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A powerful case for why anthropology should study outsiders of
thought and their speculative ideas What sort of thinking is needed
to study anomalies in thought? In this trenchantly argued and
beautifully written book, anthropologist Peter Skafish explores
this provocative question by examining the writings of the medium
and "rough metaphysician" Jane Roberts (1929-1984). Through a close
interpretation of her own published texts as well as those she
understood herself to have dictated for her cohort of channeled
personalities-including one, named "Seth," who would inspire the
New Age movement-Skafish shows her intuitive and dreamlike work to
be a source of rigorously inventive ideas about science, ontology,
translation, and pluralism. Arguing that Roberts's writings contain
philosophies ahead of their time, he also asks: How might our
understanding of speculative thinking change if we consider the way
untrained writers, occult visionaries, and their counterparts in
other cultural traditions undertake it? What can outsider thinkers
teach us about the limitations of even our most critical
intellectual habits? Rough Metaphysics is at once an ethnography of
the books of a strange and yet remarkable writer, a commentary on
the unlikely philosophy contained in them, and a call for a new way
of doing (and undoing) philosophy through anthropology, and vice
versa. In guiding the reader through Roberts's often hallucinatory
"world of concepts," Skafish also develops a series of original
interpretations of thinkers-from William James to Claude
Levi-Strauss to Paul Feyerabend-who have been vital to
anthropologists and their fellow travelers. Seductively written and
surprising in its turns of thought, Rough Metaphysics is a feast
for anyone who wants to learn how to think something new,
especially about thought.
Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned
anthropologist's intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century
French essayist Michel de Montaigne In January 1937, between the
two ethnographic trips he would describe in Tristes Tropiques,
Claude Levi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confederation generale du
travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the
Bibliotheque national de France, this lecture, "Ethnography: The
Revolutionary Science," discussed the French essayist Michel de
Montaigne, to whom Levi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered
more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing
the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the
twentieth century, these two talks reveal how Levi-Strauss's
ethnography begins and ends with Montaigne-and how his reading of
his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology
evolve along the way. Published here for the first time, these
lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and
the thinking of one of its most important practitioners. Essays by
Emmanuel Desveaux, who edited the original French volume De
Montaigne a Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of
Levi-Strauss's talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary.
A unique rereading of Lacan's theory of desire and its link to
masochism, joy, mysticism, death, and feminine jouissance Of all of
Lacan's reconceptualizations of Freudian psychoanalytic discourse,
the most misunderstood are those concerning human beings' relation
to the unconscious play of desire and the neurosis stemming from
their attachment to the phallic function. An interpretive tour de
force that engages works by surrealists such as Andre Breton,
canonical writers like William Faulkner and James Joyce, and the
philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, and Baruch
Spinoza, The Decision of Desire is groundbreaking in its proposal
that each of us can seek out and reimagine our relation to the
infinite aporias of desire and thereby detach from its destructive,
repetitive forms in favor of joy and affirmation. Providing insight
to the lay reader of psychoanalytic theory as much as to practicing
psychoanalysts, The Decision of Desire is a bold reengagement with
the legacy of the notion of desire within psychoanalysis and the
quandary of how to assume responsibility for desires. For if desire
is always already that of the Other and the unconscious, and also a
decision that escapes our consciousness of ourselves, how can we
assume an ethical relation to it that avoids the vicious circle of
disappointment, neurosis, and destruction? Such is the decision of
desire attempted within Silvia Lippi's profound development of a
contemporary psychoanalytic thought.
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From Montaigne to Montaigne (Hardcover, 1)
Claude Levi-Strauss; Edited by Emmanuel Desveaux; Translated by Robert Bononno; Introduction by Peter Skafish
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Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned
anthropologist's intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century
French essayist Michel de Montaigne In January 1937, between the
two ethnographic trips he would describe in Tristes Tropiques,
Claude Levi-Strauss gave a talk to the Confederation generale du
travail in Paris. Only recently discovered in the archives of the
Bibliotheque national de France, this lecture, "Ethnography: The
Revolutionary Science," discussed the French essayist Michel de
Montaigne, to whom Levi-Strauss would return in remarks delivered
more than a half-century later, in the spring of 1992. Bracketing
the career of one of the most celebrated anthropologists of the
twentieth century, these two talks reveal how Levi-Strauss's
ethnography begins and ends with Montaigne-and how his reading of
his intellectual forebear and his understanding of anthropology
evolve along the way. Published here for the first time, these
lectures offer new insight into the development of ethnography and
the thinking of one of its most important practitioners. Essays by
Emmanuel Desveaux, who edited the original French volume De
Montaigne a Montaigne, and Peter Skafish expand the context of
Levi-Strauss's talks with contemporary perspectives and commentary.
