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Explores the deep affinity between Proust's textual experimentation and the revolutionary philosophical interventions of Derrida and DeleuzeJames Dutton argues that Proust's lone published text, A la recherche du temps perdu (1913 1927), stages a uniquely productive encounter between philosophy and literature. In its genre-defying originality, it anticipates some of the most important concepts and strategies of poststructuralist French thought exemplified in the work of Jacques Derrida and Gille...

In Turning Emotion Inside Out, Edward S. Casey challenges the commonplace assumption that our emotions are to be located inside our minds, brains, hearts, or bodies. Instead, he invites us to rethink our emotions as fundamentally, although not entirely, emerging from outside and around the self, redirecting our attention from felt interiority to the emotions located in the world around us, beyond the confines of subjectivity. This book begins with a brief critique of internalist views of emotio...

This book provides a genealogical mapping of the universalisation/secularisation thesis that is both widely saluted and mistrusted as master narrative of modern political and normative history. While accepting that foundational issues of religions weigh heavier than political philosophy's aspirations, the authors question the outdated suggestions of Carl Schmitt's political theology, building instead upon a refined version of Giorgio Agamben's close-reading of Christian government as management....

In Archive Fever, Jacques Derrida deftly guides us through an extended meditation on remembrance, religion, time, and technology-fruitfully occasioned by a deconstructive analysis of the notion of archiving. Intrigued by the evocative relationship between technologies of inscription and psychic processes, Derrida offers for the first time a major statement on the pervasive impact of electronic media, particularly e-mail, which threaten to transform the entire public and private space of humanity...

In the tradition of Simone de Beauvoir and Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray is one of France's most versatile feminist critics. Sexes and Genealogies, a collection of lectures delivered throughout Canada and Europe, introduces her writing to a wider American audience. Irigaray's most famous work, Speculum of the Other Woman, prompted her expulsion from the Lacanin Ecole Freudienne because of its searing depiction of Platonic and Freudian representations of women. Now Sexes and Genealogies analyzes...

Ludwig Wittgenstein's writings inspired contemporary philosophical thinking and advanced many issues that had been addressed by traditional philosophy. The questions raised by the Viennese philosopher initiated debates on a reconsideration of philosophical terminology. This is especially true for a term that has generated at least three significant controversies since its creation and will probably generate more disputes in the following years. It is the expression "form(s) of life" which transl...

Explores Jacques Derrida's distinctive approach to Shakespeare Offers the first comprehensive and accessible account and discussion of Derrida's engagement with ShakespeareChallenges the way we have traditionally come to think about the interdisciplinary relationship between literature and philosophy, as well as literary geniusContextualises Derrida's readings of Shakespeare within his wider philosophical project and discusses in how far they relate to - or are distinct from - his engagement wit...

Law's Trace argues for the political importance of deconstruction by taking Derrida's reading of Hegel as its point of departure. While it is well established that seemingly neutral and inclusive legal and political categories and representations are always, in fact, partial and exclusive, among Derrida's most potent arguments was that the exclusions at work in every representation are not accidental but constitutive. Indeed, one of the most significant ways that modern philosophy appears to hav...

Identity: Fragments, Frankness is a rich and powerful essay on the notion of identity and on how it operates in our contemporary world. In contrast to the various attempts to cling to established identities or to associate identity with dubious agendas, Nancy shows that an identity is always open to alterity and its transformations. Against cynical initiatives that seek to instrumentalize the question of identity in an attempt to manipulate sentiment against immigration, Nancy problematizes anew...

The death of the author in our times has assumed a significance perhaps comparable only to the death of God in the 19th century, yet no clear state ment of what is meant by this notion has appeared in critical theory. In this study, Sean Burke provides not only a detailed explanation of this movement, but shows also how the attempt to abolish the author is fundamentally misguided and philosophically untenable. Through close readings, Burke demonstrates that the concept of the author remained pro...

Is giving possible? Is it possible to give without immediately entering into a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned? This question leads Jacques Derrida to make out an irresolvable paradox at what seems the most fundamental level of the gift's meaning: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as gift puts it in the cycle of repayment and debt. Derrida reads the relation of time to gift through a number of texts: Hei...

Despite their conceptual allergy to vegetal life, philosophers have used germination, growth, blossoming, fruition, reproduction, and decay as illustrations of abstract concepts; mentioned plants in passing as the natural backdrops for dialogues, letters, and other compositions; spun elaborate allegories out of flowers, trees, and even grass; and recommended appropriate medicinal, dietary, and aesthetic approaches to select species of plants. In this book, Michael Marder illuminates the vegetal...

This is a book about evolution from a post-Darwinian perspective. It recounts the core ideas of French philosopher Henri Bergson and his rediscovery and legacy in the poststructuralist critical philosophies of the 1960s, and explores the confluences of these ideas with those of complexity theory in environmental biology.

12 new essays evaluating Agamben's work from a postcolonial perspective. Svirsky and Bignall assemble leading figures to explore the rich philosophical linkages and the political concerns shared by Agamben and postcolonial theory. Agamben's theories of the 'state of exception' and 'bare life' are situated in critical relation to the existence of these phenomena in the colonial/postcolonial world. * Features an international set of expert contributors who approach postcolonial criticism from an i...

Shoshana Felman ranks as one of the most influential literary critics of the past five decades. Her work has inspired and shaped such divergent fields as psychoanalytic criticism, deconstruction, speech-act theory and performance studies, feminist and gender studies, trauma studies, and critical legal studies. Shoshana Felman has not only influenced these fields: her work has opened channels of communication between them. In all of her work Felman charts a way for literary critics to address the...

There has been much philosophical speculation on the potential failure of language as well as the search for a presentation of the “thing itself” beyond representation. Words Fail pursues the writings of a trio of philosophers—Jacques Derrida, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Giorgio Agamben—as prime examples of how modern poetry presents us with a profitable vantage point from which to survey the ongoing struggle of living in a highly fragmented world. Alongside these thinkers, this book looks spe...