinkers as Derrida, Levinas, Henry, Marion, Ricoeur, Lefort, and Descombes, have made the gift central to their work, haunted by the requirement of disinterestedness. As an anthropologist as well as a philosopher, Henaff worries that philosophy has failed to distinguish among various types of giving. The Philosophers' Gift returns to Mauss to reexamine these thinkers through the anthropological tradition. Reciprocity, rather than disinterestedness, he shows, is central to ceremonial giving and alliance, whereby the social bond specific to humans is proclaimed as a political bond. From the social fact of gift practices, Henaff develops an original and profound theory of symbolism, the social, and the relationship between self and other, whether that other is an individual human being, the collective other of community and institution, or the impersonal other of the world.

What should we do with the ideals of internationalism, the withering away of state and horizontality? Probably start by thinking seriously about them. That is to say, about their conditions of possibility (or impossibility), rather than sticking to the wishful thinking which believes that for them to happen it is enough to want them. Humanity exists neither as a dust cloud of separate individuals nor as a unified world political community. It exists fragmented into distinct finite wholes, the forms of which have varied considerably throughout history - the nation-state being only one among many, and certainly not the last. What are the forces that produce this fragmentation, engender such groupings and prevent them from being perfectly horizontal, but also lead them to disappear, merge, or change form? It is questions such as these that this book explores, drawing on Spinoza's political philosophy and especially his two central concepts of multitudo and imperium.

Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov transformed the art of the novel in order to convey the experience of time. Nevertheless, their works have been read as expressions of a desire to transcend time-whether through an epiphany of memory, an immanent moment of being, or a transcendent afterlife. Martin Hagglund takes on these themes but gives them another reading entirely. The fear of time and death does not stem from a desire to transcend time, he argues. On the contrary, it is generated by the investment in temporal life. From this vantage point, Hagglund offers in-depth analyses of Proust's Recherche, Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, and Nabokov's Ada. Through his readings of literary works, Hagglund also sheds new light on topics of broad concern in the humanities, including time consciousness and memory, trauma and survival, the technology of writing and the aesthetic power of art. Finally, he develops an original theory of the relation between time and desire through an engagement with Freud and Lacan, addressing mourning and melancholia, pleasure and pain, attachment and loss. Dying for Time opens a new way of reading the dramas of desire as they are staged in both philosophy and literature.

How are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the prevailing order? These acts challenge long-standing hidden or silently tolerated injustices, but as they are unsupported by existing ethical rules they pose a drastic challenge to dominant norms. In Excessive Subjectivity, Dominik Finkelde rereads the tradition of German idealism and finds in it the potential for transformative acts that are capable of revolutionizing the social order. Finkelde's discussion of the meaning and structure of the ethical act meticulously engages thinkers typically treated as opposed-Kant, Hegel, and Lacan-to develop the concept of excessive subjectivity, which is characterized by nonconformist acts that reshape the contours of ethical life. For Kant, the subject is defined by the ethical acts she performs. Hegel interprets Kant's categorical imperative as the ability of an individual's conscience to exceed the existing state of affairs. Lacan emphasizes the transgressive force of unconscious desire on the ethical agent. Through these thinkers Finkelde develops a radical ethics for contemporary times. Integrating perspectives from both analytical and continental philosophy, Excessive Subjectivity is a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the ethical subject.

This volume, now with a substantial new Introduction, represents one of the most lucid, compact and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language. Responding to questions put to him at a roundtable held at Villanova University in 1994, Jacques Derrida leads the reader through an illuminating discussion of the central themes of deconstruction. Speaking in English and extemporaneously, Derrida takes up with unusual clarity and great eloquence such topics as the task of philosophy, the Greeks, justice, responsibility, the gift, community, and the messianic. Derrida refutes the charges of relativism that are often leveled at deconstruction by its critics and sets forth the profoundly affirmative and ethico-political thrust of his work. The roundtable is marked by an unusual clarity that continues into the second part of the book, in which one of Derrida's most influential readers, John D. Caputo, elaborates upon Derrida's comments and supplies material for further discussion. This edition also includes a substantial new Introduction by Caputo that discusses the original context of the book and traces the development of deconstruction since Derrida's death in 2004, from the rise of new materialisms to return to religion. Long one of the most lucid and reliable introductions to Derrida and deconstruction available in any language, and an ideal volume for students, Deconstruction in a Nutshell will also prove illuminating for those already familiar with Derrida's work.