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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > Postmodernism
Bare Architecture: a schizoanalysis, is a poststructural exploration of the interface between architecture and the body. Chris L. Smith skilfully introduces and explains numerous concepts drawn from poststructural philosophy to explore the manner by which the architecture/body relation may be rethought in the 21st century. Multiple well-known figures in the discourses of poststructuralism are invoked: Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Roland Barthes, Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jorges Luis Borges and Michel Serres. These figures bring into view the philosophical frame in which the body is formulated. Alongside the philosophy, the architecture that Smith comes to refer to as 'bare architecture' is explored. Smith considers architecture as a complex construction and the book draws upon literature, art and music, to provide a critique of the limits, extents and opportunities for architecture itself. The book considers key works from the architects Douglas Darden, Georges Pingusson, Lacatan and Vassal, Carlo Scarpa, Peter Zumthor, Marco Casagrande and Sami Rintala and Raumlabor. Such works are engaged for their capacities to foster a rethinking of the relation between architecture and the body.
In this ground-breaking and influential study Fredric Jameson explores the complex place and function of literature within culture. At the time Jameson was actually writing the book, in the mid to late seventies, there was a major reaction against deconstruction and poststructuralism. As one of the most significant literary theorists, Jameson found himself in the unenviable position of wanting to defend his intellectual past yet keep an eye on the future. With this book he carried it off beautifully. A landmark publication, The Political Unconscious takes its place as one of the most meaningful works of the twentieth century.century.
Rethinking Joseph Conrad's Concepts of Community uses Conrad's phrase 'strange fraternity' from The Rover as a starting point for an exploration of the concept of community in his writing, including his neglected vignettes and later stories. Drawing on the work of continental thinkers including Jacques Derrida, Jean Luc-Nancy and Hannah Arendt, Yamamoto offers original readings of Heart of Darkness, The Nigger of the 'Narcissus', The Rover and Suspense and the short stories "The Secret Sharer", "The Warrior's Soul" and "The Duel". Working at the intersection between literature and philosophy, this is a unique and interdisciplinary engagement with Conrad's work.
French thinkers such as Lacan and Derrida are often labelled as representatives of 'poststructuralism' in the Anglophone world. However in France, where their work originated, they use no such category; this group of theorists - 'the poststructuralists' - were never perceived as a coherent intellectual group or movement. Outlining the institutional contexts, affinities, and rivalries of, among others, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Irigaray, and Kristeva, Angermuller - drawing from Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and the academic field - insightfully explores post-structuralism as a phenomenon. By tracing the evolution of the French intellectual field after the war, Why There is No Poststructuralism in France places French Theory both in the specific material conditions of its production and the social and historical contexts of its reception, accounting for a particularly creative moment in French intellectual life which continues to inform the theoretical imaginary of our time.
Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was among the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. In this rigorous study, Maurice Godelier traces the evolution of his thought. Focusing primarily on Levi-Strauss's analysis of kinship and myth, Godelier provides an assessment of his intellectual achievements and legacy. Meticulously researched, Levi-Strauss is written in a clear and accessible style. The culmination of decades of engagement with Levi-Strauss's work, this book will prove indispensible to students of his thought and structural anthropology more generally.
Roland Barthes - the author of such enduringly influential works as Mythologies and Camera Lucida - was one of the most important cultural critics of the post-war era. Since his death in 1980, new writings have continued to be discovered and published. The Afterlives of Roland Barthes is the first book to revisit and reassess Barthes' thought in light of these posthumously published writings. Covering work such as Barthes' Mourning Diary, the notes for his projected Vita Nova and many writings yet to be translated into English, Neil Badmington reveals a very different Barthes of today than the figure familiar from the writings published in his lifetime.
In "Quantum Anthropologies," the renowned feminist theorist Vicki
Kirby contends that some of the most provocative aspects of
deconstruction have yet to be explored. Deconstruction's
implications have been curtailed by the assumption that issues of
textuality and representation are specific to the domain of
culture. Revisiting Derrida's claim that there is "no outside of
text," Kirby argues that theories of cultural construction
developed since the linguistic turn have inadvertently reproduced
the very binaries they intended to question, such as those between
nature and culture, matter and ideation, and fact and value.
Through new readings of Derrida, Husserl, Saussure, Butler,
Irigaray, and Merleau-Ponty, Kirby exposes the limitations of
theories that regard culture as a second-order system that cannot
access--much less be--nature, body, and materiality. She suggests
ways of reconceiving language and culture to enable a more
materially implicated outcome, one that keeps alive the more
counterintuitive and challenging aspects of poststructural
criticism. By demonstrating how fields, including cybernetics,
biology, forensics, mathematics, and physics, can be conceptualized
in deconstructive terms, Kirby fundamentally rethinks
deconstruction and its relevance to nature, embodiment,
materialism, and science.
The indebtedness of contemporary thinkers to Derrida's project of deconstruction is unquestionable, whether as a source of inspiration or the grounds of critical antagonism. This collection considers: how best to recall deconstruction? Rather than reduce it to an object of historical importance or memory, these essays analyze its significance in terms of complex matrices of desire; provoked in this way, deconstruction cannot be dismissed as 'dead', nor unproblematically defended as alive and well. Repositioned on the threshold of life-death, deconstruction profoundly complicates the field of critical thought which still struggles to memorialize, inter, or reduce the deconstructive corpus to ashes.
Coming to Our Senses positions affect, or feeling, as our new cultural compass, ordering the parameters and possibilities of what can be known. From Facebook "likes" to Coca-Cola "loves," from "emotional intelligence" in business to "emotional contagion" in social media, affect has displaced reason as the primary catalyst of global culture. Through examples of feeling in the books, film, music, advertising, cultural criticism, and political discourse of the United States and Latin America, Reber shows how affect encourages the public to "reason" on the strength of sentiment alone. Well-being, represented by happiness and health, and ill-being, embodied by unhappiness and disease, form the two poles of our social judgment, whether in affirmation or critique. We must then reenvision contemporary politics as operating at the level of the feeling body, so we can better understand the physiological and epistemological conditions affirming our cultural status quo and contestatory strategies for emancipation.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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.
Theories of justice often fixate on purely normative, abstract principles unrelated to real-world applications. The philosopher and theorist Axel Honneth addresses this disconnect, constructing a theory of justice derived from the normative claims of Western liberal-democratic societies and anchored in the law and institutionally established practices that possess moral legitimacy. Termed a democratic ethical life, Honneth's paradigm draws on the spirit of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and his own theory of recognition, demonstrating how concrete social spheres generate the principles of individual freedom and a standard for what is just. Using social analysis to re-found a more grounded theory of justice, Honneth argues that all crucial actions in Western civilization, whether in personal relationships, market-induced economic activities, or the public forum of politics, share one defining characteristic: they require the realization of a particular aspect of individual freedom. This fundamental truth, Honneth shows, informs the guiding principles of justice, enabling a wide-ranging reconsideration of its theory.
Jacques Derrida's final seminars were devoted to animal life and political sovereignty-the connection being that animals slavishly adhere to the law while kings and gods tower above it and that this relationship reveals much about humanity in the West. David Farrell Krell offers a detailed account of these seminars, placing them in the context of Derrida's late work and his critique of Heidegger. Krell focuses his discussion on questions such as death, language, and animality. He concludes that Heidegger and Derrida share a commitment to finding new ways of speaking and thinking about human and animal life. -- Indiana University Press |
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