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A beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental Europe This landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy’s last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy’s account becomes more vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into language that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood’s intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our world—a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction to mere objects. The exceptional writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition—on Freud, Nietzsche, and others—with rich poetic language and an actual poem. Nancy’s thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of language. Whereas in earlier texts Nancy has referred to this excess as poetry, here he performs it in the form of a poem, in the extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While the publication of a poem by Nancy is a notable event, equally noteworthy is a remarkable essay entitled “Scandalous Death,” in which Nancy meditated on a subject that was to come to him too soon after. Above all, the book is crucial for bringing into English Cruor, the very last book Nancy completed before his death, an evocative meditation offered by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own—and our—singular survival.

A beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental Europe This landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy's last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy's account becomes more vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into language that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood's intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our world-a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction to mere objects. The exceptional writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition-on Freud, Nietzsche, and others-with rich poetic language and an actual poem. Nancy's thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of language. Whereas in earlier texts Nancy has referred to this excess as poetry, here he performs it in the form of a poem, in the extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While the publication of a poem by Nancy is a notable event, equally noteworthy is a remarkable essay entitled "Scandalous Death," in which Nancy meditated on a subject that was to come to him too soon after. Above all, the book is crucial for bringing into English Cruor, the very last book Nancy completed before his death, an evocative meditation offered by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own-and our-singular survival.

"For what tomorrow will be, no one knows," writes Victor Hugo. This dialogue, proposed to Jacques Derrida by the historian Elisabeth Roudinesco, brings together two longtime friends who share a common history and an intellectual heritage. While their perspectives are often different, they have many common reference points: psychoanalysis, above all, but also the authors and works that have come to be known outside France as "post-structuralist." Beginning with a revealing glance back at the French intellectual scene over the past forty years, Derrida and Roudinesco go on to address a number of major social and political issues. Their extraordinarily wide-ranging discussion covers topics such as immigration, hospitality, gender equality, and "political correctness"; the disordering of the traditional family, same-sex unions, and reproductive technologies; the freedom of the "subject" over and against "scientism"; violence against animals; the haunting specter of communism and revolution; the present and future of anti-Semitism (as well as that which marked Derrida's own history) and the hazardous politics of criticizing the state of Israel; the principled abolition of the death penalty; and, to conclude, a chapter "in praise of psychoanalysis." These exchanges not only help to situate Derrida's thought within the milieu out of which it grew, they also show more clearly than ever how this thought, impelled by a deep concern for justice, can be brought to bear on the social and political issues of our day. What emerges here above all, far from an abstract, apolitical discourse, is a call to take responsibility-for the inheritance of a past, for the singularities of the present, and for the unforeseeable tasks of the future.

Heidegger and Nazism: Ever since the philosopher’s public involvement in state politics in 1933, his name has necessarily been a part of this unsavory couple. After the publication in 2014 of the private Black Notebooks, it is now unambiguously part of another: Heidegger and anti-Semitism. What do we learn from analyzing the anti-Semitism of these private writings, together with its sources and grounds, not only for Heidegger’s thought, but for the history of the West in which this thought is embedded? Jean-Luc Nancy poses these questions with the depth and rigor we would expect from him. In doing so, he does not go lightly on Heidegger, in whom he finds a philosophical and “historial” anti-Semitism, outlining a clash of “peoples” that must at all costs arrive at “another beginning.” If Heidegger’s uncritical acceptance of prejudices and long-debunked myths about “world Jewry” shares in the “banality” evoked by Hannah Arendt, this does nothing to lessen the charge. Nancy’s purpose, however, is not simply to condemn Heidegger but rather to invite us to think something to which the thinker of being remained blind: anti-Semitism as a self-hatred haunting the history of the West—and of Christianity in its drive toward an auto-foundation that would leave behind its origins in Judaism.

