Available for the first time in English! Winner of the Prix Medicis Essai! Marginalized by the scientific age with its metaphysical and philosophical systems, the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution. Exploring the deleterious effects of the systematic downgrading of the senses in Western philosophy, Michel Serres - a member of the Academie Francaise and one of France's leading philosophers - traces a topology of human perception. Writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience. The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalog it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle's label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could?

This collection of original essays brings international and multidisciplinary perspectives to the problem of how to understand and practice editorial mediation: How does editing alter what it seeks to represent? How does it condition the relationship between texts and readers? The different concerns shared by "editors" of a variety of genres, literary and otherwise, emerge here as constructive new approaches to the theory and practice of editing are explored. The essays make a concerted attempt to assess the implications of postmodern thought on one of the oldest and most fundamental cultural activities, editing
The section on theory covers such important subjects as editorial responsibility, the "death of the author," and the nature of the authorial voice. The practice section covers actual editing situations in various literary areas and in musicology, recorded music, and the preservation of oral literature. The multidisciplinary volume will find its readers among students of textual criticism, literature, music, and folklore as well as any readers of postmodern criticism.

Marginalized by the scientific age with its metaphysical and philosophical systems, the lessons of the senses have been overtaken by the dominance of language and the information revolution. Exploring the deleterious effects of the systematic downgrading of the senses in Western philosophy, Michel Serres member of the Acad mie franaise and one of France's leading philosophers traces a topology of human perception. Writing against the Cartesian tradition and in praise of empiricism, he demonstrates repeatedly, and lyrically, the sterility of systems of knowledge divorced from bodily experience. The fragile empirical world, long resistant to our attempts to contain and catalogue it, is disappearing beneath the relentless accumulations of late capitalist society and information technology. Data has replaced sensory pleasure, we are less interested in the taste of a fine wine than in the description on the bottle's label. What are we, and what do we really know, when we have forgotten that our senses can describe a taste more accurately than language ever could.

The Jacobite rebellion of 1715 was a dramatic but ultimately unsuccessful challenge to the new Hanoverian regime in Great Britain. It did, however, reveal serious fault lines in the political foundations of the new regime which enormously restricted the government's freedom of action in the suppression of the rebellion, and effectively made the treatment of the rebels in its aftermath the true test of the new dynasty's legitimacy and stability. Whilst the rulers of England had traditionally dealt harshly with internal rebellion, monarchs and their ministers had to find a delicate balance between showing the power of the regime through the candid exercise of force while maintaining their own reputation for justice and clemency. As such George I and his government had to tailor their reaction to the 1715 rebellion in such a way that it effectively discouraged further participation in Jacobite insurgency, undercut the rebels' ability to challenge the state, and made clear the regime's intention to use a firm hand in preventing rebellion. At the same time it could not cross the line into tyranny with excessive or sadistic executions and had to avoid giving offence to powerful magnates and foreign powers likely to petition for the lives of the captured rebels. To accomplish this feat, the Hanoverian Whig regime used a programme far more subtle and calculated than has generally been appreciated. The scheme it put into effect had three components, to put fear into the rank-and-file of the rebels through a limited programme of execution and transportation, to cripple the Catholic community through imprisonment and property confiscation, and, most crucially, to entertain petitions from members of the elite on behalf of imprisoned rebels. By following such a strategy of retribution tempered with clemency, this book argues that the Hanoverian regime was able to quell the immediate dangers posed by the rebellion, and bring its leaders back into the orbit of the government, beginning the process of reintegrating them back into political mainstream.