Comforting a family member or friend, soothing children, providing company for the elderly, ensuring that people feel well enough to work; this is all essential labour. Without it, capitalism would cease to function. They Call It Love investigates the work that makes a haven in a heartless world, examining who performs this labour, how it is organised, and how it might change. In this groundbreaking book, Alva Gotby calls this work 'emotional reproduction', unveiling its inherently political nature. It not only ensures people's well-being but creates sentimental attachments to social hierarchy and the status quo. Drawing on the thought of the feminist movement Wages for Housework, Gotby demonstrates that emotion is a key element of capitalist reproduction. To improve the way we relate to one another will require a radical restructuring of society.

Michel Foucault defined critique as an exercise in de-subjectivation. To what extent did this claim shape his philosophical practice? What are its theoretical and ethical justifications? Why did Foucault come to view the production of subjectivity as a key site of political and intellectual emancipation in the present? Andrea Rossi pursues these questions in The Labour of Subjectivity. The book re-examines the genealogy of the politics of subjectivity that Foucault began to outline in his lectures at the College de France in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He explores Christian confession, raison d'etat, biopolitics and bioeconomy as the different technologies by which Western politics has attempted to produce, regulate and give form to the subjectivity of its subjects. Ultimately Rossi argues that Foucault's critical project can only be comprehended within the context of this historico-political trajectory, as an attempt to give the extant politics of the self a new horizon.

In a political climate increasingly characterised by hostility towards constructed others, Steven Gormley answers the question: what does it mean, and how can we respond to the demand, to do justice to the other? He pursues this question by developing a critical, but productive, dialogue between deliberative theory and deconstruction. Two key claims emerge from this: doing justice to the other demands that we maintain an ethos of interruption; and, such an ethos requires a democratic form of politics. In developing this account, Gormley places deliberative theory and deconstruction into critical conversation with the work of Mouffe, Aristotle, Rorty, Laclau and different traditions of critical theory.

The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject. Examinations of music signification have been an essential component in thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that music signification has been established as an independent area of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially, incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect the various contexts in which music is created and experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in inquiries into music signification. This book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.

This book brings to light Derrida's rich and thought-provoking discussions of Shakespearean drama. Contextualising Derrida's readings of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, The Merchant of Venice and King Lear within his wider philosophical project, Alfano explores what draws Derrida to Shakespeare and what makes him particularly suitable for philosophical thought. The author also makes the case for Derrida's singular understanding of the relationship between philosophy and Shakespeare and his radical idea of what literary genius is.

This collection of essays from a range of philosophers and art practitioners offers tools through which we can action change across art and philosophy, across a range of media and across the theory/practice divide. Including insights from contemporary Middle Eastern art to Indigenous ritual art and from feminist and queer art to architectural algorithms, this collection will decolonise your thinking about art - bypassing the traditional Western-centred art history. The first section includes theoretical essays on the concept of multiplicities, on affect and politics as well as the thought of Raymond Ruyer and Gilbert Simondon - 2 key influences on Deleuze and Guattari. The second section includes applied essays on specific art practices including the plastic arts, theatre, architecture, music and folk performances.

Is time a natural reality that social symbols such as clocks and calendars merely contingently represent? Lateness protocols seemingly exhibit such contingency, for not all cultures regulate synchronization identically. Just as social/cultural time structures are interpreted to diverge from time's natural rhythm, body modifications are often presented as social productions that divert human bodies from their naturally originated, corporeal temporality. A similar separation informs climate change discourses, supposing a natural rhythm that industrialized culture has invaded, the effects of which humans might be too late to arrest. Interrogating this conceptual separation matters, given that if certain times are considered to be more natural than others, a situated politics emerges regarding the associated cultural structures. Furthermore, our personal investments in experiences of lateness, which are embedded within social time, seemingly contradict the constructionist impression that social time is merely a contingent misrepresentation of what time actually is. Through Derridian deconstruction, Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, and Bergsonian time-philosophy, complemented with voices from fields including object oriented ontology, new materialism, and new criticism, this book re-evaluates the timing of times from a philosophical perspective.

