Vorstellungen von Absenz wirken in der Gegenwart auf breiter Basis - auch in der Literatur. Doch wie sind diese medial vermittelt? Geht man davon aus, dass Absenz-Phanomene sich nicht in einer primordialen Leere ereignen, sondern dass ihnen eher mit Vorstellungen vom Unbestimmten, Unverfugbaren und Moeglichen beizukommen ist, rucken Verraumlichungsformen in den Fokus, die bewegungslogisch zu erklaren sind. Um das intrikate Verhaltnis von Moeglichkeitsformen und 'Wirklichkeit' innerhalb der Grenzen des Sagbaren zu verhandeln, begegnen ihm Thomas Bernhards und Christoph Ransmayrs Erzahltexte mit Verfahren der Verraumlichung. Aus der Perspektive einer AEsthetik der Absenz poetisieren diese Erzahltexte Wahrnehmungsschwellen, indem sie Abwesendes textphanomenal verraumlichen, es jedoch nicht im (topo-)graphischen containment absichern, sondern eine Topologie eroeffnen, die auf Strategien des displacement setzt. Die Studie fuhrt raumtheoretische Ansatze unter einer differenztheoretischen Perspektive mit einem Konzept von Virtualitat zusammen, um literarische Verfahren der Verraumlichung von Absenz in Erzahltexten von Bernhard und Ransmayr zu untersuchen.

The renowned postmodernist philosopher s tour-de-force contemplation of sex, technology, politics and disease in Western culture after the revolutionary orgy of the 1960s.

The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, thus enabling the development of French feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism. Based on Saussure's lectures, "Course in General Linguistics" (1916) traces the rise and fall of the historical linguistics in which Saussure was trained, the synchronic or structural linguistics with which he replaced it, and the new look of diachronic linguistics that followed this change. Most important, Saussure presents the principles of a new linguistic science that includes the invention of semiology, or the theory of the "signifier," the "signified," and the "sign" that they combine to produce.

This is the first critical edition of "Course in General Linguistics" to appear in English and restores Wade Baskin's original translation of 1959, in which the terms "signifier" and "signified" are introduced into English in this precise way. Baskin renders Saussure clearly and accessibly, allowing readers to experience his shift of the theory of reference from mimesis to performance and his expansion of poetics to include all media, including the life sciences and environmentalism. An introduction situates Saussure within the history of ideas and describes the history of scholarship that made "Course in General Linguistics" legendary. New endnotes enlarge Saussure's contexts to include literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy.

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.

Colleen Glenney Boggs puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. Concentrating on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, Boggs argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and what is judged as animal. It generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity. The renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. Therefore, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state. An original contribution to animal studies, American studies, critical race theory, and posthumanist inquiry, Boggs thrillingly reinterprets a long and highly contentious human-animal history.

In this significant new work in African philosophy, Christopher Wise explores deconstruction's historical indebtedness to Egypto-African civilization and its relevance in Islamicate Africa today. He does so by comparing deconstructive and African thought on the spoken utterance, nothingness, conjuration, the oath or vow, occult sorcery, blood election, violence, circumcision, totemic inscription practices, animal metamorphosis and sacrifice, the Abrahamic, fratricide, and jihad. Situated against the backdrop of the Ansar Dine's recent jihad in Northern Mali, Sorcery, Totem and Jihad in African Philosophy examines the root causes of the conflict and offers insight into the Sahel's ancient, complex, and vibrant civilization. This book also demonstrates the relevance of deconstructive thought in the African setting, especially the writing of the Franco-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Building a foundational understanding of the digital, Logic of the Digital reveals a unique digital ontology. Beginning from formal and technical characteristics, especially the binary code at the core of all digital technologies, Aden Evens traces the pathways along which the digital domain of abstract logic encounters the material, human world. How does a code using only 0s and 1s give rise to the vast range of applications and information that constitutes a great and growing portion of our world? Evens' analysis shows how any encounter between the actual and the digital must cross an ontological divide, a gap between the productive materiality of the human world and the reductive abstraction of the binary code. Logic of the Digital examines the distortions of this ontological crossing, considering the formal abstraction that persists in exemplary digital technologies and techniques such as the mouse, the Web, the graphical user interface, and the development of software. One crucial motive for this research lies in the paradoxical issue of creativity in relation to digital technologies: the ontology of abstraction leaves little room for the unpredictable or accidental that is essential to creativity, but digital technologies are nevertheless patently creative. Evens inquires into the mechanisms by which the ostensibly sterile binary code can lend itself to such fecund cultural production. Through clarification of the digital's ontological foundation, Evens points to a significant threat to creativity lurking in the nature of the digital and so generates a basis for an ethics of digital practice. Examining the bits that give the digital its ontology, exploring the potentials and limitations of programming, and using gaming as an ideal test of digital possibility, Logic of the Digital guides future practices and shapes academic research in the digital.

