Essential reading for scholars and students in critical theory, psychoanalysis, and gender studies.
How does the self care for itself in the posthumanist era? What psychic processes might allow the postmodern subject to find meaning and value in its life? Is it possible to delineate a theory of psychic potentiality that is compatible with poststructuralist models of fluid, decentered, and polyvalent subjectivity?
"Reinventing the Soul" offers a new perspective on what it means to be a human being and to strive in the world despite the wounding effects of the socialization process. Drawing on the rich legacies of French poststructuralism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, Ruti builds an affirmative alternative to the post-Foucaultian tendency to envision subjectivity as a function of hegemonic systems of power. She proposes that the subject's encounter with the world also necessarily activates the psyche's innovative potential. By focusing on matters of creative agency, imaginative empowerment, inner metamorphosis, and self-actualization, Ruti outlines some of the mechanisms by which the psyche manages not only to survive its lack, alienation, or suffering, but also to transform its abjection into an existentially livable reality. Central to Ruti's argument is the idea that human beings relate to the world in active rather than merely passive ways--as dynamic creators of meaning rather than as powerless dupes of disciplinary power.

Globalization and consumerism are two of the buzzwords of the early twenty-first century. In Consuming Cultures, renowned scholars explore the links between modernity and consumption. The book fills a gap in contemporary thinking on the subject by approaching it from a truly global point-of-view. It draws on case studies from around the world, with Africa, Asia and Central America featuring as prominently as Western countries. A transnational perspective allows the authors to investigate the diversity of consumer cultures and the interaction between them. The authors look at the genealogy of the modern consumer and the development of consumer cultures, from the porcelain trade and consumption in Britain and China in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to post Second World War developments in America and Japan, and the contemporary consumer politics of cosmopolitan citizenship. Challenging and pioneering, Consuming Cultures problematizes popular accounts of globalization and consumerism, decentring the West and concentrating on putting history back into these accounts.

Displacement is a unique collection of essays devoted to Jacques Derrida, widely regarded as the greatest influence on the theory and practice of reading and writing of the past fifteen years. Reflecting Derrida's broad philosophical and cultural concerns, the essays in this volume deal with questions of interpretation in literature, psychoanalysis, theology, and political theory. Writing, feminism, Jewishness, radical politics, and the unconscious are all presented here as appropriate objects of a literary study that goes far beyond conventional structural analyses of individual texts. An insightful introduction by Mark Krupnick clarifies the meaning of "displacement," a concept and method central to Derrida's work. Krupnick discusses the recent history and status of "displacement" as a key term in contemporary theory both in Europe and in America.

Investigating connections between philosophical hermeneutics and neighbouring traditions of thought, this volume considers the question of how post-Heideggerian hermeneutics, as represented by Gadamer, Ricoeur and recent scholars following in their wake, relate to these traditions, both in general terms and bearing upon specific questions. The traditions covered in this volume-existentialism, pragmatism, poststructuralism, Eastern philosophy, and hermeneutics itself-are all characterized by significant internal diversity, adding to the difficulty in reaching an interpretation that is at once comparative and critical. None of these traditions represent a unified system of belief; all are umbrella terms which are at once useful and imprecise, and the differences internal to each must not to be understated. An innovative work of comparative philosophy, this volume avoids oversimplification and offers specific analyses that treat hermeneutics in relation to particular themes and key figures in each of these traditions of thought. Philosophical hermeneutics is explicitly dialogical, and it is in this spirit that the authors of this book approach their subjects, revealing the important affinities and opportunities for mutually enriching conversations which have until now been overlooked.

Lacan Contra Foucault seeks to ground the divergences and confluences between these two key thinkers in relation to contemporary philosophy and criticism. Specifically the topics of sexuality, the theory of the subject, history and historicism, scientific formalization, and ultimately politics. In doing so, the authors in this volume open up new connections between Lacan and Foucault and shine a light on their contemporary relevance to politics and critical theory.

This new collection gathers 23 highly insightful yet previously difficult-to-find interviews with Baudrillard, ranging over topics as diverse as art, war, technology, globalisation, terrorism and the fate of humanity. From familiar themes to the less well understood aspects of his thought, these interviews give you an overview of Baudrillard's ideas - without the jargon typical of written texts. Read as Baudrillard himself discusses, explains and elaborates on his ideas, making this collection essential for understanding many of his other works.