Barthes investigation into the meaning of photographs is a seminal work of twentieth-century critical theory. This is a special Vintage Design Edition, with fold-out cover and stunning photography throughout. Examining themes of presence and absence, these reflections on photography begin as an investigation into the nature of photographs - their content, their pull on the viewer, their intimacy. Then, as Barthes contemplates a photograph of his mother as a child, the book becomes an exposition of his own mind. He was grieving for his mother at the time of writing. Strikingly personal, yet one of the most important early academic works on photography, Camera Lucida remains essential reading for anyone interested in the power of images. 'Effortlessly, as if in passing, his reflections on photography raise questions and doubts which will permanently affect the vision of the reader' Guardian

Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy explores how and why Freud's late work on fetishism led to the beginnings of a re-formulation of the theory and practice of psychoanalysis. Freud himself, however, was unaware of the long history of the concept of fetishism, a history crucial to understanding the concept. This book contains three main thrusts. One is historical, tracing the development of the concept of fetishism from the 16th century onwards. The focus here is on two important thinkers: Charles de Brosses from the 18th century, and Auguste Comte from the 19th. The second thrust is philosophical. Fetishism is always about the relation between the mind and things. Martin Heidegger, Jaques Derrida, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty have made essential contributions in this area, contributions which have important scientific relevance. The third thrust integrate the historical, philosophical, and psychoanalytic investigations of fetishism. It also looks at Wallace Stevens' poetic meditation on mind and thing, which helps to illuminate everything that precedes. This comprehensive book features careful integration of the historical, philosophical, and psychoanalytic investigations of fetishism. It will contribute to opening new ways of thinking about the mind and how it is structured, so that fetishism is possible. Fetishism, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy will appeal to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars.

Your one-stop guide to poststructuralism: where it came from, what it's achieved and where it's going. Written by experts in their field, this important reference volume surveys the challenges and provocations raised by the major voices of poststructuralism: Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Cixous, Lyotard, Guattari, Kristeva, Irigary, Barthes and Baudrillard. Thematically organised and clearly written, it will guide students in philosophy, literature, art, geography, politics, sociology, law, film and cultural studies around the nature and contemporary relevance of poststructuralism. It explores the emergence of poststructuralism, from its origins in Marxism and structuralism to its global academic impact. It includes chapters that are arranged by theme and topic, showing which ideas captivated poststructuralist thinkers. It looks at the criticisms of poststructuralism. It investigates the new trends and recent debates within and around poststructuralism.

Our political climate is increasingly characterised by hostility towards constructed others. Steven Gormley answers the question: what does it mean to do justice to others? He pursues this question by developing a critical, but productive, dialogue between deliberative theory and deconstruction. Two key claims emerge from this. First: doing justice to the other demands that we maintain an ethos of interruption. And secondly: Such an ethos requires a democratic form of politics. In developing this account, Gormley places deliberative theory and deconstruction into critical conversation with the work of Mouffe, Aristotle, Rorty, Laclau and different traditions of critical theory.

A. Kiarina Kordela steps beyond extant commentaries on Marx's theory of commodity fetishism-from A. Sohn-Rethel to L. Althusser, E. Balibar, Slavoj Zizek, and others-to show that in capitalism value is the manifestation of the homology between thought and being, while their other aspect-power-is foreclosed and becomes the object of biopower. Using monistic Marxian/Lacanian structuralism as an alternative to dominant models from Plato and Kant to phenomenological accounts, deconstruction, and other contemporary approaches, Kordela expertly argues that Marx's theory of commodity fetishism is a reformulation of the Spinozian thesis that thought (mind) and things (bodies or extension) are manifestations of one and the same being or substance. Kordela's link between Spinoza and Marx shows that being consists of two aspects, value and power, the former leading to structuralist thought, the latter becoming the object of contemporary biopower. Epistemontology in Spinoza-Marx-Freud-Lacan intervenes between two dominant lines of thought in the reception of Marx today: on the one hand, an approach that relates Marxian thought to psychoanalysis from a Hegelian/dialectical perspective and, on the other hand, an approach that links Marxism to Spinozian monism, at the total exclusion of psychoanalysis. This book will interest scholars and researchers who study Marxism, (post)structuralism, psychoanalysis, critical theory, ontology, epistemology and theories of representation, theoreticians of cultural studies and comparative literature, aesthetic theory, including the relation of art to economy and politics, and biopolitics.

Deleuze's thought on the nature of temporality developed throughout his career in reference to a complex array of concepts, thinkers and artistic works as well as natural and social phenomena. In this collection, leading international scholars elaborate on Deleuze's modification of the thought of historical figures, from the ancients - Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, Lucretius - through to the moderns - Spinoza Kant, Husserl, Nietzsche, Bergson, Simondon, Negri - as well as his use of scientific fields such as complexity theory and thermodynamics. The book shows that the philosophy of time was central to the development of Deleuze's work. In addition to discussing how time is conceptualized in Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense, this collection stands out for its elucidation of Deleuze's modification of the concept in his two books on cinema.