This posthumous work brings together articles, interviews, statements, prefaces, manifestos, and speeches dating from 1964 to 1985 (just before Genet's death in 1986). These texts bear witness to the many political causes and groups with which Genet felt an affinity, including May '68 and the treatment of immigrants in France, but especially the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. We follow him from the Chicago Democratic Convention (where he met William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg) to Yale University, where he gave the famous May Day Speech in support of the Black Panthers, to Jordan and the Palestinian camps. Along the way, Genet finds allies (George Jackson, Angela Davis, Leyla Shahid, Tahar Ben Jelloun). And, of course, enemies. Between passionate enmity and passionate affinity, Genet speaks for a politics of protest, with an uncompromising outrage that, today, might seem on the verge of being forgotten. The texts are accompanied by detailed editorial notes.

A study of a largely forgotten optical device and its relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. In this first full-length study of a largely forgotten optical device from the eighteenth century, Arnaud Maillet reconfigures our historical understanding of visual experience and meaning in relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. Many are familiar with the Claude glass as a small black convex mirror used by artists and spectators of landscape to reflect a view and make tonal values and areas of light and shade visible. In a groundbreaking account, Maillet goes well beyond this particular function of the glass and situates it within a richer archaeology of Western thought, exploring the uncertainties and anxieties about mirrors, reflections, and their potential distortions. He takes us from the magical and occult background of the "black mirror," through a full evaluation of its importance in the age of the picturesque, to its persistence in a range of technological and representational practices, including photography, film, and contemporary art. The Claude Glass is a lasting contribution to the history of Western visual culture.

Exploring the thought of Mulla Sadra Shirazi, an Iranian Shi'ite of the seventeenth century: a universe of politics, morality, liberty, and order that is indispensable to our understanding of Islamic thought and spirituality. This lluminating study by Christian Jambet explores the essential elements of the philosophical system of Mulla Sadra Shirazi, an Iranian Shi'ite of the seventeenth century. The writings of Mulla Sadra Shirazi (d. 1640) bear witness to the divine revelation in every act of being, from the most humble to the most celebrated. More generally, Islamic philosophy employs an ontology of the real that is important to the destiny of metaphysics, an ontology that belongs to our own universe of thought. The Act of Being, nourished by the Sufism of Ibn al-'Arabi, the philosophy of classical Islam, the thought inherited from the Greeks, and the esoteric and mystical dimension of Shi'ism, seeks to make sense of this intuition of the real.Mulla Sadra saw the world as moving ceaselessly in an uninterrupted revolution of its substances, in which infinite existence breaks through the successive boundaries of the sensible and the intelligible, the mineral and the angelic. In a flourish of epiphanies, in the multiplied mirror of bodies and souls, Mulla Sadra perceived absolute divine liberty. Revealing freedom in the metamorphosis of the believer and the sage, existence teaches the imitation of the divine that can be seen "in its most beautiful form." Reading Mulla Sadra reveals the nexus of politics, morality, liberty, and order in his universe of thought-a universe, as Christian Jambet shows, that is indispensable to our understanding of Islamic thought and spirituality.

A classic work that rereads questions of "muthos" and "logos" in multifaceted contexts. When Jean-Pierre Vernant first published Myth and Thought among the Greeks in 1965, it transformed the field of ancient Greek scholarship, calling forth a new way to think about Greek myth and thought. In eighteen essays-three of which, along with a new preface, are translated into English for the first time-Vernant freed the subject of ancient Greece from its philological chains and reread the questions of "muthos" and "logos" within multifaced and transdisciplinary contexts-of religion, ritual, and art, philosophy, science, social and economic institutions, and historical psychology. A major contribution to both the humanities and the social sciences, Myth and Thought among the Greeks aims to come to terms with a single, essential question: How were individual persons in ancient Greece inseparable from a social and cultural environment of which they were simultaneously the creators and products? Seven themes organize this stellar work-from "Myth Structures" and "Mythic Aspects of Memory and Time" to "The Organization of Space," "Work and Technological Thought," and "Personal Identity and Religion." A master storyteller, an innovative, precise, and original thinker, Vernant continues to change the narratives we tell about the histories of civilizations and the histories of human beings in their individual and collective identities.

