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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > Postmodernism
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Alienation
(Hardcover)
Rahel Jaeggi; Translated by Frederick Neuhouser; Edited by Frederick Neuhouser; Translated by Alan Smith
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R910
R809
Discovery Miles 8 090
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The Hegelian-Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor during
the post-metaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views
of human nature. In this book Jaeggi draws on phenomenological
analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency, along with
recent work in the analytical tradition, to reconceive of
alienation as the absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself
and others, which manifests itself in feelings of helplessness and
the despondent acceptance of ossified social roles and
expectations. A revived approach to alienation helps critical
social theory engage with phenomena, such as meaninglessness,
isolation, and indifference, which have broad implications for
issues of justice. By severing alienation's link to a problematic
conception of human essence while retaining its
social-philosophical content, Jaeggi provides resources for a
renewed critique of social pathologies, a much-neglected concern in
contemporary liberal political philosophy. Her work revisits the
arguments of Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, placing
them in dialogue with Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, and Charles
Taylor.
This original textological analysis work reads the epoch making
texts of outstanding Marxist philosopher, Althusser's For Marx
(1965), Reading Capital (1965), Lenin and Philosophy and Other
Essays (1971) which includes, Ideology and Ideological State
Apparatuses and the author delves into other texts of him to
support the analysis. Althusser, again and again becomes a major
topic of discussion. Behind him stood two others: the young, morbid
Catholic one and the older, gloomy Pre-Modernity classical
materialist one. Putting it more precisely, these existential
figures are factual images that Althusser had, in the past,
intentionally concealed. This leads to an interpretative
dramatization and an inexplicable mystery. A formerly dazzling yet
fictive sage and a multi-faceted yet intentionally-concealed person
both present themselves in the research realm. Traditional academic
circles were thrown into disorder and discomfiture when the
accepted, singular conception of a scientific, Marxist Althusser's
original consistent image is destroyed, leaving only a mist that
gradually dissipates. As Lacan put it, with the shedding of its
coverings, the original vacancy further revealed itself. This is
another victory of "the Other." Nanjing's keen researcher Zhang
Yibing, whom we know from his three other successful textological
readings, discovers Marxist Althusser shifting to an Althusser with
four distinct facets. Zhang argues, the precondition of exploring
this mystery is to demonstrate Althusser's complex, painful and
obscure life and the mystery of his paradoxical thoughts.
Contemporary researchers only make a distinction between the four
different Althussers, but they fail to find integrated research
logic. According to my understanding, there still exists continuity
between the four Althussers. This is an anti-teleological viewpoint
of non-subject and pseudo-subject that takes the absence of
individual subject as the core.
In the first monograph on W. S. Merwin to appear since his death in
2019, Feng Dong focuses on the dialectical movement of desire and
infinity that ensouls the poet's entire oeuvre. His analysis
foregrounds what Merwin calls "the other side of despair," the
opposite of humans' articulated personal and social agonies. Feng
finds these presences in Merwin's evocations of what lingers on the
edge of constantly updated socio-symbolic frameworks: surreal
encounters, spiritual ecstasies, and abyssal freedoms. By examining
Merwin's lifelong engagement with psychic fantasies, anonymous
holiness, entities both natural and supernatural, and ghostly
ancestors, Feng uncovers a precarious relation with the
unarticulated, unrealized side of existence. Drawing on theories
from Lacan, Zizek, Levinas, and Heidegger, Desire and Infinity in
W. S. Merwin's Poetry reads a metaphysical possibility into the
poet's work at the intersection between contemporary poetics,
philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
Abed Azzam offers a fresh interpretation of Nietzsche's engagement
with the work of Paul the Apostle, reorienting the relationship
between the two thinkers while embedding modern philosophy within
early Christian theology. Paying careful attention to Nietzsche's
dialectics, Azzam situates the philosopher's thought within the
history of Christianity, specifically the Pauline dialectics of law
and faith, and reveals how atheism is constructed in relation to
Christianity. Countering Heidegger's characterization of Nietzsche
as an anti-Platonist, Azzam brings the philosopher closer to Paul
through a radical rereading of his entire corpus against
Christianity. This approach builds a compelling new history of the
West resting on a logic of sublimation, from ancient Greece and
early Judaism to the death of God. Azzam discovers in Nietzsche's
philosophy a solid, tangible Pauline structure and virtual, fragile
Greek content, positioning the thinker as a forerunner of the
recent "return to Paul" led by Badiou, Agamben, Zizek, and Breton.
By changing the focus of modern philosophical inquiry from
"Nietzsche and philosophy" to "Nietzsche and Christianity," Azzam
initiates a major challenge to the primacy of Plato in the history
of Western philosophy and narrow certainties regarding Nietzsche's
relationship to Christian thought.
Despite their conceptual allergy to vegetal life, philosophers
have used germination, growth, blossoming, fruition, reproduction,
and decay as illustrations of abstract concepts; mentioned plants
in passing as the natural backdrops for dialogues, letters, and
other compositions; spun elaborate allegories out of flowers,
trees, and even grass; and recommended appropriate medicinal,
dietary, and aesthetic approaches to select species of plants.
