This volume brings together an international array of scholars to reconsider the meaning and place of poststructuralism historically and demonstrate some of the ways in which it continues to be relevant, especially for debates in aesthetics, ethics, and politics. The book's chapters focus on the works of Butler, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Kristeva, Lacan, and Lyotard-in combination with those of Agamben, Luhman, Nancy, and Nietzsche-and examine issues including biopolitics, culture, embodiment, epistemology, history, music, temporality, political resistance, psychoanalysis, revolt, and the visual arts. The contributors use poststructuralism as a hermeneutical strategy that rejects the traditional affirmation of unity, totality, transparency, and representation to instead focus on the foundational importance of open-ended becoming, difference, the unknowable, and expression. This approach allows for a more expansive definition of poststructuralism and helps demonstrate how it has contributed to debates across philosophy and other disciplines. Historical Traces and Future Pathways of Poststructuralism will be of particular interest to researchers in philosophy, politics, political theory, critical theory, aesthetics, feminist theory, cultural studies, intellectual history, psychoanalysis, and sociology.

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.

Bicycling, Motorcycling, Rhetoric, and Space draws from cultural studies, rhetorical theory, and political philosophy to examine bicycling and motorcycling as serious forms of communication and even thought. By analyzing how everyday movements function in modern and postmodern contexts, Fine is able to determine the social meanings behind human powered and motorized forms of cycling. Through the lenses of sophistic rhetoric and poststructuralist theory, the author uncovers how such mobilities inform our thoughts and interactions. Throughout history, this informing process has promoted specific ways of thinking that have resulted in moments of protest, conquest, awareness, and transgression, which all involve a cycling rhetoric. This book contributes to various academic fields within the liberal arts and humanities while further establishing bicycling and motorcycling as important social, theoretical, and political areas of inquiry. Scholars of rhetoric, communication studies, cultural studies, and philosophy will find this book of particular interest.

The aim at the core of this book is a synthesis of increasingly popular and culturally significant forms of digital literature on the one hand, and established literary and critical theory on the other: reading digital texts through the lens of canonical theory, but also reading this more traditional theory through the lens of digital texts and related media. In a field which has often regarded the digital as apart from traditional literature and theory, this book highlights continuities in order to analyse digital literature as part of a longer literary tradition. Using examples from social media to video games and works particularly by postmodern and poststructuralist theorists, Digital Literature and Critical Theory contextualises digital forms among their analogue precursors and traces ongoing social developments which find expression in these cultural phenomena, including power dynamics between authors and readers, the individual in (post-)modernity, consumerism, and the potential for intersubjective exchange.

What is power? Where does it come from and who is in possession of it? How should we think about power and authority in a post-secular society in which traditional boundaries between individual and collective faith and secular governments and institutions are becoming increasingly blurred? The way which we conceive of power in the twenty-first century will effectively determine how we approach issues such as market reform and environmental disaster. Placing the twentieth-century French philosopher Michel Foucault into critical conjunction with the apostle Paul, Foucault/Paul re-evaluates the way in which power operates within society and underpins our ethical and political actions.

Foucault lived in Tunisia for two years and travelled to Japan and Iran more than once. Yet throughout his critical scholarship, he insisted that the cultures of the "Orient" constitute the "limit" of Western rationality. Using archival research supplemented by interviews with key scholars in Tunisia, Japan and France, this book examines the philosophical sources, evolution as well as contradictions of Foucault's experience with non-Western cultures. Beyond tracing Foucault's journey into the world of otherness, the book reveals the personal, political as well as methodological effects of a radical conception of cultural difference that extolled the local over the cosmopolitan.