This book makes available for the first time in English--and for the first time in its entirety in any language--an important yet little-known interview on the topic of photography that Jacques Derrida granted in 1992 to the German theorist of photography Hubertus von Amelunxen and the German literary and media theorist Michael Wetzel. Their conversation addresses, among other things, questions of presence and its manufacture, the technicity of presentation, the volatility of the authorial subject, and the concept of memory. Derrida offers a penetrating intervention with regard to the distinctive nature of photography vis-a-vis related technologies such as cinema, television, and video. Questioning the all-too-facile divides between so-called old and new media, original and reproduction, analog and digital modes of recording and presenting, he provides stimulating insights into the ways in which we think and speak about the photographic image today. Along the way, the discussion fruitfully interrogates the question of photography in relation to such key concepts as copy, archive, and signature. Gerhard Richter introduces the volume with a critical meditation on the relationship between deconstruction and photography by way of the concepts of translation and invention. "Copy, Archive, Signature" will be of compelling interest to readers in the fields of contemporary European critical thought, photography, aesthetic theory, media studies, and French Studies, as well as those following the singular intellectual trajectory of one the most influential thinkers of our time.

aThe Ground of Image offers more recent and more focused reflections on the nature of representation and art, especially painting.a
-- "Bookforum"

If anything marks the image, it is a deep ambivalence. Denounced as superficial, illusory, and groundless, images are at the same time attributed with exorbitant power and assigned a privileged relation to truth. Mistrusted by philosophy, forbidden and embraced by religions, manipulated as aspectaclea and proliferated in the media, images never cease to present their multiple aspects, their paradoxes, their flat but receding spaces.

What is this power that lies in the depths and recesses of an image--which is always only an impenetrable surface? What secrets are concealed in the ground or in the figures of an image--which never does anything but show just exactly what it is and nothing else? How does the immanence of images open onto their unimaginable others, their imageless origin?

In this collection of writings on images and visual art, Jean-Luc Nancyexplores such questions through an extraordinary range of references. From Renaissance painting and landscape to photography and video, from the image of Roman death masks to the language of silent film, from Cleopatra to Kant and Heidegger, Nancy pursues a reflection on visuality that goes far beyond the many disciplines with which it intersects. He offers insights into the religious, cultural, political, art historical, and philosophical aspects of the visual relation, treating such vexed problems as the connection between image and violence, the sacred status of images, and, in a profound and important essay, the forbidden representation of the Shoah. In the background of allthese investigations lies a preoccupation with finitude, the unsettling forces envisaged by the images that confront us, the limits that bind us to them, the death that stares back at us from their frozen traits and distant intimacies.

In these vibrant and complex essays, a central figure in European philosophy continues to work through some of the most important questions of our time.

Essays by a provocative Italian philosopher on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains. The Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has always been an original reader of texts, understanding their many rich historical, aesthetic, and political meanings and effects. In Profanations, Agamben has assembled for the first time some of his most pivotal essays on photography, the novel, and film. A meditation on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains, Profanations proves yet again that Agamben is one of the most provocative writers of our time. In ten essays, Agamben ponders a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation among genius, ego, and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; and the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon. The range of topics and themes addressed here attest to the creativity of Agamben's singular mode of thought and his persistent concern with the act of witnessing, sometimes futile, sometimes earth-shattering. "In Praise of Profanity," the central essay of this short but dense book, confronts the question of profanity as the crucial political task of the moment. An act of resistance to every form of separation, the concept of profanation reorients perceptions of how power, consumption, and use interweave to produce an urgent political modality and desire: to profane the unprofanable. Agamben not only provides a new and potent theoretical model but describes it with a writerly style that itself forges inescapable links among literature, politics, and philosophy.

This posthumous work brings together articles, interviews, statements, prefaces, manifestos, and speeches dating from 1964 to 1985 (just before Genet's death in 1986). These texts bear witness to the many political causes and groups with which Genet felt an affinity, including May '68 and the treatment of immigrants in France, but especially the Black Panthers and the Palestinians. We follow him from the Chicago Democratic Convention (where he met William Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg) to Yale University, where he gave the famous May Day Speech in support of the Black Panthers, to Jordan and the Palestinian camps. Along the way, Genet finds allies (George Jackson, Angela Davis, Leyla Shahid, Tahar Ben Jelloun). And, of course, enemies.
Between passionate enmity and passionate affinity, Genet speaks for a politics of protest, with an uncompromising outrage that, today, might seem on the verge of being forgotten.
The texts are accompanied by detailed editorial notes.