This important new book argues that Jacques Derrida's work can be treated as the basis for a distinctive historiography. The possibility of seeing Derrida not as a philosopher of language but as a philosopher of history has become more apparent with the recent publication of Derrida's 1964-1965 seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. We now know that the problem of history was at the heart of Derrida's writing in the mid-1960s, prior to the publication of his best-known work, Of Grammatology (1967). Arguing that Derrida's scholarship in the 1960s and early 1970s on historicism, historicity and the problem of history can be treated as the basis for a philosophy of history, Sean Gaston focuses on Derrida's work from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s and his relentless questioning of context, memory and narrative as the delineation of a deconstructive historiography. The book raises a challenge for historians to think about both deconstruction and historiography, arguing that contemporary philosophy can provide a basis for thinking about history in the name of a deconstructive historiography that is not incompatible with rigorous historical scholarship.

In diesem Buch befasst sich Arturo Romero Contreras mit der Frage, wie Philosophie nach ihrem proklamierten Ende moeglich ist. Dabei geht der Autor im ersten Teil von der Phanomenologie Husserls und ihrer Rezeption bei Fink, Heidegger und Derrida aus und stellt sich die Aufgabe, Kontext und Begrundung der Behauptung, die Philosophie habe ihr Ende erreicht, ans Licht zu bringen. Im zweiten Teil wird gezeigt, dass die Vertreter des Endes der Philosophie in der Tat auf eine andere "Logik" und "Mathematik" hinweisen. Die Paradoxie ist ein logischer Begriff, der nur unter gewissen Bedingungen sinnvoll ist. Was sind aber die philosophischen Folgen und der daraus resultierende Denkraum, wenn man neue mathematische Gedanken und nicht-klassische Logiken akzeptiert?

Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing argues that Jacques Derrida's philosophical understanding of language should be supplemented by Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic approach to the symbolic order. Lacan adopts a non-philosophical, genetic or developmental approach to the question of language and in doing so isolates a dimension that Derrida cannot properly envisage: the imaginary. Michael Lewis argues that the real must be understood not just in relation to the symbolic but also in relation to the imaginary. The existence of an alternative approach to the real that is other than language allows us to identify the idiosyncrasies of Derrida's purely transcendental approach, an approach that addresses language in terms of its conditions of possibility. Lacan shows us that an attention to the genesis of the symbolic order of language and culture should lead us to understand this real other in a different way.This book relates transcendental thought to the insights of non-philosophical thought, and, more specifically, it proposes a way in which philosophy might relate to the insights of the human and natural sciences. By critically juxtaposing Derrida and Lacan, Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing attempts to systematise Slavoj Zizek's presentation of a Lacanian alternative to Derridean deconstruction.
This work should be of interest to all readers in continental thought and transcendental philosophy, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and literary studies.