This book uses Deleuze's work to understand the politics of masculinity today. It analyses masculinity in terms of what it does, how it operates and what its affects are. Taking a pragmatic approach, Hickey-Moody shapes chapters around key Deleuzian concepts that have proved generative in masculinity studies and then presents case studies of popular subjects and offers overviews of disciplines that have applied Deleuze's work to the study of men's lives. This book shows how the concepts of affect and assemblage have contributed to, and transformed, the work undertaken by the foundational concept of performativity in gender studies. Examining the work of Deleuze and Guattari on the psychoanalytic boy, as exemplified by their writing on Little Hans, Hickey-Moody reconsiders the politics of their approach to psychoanalytic models of young masculinity. In this context, the author examines contemporary lived performances of young masculinity, drawing on her own fieldwork. The field of disability and masculinity studies has taken up the work of Deleuze and Guattari in a nearly unprecedented fashion. Accordingly, the book also explores the gendered nature of disability, and canvases some of the substantive scholarly contributions that have been made to this interdisciplinary space, before introducing case studies of the work of North American photographer Michael Stokes and the popular Hollywood film Me Before You. The book provocatively concludes by challenging scholars to take up Deleuze's thought to re-shape gendered economies of knowledge and matter that support and contribute to systems of patriarchal domination mediated through environmental exploitation.

In Power Without Knowledge: A Critique of Technocracy (2019), Jeffrey Friedman presented a sweeping reinterpretation of modern politics and government as technocratic, even in many of its democratic dimensions. Building on a new definition of technocracy as governance aimed at solving social and economic problems, Friedman showed that the epistemic demands that such governance places on political elites and ordinary people alike may be overwhelming if technocrats fail to attend to the ideational heterogeneity of the human beings whose control is the object of technocratic power. Yet a recognition of ideational heterogeneity considerably complicates the task of predicting behavior, which is essential to technocratic control-as Friedman demonstrated with pathbreaking critiques of the homogenizing strategies of neoclassical economics, positivist social science, behavioral economics, and populist democratic politics. In Technocracy and the Epistemology of Human Behavior, thirteen political theorists, including Friedman himself, debate the implications of Power Without Knowledge for social science, modern governance, the politics of expertise, post-structuralism, anarchism, and democratic theory; and Friedman responds to his critics with an expansive defense of his vision of contemporary politics and his political epistemology of ideationally diverse human beings. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Critical Review.

Brings together philosophy, psychoanalysis and religious elements. Examines current 'crisis' in mental health and social stability. Unique in its contradictory orientation towards Christianity. Zizek, Baudrillard, Levinas and Steiner are strong influences on the author. Likely to appeal to academic followers of Jordan Peterson.

Criticism of contemporary art is split by an opposition between activism and the critical function of form. Yet the deeper, more subterranean terms of art-judgment are largely neglected on both sides. These essays combine a re-examination of the terms of judgement of contemporary art with critical interpretations of individual works and exhibitions by Luis Camnitzer, Marcel Duchamp, Matias Faldbakken, Anne Imhof and Cady Noland. The book moves from philosophical issues, via the lingering shadows of medium-specificity (in photography and art music), and the changing states of museums, to analyses of the peculiar ways that works of art relate to time.To give artistic form to crisis, it is suggested, one needs to understand contemporary art's own constitutive crisis of form.

In this important and original book, Johann Michel paves the way for a greater understanding of Paul Ricoeur's philosophy by exploring it in relation to some major figures of contemporary French thought-Bourdieu, Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Castoriadis. Although the fertile dialogue between Ricoeur and various structuralist thinkers is well documented, his position in relation to the post-structuralist movement is less-widely understood. Does Ricoeur's philosophy stand in opposition to post-structuralism in France or, on the contrary, is it in fact a unique variation of that movement? This book defends the latter statement. Michel speaks of post-structuralisms in the plural form and engages them in a dynamic confrontation between Ricoeur and his contemporaries in the French intellectual scene. The result is a better understanding of Ricoeur's thought and also of the distinctive issues that emerge through confrontation between Ricoeur and each of these post-structuralist thinkers.

This volume addresses the issue of freedom in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. This is all the more challenging in that Deleuze-Guattari almost never use the term freedom, preferring instead, the concept of the refrain. The essays collected in the volume show that freedom has been understood in a remarkably narrow sense and that in fact freedom operates as the refrain in every realm of thought and creation. The motivating approach in these essays is Deleuze-Guattari's emphasis on the irreality of media and capitalistic sign regimes, which they perceive to have taken over even the practices of philosophy, the arts, and science. By offering a clear and engaging treatment of the underexplored issue of freedom, this volume moves the discussion of Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy forward in ways that will appeal to researchers in Continental philosophy and a wide range of other disciplines.