Rousseau's opposition to the theater is well known: Far from purging the passions, it serves only to exacerbate them, and to render them hypocritical. But is it possible that Rousseau's texts reveal a different conception of theatrical imitation, a more originary form of mimesis? Over and against Heidegger's dismissal of Rousseau in the 1930s, and in the wake of classic readings by Jacques Derrida and Jean Starobinski, Lacoue-Labarthe asserts the deeply philosophical importance of Rousseau as a thinker who, without formalizing it as such, established a dialectical logic that would determine the future of philosophy: an originary theatricality arising from a dialectic between "nature" and its supplements. Beginning with a reading of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Lacoue-Labarthe brings out this dialectic in properly philosophical terms, revealing nothing less than a transcendental thinking of origins. For Rousseau, the origin has the form of a "scene"-that is, of theater. On this basis, Rousseau's texts on the theater, especially the Letter to d'Alembert, emerge as an incisive interrogation of Aristotle's Poetics. This can be read not in the false and conventional interpretation of this text that Rousseau had inherited, but rather in relation to its fundamental concepts, mimesis and katharsis, and in Rousseau's interpretation of Greek theater itself. If for Rousseau mimesis is originary, a transcendental structure, katharsis is in turn the basis of a dialectical movement, an Aufhebung that will translate the word itself (for, as Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us, Aufheben translates katharein). By reversing the facilities of the Platonic critique, Rousseau inaugurates what we could call the philosophical theater of the future.

Is writing haunted by a categorical imperative? Does the Kantian sublime continue to shape the writer's vocation, even for twentieth-century authors? What precise shape, form, or figure does this residue of sublimity take in the fictions that follow from it-and that leave it in ruins? This book explores these questions through readings of three authors who bear witness to an ambiguous exigency: writing as a demanding and exclusive task, at odds with life, but also a mere compulsion, a drive without end or reason, even a kind of torture. If Kafka, Blanchot, and Beckett mimic a sublime vocation in their extreme devotion to writing, they do so in full awareness that the trajectory it dictates leads not to metaphysical redemption but rather downward, into the uncanny element of fiction. As this book argues, the sublime has always been a deeply melancholy affair, even in its classical Kantian form, but it is in the attenuated speech of narrative voices progressively stripped of their resources and rewards that the true nature of this melancholy is revealed.

"For what tomorrow will be, no one knows," writes Victor Hugo. This dialogue, proposed to Jacques Derrida by the historian Elisabeth Roudinesco, brings together two longtime friends who share a common history and an intellectual heritage. While their perspectives are often different, they have many common reference points: psychoanalysis, above all, but also the authors and works that have come to be known outside France as "post-structuralist." Beginning with a revealing glance back at the French intellectual scene over the past forty years, Derrida and Roudinesco go on to address a number of major social and political issues. Their extraordinarily wide-ranging discussion covers topics such as immigration, hospitality, gender equality, and "political correctness"; the disordering of the traditional family, same-sex unions, and reproductive technologies; the freedom of the "subject" over and against "scientism"; violence against animals; the haunting specter of communism and revolution; the present and future of anti-Semitism (as well as that which marked Derrida's own history) and the hazardous politics of criticizing the state of Israel; the principled abolition of the death penalty; and, to conclude, a chapter "in praise of psychoanalysis." These exchanges not only help to situate Derrida's thought within the milieu out of which it grew, they also show more clearly than ever how this thought, impelled by a deep concern for justice, can be brought to bear on the social and political issues of our day. What emerges here above all, far from an abstract, apolitical discourse, is a call to take responsibility-for the inheritance of a past, for the singularities of the present, and for the unforeseeable tasks of the future.

