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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > Postmodernism > Structuralism, deconstruction, post-structuralism
"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.
Ugly, Useless, Unstable Architectures traces productive intersections between architecture and the discourses of Post-Structuralism and New Materialism. It investigates how their unique 'ontological regimes' can be mobilised to supersede the classical framework that still informs both the production and the evaluation of architecture. Throughout its three main chapters, this enquiry challenges one of the most prevalent tropes of architectural assessment: Beauty, Utility and Stability. Author Miguel Paredes Maldonado critically unpacks the spatial and operational qualities of these three idealised concepts, before setting out an alternative framework of spatial practice that draws from Gilles Deleuze's post-structuralist take on the production of the real and Manuel DeLanda's model-based branch of New Materialism. This book reads and situates a series of spatial works through the lens of this critical methodology to contest the conceptual aspects traditionally underpinning architectural 'value'. It posits that architecture can operate as a continuous, generative spectrum encompassing a broad range of potential configurations. Written for academics and students in architectural theory, design and contemporary philosophical thought alike, this book should appeal to a wide audience.
Jacques Derrida said that deconstruction "takes place everywhere." Derridada reexamines the work of artist Marcel Duchamp as one of these places. Tucker suggests that Duchamp belongs to deconstruction as much as deconstruction belongs to Duchamp. Both bear the infra-thin mark of the other. He explores these marks through the themes of time and differance, language and the readymade, and the construction of self-identity through art. This book will be of interest to students and scholars interested in Modernism and the avant-garde. It will be useful for undergraduate students of art history, modernism, and critical theory, as well as for graduate students of philosophy, visual culture studies, and art theory.
What should we do with the ideals of internationalism, the withering away of state and horizontality? Probably start by thinking seriously about them. That is to say, about their conditions of possibility (or impossibility), rather than sticking to the wishful thinking which believes that for them to happen it is enough to want them. Humanity exists neither as a dust cloud of separate individuals nor as a unified world political community. It exists fragmented into distinct finite wholes, the forms of which have varied considerably throughout history - the nation-state being only one among many, and certainly not the last. What are the forces that produce this fragmentation, engender such groupings and prevent them from being perfectly horizontal, but also lead them to disappear, merge, or change form? It is questions such as these that this book explores, drawing on Spinoza's political philosophy and especially his two central concepts of multitudo and imperium.
Badiou's Deleuze presents the first thorough analysis of one of the most significant encounters in contemporary thought: Alain Badiou's summary interpretation and rejection of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Badiou's reading of Deleuze is largely laid out in his provocative book, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, a highly influential work of considerable power. Badiou's Deleuze presents a detailed examination of Badiou's reading and argues that, whilst it fails to do justice to the Deleuzean project, it invites us to reconsider what Deleuze's philosophy amounts to, to reassess Deleuze's power to address the ultimate concerns of philosophy. Badiou's Deleuze analyses the differing metaphysics of two of the most influential of recent continental philosophers, whose divergent views have helped to shape much contemporary thought.
The series presents historical and systematic studies on the philosophy of Alexius Meinong and his school, as well as on works influenced by aspects of Meinong's philosophy. Furthermore, the series is open to contributions in the analytic-phenomenological tradition, mirroring the most recent developments in these disciplines.
In this urgently needed book, Marc Crepon addresses the nature of hatred and its manifestations in international and domestic terrorism, racism, war and other forms of violence. Looking at the evidence of violence motivated by hatred, including US racial segregation, South African apartheid and the terrorist attacks in New York City in 2001 and in Paris in 2015, Crepon makes a compelling case for why hatred is the burden of our times.With inspiration from the non-violence resistance movements of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr., Crepon reveals how philosophy and literature, using courage and a new language, can overcome the many forms of hatred and violence present in our lives today.
Claude Levi-Strauss and the style of thinking known as 'structuralism, ' with which his work is conventionally associated, is widely recognized as having made a seminal contribution to the discipline of anthropology. More generally, his writings register the turn to language in social theory in the 1960s, and are marked by the influence of Kant, Rousseau, Saussurian linguistics, Marx and Freud. In turn, Levi-Strauss is recognized as having been a key influence on thinkers such as Althusser, Lacan, Foucault and Derrida. This volume seeks to address a key gap in the burgeoning secondary literature about Levi-Strauss: his importance to the study of religions. This volume pays particular attention to Levi-Strauss' writings on totemism, myth and "la pensee sauvage," situating these writings both in terms of previous theories of religion and in terms of the wider influences that informed his work. This volume provides an accessible and comprehensive overview of Levi-Strauss' life and work, the thinkers and theories that informed his writings, and his contribution to the study of religions.