The primary goal of this volume is to describe the contemporary state of affairs in Western psychotherapy, and to do so in a Whiteheadian spirit: with genuine openness to the relative ways in which creativity, beauty, truth, and peace manifest themselves in various cultural traditions. This Whiteheadian Dialogue explores afresh an important cross-elucidatory path: what have we, and what can be learned from a dialogue with Eastern worldviews? In order to generate meaningful contrasts between these different systems of thought, all the papers address common core issues. On one hand, how does the given system understand the interaction of the individual, society, and nature (or cosmos)? On the other hand, what is the paradigm of all pathology and what is its typical or curative pattern?

The "structuralist" theories of power show that the subject is produced and reproduced by the investment of power: but how then can we think of the subject's resistance to power? Based on this fundamental question, Power and Resistance interprets critically the (post-)structuralist theory of power and resistance, i.e., the theories of Foucault, Deleuze/Guattari, Derrida and Althusser. It analyses also the mechanism of power and the strategies of resistance in the era of neoliberalism. This meticulous analysis that completely renewed the theory of power is already published in French, Japanese, and Korean with success.

This book critically examines the debate on Martin Heidegger's concept of Entscheidung ("decision") and his engagement and confrontation with Nazism in terms of his broader philosophical thought. It argues that one cannot explain Heidegger's actions without accounting for his idea of "decision" and its connection to his understanding of individual "fate" and national (and European) "destiny." The book looks at the relation of biography to philosophy and the ethical and political implications of appropriating Heidegger's thinking in these domains of inquiry. It highlights themes such as Heidegger's differences with the neo-Kantians in Germany; Heidegger on Kant and practical reason; and his reading of Nietzsche and Hegel. It offers a philosophical assessment grounded in Heidegger's own texts, with reference to historical and other philosophical commentaries on the rise of National Socialism in post-Weimar Germany and the philosophical issues associated with the interpretation of Nazi genocide and ideology. An important intervention in Western philosophy, this book will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of political philosophy, continental philosophy, German philosophy, philosophy in general, and political studies.

The Routledge Handbook of Music Signification captures the richness and complexity of the field, presenting 30 essays by recognized international experts that reflect current interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches to the subject. Examinations of music signification have been an essential component in thinking about music for millennia, but it is only in the last few decades that music signification has been established as an independent area of study. During this time, the field has grown exponentially, incorporating a vast array of methodologies that seek to ground how music means and to explore what it may mean. Research in music signification typically embraces concepts and practices imported from semiotics, literary criticism, linguistics, the visual arts, philosophy, sociology, history, and psychology, among others. By bringing together such approaches in transparent groupings that reflect the various contexts in which music is created and experienced, and by encouraging critical dialogues, this volume provides an authoritative survey of the discipline and a significant advance in inquiries into music signification. This book addresses a wide array of readers, from scholars who specialize in this and related areas, to the general reader who is curious to learn more about the ways in which music makes sense.

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.

Concentrating mainly on the process philosophy developed by Alfred North Whitehead, this series of essays brings together some of the newest developments in the application of process thinking to the physical and social sciences. These essays, by established scholars in the field, demonstrate how a wider and deeper understanding of the world can be obtained using process philosophical concepts, how the distortions and blockages inevitably inherent in substantivist talk can be set aside, and how new and fertile lines of research in the sciences can be opened as a result.