Drawing on poststructuralist approaches, Craig Martin outlines a theory of discourse, ideology, and domination that can be used by scholars and students to understand these central elements in the study of culture. The book shows how discourses are used to construct social institutions-often classist, sexist, or racist-and that those social institutions always entail a distribution of resources and capital in ways that capacitate some subject positions over others. Such asymmetrical power relations are often obscured by ideologies that offer demonstrably false accounts of why those asymmetries exist or persist. The author provides a method of reading in order to bring matters into relief, and the last chapter provides a case study that applies his theory and method to racist ideologies in the United States, which systematically function to discourage white Americans from sympathizing with poor African Americans, thereby contributing to reinforcing the latter's place at the bottom of a racial hierarchy that has always existed in the US.

What gives us the right to speak of a Deleuzian philosophy, a philosophy at first sight concerned solely with interpreting other philosophers and writers? Koichiro Kokubun focuses on Deleuze's method of 'free indirect discourse' to locate and explicate Deleuze's philosophy of transcendental empiricism and its constitutive limits. Working through Deleuze's confrontations with Hume, Kant, Bergson, Freud, Lacan, Foucault and Guattari, Kokubun uncovers a philosophy strongly influenced by structuralism and psychoanalysis, which had to overtake these movements because of its practical ambitions. Kokubun concludes with a radical revitalisation of the political potential of this philosophy.

Gavin Rae offers us a new evaluation of poststructuralist thought. This involves a re-conception of the embodied subject as a continual process within and defined by ever-changing configurations of the social, the symbolic and the psychic.He shows that the question of the subject is central for poststructuralist thinkers, that they are aware of the problematic status of agency that arises from their decentring of the subject and that they offer heterogeneous solutions to resolve it. First, showing how this plays out in the thinking of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault, Rae subsequently demonstrates that it is with those poststructuralists associated with and influenced by Lacanian psychoanalysis that this issue most clearly comes to the fore. He goes on to reveal that the conceptual schema of Cornelius Castoriadis best explains how the founded subject is capable of agency.

A classic of Western Marxism, The Destruction of Reason is Georg Lukacs's trenchant criticism of German philosophy after Marx and the role it played in the rise of National Socialism. Originally published in 1952, the book is a sustained and detailed polemic against post-Hegelian German philosophy and sociology from Kierkegaard to Heidegger. The Destruction of Reason is unsparing in its contention that with almost no exceptions, the post-Hegelian tradition prepared the ground fascist thought. In this, the main culprits are Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger who are accused, in turn, of introducing irrationalism into social and philosophical thought, pronounced antagonism to the idea of progress in history, an aristocratic view of the "masses," and, consequently, hostility to socialism, which in its classic expressions are movements for popular democracy-especially, but not exclusively, the expropriation of most private property in terms of material production. The Destruction of Reason remains one of Lukacs's most controversial, albeit little read, books. This new edition, featuring an historical introduction by Enzo Traverso, will finally see this classic come back in to print.

This book recovers a sense of the high stakes of Shakespearean comedy, arguing that the comedies, no less than the tragedies, serve to dramatize responses to the condition of being human, responses that invite scholarly investigation and explanation. Taking its cue from Stanley Cavell's influential readings of Othello and Lear, the book argues that exposure or vulnerability to others is the source of both human happiness and human misery; while the tragedies showcase attempts at the evasion of such vulnerability through the self-defeating pursuit of epistemological certainty, the comedies present the drama and the difficulty of turning away from an epistemological register in order to productively respond to the fact of our humanity. Where Shakespeare's tragedies might be viewed in Cavellian terms as the drama of skepticism, Shakespeare's comedies then exemplify the drama of acknowledgement. As a parallel and a preamble, Gottlieb suggests that the field of literary studies is itself a site of such revealing responses: where competing research methods strive to foreclose upon (or, alternatively, rejoice in) epistemological uncertainty, such commitments bespeak an urge to avoid or circumvent the human in the practice of scholarship. Reading Shakespeare's comedies in tandem with a "defactoist" view of teaching and learning points in the direction of a new humanism, one that eschews both the relativism of old deconstruction and contemporary Presentism and the determinism of various kinds of structural accounts. This book offers something new in scholarly and popular understanding of Shakespeare's work, doing so with both philosophical rigor and literary attention to the difficult work of reading.

