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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > Postmodernism
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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