How can we overcome the rapidly ageing postmodernist paradigm, which has become sterile orthodoxy in marketing? This book answers this crucial question using fresh philosophical tools developed by New Realism. It indicates the opportunities missed by marketing due to the pervasive postmodernist ideology and proposes a new and fruitful approach pivoting on the significance of reality to marketing analyses and models. Intensifying reference to reality will boost marketing research and practice, rather than impair them; conversely, neglecting such a reference will prevent marketing from realising its full potential, in several contexts. The aim of the book is foundational: its purpose is not a return to traditional realism but to break new ground and overcome theoretical obstacles in marketing and management by revising some of their assumptions and enriching their categories, thereby paving the way to fresh approaches and methodological innovations. In that sense, the book encourages theoretical innovation and experimentation and introduces new concepts, like invitation and attrition, which can find fruitful applications in marketing theory and practice. That is meant to be conductive to the solution of important difficulties and to the uncovering of new phenomena. The last chapter of the book applies the new approach to eight case studies from business contexts. This book will be of interest to philosophers interested in New Realism and to researchers, scholars and marketing professionals sensitive to the importance and fruitfulness of reference to reality, for their own purposes.

Post-Rationalism takes the experimental journal of psychoanalysis and philosophy, Cahiers pour l'Analyse, as its main source. Established by students of Louis Althusser in 1966, the journal has rarely figured in the literature, although it contained the first published work of authors now famous in contemporary critical thought, including Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner, Luce Irigaray, Andre Green and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Cahiers served as a testing ground for the combination of diverse intellectual sources indicative of the period, including the influential reinvention of Freud and Marx undertaken by Lacan and Althusser, and the earlier post-rationalist philosophy of science pioneered by Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Alexandre Koyre. This book is a wide-ranging analysis of the intellectual foundations of structuralism, re-connecting the work of young post-Lacanian and post-Althusserian theorists with their predecessors in French philosophy of science. Tom Eyers provides an important corrective to standard histories of the period, focussing on the ways in which French epistemological writing of the 1930s and 1940s - especially that of Bachelard and Canguilhem - laid the ground for the emergence of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s, thus questioning the standard historical narrative that posits structuralism as emerging chiefly in reaction to phenomenology and existentialism.

This volume addresses the issue of freedom in the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari. This is all the more challenging in that Deleuze-Guattari almost never use the term freedom, preferring instead, the concept of the refrain. The essays collected in the volume show that freedom has been understood in a remarkably narrow sense and that in fact freedom operates as the refrain in every realm of thought and creation. The motivating approach in these essays is Deleuze-Guattari's emphasis on the irreality of media and capitalistic sign regimes, which they perceive to have taken over even the practices of philosophy, the arts, and science. By offering a clear and engaging treatment of the underexplored issue of freedom, this volume moves the discussion of Deleuze-Guattari's philosophy forward in ways that will appeal to researchers in Continental philosophy and a wide range of other disciplines.

This book approaches the construction of complex and transgressive 'pervert' characters in mainstream (not 'art'), adult-oriented (not pornographic) cinema. It deconstructs an episteme on which to base the construction of characters in screenplays, in a way that acknowledges how semiotic elements of characterisation intersect. In addition, it provides an extended re-phrasing of the notion of 'the pervert' as Feiticiero/a: a newly-coined construct that might serve as an underpinning for complex, sexual filmic characters that are both entertaining and challenging to audiences. This re-phrasing speaks to both an existential/phenomenological conception of personhood and to the scholarly tradition of the 'linguistic turn' of continental philosophers such as Foucault and Lacan, who represent language not primarily as describing the world but as constructing it. The result is an original and interdisciplinary volume that is brought to coherence through a queer, post-humanist lens.

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.

In drawing upon the work of Jacques Derrida, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger and aligning it with a new trend in interdisciplinary phenomenology, Ian Andrews provides a unique look at the role of chance in art and its philosophical implications. His account of how the composer John Cage and other avant-garde creatives such as Marcel Duchamp, Tristan Tzara, Sol LeWitt and Ed Ruscha used chance in their work to question the structures of experience and prompt a new engagement with these phenomena makes a truly important contribution to Continental philosophy. Chance, Phenomenology and Aesthetics will appeal to scholars and advanced students in the disciplines of phenomenology, deconstruction and hermeneutics, as well as being compelling reading for anyone interested in pursuing sound studies, art theory and art history through an interdisciplinary post-phenomenological lens.