"Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for humanism."

So writes Julia Kristeva in this provocative work, which skillfully upends our entrenched ideas about religion, belief, and the thought and work of a renowned psychoanalyst and critic. With dialogue and essay, Kristeva analyzes our "incredible need to believe"--the inexorable push toward faith that, for Kristeva, lies at the heart of the psyche and the history of society. Examining the lives, theories, and convictions of Saint Teresa of Avila, Sigmund Freud, Donald Winnicott, Hannah Arendt, and other individuals, she investigates the intersection between the desire for God and the shadowy zone in which belief resides.

Kristeva suggests that human beings are formed by their need to believe, beginning with our first attempts at speech and following through to our adolescent search for identity and meaning. Kristeva then applies her insight to contemporary religious clashes and the plight of immigrant populations, especially those of Islamic origin. Even if we no longer have faith in God, Kristeva argues, we must believe in human destiny and creative possibility. Reclaiming Christianity's openness to self-questioning and the search for knowledge, Kristeva urges a "new kind of politics," one that restores the integrity of the human community.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

The final major work by one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth century Foucault's History of Sexuality changed the way we think about power, selfhood and sexuality forever. Arguing that sexuality is profoundly shaped by the power structures applied to it, the series is one of his most important and far-reaching works. In this fourth and final volume, Foucault turns his attention to early Christianity, exploring how ancient ideas of pleasure were modified into the Christian notion of the 'flesh' - a transformation that would define the Western experience of sexuality and subjectivity. Completed at Foucault's death, the manuscript of this volume was locked away in a bank vault for three decades. Now for the first time, the work is available to English-language readers as the author originally conceived it.

"The Incident at Antioch" is a key play marking Alain Badiou's transition from classical Marxism to a "politics of subtraction" far removed from party and state. Written with striking eloquence and extraordinary poetic richness, and shifting from highly serious emotional and intellectual drama to surreal comic interlude, the work features statesmen, workers, and revolutionaries struggling to reconcile the nature and practice of politics.

This bilingual edition presents "L'Incident d'Antioche" in its original French and, on facing pages, an expertly executed English translation. Badiou adds a special preface, and an introduction by the scholar Kenneth Reinhard connects the play to Paul Claudel's "The City," Saint Paul and the early history of the Church, and the innovative mathematical thinking of Paul Cohen. The translation includes Susan Spitzer's extensive notes clarifying allusions and quotations and hinting at Badiou's intentions. An interview with Badiou encompasses the play's settings, themes, and events, as well as his ongoing literary and conceptual experimentation on stage and off.

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid- eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume's contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

Against Continuity is the first book to demonstrate that the beating heart of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy is a systematic ontology of irreducible, singular entities. This requires a radical break with decades of Deleuzian orthodoxy, according to which Deleuze's metaphysics revolves around the dissolution of discrete entities into a continuous world of flows and events.With reference to all of Deleuze's work, including published and untranslated seminars, as well as the recently published 'Lettres et autres textes', Arjen Kleinherenbrink critically compares Deleuze's ontology to seven related contemporary thinkers: Levi Bryant, Maurizio Ferraris, Markus Gabriel, Manuel DeLanda, Graham Harman, Tristan Garcia and Bruno Latour. These comparisons establish Deleuze as an important precursor to object-oriented speculative realism and open up exciting new avenues of thought for critics and supporters of Deleuze alike.

At a 1966 international symposium hosted by the Johns Hopkins University, many of the leading figures of European structuralist criticism first presented their ideas to the American academic community. The proceedings of this event--which proved epoch-making on both sides of the Atlantic--were first published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1970 and are now available once again, with a reflective new preface by editor and symposium convener Richard Macksey.

Gabriel Rockhill opens new space for rethinking the relationship between art and politics. Rather than understanding the two spheres as separated by an insurmountable divide or linked by a privileged bridge, Rockhill demonstrates that art and politics are not fixed entities with a singular relation but rather dynamically negotiated, sociohistorical practices with shifting and imprecise borders.

"Radical History and the Politics of Art" proposes a significant departure from extant debates on what is commonly called "art" and "politics," and the result is an impressive foray into the force field of history, in which cultural practices are meticulously analyzed in their social and temporal dynamism without assuming a conceptual unity behind them. Rockhill thereby develops an alternative logic of history and historical change, as well as a novel account of social practices and a multidimensional theory of agency. Engaging with a diverse array of intellectual, artistic, and political constellations, this tour de force diligently maps the various interactions between different dimensions of aesthetic and political practices as they intertwine and sometimes merge in precise fields of struggle.

