The Being and Event trilogy is the philosophical basis of Alain Badiou's entire oeuvre. It is formed of three major texts, which constitute a kind of metaphysical saga: Being and Event (1988). ), Logics of the Worlds (2006) and finally The Immanence of Truths, which he has been working on for 15 years. The new volume reverses the perspective adopted in Logics of Worlds. Where in that book, Badiou saw fit to analyze how truths, qua events, appear from the perspective of particular worlds that by definition exclude them, in The Immanence of Truths Badiou asks instead how the irruption of truths transforms the worlds within which they by necessity must arise. An emphasis on regularity and continuity has given way to an attempt, one unquestionable in its philosophical power and implications, to formalize rupture and reconfiguration. The Being and Event trilogy is a unique and ambitious work that reveals how truths can be at once context-specific and universal, situational and eternal.

This book explores how phenomenological ideas about embodiment, perception, and lived experience are discussed within disability studies, critical race theory, and queer studies. Building on these disciplines, it offers readings of memoirs and novels that address the consequences of stigmatization and the bodily dimensions of social differences. The texts include Robert F. Murphy's The Body Silent, Simi Linton's My Body Politic, Rod Michalko's The Two-in-One: Walking with Smokie, Walking with Blindness, three memoirs by Stephen Kuusisto, Vincent O. Carter's The Bern Book, as well as two novels, Matthew Griffin's Hide and Armistead Maupin's Maybe the Moon. All of the texts discussed in this book negotiate the significance of bodily and perceptual habits, the influence of language and culture on embodiment, the importance of relationality and community, the severe effects of misrecognition, and the possibilities of emancipation and social recognition. Hence, they are read as pioneering contributions to the emerging field of critical phenomenology.

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.

Can the Marxist tradition still provide new resources for understanding the specificity of historical time? This volume proposes to transform our understanding of Marxism by reconnecting with the 'subterranean currents' of plural temporalities that have traversed its development. From Rousseau and Sieyes to Marx, from Bloch to Althusser, from Gramsci to Pasolini and postcolonialism, the chapters in this volume seek both to valorise neglected resources from Marxism's contradictory history, and also to read against the grain its orthodox and heterodox currents.

This book places the phenomenon of sports and games in its philological, archeological, and art historical context, and examines its connections to cultural and social history. The temporal scope extends from Tacitus' mention of dice games to courtly falconry and includes the culture of games among 17th century Swedish miners. The thematic spectrum includes among others dice and board games and the chivalrous septem probitates (seven skills).

This book synthesizes Jacques Derrida's hauntology and spectrality with affect theory, in order to create a rhetorical framework analyzing the felt absences and hauntings of written and oral texts. The book opens with a history of hauntology, spectrality, and affect theory and how each of those ideas have been applied. The book then moves into discussing the unique elements of the rhetorical framework known as the rhetorrectional situation. Three case studies taken from the Christian tradition, serve to demonstrate how spectral rhetoric works. The first is fictional, C.S. Lewis 'The Great Divorce. The second is non-fiction, Tim Jennings 'The God Shaped Brain. The final one is taken from homiletics, Bishop Michael Curry's royal wedding 2018 sermon. After the case studies conclusion offers the reader a summary and ideas future applications for spectral rhetoric.

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.

In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology--fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity. Plying this rich material with characteristic virtuosity, Derrida constructs a synergistic reading of archives and archiving, both provocative and compelling. Judaic mythos, Freudian psychoanalysis, and e-mail all get fused into another staggeringly dense, brilliant slab of scholarship and suggestion.--The Guardian [Derrida] convincingly argues that, although the archive is a public entity, it nevertheless is the repository of the private and personal, including even intimate details.--Choice Beautifully written and clear.--Jeremy Barris, Philosophy in Review Translator Prenowitz has managed valiantly to bring into English a difficult but inspiring text that relies on Greek, German, and their translations into French.--Library Journal

Demonstrates the embodied foundation of figurative, poetic and literary language and form Formal Matters re-examines the postmodernist insistence that the body escapes signification by turning to an unexpected source: early and mid-century formalisms. Bringing together formalism's endeavour to give shape to the ineffable with postmodernism's discursive body, the book argues that embodiment or the experience of the lived, corporeal body is not what resists representation but what constitutes form. Working at the intersection of formalist criticism, phenomenology and body studies, Zoe Roth reassesses the relationship between embodiment and form in a range of modern European authors, including Primo Levi, Maurice Blanchot, Samuel Beckett, Anne F. Garreta and Hannah Arendt. Through close textual analysis, Formal Matters provides a new method for grasping embodied experience where it appears most attenuated and fragmented. It provides an original account of the body's relationship to language and representation, while also reinvigorating formalist methods with political potential.