This book addresses a surprisingly overlooked Foucauldian conundrum: what is the logical relationship between modern law and power? Jacopo Martire investigates the development of modern law in conjunction with what Foucault termed biopolitical forms of power. He gives you a much-needed genealogical analysis of the modern legal phenomenon, opening new avenues for Foucauldian approaches to law.

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.

True translation is transparent: it does not obscure the original, does not stand in its light, but rather allows pure language, as if strengthened by its own medium, to shine even more fully on the original. This is made possible primarily by conveying the syntax word-for-word; and this demonstrates that the word, not the sentence, is translations original element. For the sentence is the wall in front of the language of the original, and word-for-word rendering the arcade. (Walter Benjamin, The Translators Task) The book centers on Walter Benjamins revolutionary essay The Translators Task (1923) which subverts some widespread assumptions concerning translation: that it serves for communication, that it transfers meaning, that it must not distort the translators own language, and that it is inferior to the original. Benjamin overturns these assumptions by replacing the concept of translation as a merely linguistic operation with a metaphysical or theological concept of the same, derived from Jewish Kabbala and French Symbolisme. In The Translators Task, as well as his earlier essay On Language as such and the Language of Man, he delineates a cosmic linguistic cycle of descent from, and ascent back to, God. The translators task is to promote this ascent by deconstructing his own language in order to advance it towards a final Pure Language. Following an analysis of Benjamins approach, some of its affiliates are discussed in texts by Franz Rosenzweig, Paul Celan (as explicated by Peter Szondi) and Jacques Derrida. Rosenzweig, a translator like Benjamin, is shown to be concerned with more concrete aspects of translation, whereas Derridas autobiographical Monolingualism of the Other, though not focussing on translation, is shown to be an innovative contribution to the metaphysics of translation. Finally, an attempt is made to deal with the question of whether and how this abstract approach can be of help for the concrete practice of Poetry translation. The great poet Hoelderlins German translations of Sophocles testify to the clear, though elusive, practical contribution of this approach and to the importance of Benjamins legacy.

Vorstellungen von Absenz wirken in der Gegenwart auf breiter Basis - auch in der Literatur. Doch wie sind diese medial vermittelt? Geht man davon aus, dass Absenz-Phanomene sich nicht in einer primordialen Leere ereignen, sondern dass ihnen eher mit Vorstellungen vom Unbestimmten, Unverfugbaren und Moeglichen beizukommen ist, rucken Verraumlichungsformen in den Fokus, die bewegungslogisch zu erklaren sind. Um das intrikate Verhaltnis von Moeglichkeitsformen und 'Wirklichkeit' innerhalb der Grenzen des Sagbaren zu verhandeln, begegnen ihm Thomas Bernhards und Christoph Ransmayrs Erzahltexte mit Verfahren der Verraumlichung. Aus der Perspektive einer AEsthetik der Absenz poetisieren diese Erzahltexte Wahrnehmungsschwellen, indem sie Abwesendes textphanomenal verraumlichen, es jedoch nicht im (topo-)graphischen containment absichern, sondern eine Topologie eroeffnen, die auf Strategien des displacement setzt. Die Studie fuhrt raumtheoretische Ansatze unter einer differenztheoretischen Perspektive mit einem Konzept von Virtualitat zusammen, um literarische Verfahren der Verraumlichung von Absenz in Erzahltexten von Bernhard und Ransmayr zu untersuchen.

Words like "terrorism" and "war" no longer encompass the scope of contemporary violence. With this explosive book, Adriana Cavarero, one of the world's most provocative feminist theorists and political philosophers, effectively renders such terms obsolete. She introduces a new word--"horrorism"--to capture the experience of violence.

Unlike terror, horrorism is a form of violation grounded in the offense of disfiguration and massacre. Numerous outbursts of violence fall within Cavarero's category of horrorism, especially when the phenomenology of violence is considered from the perspective of the victim rather than that of the warrior. Cavarero locates horrorism in the philosophical, political, literary, and artistic representations of defenseless and vulnerable victims. She considers both terror and horror on the battlefields of the "Iliad," in the decapitation of Medusa, and in the murder of Medea's children. In the modern arena, she forges a link between horror, extermination, and massacre, especially the Nazi death camps, and revisits the work of Primo Levi, Hannah Arendt's thesis on totalitarianism, and Arendt's debate with Georges Bataille on the estheticization of violence and cruelty.

