French thinkers such as Lacan and Derrida are often labelled as representatives of 'poststructuralism' in the Anglophone world. However in France, where their work originated, they use no such category; this group of theorists - 'the poststructuralists' - were never perceived as a coherent intellectual group or movement. Outlining the institutional contexts, affinities, and rivalries of, among others, Althusser, Barthes, Foucault, Irigaray, and Kristeva, Angermuller - drawing from Bourdieu's concepts of cultural capital and the academic field - insightfully explores post-structuralism as a phenomenon. By tracing the evolution of the French intellectual field after the war, Why There is No Poststructuralism in France places French Theory both in the specific material conditions of its production and the social and historical contexts of its reception, accounting for a particularly creative moment in French intellectual life which continues to inform the theoretical imaginary of our time.

'No brief survey can do justice to the richness, complexity and detail of Foucault's discussion' New York Review of Books The second volume of Michel Foucault's pioneering analysis of the changing nature of desire explores how sexuality was perceived in classical Greek culture. From the stranger byways of Greek medicine (with its advice on the healthiest season for sex, as well as exercise and diet) to the role of women, The Use of Pleasure is full of extraordinary insights into the differences - and the continuities - between the Ancient, Christian and Modern worlds, showing how sex became a moral issue in the west. 'Required reading for those who cling to stereotyped ideas about our difference from the Greeks in terms of pagan license versus Christian austerity' Los Angeles Times Book Review

Roland Barthes - the author of such enduringly influential works as Mythologies and Camera Lucida - was one of the most important cultural critics of the post-war era. Since his death in 1980, new writings have continued to be discovered and published. The Afterlives of Roland Barthes is the first book to revisit and reassess Barthes' thought in light of these posthumously published writings. Covering work such as Barthes' Mourning Diary, the notes for his projected Vita Nova and many writings yet to be translated into English, Neil Badmington reveals a very different Barthes of today than the figure familiar from the writings published in his lifetime.

The indebtedness of contemporary thinkers to Derrida's project of deconstruction is unquestionable, whether as a source of inspiration or the grounds of critical antagonism. This collection considers: how best to recall deconstruction? Rather than reduce it to an object of historical importance or memory, these essays analyze its significance in terms of complex matrices of desire; provoked in this way, deconstruction cannot be dismissed as 'dead', nor unproblematically defended as alive and well. Repositioned on the threshold of life-death, deconstruction profoundly complicates the field of critical thought which still struggles to memorialize, inter, or reduce the deconstructive corpus to ashes.

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

Coming to Our Senses positions affect, or feeling, as our new cultural compass, ordering the parameters and possibilities of what can be known. From Facebook "likes" to Coca-Cola "loves," from "emotional intelligence" in business to "emotional contagion" in social media, affect has displaced reason as the primary catalyst of global culture. Through examples of feeling in the books, film, music, advertising, cultural criticism, and political discourse of the United States and Latin America, Reber shows how affect encourages the public to "reason" on the strength of sentiment alone. Well-being, represented by happiness and health, and ill-being, embodied by unhappiness and disease, form the two poles of our social judgment, whether in affirmation or critique. We must then reenvision contemporary politics as operating at the level of the feeling body, so we can better understand the physiological and epistemological conditions affirming our cultural status quo and contestatory strategies for emancipation.

In 1996 Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York on the occasion of Antonin Artaud: Works on Paper, one of the first major international exhibitions to present the avant-garde dramatist and poet's paintings and drawings. Derrida's original title, "Artaud the Moma," is a characteristic play on words. It alludes to Artaud's calling himself Momo, Marseilles slang for "fool," upon his return to Paris in 1946 after nine years in various asylums while playing off of the museum's nickname, MoMA. But the title was not deemed "presentable or decent," in Derrida's words, by the very institution that chose to exhibit Artaud's work. Instead, the lecture was advertised as "Jacques Derrida ...will present a lecture about Artaud's drawings." For Derrida, what was at stake was what it meant for the museum to exhibit Artaud's drawings and for him to lecture on Artaud in that institutional context. Thinking over the performative force of Artaud's work and the relation between writing and drawing, Derrida addresses the multiplicity of Artaud's identities to confront the modernist museum's valorizing of originality. He channels Artaud's specter, speech, and struggle against representation to attempt to hold the museum accountable for trying to confine Artaud within its categories. Artaud the Moma, as lecture and text, reveals the challenge that Artaud posed to Derrida-and to art and its institutional history. A powerful interjection into the museum halls, this work is a crucial moment in Derrida's thought and an insightful, unsparing reading of a challenging writer and artist.

What has happened since de Man and Derrida first read Austin? How has the encounter between deconstruction and the performative affected each of these terms? In addressing these questions, this book brings together scholars whose works have been provoked in different ways by the encounter of deconstruction and the performative.Following Derrida's appeal to any rigorous deconstruction to reckon with Austin's theorems and his ever growing commitment to rethink and rewrite the performative and its multiple articulations, it is now urgent that we reflect upon the effects of a theoretical event that has profoundly marked the contemporary scene. The contributors to this book suggest various ways of re-reading the heritage and future of both deconstruction and the performative "after" their encounter, bringing into focus both the constitutive aporia of the performative "and" the role it plays within the deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition.

Derrida and the Future of the Liberal Arts highlights the Derridean assertion that the university must exist 'without condition' - as a bastion of intellectual freedom and oppositional activity whose job it is to question mainstream society. Derrida argued that only if the life of the mind is kept free from excessive corporate influence and political control can we be certain that the basic tenets of democracy are being respected within the very societies that claim to defend democratic principles. This collection contains eleven essays drawn from international scholars working in both the humanities and social sciences, and makes a well-grounded and comprehensive case for the importance of Derridean thought within the liberal arts today. Written by specialists in the fields of philosophy, literature, history, sociology, geography, political science, animal studies, and gender studies, each essay traces deconstruction's contribution to their discipline, explaining how it helps keep alive the 'unconditional', contrapuntal mission of the university. The book offers a forceful and persuasive corrective to the current assault on the liberal arts.