This Pivot studies the influence of Julia Kristeva's work on American literary and film studies. Chapters consider this influence via such innovative approaches as Hortense Spillers's and Jack Halberstam's to Paule Marshall's fiction and Bram Stoker's Dracula, respectively. The book also considers how critics in the United States receive Kristeva's work on French feminism, semiotics, and psychoanalytic writing in complex, controversial ways, especially on the question of marginalized populations. Examples include Kelly Oliver and Benigno Trigo on Orson Welles's The Lady from Shanghai and Touch of Evil as well as Frances Restuccia on David Lynch's Mulholland Drive. Carol Mastrangelo Bove also examines Kristeva's take on the US in her essays and fiction, which provide a vital part of the dialogue with American critics. Like them, Bove incorporates Kristeva's thought in her own creative readings of little-known authors and directors including Christiane Rochefort, Nancy Savoca, and Frank Lentricchia.

Siegfried Kracauer stands out as one of the most significant theorists and critics of the twentieth century, acclaimed for his analyses of film and popular culture. However, his writing on propaganda and politics has been overshadowed by the works of his contemporaries and colleagues associated with the Frankfurt School. This book brings together a broad selection of Kracauer's work on media and political communication, much of it previously unavailable in English. It features writings spanning more than two decades, from studies of totalitarian propaganda written in the 1930s to wartime work on Nazi newsreels and anti-Semitism through to examinations of American and Soviet political messaging in the early Cold War period. These varied texts illuminate the interplay among politics, mass culture, and the media, and they encompass Kracauer's core concerns: the individual and the masses, the conditions of cultural production, and the critique of modernity. The introduction and afterword explore the significance of Kracauer's contributions to critical theory, film and media studies, and the analysis of political communication both in his era and the present day. At a time when demagoguery and bigotry loom over world politics, Kracauer's inquiries into topics such as the widespread appeal of fascist propaganda and the relationship of new media forms and technologies to authoritarianism are strikingly relevant.

When it comes to the question of objectivity in current philosophical debates, there is a growing prominence of two opposite approaches: nominalism and realism. By absolutising intersubjectivity, the nominalist approach is moving towards the abandonment of the very notion of truth and objective reality. For its part, the realist approach insists on the category of the object-in-itself as irreducible to any kind of subjective mediation. Despite their seeming mutual exclusiveness, both approaches share a fundamental presupposition, namely, that of a neat separation between the spheres of subjectivity and objectivity as well as between fiction and truth. This collection offers a rethinking of the relationship between objectivity and fiction through engaging with a series of 'objective fictions', including such topics as fetishes, semblances, lies, rumours, sophistry, fantasies and conspiracy theories. It does so through engagement with modern and contemporary philosophical traditions and psychoanalytic theory, with all of these orientations being irreducible to either nominalist or realist approaches.

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.

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.

Wahrheitstheorien sind ein zentraler Bestandteil von Davidsons semantischem Programm zur Erklarung von Interpretation. Deflationare Wahrheitskonzeptionen hingegen schreiben dem Wahrheitspradikat eine minimale explanatorische Funktion zu. Die Frage der Vereinbarkeit dieser beiden Positionen bildet den Kern dieser Untersuchung. Eine Antwort wird durch eine kritische Auseinandersetzung mit Unvereinbarkeitsargumenten und durch eine systematische Betrachtung der Funktion eines deflationaren Wahrheitspradikats anhand von axiomatischen Wahrheitstheorien gegeben. Letztlich wird dafur argumentiert, dass nichts gegen die fruchtbare Anwendbarkeit einer deflationaren Wahrheitstheorie innerhalb von Davidsons semantischem Programm spricht."

