Bøger i Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics serien

Technics and Time 2: Disorientation continues Stiegler's interrogation of prosthetic and ortho-thetic memory in light of the crisis that arises when speed and delay are irreconcilable, the crisis of "human being" itself.

In this philosophical detective story, Giorgio Agamben reads the mysterious 1938 disappearance of atomic physicist Ettore Majorana as an intentional and decisive objection to how quantum physics had reduced the real to probability.

Originally published in Italian in 2016 under the title Che cos'ae la filosofia?

This is the author's most influential work of literary theory and criticism in which she explores the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

This volume presents a new proposal for the link between philosophy and art. Badiou identifies and rejects the three schemes of didacticism, romanticism, and classicism that he sees as having governed traditional "aesthetics," and seeks a fourth mode of accounting for the educative value of works of art.

Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature with man-made objects, which did not have the source of production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.

Technics and Time, 3 furthers Stiegler's critique of technics, working (back) through Kant in order to examine the nature of "cinematic time" relative to phenomenology and hypertechnology.

The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben's recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of apparatus, a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on the singular relation with one's own time that we call contemporariness.

This book, written out of Derrida's long-standing friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, examines the central place accorded to the sense of touch in the Western philosophical tradition.

The influential French philosopher, Derrida, discusses the analytic of death in Heidegger's Being and Time. This new book will not fail to set new standards for the discussion of Heidegger and for dealing with philosophical texts.

In The Time That Remains, Agamben seeks to separate the Pauline texts from the history of the Church that canonized them, thus revealing them to be "the fundamental messianic texts of the West." He argues that Paul's letters are concerned not with the foundation of a new religion but rather with the "messianic" abolition of Jewish law. Situating Paul's texts in the context of early Jewish messianism, this book is part of a growing set of recent critiques devoted to the period when Judaism and Christianity were not yet fully distinct, placing Paul in the context of what has been called "Judaeo-Christianity." >

This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary works. Though the founding text of speech act theory, J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, repeatedly expels literature from the domain of felicitous speech acts, literature is an indispensable presence within Austin's book. It contains many literary references but also uses as essential tools literary devices of its own: imaginary stories that serve as examples and imaginary dialogues that forestall potential objections. How to Do Things with Words is not the triumphant establishment of a fully elaborated theory of speech acts, but the story of a failure to do that, the story of what Austin calls a "bogging down." After an introductory chapter that explores Austin's book in detail, the two following chapters show how Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man in different ways challenge Austin's speech act theory generally and his expulsion of literature specifically. Derrida shows that literature cannot be expelled from speech acts--rather that what he calls "iterability" means that any speech act may be literature. De Man asserts that speech act theory involves a radical dissociation between the cognitive and positing dimensions of language, what Austin calls language's "constative" and "performative" aspects. Both Derrida and de Man elaborate new speech act theories that form the basis of new notions of responsible and effective politico-ethical decision and action.The fourth chapter explores the role of strong emotion in effective speech acts through a discussion of passages in Derrida, Wittgenstein, and Austin. The final chapter demonstrates, through close readings of three passages in Proust, the way speech act theory can be employed in an illuminating way in the accurate reading of literary works.

"This is a very useful book because it makes Blanchot's powerful text widely available in both French and English."--The European Legacy

In the three essays that make up this stimulating and often startling book, Jacques Derrida argues against the notion that the basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through, argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychoanalysis is here examined in the various "resistances" to analysis--conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself, an insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of analysis itself. Derrida not only shows how the interest of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing can be renewed today, but these essays afford him the opportunity to revisit and reassess a subject he first confronted (in an essay on Freud) in 1966. They also serve to clarify Derrida's thinking about the subjects of the essays--Freud, Lacan, and Foucault--a thinking that, especially with regard to the last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood.The first essay, on Freud, is a tour de force of close reading of Freud's texts as philosophical reflection. By means of the fine distinctions Derrida makes in this analytical reading, particularly of The Interpretation of Dreams, he opens up the realm of analysis into new and unpredictable forms--such as meeting with an interdiction (when taking an analysis further is "forbidden" by a structural limit).Following the essay that might be dubbed Derrida's "return to Freud," the next is devoted to Lacan, the figure for whom that phrase was something of a slogan. In this essay and the next, on Foucault, Derrida reencounters two thinkers to whom he had earlier devoted important essays, which precipitated stormy discussions and numerous divisions within the intellectual milieus influenced by their writings. In this essay, which skillfully integrates the concept of resistance into larger questions, Derrida asks in effect: What is the origin and nature of the text that constitutes Lacanian psychoanalysis, considering its existence as an archive, as teachings, as seminars, transcripts, quotations, etc.?Derrida's third essay may be called not simply a criticism but an appreciation of Foucault's work: an appreciation not only in the psychological and rhetorical sense, but also in the sense that it elevates Foucault's thought by giving back to it ranges and nuances lost through its reduction by his readers, his own texts, and its formulaic packaging.