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.

In this volume, Garnet C. Butchart shows how human communication can be understood as embodied relations and not merely as a mechanical process of transmission. Expanding on contemporary philosophies of speech and language, self and other, and community and immunity, this book challenges many common assumptions, constructs, and problems of communication theory while offering compelling new resources for future study. Human communication has long been characterized as a problem of transmitting information, or the "outward" sharing of "inner thought" through mediated channels of exchange. Butchart questions that model and the various theories to which it gives rise. Drawing from the work of Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Jacques Lacan-thinkers who, along with Martin Heidegger and Michel Foucault, have critiqued the modern notion of a rational subject-Butchart shows that the subject is shaped by language rather than preformed, and that humans embody, and not just use, the signs and contexts of interaction that form what he calls a "communication community." Accessibly written and engagingly researched, Embodiment, Relation, Community is relevant for researchers and advanced students of communication, cultural studies, translation, and rhetorical studies, especially those who work with a humanistic or interpretive paradigm.

There is a deep cultural anxiety around public expressions of maternalism and the application of maternal values to society as a whole. Julie Stephens examines why postmaternal thinking has become so influential in recent decades and why there has been a growing unease with maternal forms of subjectivity and maternalist perspectives. In moving beyond policy definitions, which emphasize the priority given to women's claims as employees over their political claims as mothers, Stephens details an elaborate process of cultural forgetting that has accompanied this repudiation of the maternal.

Reclaiming an alternative feminist position through an investigation of oral history, life narratives, Web blogs, and other rich and varied sources, Stephens confronts the core claims of postmaternal thought and challenges dominant representations of feminism as having forgotten motherhood. Deploying the interpretive framework of memory studies, she examines the political structures of forgetting surrounding the maternal and the weakening of nurture and care in the public domain. She views the promotion of an illusory, self-sufficient individualism as a form of social unmothering that is profoundly connected to this ethos. In rejecting both traditional maternalism and the new postmaternalism, Stephens challenges prevailing paradigms and makes way for an alternative feminist maternalism centering on a politics of care.

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

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 future of deconstruction lies in the ability of its practitioners to mobilise the tropes and interests of Derrida's texts into new spaces and creative readings. In Deconstruction without Derrida, Martin McQuillan sets out to do just that, to continue the task of deconstructive reading both with and without Derrida. The book's principal theme is an attention to instances of deconstruction other than or beyond Derrida and thus imagining a future for deconstruction after Derrida. This future is both the present of deconstruction and its past. The readings presented in this book address the expanded field of deconstruction in the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, Helene Cixous, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, J. Hillis Miller, Judith Butler, Gayatri Spivak and Catherine Malabou. They also, necessarily, address Derrida's own readings of this work. McQuillan accounts for an experience of otherness in deconstruction that is, has been and always will be beyond Derrida, just as deconstruction remains forever tied to Derrida by an invisible, indestructible thread.

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.

The twenty-first century has seen an increased awareness of the forms of environmental destruction that cannot immediately be seen, localised or, by some, even acknowledged. Ecocriticism on the Edge explores the possibility of a new mode of critical practice, one fully engaged with the destructive force of the planetary environmental crisis. Timothy Clark argues that, in literary and cultural criticism, the "Anthropocene", which names the epoch in which human impacts on the planet's ecological systems reach a dangerous limit, also represents a threshold at which modes of interpretation that once seemed sufficient or progressive become, in this new counterintuitive context, inadequate or even latently destructive. The book includes analyses of literary works, including texts by Paule Marshall, Gary Snyder, Ben Okri, Henry Lawson, Lorrie Moore and Raymond Carver.

In his philosophy of ethics and time, Emmanuel Levinas highlighted the tension that exists between the "ontological adventure" of immediate experience and the "ethical adventure" of redemptive relationships-associations in which absolute responsibility engenders a transcendence of being and self.