In applying the horroristic paradigm to the current phenomena of suicide bombers, torturers, and hypertechnological warfare, Cavarero integrates Susan Sontag's views on photography and the eroticization of horror, as well as ideas on violence and the state advanced by Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt. Through her searing analysis, Caverero proves that violence against the helpless claims a specific vocabulary, one that has been known for millennia, and not just to the Western tradition. Where common language fails to form a picture of atrocity, horrorism paints a brilliant portrait of its vivid reality.

The thirty-three essays in "Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology" grapple with one of the most intriguing, enduring, and far-reaching philosophical problems of our age. Relativism comes in many varieties. It is often defined as the belief that truth, goodness, or beauty is relative to some context or reference frame, and that no absolute standards can adjudicate between competing reference frames.

Michael Krausz's anthology captures the significance and range of relativistic doctrines, rehearsing their virtues and vices and reflecting on a spectrum of attitudes. Invoking diverse philosophical orientations, these doctrines concern conceptions of relativism in relation to facts and conceptual schemes, realism and objectivity, universalism and foundationalism, solidarity and rationality, pluralism and moral relativism, and feminism and poststructuralism. Featuring nine original essays, the volume also includes many classic articles, making it a standard resource for students, scholars, and researchers.

Deconstructions is a user's guide to deconstruction across a range of topics and discourses. Chapter topics range from the obvious (feminism, post-colonialism, and technology) to the less so (drugs, film, weaving). Yet each of the essays has more than one focus, exploring or opening on to further and other deconstructions. The book has been put together to demonstrate the multiple and altering contexts in which deconstructive thinking and practice are at work, both within and beyond the academy, both within and beyond what is called "the West." Nicholas Royle has commissioned new essays by some of the most distinguished contemporary thinkers, including Geoffrey Bennington, Diane Elam, J. Hillis Miller, and Jacques Derrida.

The founder of modern linguistics, Ferdinand de Saussure inaugurated semiology, structuralism, and deconstruction and made possible the work of Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan, thus enabling the development of French feminism, gender studies, New Historicism, and postcolonialism. Based on Saussure's lectures, "Course in General Linguistics" (1916) traces the rise and fall of the historical linguistics in which Saussure was trained, the synchronic or structural linguistics with which he replaced it, and the new look of diachronic linguistics that followed this change. Most important, Saussure presents the principles of a new linguistic science that includes the invention of semiology, or the theory of the "signifier," the "signified," and the "sign" that they combine to produce.

This is the first critical edition of "Course in General Linguistics" to appear in English and restores Wade Baskin's original translation of 1959, in which the terms "signifier" and "signified" are introduced into English in this precise way. Baskin renders Saussure clearly and accessibly, allowing readers to experience his shift of the theory of reference from mimesis to performance and his expansion of poetics to include all media, including the life sciences and environmentalism. An introduction situates Saussure within the history of ideas and describes the history of scholarship that made "Course in General Linguistics" legendary. New endnotes enlarge Saussure's contexts to include literary criticism, cultural studies, and philosophy.

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.

Colleen Glenney Boggs puts animal representation at the center of the making of the liberal American subject. Concentrating on the formative and disruptive presence of animals in the writings of Frederick Douglass, Edgar Allan Poe, and Emily Dickinson, Boggs argues that animals are critical to the ways in which Americans enact their humanity and regulate subjects in the biopolitical state. Biopower, or a politics that extends its reach to life, thrives on the strategic ambivalence between who is considered human and what is judged as animal. It generates a space of indeterminacy in which animal representations intervene to define and challenge the parameters of subjectivity. The renegotiation of the species line produces a tension that is never fully regulated. Therefore, as both figures of radical alterity and the embodiment of biopolitics, animals are simultaneously exceptional and exemplary to the biopolitical state. An original contribution to animal studies, American studies, critical race theory, and posthumanist inquiry, Boggs thrillingly reinterprets a long and highly contentious human-animal history.