Understanding Poststructuralism presents a lucid guide to some of the most exciting and controversial ideas in contemporary thought. This is the first introduction to poststructuralism through its major theorists - Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault, Lyotard, Kristeva - and their central texts. Each chapter takes the reader through a key text, providing detailed summaries of the main points of each and a critical and detailed analysis of their central arguments. Ideas are clearly explained in terms of their value to both critical thinking and to contemporary issues. Criticisms of poststructuralism are also assessed. The aim throughout is to illuminate the main methods of poststructuralism - deconstruction, libidinal economics, genealogy and transcendental empiricism - in context. A balanced and up-to-date assessment of poststructuralism, the book presents the ideal introduction to this most revolutionary of philosophies.
In Meaning and Structure, Peregrin argues that recent and contemporary (post)analytic philosophy, as developed by Quine, Davidson, Sellars and their followers, is largely structuralistic in the very sense in which structuralism was originally tabled by Ferdinand de Saussure. The author reconstructs de Saussure's view of language, linking it to modern formal logic and mathematics, and reveals close analogies between its constitutive principles and the principles informing the holistic and neopragmatistic view of language put forward by Quine and his followers. Peregrin also indicates how this view of language can be made compatible with what is usually called 'formal semantics'. Drawing on both the Saussurean tradition and recent developments in analytic philosophy of language, this book offers a unique study of the ways in which the concept of meaning can be seen as consisting in the concept of structure.
This volume contributes to the growing body of literature exploring the work of contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Through its fifteen contributions, including two previously untranslated essays by Malabou, the volume explores the various ways in which Malabou's thought both performs and furnishes resources for the negotiation of philosophy's attachment and detachment from itself and other disciplines. What kind of interaction can philosophy have with either science or politics without conquering them? How does one carry out philosophy while subverting it, changing it, directing it on or opening it up to different pathways? The chapters explore the detachment of Malabou from her own philosophical training in deconstruction, the theme of habit and the question of new attachments, detachments through the relation of Malabou's thought and science, and the detachments that transpire through philosophy's confrontation with politics. In order to have a future, philosophy must detach from its own tradition and passionately confront questions of race, gender, and colonialism.
The concept of biopolitics has been one of the most important and widely used in recent years in disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. In Biopolitics, Mills provides a wide-ranging and insightful introduction to the field of biopolitical studies. The first part of the book provides a much-needed philosophical introduction to key theoretical approaches to the concept in contemporary usage. This includes discussions of the work of Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Hannah Arendt, Roberto Esposito, and Antonio Negri. In the second part of the book, Mills discusses various topics across the categories of politics, life and subjectivity. These include questions of sovereignty and governmentality, violence, rights, technology, reproduction, race, and sexual difference. This book will be an indispensable guide for those wishing to gain an understanding of the central theories and issues in biopolitical studies. For those already working with the concept of biopolitics, it provides challenging and provocative insights and argues for a ground-breaking reorientation of the field.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a legal icon. In more than four decades as a lawyer, professor, appellate judge, and Associate Justice of the US Supreme Court, Ginsburg influenced the law and society in real and permanent ways. This book chronicles and evaluates the remarkable achievements Ruth Bader Ginsburg made over the last half-century. Including chapters written by prominent court-watchers and leading scholars from law, political science, and history, the book offers diverse perspectives on an array of doctrinal areas and different periods in Ginsburg's career. Together, these perspectives document the impressive legacy of one of the most important figures in modern law. This updated second edition features a new foreword from Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer and a new introduction from the editor Scott Dodson.
The book offers a new introduction to Jacques Derrida and to
Deconstruction as an important strand of Continental Philosophy.
From his early writings on phenomenology and linguistics to his
later meditations on war, terrorism, and justice, Jacques Derrida
(1930-2004) achieved prominence on an international scale by
addressing as many different audiences as he did topics. Yet
despite widespread acclamation, his work has never been considered
easy. Rendering accessible debates that marked more than four
decades of engagement and inquiry, Susanne Ludemann traces
connections between the philosopher's own texts and those of his
many interlocutors, past and present.
In recent decades, what is known as 'the subject' has been problematized by various old and new materialisms and today appears as decentered in and by language, split by the unconscious, deformed by social forces, governed by ideology and is either seen to have succumbed to the postmodern condition or to never have existed in the first place. Every materialist theory of the subject depends on a conception of materiality, which can delineate the character of what the material reality, which de-centers or constitutes the subject consists of. Materiality and Subject in Marxism, (Post-)Structuralism, and Material Semiotics investigates the relation between materiality and the subject in the materialist approaches of Marxism, (post-)structuralism, and material semiotics. None of these approaches subscribes to a reductionist materialism; rather, they conceive of materiality as multiple, complex, and not reducible to tangible matter. For each approach, the modalities of materiality of the respective materialism are defined. The relationship between the multiple materialities and the subject constituted and decentered in this relationship are presented as specific to the theoretical approaches discussed.