Taxidermy, once the province of natural history and dedicated to the pursuit of lifelike realism, has recently resurfaced in the world of contemporary art,culture, and interior design. In Speculative Taxidermy, Giovanni Aloi offers a comprehensive mapping of the discourses and practices that have enabled the emergence of taxidermy in contemporary art. Drawing on the speculative turn in philosophy and recovering past alternative histories of art and materiality from a biopolitical perspective, Aloi theorizes speculative taxidermy: a powerful interface that unlocks new ethical and political opportunities in human-animal relationships and speaks to how animal representation conveys the urgency of climate change, capitalist exploitation, and mass extinction. A resolutely nonanthropocentric take on the materiality of one of the most controversial mediums in art, this approach relentlessly questions past and present ideas of human separation from the animal kingdom. It situates taxidermy as a powerful interface between humans and animals, rooted in a shared ontological and physical vulnerability. Carefully considering a select number of key examples including the work of Nandipha Mntambo, Maria Papadimitriou, Mark Dion, Berlinde De Bruyckere, Roni Horn, Oleg Kulik, Steve Bishop, Snaebjornsdottir/Wilson, and Cole Swanson,Speculative Taxidermy contextualizes the resilient presence of animal skin in the gallery space as a productive opportunity to rethink ethical and political stances in human-animal relationships.

Derrida and Textual Animality: For a Zoogrammatology of Literature analyses what has come to be known, in the Humanities, as 'the question of the animal', in relation to literary texts. Rodolfo Piskorski intervenes in the current debate regarding the non-human and its representation in literature, resisting popular materialist methodological approaches in the field by revisiting and revitalising the post-structuralist thought of Derrida and the 'linguistic turn'. The book focuses on Derrida's early work in order to frame deconstructive approaches to literature as necessary for a theory and practice of literary criticism that addresses the question of the animal, arguing that texts are like animals, and animals are like texts. While Derrida's late writings have been embraced by animal studies scholars due to its overt focus on animality, ethics, and the non-human, Piskorski demonstrates the additional value of these early Derridean texts for the field of literary animal studies by proposing detailed zoogrammatological readings of texts by Freud, Clarice Lispector, Ted Hughes, and Darren Aronofsky, while in dialogue with thinkers such as Butler, Kristeva, Genette, Deleuze and Guattari, and Attridge.

The present book deals with Sarah Kane's dramatic text Cleansed to show a specific negotiation of violence, pain, life and death - one that is not necessarily causal or dichotomous. Instead, a new mode of reading, based on Bruno Latour's take on Actor-Network-Theory, helps to make fictional worlds simultaneously intelligible in a mediate and in an immediate way. This results in an unprecedented understanding of how language can influence and modify ontological configurations. Eventually, this allows for a re-evaluation of political problems that occur in the 20th and 21st century.

Monika Kaup pairs post-apocalyptic novels by Margaret Atwood, Jose Saramago, Octavia Butler and Cormac McCarthy with new realist theories from Bruno Latour, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Markus Gabriel, Jean-Luc Marion and Alphonso Lingis. She shows that, just as new realist theory can illuminate post-apocalyptic literature, post-apocalyptic literature can illuminate new theories of the real. Kaup showcases a context-based concept of the real. She argues that new realisms of complex and embedded wholes, actor-networks and ecologies - not the old realisms of isolated parts and things - represent the most promising escape from the impasses of constructivism and positivism.

This book explores the ethical dilemma clinicians may face when disclosing a diagnosis of atypical sex. The moment of disclosure reveals an epistemic incompatibility between scientific fact and social meaning in relation to sex. Attempting to assess the bio-psychosocial implications of this dilemma highlights a complex historic antagonism between fact and meaning making satisfactory resolution of this dilemma difficult. Drawing on David Hume, WVO Quine and Michel Foucault the author presents an integrative model, which views scientific fact and social meaning as codetermining threads in one fabric of knowledge. From this epistemic perspective, the ethical dilemma is understood as a tear in the fabric signifying a rupturing of ontological integrity. To mend this tear and resolve the ethical dilemma three metaphysical perspectives are considered: essentialism, naturalism and emergentism. The book's unique features include: an exploration of the impact of diagnostic disclosure on people with atypical sex (intersex); a synthesis of the epistemic perspectives of social and natural science facilitating interdisciplinary collaboration; a critical evaluation of three metaphysical perspectives on atypical sex (intersex); the application of Hume's epistemological and moral distinctions to contemporary biomedicine and bioethics. The book's target audience includes academics, students and professionals whose work intersects the natural and social sciences, and individuals interested in the metaphysics, epistemology and meta-ethics of sex.