In this book, one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He probes the meaning and historical consequences of the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a "self-annulling" mode, in the process offering an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetics from Kant to Heidegger.

Acting Out brings together two short books (the autobiographical I>How I Became a Philosopher and To Love, To Love Me, To Love Us) by Bernard Stiegler, the fruit of the discipline he developed in prison and of the passion he brings to his political, philosophical, and technical diagnoses of contemporary life.

Levinas discusses his encounters with those philosophers and literary authors whose writings have contributed to his own philosophy: Agnon, Buber, Celan, Delhomme, Derrida, Jabes, Kierkegaard, Lacroix, Laporte, Picard, Proust, Van Breda, Wahl, and, most notably, Blanchot.

"Originally published in Italian in 2017 under the title Creazione e anarchia: l'opera nell'etaa della religione capitalistica."

In this book, literary critic and political theorist Werner Hamacher shows how Hoelderlin's late poetry develops and enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique, unprecedented, and still revolutionary concept of revolution that begins with a groundbreaking understanding of language.

This analysis of art and its modes of existence by a contemporary French philosopher begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones.

Advances the author's reflections on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative theology, politics, war, nationalism, and religion.

"Originally published in Italian in 2017 under the title Karman: breve trattato sull'azione, la colpa e il gesto."

In The Sacrament of Language Agamben investigates the phenomenon of the oath, arguing that it points toward a fundamental experience of language that lies at the root of religion and law alike.

Tracing the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature works, the author analyzes the violent transformations which Hegel's philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible.

This book argues that the theory of force elaborated in Immanuel Kant's aesthetics (and in particular, his theorization of the dynamic sublime) is of decisive importance to poetry in the nineteenth century and to the connection between poetry and philosophy over the last two centuries. Inspired by his deep engagement with the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, who especially developed this Kantian strain of thinking, Kevin McLaughlin uses this theory of force to illuminate the work of three of the most influential nineteenth-century writers in their respective national traditions: Friedrich Holderlin, Charles Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold. The result is a fine elucidation of Kantian theory and a fresh account of poetic language and its aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities.

In 1980, deconstructive and psychoanalytic literary theorist Barbara Johnson wrote an essay on Mary Shelley for a colloquium on the writings of Jacques Derrida. The essay marked the beginning of Johnson's lifelong interest in Shelley as well as her first foray into the field of "e;women's studies,"e; one of whose commitments was the rediscovery and analysis of works by women writers previously excluded from the academic canon. Indeed, the last book Johnson completed before her death was Mary Shelley and Her Circle, published here for the first time. Shelley was thus the subject for Johnson's beginning in feminist criticism and also for her end. It is surprising to recall that when Johnson wrote her essay, only two of Shelley's novels were in print, critics and scholars having mostly dismissed her writing as inferior and her career as a side effect of her famous husband's. Inspired by groundbreaking feminist scholarship of the seventies, Johnson came to pen yet more essays on Shelley over the course of a brilliant but tragically foreshortened career. So much of what we know and think about Mary Shelley today is due to her and a handful of scholars working just decades ago. In this volume, Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman have united all of Johnson's published and unpublished work on Shelley alongside their own new, insightful pieces of criticism and those of two other peers and fellow pioneers in feminist theory, Mary Wilson Carpenter and Cathy Caruth. The book thus evolves as a conversation amongst key scholars of shared intellectual inclinations while closing the circle on Johnson's life and her own fascination with the life and circle of another woman writer, who, of course, also happened to be the daughter of a founder of modern feminism.

H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . is Jacques Derrida's tribute to Helene Cixous-the author, her works, and their lifelong mutual reading and intellectual friendship.

A probing investigation of the trial of Jesus by noted Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

A first step toward a viable theory of the manifold internal conflicts that afflict the world's populations today, this book looks at how civil war was conceived of at two crucial moments in the history of Western thought, in ancient Athens (from which the political concept of stasis emerges) and later, in the work of Thomas Hobbes.