Levinas and Lacan, two giants of contemporary theory, represent schools of thought that seem poles apart. In this major new work, Mari Ruti charts the ethical terrain between them. At first glance, Levinansian and Lacanian approaches may seem more or less incompatible, and in many ways they are, particularly in their understanding of the self-other relationship. For both Levinas and Lacan, the subject's relationship to the other is primary in the sense that the subject, literally, does not exist without the other, but they see the challenge of ethics quite differently: while Levinas laments our failure to adequately meet the ethical demand arising from the other, Lacan laments the consequences of our failure to adequately escape the forms this demand frequently takes. Although this book outlines the major differences between Levinas and Judith Butler on the one hand and Lacan, Slavoj Zizek, and Alain Badiou on the other, Ruti proposes that underneath these differences one can discern a shared concern with the thorny relationship between the singularity of experience and the universality of ethics. Between Levinas and Lacan is an important new book for anyone interested in contemporary theory, ethics, psychoanalysis, and feminist and queer theory.

Philosophy, Myth and Epic Cinema looks at the power of cinema in creating ideas that inspire our culture. Sylvie Magerstadt discusses the relationship between art, illusion and reality, a theme that has been part of philosophical debate for centuries. She argues that with the increase in use of digital technologies in modern cinema, this debate has entered a new phase. She discusses the notion of illusions as a system of stories and values that inspire a culture similar to other grand narratives, such as mythology or religion. Cinema thus becomes the postmodern "mythmaking machine" par excellence in a world that finds it increasingly difficult to create unifying concepts and positive illusions that can inspire and give hope. The author draws on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche, Siegfried Kracauer, and Gilles Deleuze to demonstrate the relevance of continental philosophy to a reading of mainstream Hollywood cinema. The book argues that our longing for illusion is particularly strong in times of crisis, illustrated through an exploration of the recent revival of historic and epic myths in Hollywood cinema, including films such as Troy, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy, and Clash of the Titans.

Theopoetics of the Word weaves together Christian theology, continental philosophy and cultural studies to present a new theology of language and technology for the 21st century. It is the final work of the famed death-of-God theologian Gabriel Vahanian completed only weeks before his death in 2012. It radicalizes his pioneering, iconoclastic work in contemporary religious thought by addressing issues of identity, Christology, secularity and the legacy of the Protestant West. The book continues Vahanian's longtime engagement with the thought of Paul Tillich and Jacques Ellul, and opens new pathways for thought in the work of Elisabeth Roudinesco and Francois Laurelle. Vahanian's is a prophetic and timely voice who has forged reputation as one of the most original and poetic religious thinkers of our time, who tells us here, 'You can only forget what you need to be reminded of. Read what follows in this book. And forget it.'

What has happened since de Man and Derrida first read Austin? How has the encounter between deconstruction and the performative affected each of these terms? In addressing these questions, this book brings together scholars whose works have been provoked in different ways by the encounter of deconstruction and the performative.Following Derrida's appeal to any rigorous deconstruction to reckon with Austin's theorems and his ever growing commitment to rethink and rewrite the performative and its multiple articulations, it is now urgent that we reflect upon the effects of a theoretical event that has profoundly marked the contemporary scene. The contributors to this book suggest various ways of re-reading the heritage and future of both deconstruction and the performative "after" their encounter, bringing into focus both the constitutive aporia of the performative "and" the role it plays within the deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition.

Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts highlights the Derridean assertion that the university must exist 'without condition' - as a bastion of intellectual freedom and oppositional activity whose job it is to question mainstream society. Derrida argued that only if the life of the mind is kept free from excessive corporate influence and political control can we be certain that the basic tenets of democracy are being respected within the very societies that claim to defend democratic principles. This collection contains eleven essays drawn from international scholars working in both the humanities and social sciences, and makes a well-grounded and comprehensive case for the importance of Derridean thought within the liberal arts today. Written by specialists in the fields of philosophy, literature, history, sociology, geography, political science, animal studies, and gender studies, each essay traces deconstruction's contribution to their discipline, explaining how it helps keep alive the 'unconditional', contrapuntal mission of the university. The book offers a forceful and persuasive corrective to the current assault on the liberal arts.

The first book in English to offer an extended comparative analysis of Heidegger and Deleuze. Those familiar with Heidegger's and Deleuze's thinking will find a detailed, well-researched book that comes to an innovative conclusion, while those new to both will find a clear, well-written exposition of their key concepts.

This original study examines Jean-Francois Lyotard's philosophical concept of the differend and details its unexplored implications for literature. it provides a new framework with which to understand the discourse itself, from its Homeric beginnings to postmodern works by authors such as Michael Ondaatje and Jonathan Safran Foer.