Cybernetic Revelation explores the dual philosophical histories of deconstruction and artificial intelligence, tracing the development of concepts like the "logos" and the notion of modeling the mind technologically from pre-history to contemporary thinkers like Slavoj i ek, Steven Pinker, Bernard Stiegler and Daniel C. Dennett. The writing is clear and accessible throughout, yet the text probes deeply into major philosophers seen by JD Casten as "conceptual engineers."

Michel Foucault once expressed his disagreement with the "breach" between social history and the history of ideas brought about by the assumption that the former is concerned with how people act without thinking, while the latter analyses how people think without acting. "People both think and act," he says, by way of a sarcasm consisting in having to point out the obvious. While in complete agreement with Foucault on this as on several other issues, the author of this book chooses to emphasise another "obviousness" of at least equal importance: that thoughts and (material) actions may well be inseparable in all fields of human/social existence, but they are not the same thing. The maintenance of the distinction between subjectivity/conceptuality on one hand and objectivity /materiality on the other constitutes a fundamental premise for the book's two closely interrelated goals: to criticise certain extremely influential currents of contemporary thought more or less loosely associated with "poststructuralism" and/or "postmodernism" which, each in its own fashion, have served to undermine this distinction; and to provide a philosophical /theoretical grounding for the methodology of the social sciences known as "discourse analysis." The importance of the latter is shown to consist in forming a methodological framework for a materialist critique that would escape both the economic reductionism of Marxism and the implicit (or manifest) idealism pertaining to all variations of Hegelianism.

Theories of justice often fixate on purely normative, abstract principles unrelated to real-world applications. The philosopher and theorist Axel Honneth addresses this disconnect, constructing a theory of justice derived from the normative claims of Western liberal-democratic societies and anchored in the law and institutionally established practices that possess moral legitimacy. Termed a democratic ethical life, Honneth's paradigm draws on the spirit of Hegel's Philosophy of Right and his own theory of recognition, demonstrating how concrete social spheres generate the principles of individual freedom and a standard for what is just. Using social analysis to re-found a more grounded theory of justice, Honneth argues that all crucial actions in Western civilization, whether in personal relationships, market-induced economic activities, or the public forum of politics, share one defining characteristic: they require the realization of a particular aspect of individual freedom. This fundamental truth, Honneth shows, informs the guiding principles of justice, enabling a wide-ranging reconsideration of its theory.

Derrida wrote a vast number of texts for particular events across the world, as well as a series of works that portray him as a voyager. As an Algerian emigre, a postcolonial outsider, and an idiomatic writer who felt tied to a language that was not his own, and as a figure obsessed by the singularity of the literary or philosophical event, Derrida emerges as one whose thought always arrives on occasion. But how are we to understand the event in Derrida? Is there a risk that such stories of Derrida's work tend to misunderstand the essential unpredictability at work in the conditions of his thought? And how are we to reconcile the importance in Derrida of the unknowable event, the pull of the singular, with deconstruction's critical and philosophical rigour and its claims to rethink more systematically the ethico-political field. This book argues that this negotiation in fact allows deconstruction to reformulate the very questions that we associate with ethical and political responsibility and shows this to be the central interest in Derrida's work.

Jacques Derrida's final seminars were devoted to animal life and political sovereignty-the connection being that animals slavishly adhere to the law while kings and gods tower above it and that this relationship reveals much about humanity in the West. David Farrell Krell offers a detailed account of these seminars, placing them in the context of Derrida's late work and his critique of Heidegger. Krell focuses his discussion on questions such as death, language, and animality. He concludes that Heidegger and Derrida share a commitment to finding new ways of speaking and thinking about human and animal life. -- Indiana University Press

"Modern/Postmodern: Society, Philosophy, Literature" offers new definitions of modernism and postmodernism by presenting an original theoretical system of thought that explains the differences between these two key movements. Taking a contrastive approach, Peter V. Zima identifies three key concepts in the relationship between modernism and postmodernism - ambiguity, ambivalence and indifference.
Zima defines modernism and postmodernism as problematics, as opposed to aesthetics, stylistics or ideologies. Unlike modernism, which is grounded in an increasing ambivalence towards social norms and values, postmodernity is presented as an era of indifference, i.e. of interchangeable norms, values and perspectives.
Taking an historical, interdisciplinary and intercultural approach that engages with Anglo-American and European debates, the book describes the transition from late modernist ambivalence to postmodern indifference in the contexts of philosophy, literature and sociology. This is the ideal guide to the relationship between modernism and postmodernism for students and scholars throughout the humanities.

An ambitious theoretical work that ranges from the age of Socrates to the late twentieth century, this book traces the development of the concepts of irony within the history of Western literary criticism. Its purpose is not to promote a universal definition of irony, whether traditional or revisionist, but to examine how such definitions were created in critical history and what their use and invocation imply.
Joseph A. Dane argues that the diverse, supposed forms of irony--Socratic, rhetorical, romantic, dramatic, to name a few--are not so much literary elements embedded in texts, awaiting discovery by critics, as they are notions used by critics of different eras and persuasions to manipulate those texts in various, often self-serving ways. The history of irony, Dane suggests, runs parallel to the history of criticism, and the changing definitions of irony reflect the changing ways in which readers and critics have defined their own roles in relation to literature.
Probing and provocative, "The Critical Mythology of Irony" will appeal to a broad spectrum of critics and scholars, particularly those concerned with the historical basis of critical language and its political and educational implications.