In this book, Michael Marder illuminates the elaborate vegetal
centerpieces and hidden kernels that have powered theoretical
discourse for centuries. Choosing twelve botanical specimens that
correspond to twelve significant philosophers, he recasts the
development of philosophy through the evolution of human and plant
relations. A philosophical history for the postmetaphysical age,
The Philosopher's Plant reclaims the organic heritage of human
thought. With the help of vegetal images, examples, and metaphors,
the book clears a path through philosophy's tangled roots and dense
undergrowth, opening up the discipline to all readers.
Author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude,
Jonathan Lethem is one of the most celebrated and significant
American writers working today. This new scholarly study draws on a
deep knowledge of all Lethem's work to explore the range of his
writing, from his award-winning fiction to his work in comics and
criticism. Reading Lethem in relation to five themes crucial to his
work, Joseph Brooker considers influence and intertextuality; the
role of genres such as crime, science fiction and the Western; the
imaginative production of worlds; superheroes and comic book
traditions; and the representation of New York City. Close readings
of Lethem's fiction are contextualized by reference to broader
conceptual and comparative frames, as well as to Lethem's own
voluminous non-fictional writing and his adaptation of precursors
from Franz Kafka to Raymond Chandler. Rich in critical insight,
Jonathan Lethem and the Galaxy of Writing demonstrates how an
understanding of this author illuminates contemporary literature
and culture at large.
While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and
conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and
psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the
imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also
appreciates the process through which creative acts counteract and
transform feelings of violence and depression. Reviewing Kristeva's
corpus, Elaine P. Miller considers the intellectual's "aesthetic
idea" and "thought specular" in their capacity to reshape
depressive thought on both the individual and cultural level. She
revisits Kristeva's reading of Walter Benjamin with reference to
melancholic art and the imagination's allegorical structure; her
analysis of Byzantine iconoclasm in relation to Freud's
psychoanalytic theory of negation and Hegel's dialectical
negativity; her understanding of Proust as an exemplary
practitioner of sublimation; her rereading of Kant and Arendt in
terms of art as an intentional lingering with foreignness; and her
argument that forgiveness is both a philosophical and
psychoanalytic method of transcending a "stuck" existence. Focusing
on specific artworks that illustrate Kristeva's ideas, from ancient
Greek tragedy to early photography, contemporary installation art,
and film, Miller positions creative acts as a form of "spiritual
inoculation" against the violence of our society and its
discouragement of thought and reflection.
Lynne Huffer's ambitious inquiry redresses the rift between
feminist and queer theory, traversing the space of a new,
post-moral sexual ethics that includes pleasure, desire,
connection, and betrayal. She begins by balancing queer theorists'
politics of sexual freedoms with a moralizing feminist politics
that views sexuality as harm. Drawing on the best insights from
both traditions, she builds an ethics centered on eros, following
Michel Foucault's ethics as a practice of freedom and Luce
Irigaray's lyrical articulation of an ethics of sexual
difference.
Through this theoretical lens, Huffer examines everyday
experiences of ethical connection and failure connected to sex,
including queer sexual practices, sodomy laws, interracial love,
pornography, and work-life balance. Her approach complicates sexual
identities while challenging the epistemological foundations of
subjectivity. She rethinks ethics "beyond good and evil" without
underestimating, as some queer theorists have done, the persistence
of what Foucault calls the "catastrophe" of morality. Elaborating a
thinking-feeling ethics of the other, Huffer encourages
contemporary intellectuals to reshape sexual morality from within,
defining an ethical space that is both poetically suggestive and
politically relevant, both conceptually daring and grounded in
common sexual experience.
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Dissemination
(Paperback)
Jacques Derrida; Translated by Barbara Johnson
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R741
Discovery Miles 7 410
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Ships in 9 - 17 working days
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First published in 1972, Dissemination contains three of Derrida's
most central and seminal works: 'Plato's Pharmacy', 'The Double
Session' and 'Dissemination'. The essays present a re-evaluation of
the logic of meaning and the function of writing in Western
discourse and explore the relationship and interplay between
language, literature and philosophy. The text includes a
substantial introduction and additional notes on the text by
Barbara Johnson.
Gianni Vattimo, a leading philosopher of the continental school,
has always resisted autobiography. But in this intimate memoir, the
voice of Vattimo as thinker, political activist, and human being
finds its expression on the page. With Piergiorgio Paterlini, a
noted Italian writer and journalist, Vattimo reflects on a lifetime
of politics, sexual radicalism, and philosophical exuberance in
postwar Italy. Turin, the city where he was born and one of the
intellectual capitals of Europe (also the city in which Nietzsche
went mad), forms the core of his reminiscences, enhanced by
fascinating vignettes of studying under Hans Georg Gadamer,
teaching in the United States, serving as a public intellectual and
interlocutor of Habermas and Derrida, and working within the
European Parliament to unite Europe.
Vattimo's status as a left-wing faculty president paradoxically
made him a target of the Red Brigades in the 1970s, causing him to
flee Turin for his life. Left-wing terrorism did not deter the
philosopher from his quest for social progress, however, and in the
1980s, he introduced a daring formulation called "weak thought,"
which stripped metaphysics, science, religion, and all other
absolute systems of their authority. Vattimo then became notorious
both for his renewed commitment to the core values of Christianity
(he was trained as a Catholic intellectual) and for the Vatican's
denunciation of his views.
Paterlini weaves his interviews with Vattimo into an utterly
candid first-person portrait, creating a riveting text that is
destined to become one of the most compelling accounts of
homosexuality, history, politics, and philosophical invention in
the twentieth century.
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