Wrestling with the Angel is a meditation on contemporary political, legal, and social theory from a psychoanalytic perspective. It argues for the enabling function of formal and symbolic constraints in sustaining desire as a source of creativity, innovation, and social change. The book begins by calling for a richer understanding of the psychoanalytic concept of the symbolic and the resources it might offer for an examination of the social link and the political sphere. The symbolic is a crucial dimension of social coexistence but cannot be reduced to the social norms, rules, and practices with which it is so often collapsed. As a dimension of human life that is introduced by language-and thus inescapably "other" with respect to the laws of nature-the symbolic is an undeniable fact of human existence. Yet the same cannot be said of the forms and practices that represent and sustain it. In designating these laws, structures, and practices as "fictions," Jacques Lacan makes clear that the symbolic is a dimension of social life that has to be created and maintained and that can also be displaced, eradicated, or rendered dysfunctional. The symbolic fictions that structure and support the social tie are therefore historicizable, emerging at specific times and in particular contexts and losing their efficacy when circumstances change. They are also fragile and ephemeral, needing to be renewed and reinvented if they are not to become outmoded or ridiculous. Therefore the aim of this study is not to call for a return to traditional symbolic laws but to reflect on the relationship between the symbolic in its most elementary or structural form and the function of constraints and limits. McNulty analyzes examples of "experimental" (as opposed to "normative") articulations of the symbolic and their creative use of formal limits and constraints not as mere prohibitions or rules but as "enabling constraints" that favor the exercise of freedom. The first part examines practices that conceive of subjective freedom as enabled by the struggle with constraints or limits, from the transference that structures the "minimal social link" of psychoanalysis to constrained relationships between two or more people in the context of political and social movements. Examples discussed range from the spiritual practices and social legacies of Moses, Jesus, and Teresa of Avila to the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Ranciere. The second part is devoted to legal and political debates surrounding the function of the written law. It isolates the law's function as a symbolic limit or constraint as distinct from its content and representational character. The analysis draws on Mosaic law traditions, the political theology of Paul, and twentieth-century treatments of written law in the work of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, Sigmund Freud, Pierre Legendre, and Alain Badiou. In conclusion, the study considers the relationship between will and constraint in Kant's aesthetic philosophy and in the experimental literary works of the collective Oulipo.

Words like "terrorism" and "war" no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word--"horrorism"--to capture the experience of violence.

Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from the perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the "Iliad," in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty.

In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality.

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.

The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform the broader understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead--even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities. Deconstruction begins well before Jacques Derrida's initial American presentation of his deconstructive work in a famed lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and continues through several decades of theoretic growth and tumult. While much of the subsequent story remains focused, inevitably, on Yale University and the personalities and curriculum that came to be lumped under the "Yale school" umbrella, Deconstruction makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory, and gender studies also were to the lifeblood of this mode of thought. Ultimately, Jones-Katz shows that deconstruction in the United States--so often caricatured as a French infection--was truly an American phenomenon, rooted in our preexisting political and intellectual tensions, that eventually came to influence unexpected corners of scholarship, politics, and culture.

Building on discussions originating in post-humanism, the non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle, and the science of "species being of humanity" stemming from Marx's critique of philosophy, Katerina Kolozova proposes a radical consideration of capitalism's economic exploitation of life. This book uses Francois Laruelle's work to think through questions of "practical ethics" and bring the abstract tools of Laruelle's non-philosophy into conversation with other critical methods in the humanities. Kolozova centres the question of the animal at the very heart of what it means for us as human beings to think and act in the world, and the mistreatment of animality that underpins the logic of capitalism.

The volume is inspired by Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project, which builds on the critique of European Humanism and opens up inspiring new perspectives for the renewal of the field. The book gathers leading scholars in the field of Deleuze, while also bringing together scholars from Europe and North America (the West), as well from Asia (the East), in order to create a lively academic debate, and contribute to the growth and expansion of the field. it provides both critical and creative insights into some key issues in contemporary social and political thought. More specifically, the volume hopes to start a critical evaluation of the reception and creative adaptation of Deleuze and of other Continental philosophers in the Austral-Asian region, with special focus on China.

What is the legacy of Theory after the deaths of so many of its leading lights, from Jacques Derrida to Roland Barthes? Bringing together reflections by leading contemporary scholars, Dead Theory explores the afterlives of the work of the great theorists and the current state of Theory today. Considering the work of thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas, the book explores the ways in which Theory has long been haunted by death and how it might endure for the future.