Since the early 1970s, European thinkers have departed notably from their predecessors in order to pursue analytical programs more thoroughly their own. Rethinking the Subject brings together in one volume some of the most influential writings of Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu, Pizzorno, Macfarlane, and other authors whose ideas have had a worldwide

Since the early seventies, European thinkers have departed notably from their predecessors in order to pursue analytical programs more thoroughly their own. Rethinking the Subject brings together in one volume some of the most influential writings of Foucault, Habermas, Bourdieu, Pizzorno, Macfarlane, and other authors whose ideas have had a worldwide influence in recent social theory. This anthology is testament to the central importance of three contemporary themes, each familiar to earlier thinkers but never definitively formulated or resolved. The first two concern the nature and modalities of power and legitimacy in society. The third, and most fundamental, deals with the nature and modalities of the "self" or "subject." These themes owe their special contemporary relevance to an array of events- from the collapse of colonialism to the birth of test-tube babies. James Faubion's introduction traces the historical context of these influential events and themes. It also traces the lineaments of a still inchoate intellectual movement, of which the anthology's contributors are the vanguard. Whether "modernist" or "post-modernist," this movement leads away from a "world-constituting subject," which in one guise or another has served as the ontological ground of social reflection and research since Kant. It points instead toward ontological pluralism and toward polythetic diagnostics of heterogeneous forces that constitute a multiplicity of worlds and subjects.

This book explores diverse but complementary interdisciplinary approaches to the poetics, intertexts, and influence of the work of C. P. Cavafy (Konstantinos Kavafis), one of the most important twentieth-century European poets. Written by leading international scholars in a number of disciplines (critical theory, gender studies, comparative literature, English studies, Greek studies, anthropology, classics), the essays of this volume situate Cavafy s poetry within the broader contexts of modernism and aestheticism and investigate its complex and innovative responses to European literary traditions (from Greek antiquity to modernity) as well as its multifaceted impact on major figures of world literature from North America to South Africa.

Contributors include Eve Sedgwick, Helen Vendler, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, Richard Dellamora, Mark Doty, James Faubion, Diana Haas, John Chioles, Edmund Keeley, Albert Henrichs, Kathleen Coleman, Gregory Nagy, Michael Paschalis, Peter Jeffreys, Diskin Clay, and Panagiotis Roilos.

"Death and the Labyrinth" is unique, being Foucault's only work on literature. For Foucault this was "by far the book I wrote most easily and with the greatest pleasure". Here, Foucault explores theory, criticism and psychology through the texts of Raymond Roussel, one of the fathers of experimental writing, whose work has been celebrated by the likes of Cocteau, Duchamp, Breton, Robbe Grillet, Gide and Giacometti. This revised edition includes: an introduction, chronology and bibliography to Foucault's work by James Faubion, an interview with Foucault, conducted only nine months before his death, and concludes with an essay on Roussel by the poet, John Ashbery.

What need is there for kinship? What good is it anyway? The questions are as old as anthropology itself, but few answers have been enduringly persuasive. Kinship systems can contribute to our enslavement, but more often they permit, channel, and facilitate our relations with others and our further fashioning of ourselves--as kin but also as subjects of other kinds. When they do, they are among the matrices of our lives as ethical beings. Each contributor to this innovative book treats his or her own alterity as the touchstone of the exploration of an ethnographically and historically specific ethics of kinship. Together, the chapters reveal the irreducible complexity of the entanglement of the subject of kinship with the subject of nation, class, ethnicity, gender, desire. The chapters speak eloquently to the sometimes liberating stories that we cannot help but keep telling about our kin and ourselves.