Following Francois Laruelle's nonstandard philosophy and the work of Judith Butler, Drucilla Cornell, Luce Irigaray, and Rosi Braidotti, Katerina Kolozova reclaims the relevance of categories traditionally rendered "unthinkable" by postmodern feminist philosophies, such as "the real," "the one," "the limit," and "finality," thus critically repositioning poststructuralist feminist philosophy and gender/queer studies. Poststructuralist (feminist) theory sees the subject as a purely linguistic category, as always already multiple, as always already nonfixed and fluctuating, as limitless discursivity, and as constitutively detached from the instance of the real. This reconceptualization is based on the exclusion of and dichotomous opposition to notions of the real, the one (unity and continuity), and the stable. The non-philosophical reading of postructuralist philosophy engenders new forms of universalisms for global debate and action, expressed in a language the world can understand. It also liberates theory from ideological paralysis, recasting the real as an immediately experienced human condition determined by gender, race, and social and economic circumstance.

Warum gefallt uns etwas? Wie koennen wir jemanden von unseren asthetischen Einschatzungen uberzeugen? Gibt es Richtig und Falsch in der AEsthetik? Worin besteht der Wert von Kunst? Was heisst es, ein Musikstuck zu verstehen? Was ist Stil? Was zeichnet ein Genie aus? Welche Rolle spielt die Kultur beim Verstehen von Kunst? Und schliesslich: Was haben philosophische und asthetische Probleme gemeinsam? Ludwig Wittgenstein beschaftigte sich intensiv mit diesen Fragen und glaubte, zwischen AEsthetik und Philosophie bestehe eine "seltsame AEhnlichkeit". Die vorliegende Arbeit erlautert Wittgensteins UEberlegungen zur AEsthetik und zeigt, dass seine Thesen und Argumente einen hilfreichen Beitrag zur Klarung systematischer Fragen der AEsthetik leisten. Leseprobe Leseprobe oeffnen

This book is about Positioning Theory (Davies & Harre, 1990) and its potential applications in bilingual and multilingual contexts involving teachers, learners, speakers, and users of a second/foreign or additional language. By using Positioning Theory as a theoretical lens and analytical approach, the author illustrates how various social and poststructural concepts in applied linguistics and language teacher education, including identity, agency, language socialization, classroom participation, and intercultural communication, can be investigated and better understood. The book adds a new perspective to the growing body of multidisciplinary literature in the areas of L2 teacher education and classroom learning, and includes step-by-step guidelines for positioning analysis, insights and implications for classroom practice, as well as suggested directions for future research. It will be of particular interest to language teachers and teacher educators, as well as students and scholars of applied linguistics more broadly.

This edited volume brings together leading international researchers from across the social sciences to examine the theoretical premises, methodological options and critical potentials of the Essex School of discourse analysis, founded on the work of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe. In doing so, it presents a clear picture of a poststructuralist and post-foundational research program to postdisciplinary discourse research. Divided into three parts, it begins by elaborating the ontological, theoretical and methodological foundations of the Essex School's approach to discourse analysis. The second part provides empirical case studies showing how the Essex School research program informs and instructs empirical discourse research. In the concluding third part authors explain how and with what possible consequences this strand of discourse research contributes to social practices of critique. It offers a crucial contribution to the further methodologization and operationalization of the Essex School's approach so as to make it a viable alternative to discourse-analytical approaches that take dominant positions in today's 'field of discourse studies'. The book's transdisciplinary focus will attract readers who use discourse analysis in all areas of the social sciences and humanities, particularly applied linguistics, cultural anthropology, sociology, philosophy and history.