This book addresses a surprisingly overlooked Foucauldian conundrum: what is the logical relationship between modern law and power? Jacopo Martire investigates the development of modern law in conjunction with what Foucault termed biopolitical forms of power. He gives you a much-needed genealogical analysis of the modern legal phenomenon, opening new avenues for Foucauldian approaches to law.

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.

Traversing philosophy and the human sciences, literature, cinema, and the visual arts, this book maps out a history where all is chaos, maelstrom, and fog. If perception and language objectivate the world, if imagination structures it, if knowledge orders it, then how can we describe, name, or even apprehend that which comes to pass when language is absent, when perception vacillates, and when knowledge eludes us? How can we say, show, or make known that which undermines and refutes the order of things, the supposedly immutable real, and the administration of the sensible? This book takes us on a quest that traverses philosophy and the human sciences, but also literature, cinema, and the visual arts. Not content with analysing the ordering power of our representations, in The Infra-World Francois J. Bonnet also interrogates the works of artists who have experienced and experimented with those moments when they crack open, giving way to anguish and vertigo. If perception is a sieve, what can be said of that which slips through its net, how does one speak of what escapes? What remains of unqualified perceptions, of vanishing sensations? Where do the indescribable, nocturnal fears hide, the horrors lurking behind closed eyes? What of the world beneath language and objectivated sensation? What of the infra-world?

This new collection gathers 23 highly insightful yet previously difficult-to-find interviews with Baudrillard, ranging over topics as diverse as art, war, technology, globalisation, terrorism and the fate of humanity. From familiar themes to the less well understood aspects of his thought, these interviews give you an overview of Baudrillard's ideas - without the jargon typical of written texts. Read as Baudrillard himself discusses, explains and elaborates on his ideas, making this collection essential for understanding many of his other works.

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original. This is made possible primarily by conveying the syntax word-for-word; and this demonstrates that the word, not the sentence, is translations original element. For the sentence is the wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering the arcade. (Walter Benjamin, The Translators Task) The book centers on Walter Benjamins revolutionary essay The Translators Task (1923) which subverts some widespread assumptions concerning translation: that it serves for communication, that it transfers meaning, that it must not distort the translators own language, and that it is inferior to the original. Benjamin overturns these assumptions by replacing the concept of translation as a merely linguistic operation with a metaphysical or theological concept of the same, derived from Jewish Kabbala and French Symbolisme. In The Translators Task, as well as his earlier essay On Language as such and the Language of Man, he delineates a cosmic linguistic cycle of descent from, and ascent back to, God. The translators task is to promote this ascent by deconstructing his own language in order to advance it towards a final Pure Language. Following an analysis of Benjamins approach, some of its affiliates are discussed in texts by Franz Rosenzweig, Paul Celan (as explicated by Peter Szondi) and Jacques Derrida. Rosenzweig, a translator like Benjamin, is shown to be concerned with more concrete aspects of translation, whereas Derridas autobiographical Monolingualism of the Other, though not focussing on translation, is shown to be an innovative contribution to the metaphysics of translation. Finally, an attempt is made to deal with the question of whether and how this abstract approach can be of help for the concrete practice of Poetry translation. The great poet Hoelderlins German translations of Sophocles testify to the clear, though elusive, practical contribution of this approach and to the importance of Benjamins legacy.

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.

Feminist theorist and philosopher Donna Haraway has substantially impacted thought on science, cyberculture, the environment, animals, and social relations. This long-overdue volume explores her influence on feminist theory and philosophy, paying particular attention to her more recent work on companion species, rather than her "Manifesto for Cyborgs." Margret Grebowicz and Helen Merrick argue that the ongoing fascination with, and re-production of, the cyborg has overshadowed Haraway's extensive body of work in ways that run counter to her own transdisciplinary practices. Sparked by their own personal "adventures" with Haraway's work, the authors offer readings of her texts framed by a series of theoretical and political perspectives: feminist materialism, standpoint epistemology, radical democratic theory, queer theory, and even science fiction. They situate Haraway's critical storytelling and "risky reading" practices as forms of feminist methodology and recognize her passionate engagement with "naturecultures" as the theoretical core driving her work. Chapters situate Haraway as critic, theorist, biologist, feminist, historian, and humorist, exploring the full range of her identities and reflecting her commitment to embodying all of these modes simultaneously.

There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to society as a whole. Julie Stephens examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, Stephens details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal.

Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care.

For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida represent a "great generation" of French philosophers who accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible lives. These troubled and innovative thinkers endured World War II and the cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and their cultural horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, though they were by no means strict adherents to the doctrines of Marx and Freud.

Roudinesco knew many of these intellectuals personally, and she weaves an account of their thought through lived experience and reminiscences. Canguilhem, for example, was a distinguished philosopher of science who had a great influence on Foucault's exploration of sanity and madness-themes Althusser lived in a notorious personal drama. And in dramatizing the life of Freud for the screen, Sartre fundamentally altered his own philosophical approach to psychoanalysis.

Roudinesco launches a passionate defense of Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida against the "new philosophers" of the late 1970s and 1980s, who denounced the work-and sometimes the private lives-of this great generation. Roudinesco refutes attempts to tar them, as well as the Marxist and left-wing tradition in general, with the brush of Soviet-style communism. In Freudian theory and the philosophy of radical commitment, she sees a bulwark against the kind of manipulative, pill-prescribing, and normalizing psychology that aims to turn individuals into mindless consumers. Intense, clever, and persuasive, "Philosophy in Turbulent Times" captivates with the dynamism of French thought in the twentieth century.

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 English version of Dissemination [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson . . . . Derrida's central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosophy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives--against the grain of language--to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature--on the other hand--flaunts its own meretriciousness, abandons itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In Dissemination--more than any previous work--Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to 'deconstruct' both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to the literature of truth.--Peter Dews, New Statesman

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.

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.

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.

Perspektiven der Philosophie. Neues Jahrbuch eroeffnet Forschern, denen die philosophische Begrundung des Denkens wichtig ist, eine Publikationsmoeglichkeit. Wir verstehen uns nicht als Schulorgan einer philosophischen Lehrmeinung, sondern sehen unsere Aufgabe darin, an der Intensivierung des wissenschaftlichen Philosophierens mitzuwirken. Besonders foerdern wir den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs und laden ihn zur Mitarbeit ein.

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.

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.