In an original commingling of philosophy and cinema study, Sam B. Girgus applies Levinas's ethics to a variety of international films. His efforts point to a transnational pattern he terms the "cinema of redemption" that portrays the struggle to connect to others in redeeming ways. Girgus not only reveals the power of these films to articulate the crisis between ontological identity and ethical subjectivity. He also locates time and ethics within the structure and content of film itself. Drawing on the work of Luce Irigaray, Tina Chanter, Kelly Oliver, and Ewa Ziarek, Girgus reconsiders Levinas and his relationship to film, engaging with a feminist focus on the sexualized female body. Girgus offers fresh readings of films from several decades and cultures, including Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" (1939), Federico Fellini's "La dolce vita" (1959), Michelangelo Antonioni's "L'avventura" (1960), John Huston's "The Misfits" (1961), and Philip Kaufman's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1988).

H?l?ne Cixous is more than an influential theorist. She is also a groundbreaking author and playwright. Combining an idiosyncratic mix of autobiographical and fictional narrative with a host of philosophical and poetic observations, Cixous's writing matches the kaleidoscopic nature of her thought, offering new ways of conceptualizing sex, relationships, identity, and the self, among other topics.

Yet, as Jacques Derrida once observed, a "profound misunderstanding" hangs over the accomplishments of Cixous, with many believing the intellectual excelled only at theoretical exploration. Providing a truly liberal selection of her writings from throughout her career, Marta Segarra rediscovers Cixous's acts of invention for a new generation to enjoy. Divided into thematic concerns, these works fully capture Cixous's genius for merging fiction, theory, and the experience of living. They discuss dreaming in the feminine, Algeria and Germany, love and the other, the animal, Derrida, and the theater. They defy classification, locking literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis into thrilling new patterns of engagement. Whether readers are familiar with Cixous or are approaching her thought for the first time, all will find fresh perspectives on gender, fiction, drama, philosophy, religion, and the postcolonial.

For Elisabeth Roudinesco, a historian of psychoanalysis and one of France's leading intellectuals, Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida represent a "great generation" of French philosophers who accomplished remarkable work and lived incredible lives. These troubled and innovative thinkers endured World War II and the cultural and political revolution of the 1960s, and their cultural horizon was dominated by Marxism and psychoanalysis, though they were by no means strict adherents to the doctrines of Marx and Freud.

Roudinesco knew many of these intellectuals personally, and she weaves an account of their thought through lived experience and reminiscences. Canguilhem, for example, was a distinguished philosopher of science who had a great influence on Foucault's exploration of sanity and madness-themes Althusser lived in a notorious personal drama. And in dramatizing the life of Freud for the screen, Sartre fundamentally altered his own philosophical approach to psychoanalysis.

Roudinesco launches a passionate defense of Canguilhem, Sartre, Foucault, Althusser, Deleuze, and Derrida against the "new philosophers" of the late 1970s and 1980s, who denounced the work-and sometimes the private lives-of this great generation. Roudinesco refutes attempts to tar them, as well as the Marxist and left-wing tradition in general, with the brush of Soviet-style communism. In Freudian theory and the philosophy of radical commitment, she sees a bulwark against the kind of manipulative, pill-prescribing, and normalizing psychology that aims to turn individuals into mindless consumers. Intense, clever, and persuasive, "Philosophy in Turbulent Times" captivates with the dynamism of French thought in the twentieth century.

What can psychoanalysis, a psychological approach developed more than a century ago, offer us in an age of rapidly evolving, hard-to-categorize ideas of sexuality and the self? Should we abandon Freud's theories completely or adapt them to new findings and the new relationships taking shape in modern liberal societies? In a remarkably prescient series of lectures delivered in the early 1960s, the French philosopher Louis Althusser anticipated the challenges that psychoanalytic theory would face as politics moved away from structuralist frameworks and toward the elastic possibilities of anthropological and sociological thought. Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences translates Althusser's remarkable seminars into English for the first time, making available to a wider audience the origins and potential future of radical political theory. Althusser takes the important step in these lectures of distinguishing psychoanalysis from psychology and especially psychiatry, which long resisted Freud's analytical concepts of the unconscious and overdetermination. By freeing psychoanalysis from this bind, Althusser can then apply these analytical concepts to the social and the political, integrated with Marxist theory. The result is an enlivened methodology for comprehending social organization and change that had a profound influence on the Frankfurt School and scholars who continue to work at the forefront of radical thought today: Judith Butler, Etienne Balibar, and Alain Badiou.