The discussions about the ethical, political and human implications
of the postmodernist condition have been raging for longer than
most of us care to remember. They have been especially fierce
within feminism. After a brief flirtation with postmodern thinking
in the 1980s, mainstream feminist circles seem to have turned their
back on the staple notions of poststructuralist philosophy.
"Metamorphoses" takes stock of the situation and attempts to reset
priorities within the poststructuralist feminist agenda. Cross-referring in a creative way to Deleuze's and Irigaray's
respective philosophies of difference, the book addresses key
notions such as embodiment, immanence, sexual difference, nomadism
and the materiality of the subject. "Metamorphoses" also focuses on
the implications of these theories for cultural criticism and a
redefinition of politics. It provides a vivid overview of
contemporary culture, with special emphasis on technology, the
monstrous imaginary and the recurrent obsession with 'the flesh' in
the age of techno-bodies. This highly original contribution to current debates is written for those who find changes and transformations challenging and necessary. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, feminist theory, gender studies, sociology, social theory and cultural studies.
Der erste Band der Meinong Studien vereinigt historische Beitrage zur Meinong-Forschung im engeren Sinn mit solchen, die Meinongsche Themen und Gedanken in systematischer Absicht wieder aufnehmen. Die angestellten Untersuchungen widmen sich der vor-gegenstandstheoretischen Periode Meinongs (Chrudzimski), seinen fruhen erkenntnistheoretischen Untersuchungen (Manotta), seinen Theorien der Vorstellungsproduktion (Raspa) und der Annahmen (Dolling), konfrontieren seine Lehren mit jenen Franz Brentanos (Rollinger), Sartres und Russells (Hochberg) und analysieren die Fragen der Konsistenz des Meinongschen Universums der Gegenstande (Simons), seiner Theorie der Grossen und Messung (Guigon), seiner (und Ernst Mallys) Objekt-theoretischen Grundlegung der Logik (Tegtmeier) sowie dem Verhaltnis von Semantik und Ontologie aus der Perspektive einer heutigen Konzeption."
In Resounding Events, one of the world's preeminent political theorists reflects on a career as an academic hailing from the working class. From youthful experiences of McCarthyism, to the resurgence of white evangelicalism, to the advent of aspirational fascism and the acceleration of the Anthropocene, Connolly traces a career spent passionately engaged in making a more just, diverse, and equitable world. He surveys the shifting ground upon which politics can be pursued; and he discloses how to be an intellectual in universities that today do not encourage that practice. Far more than a memoir, Resounding Events probes the concerns that have animated Connolly's work across more than a dozen books by tracing the bumpy imbrications of event, memory and thinking in intellectual life. Connolly experiments with ways to capture various voices that mark a self at any time. An event, as he elaborates it, is what disturbs or inspires thinking as it activates layered sheets of memory. A memory sheet itself assembles recollections, dispositions organized from the past, and vague remains that carry efficacies. Resounding Events shows how resonances between event and memory can help forge new concepts better adjusted to an emergent situation. Addressing tensions between working class experience and norms of the academy, his father's coma, antiwar protests, the growing disaffection of the white working class, the neoliberalization of the university, climate denialism, and his sister's experience with workers shifting to Trump, Connolly shows how engaged intellectuals become worthy of the events they encounter.
Finalist, French-American Foundation Translation Prize In an age that prizes political and personal transparency, In Defense of Secrets champions the secret as what permits relation and ensures our humanity. Psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle drowned in 2017 in an attempt to rescue two children caught in the ocean. Her work lives on, though, in this provocative and necessary book. Through etymologies and case studies, personal history and incisive commentary on contemporary society, In Defense of Secrets returns us to the fundamental psychic scene of the secret. The secret, for Dufourmantelle, is not a code to be cracked or a firewall to be penetrated but a dynamic and powerful entity that permits relation and that ensures our humanity. Tracking the secret though art and literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology, from the Inquisition to the present, Dufourmantelle's writing spirals around the question of the secret's value. In our age, when political and personal transparency seem to be prized above all-lives posted on the Internet, information leaked, whistles blown, taboos absent except with respect to the secret itself-In Defense of Secrets champions what remains hidden, private, veiled, hushed, just out of sight. The secret is on the side of nature, not science; organic growth, not technology; love's generosity, not knowledge's grasp. For Dufourmantelle, the secret is a powerful and dynamic thing: deadly if unheard or misused, perhaps, but equally the source of creativity and of ethics. An ethics of the secret, we can hear her say, means listening hard and sensitively, respecting the secret in its secret essence, unafraid of it and open to what it has to say.
