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Two previously unpublished lectures charting the renowned anthropologist's intellectual engagement with the sixteenth-century French essayist Michel de Montaigne In January 1937, between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.

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."