A powerful case for why anthropology should study outsiders of
thought and their speculative ideas What sort of thinking is needed
to study anomalies in thought? In this trenchantly argued and
beautifully written book, anthropologist Peter Skafish explores
this provocative question by examining the writings of the medium
and "rough metaphysician" Jane Roberts (1929-1984). Through a close
interpretation of her own published texts as well as those she
understood herself to have dictated for her cohort of channeled
personalities-including one, named "Seth," who would inspire the
New Age movement-Skafish shows her intuitive and dreamlike work to
be a source of rigorously inventive ideas about science, ontology,
translation, and pluralism. Arguing that Roberts's writings contain
philosophies ahead of their time, he also asks: How might our
understanding of speculative thinking change if we consider the way
untrained writers, occult visionaries, and their counterparts in
other cultural traditions undertake it? What can outsider thinkers
teach us about the limitations of even our most critical
intellectual habits? Rough Metaphysics is at once an ethnography of
the books of a strange and yet remarkable writer, a commentary on
the unlikely philosophy contained in them, and a call for a new way
of doing (and undoing) philosophy through anthropology, and vice
versa. In guiding the reader through Roberts's often hallucinatory
"world of concepts," Skafish also develops a series of original
interpretations of thinkers-from William James to Claude
Levi-Strauss to Paul Feyerabend-who have been vital to
anthropologists and their fellow travelers. Seductively written and
surprising in its turns of thought, Rough Metaphysics is a feast
for anyone who wants to learn how to think something new,
especially about thought.
How does the ontological turn in anthropology redefine what modern,
Western ontology is in practice, and offer the beginnings of a new
ontological pluralism? On a planet that is increasingly becoming a
single, metaphysically homogeneous world, anthropology remains one
of the few disciplines that recognizes that being has been thought
with very different concepts and can still be rendered in terms
quite different than those placed on it today. Yet despite its
critical acuity, even the most philosophically oriented
anthropology often remains segregated from philosophical
discussions aimed at rethinking such terms. What would come of an
anthropology more fully committed to being a source of (post-)
philosophical concepts? What would happen to philosophy if it began
to think with and through these concepts? How, finally, does
comparison condition these two projects ? This book addresses these
questions from a variety of perspectives, all of which nonetheless
hold in common the view that "philosophy" has been displaced and
altered by the modes of thought of other collectives. An
international group of authors, including Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro, Marilyn Strathern, Philippe Descola, and Bruno Latour,
explore how the new anthropology/philosophy conjuncture opens new
horizons of critique.
How does the ontological turn in anthropology redefine what modern,
Western ontology is in practice, and offer the beginnings of a new
ontological pluralism? On a planet that is increasingly becoming a
single, metaphysically homogeneous world, anthropology remains one
of the few disciplines that recognizes that being has been thought
with very different concepts and can still be rendered in terms
quite different than those placed on it today. Yet despite its
critical acuity, even the most philosophically oriented
anthropology often remains segregated from philosophical
discussions aimed at rethinking such terms. What would come of an
anthropology more fully committed to being a source of (post-)
philosophical concepts? What would happen to philosophy if it began
to think with and through these concepts? How, finally, does
comparison condition these two projects ? This book addresses these
questions from a variety of perspectives, all of which nonetheless
hold in common the view that "philosophy" has been displaced and
altered by the modes of thought of other collectives. An
international group of authors, including Eduardo Viveiros de
Castro, Marilyn Strathern, Philippe Descola, and Bruno Latour,
explore how the new anthropology/philosophy conjuncture opens new
horizons of critique.
Behind Martin Heidegger s question of Being lies another one not
yet sufficiently addressed in continental philosophy: change.
Catherine Malabou, one of France s most inventive contemporary
philosophers, explores this topic in the writings of Heidegger
through the themes of metamorphosis, migration, exchange, and
modification, finding and articulating a radical theory of
ontico-ontological transformability. "The Heidegger Change"
sketches the implications of this theory for a wide range of issues
of central concern to the humanities capitalism, the gift, ethics,
suffering, the biological, technology, imagination, and time. Not
since the writings of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas has the
work of Heidegger been the subject of such inventive interpretation
and original theory in its own right."
Behind Martin Heidegger s question of Being lies another one not
yet sufficiently addressed in continental philosophy: change.
Catherine Malabou, one of France s most inventive contemporary
philosophers, explores this topic in the writings of Heidegger
through the themes of metamorphosis, migration, exchange, and
modification, finding and articulating a radical theory of
ontico-ontological transformability. "The Heidegger Change"
sketches the implications of this theory for a wide range of issues
of central concern to the humanities capitalism, the gift, ethics,
suffering, the biological, technology, imagination, and time. Not
since the writings of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas has the
work of Heidegger been the subject of such inventive interpretation
and original theory in its own right."
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