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.

This important new book argues that Jacques Derrida's work can be treated as the basis for a distinctive historiography. The possibility of seeing Derrida not as a philosopher of language but as a philosopher of history has become more apparent with the recent publication of Derrida's 1964-1965 seminar Heidegger: The Question of Being and History. We now know that the problem of history was at the heart of Derrida's writing in the mid-1960s, prior to the publication of his best-known work, Of Grammatology (1967). Arguing that Derrida's scholarship in the 1960s and early 1970s on historicism, historicity and the problem of history can be treated as the basis for a philosophy of history, Sean Gaston focuses on Derrida's work from the mid-1970s to the mid-1990s and his relentless questioning of context, memory and narrative as the delineation of a deconstructive historiography. The book raises a challenge for historians to think about both deconstruction and historiography, arguing that contemporary philosophy can provide a basis for thinking about history in the name of a deconstructive historiography that is not incompatible with rigorous historical scholarship.

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.

In diesem Buch befasst sich Arturo Romero Contreras mit der Frage, wie Philosophie nach ihrem proklamierten Ende moeglich ist. Dabei geht der Autor im ersten Teil von der Phanomenologie Husserls und ihrer Rezeption bei Fink, Heidegger und Derrida aus und stellt sich die Aufgabe, Kontext und Begrundung der Behauptung, die Philosophie habe ihr Ende erreicht, ans Licht zu bringen. Im zweiten Teil wird gezeigt, dass die Vertreter des Endes der Philosophie in der Tat auf eine andere "Logik" und "Mathematik" hinweisen. Die Paradoxie ist ein logischer Begriff, der nur unter gewissen Bedingungen sinnvoll ist. Was sind aber die philosophischen Folgen und der daraus resultierende Denkraum, wenn man neue mathematische Gedanken und nicht-klassische Logiken akzeptiert?

Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing argues that Jacques Derrida's philosophical understanding of language should be supplemented by Jacques Lacan's psychoanalytic approach to the symbolic order. Lacan adopts a non-philosophical, genetic or developmental approach to the question of language and in doing so isolates a dimension that Derrida cannot properly envisage: the imaginary. Michael Lewis argues that the real must be understood not just in relation to the symbolic but also in relation to the imaginary. The existence of an alternative approach to the real that is other than language allows us to identify the idiosyncrasies of Derrida's purely transcendental approach, an approach that addresses language in terms of its conditions of possibility. Lacan shows us that an attention to the genesis of the symbolic order of language and culture should lead us to understand this real other in a different way.This book relates transcendental thought to the insights of non-philosophical thought, and, more specifically, it proposes a way in which philosophy might relate to the insights of the human and natural sciences. By critically juxtaposing Derrida and Lacan, Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing attempts to systematise Slavoj Zizek's presentation of a Lacanian alternative to Derridean deconstruction.
This work should be of interest to all readers in continental thought and transcendental philosophy, deconstruction, psychoanalysis, and literary studies.

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.

Perspektiven der Philosophie. Neues Jahrbuch eroeffnet Forschern, denen die philosophische Begrundung des Denkens wichtig ist, eine Publikationsmoeglichkeit. Wir verstehen uns nicht als Schulorgan einer philosophischen Lehrmeinung, sondern sehen unsere Aufgabe darin, an der Intensivierung des wissenschaftlichen Philosophierens mitzuwirken. Besonders foerdern wir den wissenschaftlichen Nachwuchs und laden ihn zur Mitarbeit ein.

The concept of community is one of the most frequently used and abused of recent philosophical or socio-political concepts. In the 1980s, faced with the imminent collapse of communism and the unchecked supremacy of free-market capitalism, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (in The Inoperative Community) and the writer Maurice Blanchot (in The Unavowable Community) both thought it essential to rethink the fundamental basis of "community" as such. More recently, Nancy has renewed the debate by unexpectedly attacking Blanchot's account of community, claiming that it embodies a dangerously nostalgic desire for mythic and religious communion. This book examines the history and implications of this controversy. It analyses in forensic detail Nancy's and Blanchot's contrasting interpretations of German Romanticism, and the work of Heidegger, Bataille, and Marguerite Duras, and examines closely their divergent approaches to the contradictory legacy of Christianity. At a time when politics are increasingly inseparable from a deep-seated sense of crisis, it provides an incisive account of what, in the concept of community, is thought yet crucially still remains unthought.

In the first monograph on W. S. Merwin to appear since his death in 2019, Feng Dong focuses on the dialectical movement of desire and infinity that ensouls the poet's entire oeuvre. His analysis foregrounds what Merwin calls "the other side of despair," the opposite of humans' articulated personal and social agonies. Feng finds these presences in Merwin's evocations of what lingers on the edge of constantly updated socio-symbolic frameworks: surreal encounters, spiritual ecstasies, and abyssal freedoms. By examining Merwin's lifelong engagement with psychic fantasies, anonymous holiness, entities both natural and supernatural, and ghostly ancestors, Feng uncovers a precarious relation with the unarticulated, unrealized side of existence. Drawing on theories from Lacan, Zizek, Levinas, and Heidegger, Desire and Infinity in W. S. Merwin's Poetry reads a metaphysical possibility into the poet's work at the intersection between contemporary poetics, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Building on discussions originating in post-humanism, the non-philosophy of Francois Laruelle, and the science of "species being of humanity" stemming from Marx's critique of philosophy, Katerina Kolozova proposes a radical consideration of capitalism's economic exploitation of life. This book uses Francois Laruelle's work to think through questions of "practical ethics" and bring the abstract tools of Laruelle's non-philosophy into conversation with other critical methods in the humanities. Kolozova centres the question of the animal at the very heart of what it means for us as human beings to think and act in the world, and the mistreatment of animality that underpins the logic of capitalism.

The volume is inspired by Gilles Deleuze's philosophical project, which builds on the critique of European Humanism and opens up inspiring new perspectives for the renewal of the field. The book gathers leading scholars in the field of Deleuze, while also bringing together scholars from Europe and North America (the West), as well from Asia (the East), in order to create a lively academic debate, and contribute to the growth and expansion of the field. it provides both critical and creative insights into some key issues in contemporary social and political thought. More specifically, the volume hopes to start a critical evaluation of the reception and creative adaptation of Deleuze and of other Continental philosophers in the Austral-Asian region, with special focus on China.

One of the world's leading anthropologists assesses the work of the founder of structural anthropology As a young man, Maurice Godelier was Claude Levi-Strauss's assistant. Since then, Godelier has drawn on this experience to develop a profound and intimate grasp on the writings of his former teacher, one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Meticulously researched, Levi-Strauss: A Critical Study of His Thought will prove indispensable to students of Levi-Strauss and to structural anthropologists more generally. It is a compelling and comprehensive study destined to become the definitive work on the evolution of Levi-Strauss's ideas, at the heart of which lies his analysis of kinship and myth.

What is the legacy of Theory after the deaths of so many of its leading lights, from Jacques Derrida to Roland Barthes? Bringing together reflections by leading contemporary scholars, Dead Theory explores the afterlives of the work of the great theorists and the current state of Theory today. Considering the work of thinkers such as Derrida, Deleuze, and Levinas, the book explores the ways in which Theory has long been haunted by death and how it might endure for the future.

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.