In February 1988, philosophers Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger's thought. This event took place in the very amphitheater in which, more than fifty years earlier, Heidegger, as rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of the Nazi Party, had given a speech entitled "The University in the New Reich." Heidegger's involvement in Nazism has always been, and will remain, an indelible scandal, but what is its real relation to his work and thought? And what are the responsibilities of those who read this work, who analyze and elaborate this thought? Conversely, what is at stake in the wholesale dismissal of this important but compromised twentieth-century philosopher? In 1988, in the wake of the recent publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism, and of the heated debates that ensued, these questions had become more pressing than ever. The reflections presented by three of the most prominent of Heidegger's readers, improvised in French and transcribed here, were an attempt to approach these questions before a broad public, but with a depth of knowledge and a complex sense of the questions at issue that have been often lacking in the press. Ranging over two days and including exchanges with one another and with the audience, the discussions pursued by these major thinkers remain highly relevant today, especially following the publication of Heidegger's already notorious "Black Notebooks," which have added another chapter to the ongoing debates over this contested figure. The present volume recalls a highly charged moment in this history, while also drawing the debate toward its most essential questions.

A study of a largely forgotten optical device and its relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. In this first full-length study of a largely forgotten optical device from the eighteenth century, Arnaud Maillet reconfigures our historical understanding of visual experience and meaning in relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. Many are familiar with the Claude glass as a small black convex mirror used by artists and spectators of landscape to reflect a view and make tonal values and areas of light and shade visible. In a groundbreaking account, Maillet goes well beyond this particular function of the glass and situates it within a richer archaeology of Western thought, exploring the uncertainties and anxieties about mirrors, reflections, and their potential distortions. He takes us from the magical and occult background of the "black mirror," through a full evaluation of its importance in the age of the picturesque, to its persistence in a range of technological and representational practices, including photography, film, and contemporary art. The Claude Glass is a lasting contribution to the history of Western visual culture.

"Pagan life seduces me a little more with each passing day. If it were possible today, I would change my religion and would joyfully embrace poetic paganism," wrote the Armenian poet Daniel Varuzhan in 1908. During the seven years that remained in his life, he wrote largely in this "pagan" vein. If it was an artistic endeavour, why then should art be defined in reference to religion? And which religion precisely? Was Varuzhan echoing Schelling's Philosophy of Art?
Mourning Philology draws on Varuzhan and his work to present a history of the national imagination, which is also a history of national philology, as a reaction to the two main philological inventions of the nineteenth century: mythological religion and the native. In its first part, the book thus gives an account of the successive stages of the orientalist philology. The last episode in this story of national emergence took place in 1914 in Constantinople, when the literary journal Mehyan gathered around Varuzhan the great names to come of Armenian literature in the diaspora

An exploration of the roles of conflict and forgetting in ancient Athens. Athens, 403 B.C.E. The bloody oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty is over, and the democrats have returned to the city victorious. Renouncing vengeance, in an act of willful amnesia, citizens call for--if not invent--amnesty. They agree to forget the unforgettable, the "past misfortunes," of civil strife or stasis. More precisely, what they agree to deny is that stasis--simultaneously partisanship, faction, and sedition--is at the heart of their politics. Continuing a criticism of Athenian ideology begun in her pathbreaking study The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux argues that this crucial moment of Athenian political history must be interpreted as constitutive of politics and political life and not as a threat to it. Divided from within, the city is formed by that which it refuses. Conflict, the calamity of civil war, is the other, dark side of the beautiful unitary city of Athens. In a brilliant analysis of the Greek word for voting, diaphora, Loraux underscores the conflictual and dynamic motion of democratic life. Voting appears as the process of dividing up, of disagreement--in short, of agreeing to divide and choose. Not only does Loraux reconceptualize the definition of ancient Greek democracy, she also allows the contemporary reader to rethink the functioning of modern democracy in its critical moments of internal stasis.

Rousseau's opposition to the theater is well known: Far from purging the passions, it serves only to exacerbate them, and to render them hypocritical. But is it possible that Rousseau's texts reveal a different conception of theatrical imitation, a more originary form of mimesis? Over and against Heidegger's dismissal of Rousseau in the 1930s, and in the wake of classic readings by Jacques Derrida and Jean Starobinski, Lacoue-Labarthe asserts the deeply philosophical importance of Rousseau as a thinker who, without formalizing it as such, established a dialectical logic that would determine the future of philosophy: an originary theatricality arising from a dialectic between "nature" and its supplements. Beginning with a reading of Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality, Lacoue-Labarthe brings out this dialectic in properly philosophical terms, revealing nothing less than a transcendental thinking of origins. For Rousseau, the origin has the form of a "scene"-that is, of theater. On this basis, Rousseau's texts on the theater, especially the Letter to d'Alembert, emerge as an incisive interrogation of Aristotle's Poetics. This can be read not in the false and conventional interpretation of this text that Rousseau had inherited, but rather in relation to its fundamental concepts, mimesis and katharsis, and in Rousseau's interpretation of Greek theater itself. If for Rousseau mimesis is originary, a transcendental structure, katharsis is in turn the basis of a dialectical movement, an Aufhebung that will translate the word itself (for, as Lacoue-Labarthe reminds us, Aufheben translates katharein). By reversing the facilities of the Platonic critique, Rousseau inaugurates what we could call the philosophical theater of the future.