Lacan postulated that the psyche can be understood by means of certain structures, which control our lives and our desires, and which operate differently at different logical moments or stages of formation. Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure offers us a reading of the major concepts of Lacan in terms of his later topological theory and aims to show how this was always a concern for Lacan and not only an issue in the last seminars. Ellie Ragland discusses how various stages of formation can be uncovered topologically within language itself, and operate to place certain properties - fantasy, the drive, jouissance, discourse and ethics in language itself. In this way she explores not only how language actually works in tandem with the properties, but also gives a different idea of what knowledge actually is and what implications that may have for reimagining and reworking differential/diagnostic structures. Jacques Lacan and the Logic of Structure is a compelling exponent of the innovative approaches Lacan takes to rethinking what psychoanalysis is and what it can do to enlighten psychoanalysts and treat patients. It will be essential reading to psychoanalysts, psychoanalytic psychotherapists training graduate students in the fields of film, literary, gender and cultural studies.

Hartmut Rosa advances an account of the temporal structure of society from the perspective of critical theory. He identifies three categories of change in the tempo of modern social life: technological acceleration, evident in transportation, communication, and production; the acceleration of social change, reflected in cultural knowledge, social institutions, and personal relationships; and acceleration in the pace of life, which happens despite the expectation that technological change should increase an individual's free time. According to Rosa, both the structural and cultural aspects of our institutions and practices are marked by the "shrinking of the present," a decreasing time period during which expectations based on past experience reliably match the future. When this phenomenon combines with technological acceleration and the increasing pace of life, time seems to flow ever faster, making our relationships to each other and the world fluid and problematic. It is as if we are standing on "slipping slopes," a steep social terrain that is itself in motion and in turn demands faster lives and technology. As Rosa deftly shows, this self-reinforcing feedback loop fundamentally determines the character of modern life.

Focusing primarily on Aristotle's Physics Alpha, an attempt is made to establish the structure and significance of the Aristotelian analogy. Traditionally, the concept of analogy in Aristotle has been treated along two lines of interpretation. In this book, these are referred to as the mathematical interpretation and the correlative interpretation. The mathematical approach claims that the Aristotelian analogy only accounts for proportional comparisons between usually four things. On the other hand, the correlative interpretation describes the Aristotelian analogy as something that unites the multiple uses of a single term (the many uses of "healthy," for example). This book will argue that both of these interpretations overlook the nature of the Aristotelian analogy. The structure of analogy can be taken from Aristotle's discussion of the three principles of natural "becoming" in his Physics Alpha. In Physics Alpha, Aristotle claims that these three principles are: 1) the being in its addressable form (logos); 2) the course of becoming of that addressable being (steresis); 3) the substance that remains the same throughout the change (hypokeimenon). Although the first principle, logos, accounts for addressability, the other two do not. The second and third principles are inseparable from logos but always remain hidden from addressability (ana-logos). This book will argue that these principles reveal a structure of analogy that discloses an inherent mobility of logos which enables it to reflect the intuitive and ever-changing principles of becoming. As such, the relationship between Logos and intuition (nous) can be reimagined.

Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to grasp, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Jacques Derrida is one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. His writings, his lectures and his involvement in a number of political causes have transformed the way in which literature and cultural studies is taught yet his work has often met with incomprehension, hostility and fear. This guide provides students with a clear, unintimidating introduction to Derrida, the key concepts and ideas associated with his work and the major subjects he addresses. Without assuming any prior knowledge of Derrida's work or literary theory more widely, the guide introduces Derrida's ideas, work, reception and his wider philosophical and critical influence. Throughout, Wolfreys refers to literature and film examples, grounding discussion of theoretical concepts in close reading of specific texts. CONTENTS: Acknowledgements; Abbreviations; Preface; 1. Introduction; 2. Deconstruction; 3. Differance and Writing; 4. Art; 5. Literature; Afterword; Bibliography; Index

Twenty-five years after the publication of Derrida's Politics of Friendship (Politiques de l'amitie, 1994), this edited collection gathers twenty-three critical chapters each revisiting this underappreciated text, including Derrida's Geschlecht IV, an essay excluded from the English translation.Engaging closely with Derrida's text are analyses, extensions and critiques of the work. It not only reconsiders the place this book occupies in Derrida's political philosophy but also its potential for contemporary politics, when the promises and perils of political friendship have reappeared, intertwined with both nationalist and anti-nationalist political programmes.

'A brilliant display of fireworks, attacking the widespread and banal notion that "in the beginning" sexual activity was guilt-free and delicious, being repressed and blighted only by the gloom of Victorianism' Spectator We talk about sex more and more, but are we more liberated? The first part of Michel Foucault's landmark account of our evolving attitudes in the west shows how the nineteenth century, far from suppressing sexuality, led to an explosion of discussion about sex as a separate sphere of life for study and examination. As a result, he argues, we are making a science of sex which is devoted to the analysis of desire rather than the increase of pleasure. 'A wealth of insights, original conceptualizations and provocative ideas' The Times Literary Supplement