What is power? Where does it come from and who is in possession of it? How should we think about power and authority in a post-secular society in which traditional boundaries between individual and collective faith and secular governments and institutions are becoming increasingly blurred? The way which we conceive of power in the twenty-first century will effectively determine how we approach issues such as market reform and environmental disaster. Placing the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault into critical conjunction with the apostle Paul, Foucault/Paul re-evaluates the way in which power operates within society and underpins our ethical and political actions.

The way which society conceives of power in the twenty-first century determines how it approaches future issues. Placing the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault into critical conjunction with the apostle Paul, Fuggle re-evaluates the way in which power operates within society and underpins ethical and political actions.

Raoul Moati intervenes in the critical debate that divided two prominent philosophers in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s, the British philosopher J. L. Austin advanced a theory of speech acts, or the "performative," that Jacques Derrida and John R. Searle interpreted in fundamentally different ways. Their disagreement centered on the issue of intentionality, which Derrida understood phenomenologically and Searle read pragmatically. The controversy had profound implications for the development of contemporary philosophy, which, Moati argues, can profit greatly by returning to this classic debate. In this book, Moati systematically replays the historical encounter between Austin, Derrida, and Searle and the disruption that caused the lasting break between Anglo-American language philosophy and continental traditions of phenomenology and its deconstruction. The key issue, Moati argues, is not whether "intentionality," a concept derived from Husserl's phenomenology, can or cannot be linked to Austin's speech-acts as defined in his groundbreaking How to Do Things with Words, but rather the emphasis Searle placed on the performativity and determined pragmatic values of Austin's speech-acts, whereas Derrida insisted on the trace of writing behind every act of speech and the iterability of signs in different contexts.

(Mis)readings of Marx In Continental Philosophy reflects on the way major European philosophers related to the work of Karl Marx. It brings together leading and emerging critical theorists to address the readings of Marx offered by Benjamin, Adorno, Arendt, Althusser, Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, Negri, Badiou, Agamben, Ranciere, Latour and Zizek.

The future of deconstruction lies in the ability of its practitioners to mobilise the tropes and interests of Derrida's texts into new spaces and creative readings. In Deconstruction without Derrida, Martin McQuillan sets out to do just that, to continue the task of deconstructive reading both with and without Derrida. The book's principal theme is an attention to instances of deconstruction other than or beyond Derrida and thus imagining a future for deconstruction after Derrida. This future is both the present of deconstruction and its past. The readings presented in this book address the expanded field of deconstruction in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Helene Cixous, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak and Catherine Malabou. They also, necessarily, address Derrida's own readings of this work. McQuillan accounts for an experience of otherness in deconstruction that is, has been and always will be beyond Derrida, just as deconstruction remains forever tied to Derrida by an invisible, indestructible thread.

Transcendental History defends the claim that historicality is the very condition for human knowledge. By explaining this thesis, and by tracing its development from Kant and Hegel to Derrida and Agamben, this book enriches our understanding of the history of philosophy and contributes to epistemology and the philosophy of history.

Derrida's work is controversial, its interpretation hotly contested. Derrida: Ethics Under Erasure offers a new way of thinking about ethics from a Derridean perspective, linking the most abstract theoretical implications of his writing on deconstruction and on justice and responsibility to representations of the practice of ethical paradoxes in everyday life. The book presents the development of Derrida's thinking on ethics by demonstrating that the ethical was a focus of Derrida's work at every stage of his career. In connecting Derrida's earlier work on language with the ethics implicated in his later work on justice and responsibility, Nicole Anderson traverses literary, linguistic, philosophical and ethical interpretative movements, thus recontextualising Derrida's entire oeuvre for a contemporary readership. She explores the positive ethical implications of Derrida's work for representation and practice and asks the reader to consider how this new ethical reading of Derrida's work might be applied to concrete instances of his or her own ethical experience.

This title brings a deconstructive perspective to theories of justice in the early and later work of Rawls, Habermas and Honneth. Deconstructing influential theories of justice by John Rawls, Jurgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, Miriam Bankovsky explores and critiques the early and later work of these three important liberal theorists. Bankovsky examines the commitments that all these thinkers make to a conception of justice as, in Rawls' words, an 'art of the possible' and the difficulties that such commitments present for their theories. Taking a deconstructive approach, the book argues that such a defence of possibility must be supplemented by an acknowledgment of the ways in which theory ultimately fails to reconcile the conflicting demands of 'justice' - namely, it's demand for responsibility for the other in the particular and for impartiality among all. In so doing, the book draws attention to the 'perfectible' (simultaneously possible and impossible) status of theories of justice, celebrating such perfectibility as the very condition for justice's critical function. "Continuum Studies in Political Philosophy" presents cutting-edge scholarship in the field of political philosophy. Making available the latest high-quality research from an international range of scholars working on key topics and controversies in political philosophy and political science, this series is an important and stimulating resource for students and academics working in the area.