What is man? Judith Still examines Derrida's contribution to this long-standing philosophical and political debate, which has typically evoked a significant division between human beings and other animals. Derrida pays close attention to how animals are used to explore humanity in a range of writings, including fables and fiction. This leads to ethical questions about how humans treat animals: sacrificing animals (say, in factory farms) while extending love to pets. And it leads to political questions about how we dehumanise 'outsiders', from historical matters such as colonialism and slavery to contemporary issues such as State Terror in response to 'rogue states'.

In this ground-breaking and influential study Fredric Jameson explores the complex place and function of literature within culture. At the time Jameson was actually writing the book, in the mid to late seventies, there was a major reaction against deconstruction and poststructuralism. As one of the most significant literary theorists, Jameson found himself in the unenviable position of wanting to defend his intellectual past yet keep an eye on the future. With this book he carried it off beautifully. A landmark publication, The Political Unconscious takes its place as one of the most meaningful works of the twentieth century.century.

Table of Contents

PREFACE 1 On Interpretation: Literature as a Socially Symbolic Act 2 Magical Narratives: On the Dialectical Use of Genre Criticism 3 Realism and Desire: Balzac and the Problem of the Subject 4 Authentic Ressentiment: Generic Discontinuities and Ideologemes in the Experimental Novels of George Gissing 5 Romance and Reification: Plot Construction and Ideological Closure in Joseph Conrad 6 Conclusion: The Dialectic of Utopia and Ideology INDEX

The English version of Dissemination [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson . . . . Derrida's central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosophy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives--against the grain of language--to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature--on the other hand--flaunts its own meretriciousness, abandons itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In Dissemination--more than any previous work--Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to 'deconstruct' both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to the literature of truth.--Peter Dews, New Statesman

In this significant new work in African philosophy, Christopher Wise explores deconstruction's historical indebtedness to Egypto-African civilization and its relevance in Islamicate Africa today. He does so by comparing deconstructive and African thought on the spoken utterance, nothingness, conjuration, the oath or vow, occult sorcery, blood election, violence, circumcision, totemic inscription practices, animal metamorphosis and sacrifice, the Abrahamic, fratricide, and jihad. Situated against the backdrop of the Ansar Dine's recent jihad in Northern Mali, Sorcery, Totem and Jihad in African Philosophy examines the root causes of the conflict and offers insight into the Sahel's ancient, complex, and vibrant civilization. This book also demonstrates the relevance of deconstructive thought in the African setting, especially the writing of the Franco-Algerian philosopher Jacques Derrida.

Building a foundational understanding of the digital, Logic of the Digital reveals a unique digital ontology. Beginning from formal and technical characteristics, especially the binary code at the core of all digital technologies, Aden Evens traces the pathways along which the digital domain of abstract logic encounters the material, human world. How does a code using only 0s and 1s give rise to the vast range of applications and information that constitutes a great and growing portion of our world? Evens' analysis shows how any encounter between the actual and the digital must cross an ontological divide, a gap between the productive materiality of the human world and the reductive abstraction of the binary code. Logic of the Digital examines the distortions of this ontological crossing, considering the formal abstraction that persists in exemplary digital technologies and techniques such as the mouse, the Web, the graphical user interface, and the development of software. One crucial motive for this research lies in the paradoxical issue of creativity in relation to digital technologies: the ontology of abstraction leaves little room for the unpredictable or accidental that is essential to creativity, but digital technologies are nevertheless patently creative. Evens inquires into the mechanisms by which the ostensibly sterile binary code can lend itself to such fecund cultural production. Through clarification of the digital's ontological foundation, Evens points to a significant threat to creativity lurking in the nature of the digital and so generates a basis for an ethics of digital practice. Examining the bits that give the digital its ontology, exploring the potentials and limitations of programming, and using gaming as an ideal test of digital possibility, Logic of the Digital guides future practices and shapes academic research in the digital.

The volume addresses the philosophical, epistemological and interdisciplinary aspects of the link between psychoanalysis and topology. Looking at the historical developments of psychoanalytic theory, one can hardly overlook the significant presence of architectonic and geometrical references that traverse Freud's writings. Lacan's return to Freud made a decisive step in taking these metaphors seriously and engaged with the mathematical correspondence of Freud's topological models. He thereby intensified the link with topology, which obtained an important didactic and conceptual value. The contributions highlight the ongoing relevance of this "topological turn" in psychoanalysis by exploring both concrete topological objects and outline the philosophical framework that supports the relation of psychoanalysis to topology.