Bøger udgivet af Stanford University Press

"This book investigates a fundamental tension in Hasidic studies: How did a religious movement known to be radical in its views about God, revelation, and personal religiosity simultaneously produce commitment to the structures and obligations of Jewish law? Exploring the movement from its emergence in the mid-1700s until 1815, Ariel Evan Mayse argues that nomos, eros, and mystical piety merged in Hasidism to produce a daring and highly original theory of the commandments and their significance. The novum of Hasidism is visible not in whether its leaders broke or upheld rabbinic norms, but in the movement's vivid attempt to rethink the purpose of ritual. Shedding allegiance to the notion of law, Mayse claims that the methods and vocabulary of ritual studies are better suited to helping us understand the contradictions and tensions of this religious movement as well as its remarkable intellectual vitality. Delving into the full range of Hasidic sources (legal writings, sermons, regimen vitae, theological treatises, responsa, letters, and hagiography) and reading them together with studies of ritual across the past three decades, this book argues that Hasidism offers a sophisticated intellectual vision that pushes beyond a host of hopelessly insufficient binaries such as law and spirit, nomos and eros, mind and body, tradition and innovation"--

"At the height of the Great Terror in 1937, Joseph Stalin took a break from the purges to edit a new textbook on the history of the U.S.S.R. Published shortly thereafter, the Short History of the U.S.S.R amounted to an ideological sea change. Stalin had literally rewritten Russo-Soviet History, breaking with two decades of Bolshevik propaganda that styled the 1917 Revolution as the start of a new era. In its place, he established a thousand-year pedigree for the Soviet state that stretched back through the Russian empire and Muscovy to the very dawn of Slavic civilization. Appearing in million-copy print runs through 1955, the Short History transformed how a generation of Soviet citizens were to understand the past, not only in public school and adult indoctrination courses, but on the printed page, the theatrical stage, and the silver screen. Stalin's Usable Past supplies a critical edition of the Short History that both analyzes the text and places it in historical context. By highlighting Stalin's precise redactions and embellishments, historian David Brandenberger reveals the scope of Stalin's personal involvement in the textbook's development, documenting in unprecedented detail his plans for the transformation of Soviet society's historical imagination"--

"What happens to the experience of community when the grounds of communal life collapse? The Romantic period's upheaval cast both traditional communal organizations of life and outgrowths of the new revolutionary age into crisis. In this context, Joseph Albernaz argues that Romantic writers articulate a vital conception of "groundless community," while following this idea through its aesthetic, ecological, political, and philosophical registers into the present. Amidst the violent expropriation of the commons, Romantic writers including the Wordsworths, Clare, Hèolderlin, and the revolutionary abolitionist Robert Wedderburn reimagined the forms of their own lives through literature to conceive community as groundless, a disposition toward radically open forms of sharing - including with nonhuman beings - without recourse to any collective identity. Both a poetics and ethics, groundless community names an everyday sociality that surges beneath and against the enclosures of property and identity, binding us to the movements of the earth. Unearthing Romanticism's intersections with the history of communism and the general strike, Albernaz also demonstrates how Romantic literature's communal imagination reverberates through later theories of community in Bataille, Derrida, Nancy, Moten, and others. With sharp close readings, new historical constellations, and innovative theoretical paradigms, Common Measures recasts the relationship of the Romantic period to the basic terms of modernity"--

"In this ambitious work, Collin Jennings applies computational methods to eighteenth-century fiction, history, and poetry to reveal the nonlinear courses of reading they produce. Hallmark genres of the British Enlightenment, such as the novel and the stadial history, are typically viewed as narratives of linear progress, emerging from Britain's imperial growth and scientific advancement. Jennings foregrounds Enlightenment links: the paratextual devices, including cross-references, footnotes, and epigraphs, that make words work differently by pointing the reader to places inside and outside the text. Writers and printers combined text and paratext to produce nonlinear paths of reading and polysemous forms of reference that resist simple, causal structures of experience or theories of mind. Alexander Pope, Adam Smith, Ann Radcliffe, and other writers developed genres that operate diagrammatically, with different points of entry and varied relationships between the language and format of books. Revealing the eighteenth-century genealogy of the digital hyperlinks of today, Enlightenment Links argues that emergent print genres combined language and links to bring forward the associative, circular, and multi-sequential ways in which literature makes language work"--

"Deadly viruses, climate-changing carbon molecules, and harmful pollutants cross the globe unimpeded by national borders. While the consequences of these flows range across scales, from the planetary to the local, the authority and resources to manage them are concentrated at mainly one level: the nation-state. This profound mismatch between the scale of planetary challenges and the institutions tasked with governing them is leading to cascading systemic failures. In the groundbreaking Children of a Modest Star, Jonathan S. Blake and Nils Gilman not only challenge dominant ways of thinking about humanity's relationship to the planet and the political forms that presently govern it, but also present a new, innovative framework that corresponds to our inherently planetary condition. Drawing on intellectual history, political philosophy, and the holistic findings of Earth system science, Blake and Gilman argue that it is essential to reimagine our governing institutions in light of the fact that we can only thrive if the multi-species ecosystems we inhabit are also flourishing. Aware of the interlocking challenges we face, it is no longer adequate merely to critique our existing systems or the modernist assumptions that helped create them. Blake and Gilman propose a bold, original architecture for global governance--what they call planetary subsidiarity--designed to enable the enduring habitability of the Earth for humans and non-humans alike. Children of a Modest Star offers a trailblazing vision for constructing a system capable of stabilizing a planet in crisis"--

"Calls to defund the police or to stop brutal police violence, argue Mark Maguire and Setha Low, will never succeed as long as there are those who enjoy and take comfort in security capitalism. Security capitalism can be recognized by the marks it leaves on society, remaking public space in its own image--privatized, fortified, unequal, striated, and access-controlled. With a global and comparative lens that takes readers from Nairobi to New York City, Maguire and Low offer intimate portraits of the people behind security capitalism--the police, policy makers, and private contractors who agree that a price must be paid in blood to maintain public safety--and critique phenomena like the transfer of public funds to arms dealers via the militarization of police, securitized housing developments, and ineffectual counterterrorism efforts. But more than just an exposâe of the nefarious corporations, corrupt agencies, and incompetent governments, this book uniquely shines the spotlight on the ordinary citizens whose desires for safety drive these phenomena. Angela Davis has written of the challenge of persuading people that "safety, safeguarded by violence, is not really safety." Maguire and Low aid us in thinking through the challenge, providing a common language to discuss security capitalism and offering ways to escape its clutches"--