Urban Arabesques examines philosophy as an event of the city and the city as an event of philosophy and how the intertwining of the two generates an urban imaginary. This critique-in-motion of creative figures and conceptual personae from (non) philosophy illuminates the emergence of sense in the city, shows how "transcendental empiricism" operates within it, and how the everyday life of the streets-the ordinariness of experience as well as the screen/projector of urban surfaces-uncovers new pathways for politics, experience, and relationalities. Using Hong Kong as the primary site of thinking yet recognizing that thinking incessantly moves beyond any particular location, the book opens up cities within the city. Traversing Hong Kong reveals how the corners, the money, the trees and the water are involved in philosophy. Combining the linguistic approach found in Heidegger and Derrida, with the more materialist analysis of Serres and Deleuze, the objective of this book is to retheorize the urban and its imaginary-its virtuality, irreality, phantasmicity-with an emphasis on signs, images and rhythms, resonating through philosophy, and beyond.

In 'Kant in Hong Kong' travel, philosophy, and the city weave through one another. The book brings Immanuel Kant-famous for the regularity of his walks in his hometown of Konigsberg-into the swarming streets of the hypermodern city and carries everyday urban experience into the labyrinthine texts of Kant's critical idealism. It lets the empirical and the transcendental play with one another in Kowloon, Hung Hom, Sheung Wan, and Admiralty as we move up and down the travelator between Queen's Road Central and the Mid-Levels, or take the bus to the beach at Shek-O. Freedom and knowledge swirl through the thick incense in the Temple of Tin Hau. When Kant comes to visit, walking, thinking, and the city illuminate one another more brightly than the colored lights of the nightly laser shows illuminatethe harbor-front skyline of Hong Kong.

Although there is a significant literature on the philosophy of Jacques Derrida, there are few analyses that address the deconstructive critique of phenomenology as it simultaneously plays across range of cultural productions including literature, painting, cinema, new media, and the structure of the university. Using the critical figures of "ghost" and "shadow"-and initiating a vocabulary of phantomenology-this book traces the implications of Derridean "spectrality" on the understanding of contemporary thought, culture, and experience.This study examines the interconnections of philosophy, art in its many forms, and the hauntology of Jacques Derrida. Exposure is explored primarily as exposure to the elemental weather (with culture serving as a lean-to); exposure in a photographic sense; being over-exposed to light; exposure to the certitude of death; and being exposed to all the possibilities of the world. Exposure, in sum, is a kind of necessary, dangerous, and affirmative openness.The book weaves together three threads in order to format an image of the contemporary exposure: 1) a critique of the philosophy of appearances, with phenomenology and its vexed relationship to idealism as the primary representative of this enterprise; 2) an analysis of cultural formations-literature, cinema, painting, the university, new media-that highlights the enigmatic necessity for learning to read a spectrality that, since the two cannot be separated, is both hauntological and historical; and 3) a questioning of the role of art-as semblance, reflection, and remains-that occurs within and alongside the space of philosophy and of the all the "posts-" in which people find themselves.Art is understood fundamentally as a spectral aesthetics, as a site that projects from an exposed place toward an exposed, and therefore open, future, from a workplace that testifies to the blast wind of obliteration, but also in that very testimony gives a place for ghosts to gather, to speak with each other and with humankind. Art, which installs itself in the very heart of the ancient dream of philosophy as its necessary companion, ensures that each phenomenon is always a phantasm and thus we can be assured that the apparitions will continue to speak in what Michel Serres's has called the "grotto of miracles." This book, then, enacts the slowness of a reading of spectrality that unfolds in the chiaroscuro of truth and illusion, philosophy and art, light and darkness.Scholars, students, and professional associations in philosophy (especially of the work of Derrida, Husserl, Heidegger, and Kant), literature, painting, cinema, new media, psychoanalysis, modernity, theories of the university, and interdisciplinary studies.

Night Cafe is a book for the senses that think. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren takes us through a history of coffee as recorded for and by the thinkers of the 19th and 20th century. The Night Cafe brings together prominent critics, artists, and intellectuals in an encounter which the author describes as a meeting between epistemo-lovers who are equally into rigorous mathematics and the architecture of the tastes. Here's some coffee according to Walter Benjamin, Vincent Van Gogh, Hemingway, Rilke, Ovid, and others."These amorous notes show a deep, dark passion for philosophy, literature and art-as well as an ardent love of the dispeller of all worries, the drink whose ingestion-and the ensuing thoughts-Gray convinces us amounts to a Hell of a lot more than a mere hill of beans: coffee." (Bent Sorensen)"When one opens the pages of Kochhar-Lindgren's Night Cafe, after inspectingthe menu, one ultimately chooses to fill the optic cup to the brim, that concavereceptacle, which synthesizes light from the pupil, iris, & retina, beaming color & imagery into the optic nerve. A pathway, past fact, into depths of imagination, reaching down to the Shaman of Trois Freres, & seeing through the eyes in Cafesof Vincent van Gogh, Walter Benjamin, Ernest Hemingway, & others. Refills aredesirable & free " (Robert Gibbons)