Reading philosophy through the lens of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, Andrea Cavalletti shows why, for two centuries, major philosophers have come to think of vertigo as intrinsically part of philosophy itself. Fear of the void, terror of heights: everyone knows what acrophobia is, and many suffer from it. Before Freud, the so-called "sciences of the mind" reserved a place of honor for vertigo in the domain of mental pathologies. The fear of falling-which is also the fear of giving in to the temptation to let oneself fall-has long been understood as a destabilizing yet intoxicating element without which consciousness itself was inconceivable. Some went so far as to induce it in patients through frightening rotational therapies. In a less cruel but no less radical way, vertigo also staked its claim in philosophy. If Montaigne and Pascal could still consider it a perturbation of reason and a trick of the imagination which had to be subdued, subsequent thinkers stopped considering it an occasional imaginative instability to be overcome. It came, rather, to be seen as intrinsic to reason, such that identity manifests itself as tottering, kinetic, opaque and, indeed, vertiginous. Andrea Cavalletti's stunning book sets this critique of stable consciousness beside one of Hitchcock's most famous thrillers, a drama of identity and its abysses. Hitchcock's brilliant combination of a dolly and a zoom to recreate the effect of falling describes that double movement of "pushing away and bringing closer" which is the habitual condition of the subject and of intersubjectivity. To reach myself, I must see myself from the bottom of the abyss, with the eyes of another. Only then does my "here" flee down there and, from there, attract me. From classical medicine and from the role of imagination in our biopolitical world to the very heart of philosophy, from Hollywood to Heidegger's "being-toward-death," Cavalletti brings out the vertiginous nature of identity.
Jacques Derrida's revolutionary approach to phenomenology, psychoanalysis, structuralism, linguistics, and indeed the entire European tradition of philosophy-called deconstruction-changed the face of criticism. It provoked a questioning of philosophy, literature, and the human sciences that these disciplines would have previously considered improper. Forty years after Of Grammatology first appeared in English, Derrida still ignites controversy, thanks in part to Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's careful translation, which attempted to capture the richness and complexity of the original. This fortieth anniversary edition, where a mature Spivak retranslates with greater awareness of Derrida's legacy, also includes a new afterword by her which supplements her influential original preface. Judith Butler has added an introduction. All references in the work have been updated. One of contemporary criticism's most indispensable works, Of Grammatology is made even more accessible and usable by this new release.
Finalist, French-American Foundation Translation Prize In an age that prizes political and personal transparency, In Defense of Secrets champions the secret as what permits relation and ensures our humanity. Psychoanalyst and philosopher Anne Dufourmantelle drowned in 2017 in an attempt to rescue two children caught in the ocean. Her work lives on, though, in this provocative and necessary book. Through etymologies and case studies, personal history and incisive commentary on contemporary society, In Defense of Secrets returns us to the fundamental psychic scene of the secret. The secret, for Dufourmantelle, is not a code to be cracked or a firewall to be penetrated but a dynamic and powerful entity that permits relation and that ensures our humanity. Tracking the secret though art and literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and sociology, from the Inquisition to the present, Dufourmantelle's writing spirals around the question of the secret's value. In our age, when political and personal transparency seem to be prized above all-lives posted on the Internet, information leaked, whistles blown, taboos absent except with respect to the secret itself-In Defense of Secrets champions what remains hidden, private, veiled, hushed, just out of sight. The secret is on the side of nature, not science; organic growth, not technology; love's generosity, not knowledge's grasp. For Dufourmantelle, the secret is a powerful and dynamic thing: deadly if unheard or misused, perhaps, but equally the source of creativity and of ethics. An ethics of the secret, we can hear her say, means listening hard and sensitively, respecting the secret in its secret essence, unafraid of it and open to what it has to say.
In Becoming Marxist Ted Stolze offers a series of studies that take up the importance of philosophy for the development of an open and critical Marxism. He argues that an adequate 'philosophy for Marxism' must be open to engagement with a diverse range of traditions, texts, and authors-from Paul of Tarsus, via Averroes, Spinoza, and Hobbes, to Althusser, Deleuze, Negri, Habermas, and Zizek. Stolze also explores such practical contemporary issues as the politics of self-emancipation, the nature of Islamophobia, and climate change.
This work advances a theory in the metaphysics of phenomenal consciousness, which the author labels "e-physicalism". Firstly, he endorses a realist stance towards consciousness and physicalist metaphysics. Secondly, he criticises Strong AI and functionalist views, and claims that consciousness has an internal character. Thirdly, he discusses HOT theories, the unity of consciousness, and holds that the "explanatory gap" is not ontological but epistemological. Fourthly, he argues that consciousness is not a supervenient but an emergent property, not reducible and endowed with original causal powers, with respect to the micro-constituents of the conscious entity. Fifthly, he addresses the "zombie argument" and the "supervenience argument" within the e-physicalism framework. Finally, he elaborates on the claim that phenomenal properties are physical and discusses the "knowledge argument". |
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