Cybernetic Revelation explores the dual philosophical histories of deconstruction and artificial intelligence, tracing the development of concepts like the "logos" and the notion of modeling the mind technologically from pre-history to contemporary thinkers like Slavoj i ek, Steven Pinker, Bernard Stiegler and Daniel C. Dennett. The writing is clear and accessible throughout, yet the text probes deeply into major philosophers seen by JD Casten as "conceptual engineers."

Der erste Band der Meinong Studien vereinigt historische Beitrage zur Meinong-Forschung im engeren Sinn mit solchen, die Meinongsche Themen und Gedanken in systematischer Absicht wieder aufnehmen. Die angestellten Untersuchungen widmen sich der vor-gegenstandstheoretischen Periode Meinongs (Chrudzimski), seinen fruhen erkenntnistheoretischen Untersuchungen (Manotta), seinen Theorien der Vorstellungsproduktion (Raspa) und der Annahmen (Dolling), konfrontieren seine Lehren mit jenen Franz Brentanos (Rollinger), Sartres und Russells (Hochberg) und analysieren die Fragen der Konsistenz des Meinongschen Universums der Gegenstande (Simons), seiner Theorie der Grossen und Messung (Guigon), seiner (und Ernst Mallys) Objekt-theoretischen Grundlegung der Logik (Tegtmeier) sowie dem Verhaltnis von Semantik und Ontologie aus der Perspektive einer heutigen Konzeption."

Michel Foucault once expressed his disagreement with the "breach" between social history and the history of ideas brought about by the assumption that the former is concerned with how people act without thinking, while the latter analyses how people think without acting. "People both think and act," he says, by way of a sarcasm consisting in having to point out the obvious. While in complete agreement with Foucault on this as on several other issues, the author of this book chooses to emphasise another "obviousness" of at least equal importance: that thoughts and (material) actions may well be inseparable in all fields of human/social existence, but they are not the same thing. The maintenance of the distinction between subjectivity/conceptuality on one hand and objectivity /materiality on the other constitutes a fundamental premise for the book's two closely interrelated goals: to criticise certain extremely influential currents of contemporary thought more or less loosely associated with "poststructuralism" and/or "postmodernism" which, each in its own fashion, have served to undermine this distinction; and to provide a philosophical /theoretical grounding for the methodology of the social sciences known as "discourse analysis." The importance of the latter is shown to consist in forming a methodological framework for a materialist critique that would escape both the economic reductionism of Marxism and the implicit (or manifest) idealism pertaining to all variations of Hegelianism.

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".

In Derrida, Myth and the Impossibility of Philosophy, Anais N. Spitzer shows that philosophy cannot separate itself from myth since myth is an inevitable condition of the possibility of philosophy. Bombarded by narratives that terrorize and repress, we may often consider myth to be constrictive dogma or, at best, something to be readily disregarded as unphilosophical and irrelevant. However, such dismissals miss a crucial aspect of myth. Harnessing the insights of Jacques Derrida's deconstruction and Mark C. Taylor's philosophical reading of complexity theory, Derrida, Myth and the Impossibility of Philosophy provocatively reframes the pivotal relation of myth to thinking and to philosophy, demonstrating that myth's inherent ambiguity engenders vital and inescapable deconstructive propensities. Exploring myth's disruptive presence, Spitzer shows that philosophy cannot separate itself from myth. Instead, myth is an inevitable condition of the possibility of philosophy. This study provides a nuanced account of myth in the postmodern era, not only laying out the deconstructive underpinnings of myth in philosophy and religion, but establishing the very necessity of myth in the study of ideas.

"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.

Quentin Antoine, who struggles mightily to get out of bed, travels freely in his mind (philosophically speaking) as he tries to discover the reason for his own existence. With a critical eye bordering on pathological he dissects the slightest phenomena as he searches for a clue. Inspired by Sartre's La Naus e, Still Life with Abyss chronicles Quentin Antoine's adventures of the mind as he eventually makes his way to Paris, to cooking school, and to his surprising true calling.

Derrida wrote a vast number of texts for particular events across the world, as well as a series of works that portray him as a voyager. As an Algerian emigre, a postcolonial outsider, and an idiomatic writer who felt tied to a language that was not his own, and as a figure obsessed by the singularity of the literary or philosophical event, Derrida emerges as one whose thought always arrives on occasion. But how are we to understand the event in Derrida? Is there a risk that such stories of Derrida's work tend to misunderstand the essential unpredictability at work in the conditions of his thought? And how are we to reconcile the importance in Derrida of the unknowable event, the pull of the singular, with deconstruction's critical and philosophical rigour and its claims to rethink more systematically the ethico-political field. This book argues that this negotiation in fact allows deconstruction to reformulate the very questions that we associate with ethical and political responsibility and shows this to be the central interest in Derrida's work.