"A great story, full of twists and turns. . . . Careers made and ruined, departments torn apart, writing programs turned into sensitivity seminars, political witch hunts, public opprobrium, ignorant media attacks, the whole ball of wax. Read it and laugh or read it and weep. I can hardly wait for the movie." --Stanley Fish, "Think Again, New York Times" "In such a difficult genre, full of traps and obstacles, French Theory" is a success and a remarkable book in every respect: it is fair, balanced, and informed. I am sure this book will become the" reference on both sides of the Atlantic." --Jacques Derrida "The Atlantic Ocean has two sides, and so does French Theory. Reinvented in America and betrayed in its own country, it has become the most radical intellectual movement in the West with global reach, rewriting Marx in light of late capitalism. Breathtakingly moving back and forth between the two cultures, Francois Cusset takes us through a dazzling intellectual adventure that illuminates the past thirty years, and many more decades to come." --Sylvere Lotringer During the last three decades of the twentieth century, a disparate group of radical French thinkers achieved an improbable level of influence and fame in the United States. Compared by at least one journalist to the British rock 'n' roll invasion, the arrival of works by Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari on American shores in the late 1970s and 1980s caused a sensation. Outside the academy, "French theory" had a profound impact on the era's emerging identity politics while also becoming, in the 1980s, the target of right-wing propagandists. At thesame time in academic departments across the country, their poststructuralist form of radical suspicion transformed disciplines from literature to anthropology to architecture. By the 1990s, French theory was woven deeply into America's cultural and intellectual fabric. French Theory "is the first comprehensive account of the American fortunes of these unlikely philosophical celebrities. Francois Cusset looks at why America proved to be such fertile ground for French theory, how such demanding writings could become so widely influential, and the peculiarly American readings of these works. Reveling in the gossipy history, Cusset also provides a lively exploration of the many provocative critical practices inspired by French theory. Ultimately, he dares to shine a bright light on the exultation of these thinkers to assess the relevance of critical theory to social and political activism today-showing, finally, how French theory has become inextricably bound with American life. Francois Cusset, a writer and intellectual historian, teaches contemporary French thought in Paris at the Institut d'Etudes Politiques and at Columbia University's Reid Hall. His books include Queer Critics" and La Decennie." Jeff Fort is assistant professor of French at the University of California, Davis. He has translated works by Maurice Blanchot, Jean Genet, and Jean-Luc Nancy.

An exploration of the roles of conflict and forgetting in ancient Athens. Athens, 403 B.C.E. The bloody oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty is over, and the democrats have returned to the city victorious. Renouncing vengeance, in an act of willful amnesia, citizens call for--if not invent--amnesty. They agree to forget the unforgettable, the "past misfortunes," of civil strife or stasis. More precisely, what they agree to deny is that stasis--simultaneously partisanship, faction, and sedition--is at the heart of their politics. Continuing a criticism of Athenian ideology begun in her pathbreaking study The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux argues that this crucial moment of Athenian political history must be interpreted as constitutive of politics and political life and not as a threat to it. Divided from within, the city is formed by that which it refuses. Conflict, the calamity of civil war, is the other, dark side of the beautiful unitary city of Athens. In a brilliant analysis of the Greek word for voting, diaphora, Loraux underscores the conflictual and dynamic motion of democratic life. Voting appears as the process of dividing up, of disagreement--in short, of agreeing to divide and choose. Not only does Loraux reconceptualize the definition of ancient Greek democracy, she also allows the contemporary reader to rethink the functioning of modern democracy in its critical moments of internal stasis.