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Books > Reference & Interdisciplinary > Interdisciplinary studies > Cultural studies > Postmodernism > Structuralism, deconstruction, post-structuralism
Existential semiotics is a new paradigm which combines classical
semiotics with continental philosophy. It does not mean a return to
existentialism, albeit philosophers from Hegel and Kierkegaard to
Heidegger, Jaspers and Sartre are its sources of inspiration. It
introduces completely new sign categories and concepts to the
field, recasting the whole of semiotics, communication and
signification as integral to a transcendental art. The volume
contains essays on music, the voice, silence, calligraphy,
metaphysics, myth, aesthetics, entropy, cultural heritage, film,
the Bible, among other subjects.
Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence
of biopolitics in Europe from the mid- eighteenth to the
mid-nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature,
political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that
historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of
how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other
biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of
thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's
contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as
distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations
required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual
mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or
aesthetic representation.
In this book Jacques Ranciere radicalises his critique of modernism
and its postmodern appendix. He contrasts their unilinear and
exclusive time with the interweaving of temporalities at play in
modern processes of emancipation and artistic revolutions, showing
how this plurality itself refers to the double dimension of time.
Time is more than a line drawn from the past to the future. It is a
form of life, marked by the ancient hierarchy between those who
have time and those who do not. This hierarchy, continued in the
Marxist notion of the vanguard and nakedly exhibited in Clement
Greenberg's modernism, still governs a present which clings to the
fable of historical necessity and its experts. In opposition to
this, Ranciere shows how the break with the hierarchical conception
of time, formulated by Emerson in his vision of the new poet,
implies a completely different idea of the modern. He sees the
fulfilment of this in the two arts of movement, cinema and dance,
which at the beginning of the twentieth century abolished the
opposition between free and mechanical people, at the price of
exposing the rift between the revolution of artists and that of
strategists.
What is the strange eros that haunts Foucault's writing? In this
deeply original consideration of Foucault's erotic ethics, Lynne
Huffer provocatively rewrites Foucault as a Sapphic poet. She
uncovers eros as a mode of thought that erodes the interiority of
the thinking subject. Focusing on the ethical implications of this
mode of thought, Huffer shows how Foucault's poetic archival method
offers a way to counter the disciplining of speech. At the heart of
this method is a conception of the archive as Sapphic: the past's
remains are, like Sappho's verses, hole-ridden, scattered, and
dissolved by time. Listening for eros across fragmented texts,
Huffer stages a series of encounters within an archive of literary
and theoretical readings: the eroticization of violence in works by
Freud and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, the historicity of madness in the
Foucault-Derrida debate, the afterlives of Foucault's antiprison
activism, and Monique Wittig's Sapphic materialism. Through these
encounters, Foucault's Strange Eros conceives of ethics as
experiments in living that work poetically to make the present
strange. Crafting fragments that dissolve into Sapphic brackets,
Huffer performs the ethics she describes in her own practice of
experimental writing. Foucault's Strange Eros hints at the
self-hollowing speech of an eros that opens a space for the
strange.
In the mid-1970s, Sylvere Lotringer created Semiotext(e), a
philosophical group that became a magazine and then a publishing
house. Since its creation, Semio-text(e) has been a place of
stimulating dialogue between artists and philosophers, and for the
past fifty years, much of American artistic and intellectual life
has depended on it. The model of the journal and the publishing
house revolves around the notion of the collective, and Lotringer
has rarely shared his personal journey: his existence as a hidden
child during World War II; the liberating and then traumatic
experience of the collective in the kibbutz; his Parisian activism
in the 1960s; his time of wandering, that took him, by way of
Istanbul, to the United States; and then, of course, his American
years, the way he mingled his nightlife with the formal
experimentation he invented with Semiotext(e) and with his classes.
Since the early 2010s, Donatien Grau has developed the habit of
visiting Lotringer during his trips to Los Angeles; some of their
dialogs were published or held in public. This book is an entry
into Lotringer's life, his friendships, his choices, and his
admiration for some of the leading thinkers of our times. The
conversations between Lotringer and Grau show bursts of life,
traces of a journey, through texts and existence itself, with an
unusual intensity.
While ancient civilizations worshipped strong, active emotions,
modern societies have favored more peaceful attitudes, especially
within the democratic process. We have largely forgotten the
struggle to make use of "thymos," the part of the soul that,
following Plato, contains spirit, pride, and indignation. Rather,
Christianity and psychoanalysis have promoted mutual understanding
to overcome conflict. Through unique examples, Peter Sloterdijk,
the preeminent posthumanist, argues exactly the opposite, showing
how the history of Western civilization can be read as a
suppression and return of rage.
By way of reinterpreting the "Iliad," Alexandre Dumas's "Count
of Monte Cristo," and recent Islamic political riots in Paris,
Sloterdijk proves the fallacy that rage is an emotion capable of
control. Global terrorism and economic frustrations have rendered
strong emotions visibly resurgent, and the consequences of violent
outbursts will determine international relations for decades to
come. To better respond to rage and its complexity, Sloterdijk
daringly breaks with entrenched dogma and contructs a new theory
for confronting conflict. His approach acknowledges and respects
the proper place of rage and channels it into productive political
struggle.
The Ego And Its Hyperstate is a unified theory of psychological and
ethical egoism which posits self-interest. The dialectical dream
theory sets its sights against capitalist notions of the
self-interest contra the other, not simply with moralism, but with
a more accurate analysis of the subject of self-interest than has
been provided by capitalists and anarchist theorists alike. Through
the lens of psychoanalysis and Hegelian dialectical logic, the
process of self-interest as the ground of all human existence
reveals itself. Eliot Rosenstock has a symptom he wants you to know
about: he wants you to know how the nature of self-interest strikes
through the notions of pure duty and state worship, he wants to
bring in psychoanalyis and redeem dialectics in its power to reveal
the universe rather than be a simple rhetorical tool, and he wants
to reveal to you how the material conditions of the world, as well
as psychological processes of mankind, work together to bring about
all that is brought into the universe by humanity.
Over the course of his career, Gianni Vattimo has assumed a
number of public and private identities and has pursued multiple
intellectual paths. He seems to embody several contradictions, at
once defending and questioning religion and critiquing and serving
the state. Yet the diversity of his life and thought form the very
essence of, as he sees it, the vocation and responsibility of the
philosopher. In a world that desires quantifiable results and
ideological expediency, the philosopher becomes the vital
interpreter of the endlessly complex.
As he outlines his ideas about the philosopher's role, Vattimo
builds an important companion to his life's work. He confronts
questions of science, religion, logic, literature, and truth, and
passionately defends the power of hermeneutics to engage with
life's conundrums. Vattimo conjures a clear vision of philosophy as
something separate from the sciences and the humanities but also
intimately connected to their processes, and he explicates a
conception of truth that emphasizes fidelity and participation
through dialogue.
The debate over the place of religion in secular, democratic
societies dominates philosophical and intellectual discourse. These
arguments often polarize around simplistic reductions, making
efforts at reconciliation impossible. Yet more rational stances do
exist, positions that broker a peace between relativism and
religion in people's public, private, and ethical lives.
"Christianity, Truth, and Weakening Faith" advances just such a
dialogue, featuring the collaboration of two major philosophers
known for their progressive approach to this issue. Seeking unity
over difference, Gianni Vattimo and Ren? Girard turn to Max Weber,
Eric Auerbach, and Marcel Gauchet, among others, in their
exploration of truth and liberty, relativism and faith, and the
tensions of a world filled with new forms of religiously inspired
violence.
Vattimo and Girard ultimately conclude that secularism and the
involvement (or lack thereof) of religion in governance are, in
essence, produced by Christianity. In other words, Christianity is
"the religion of the exit from religion," and democracy, civil
rights, the free market, and individual freedoms are all
facilitated by Christian culture. Through an exchange that is both
intimate and enlightening, Vattimo and Girard share their
unparalleled insight into the relationships among religion,
modernity, and the role of Christianity, especially as it exists in
our multicultural world.
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