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A beautiful, profound series of reflections on the body by one of the most prominent and consequential philosophers of continental EuropeThis landmark volume brings into English Jean-Luc Nancy's last completed work and concludes his remarkable philosophical reflections on the body, a project he began almost thirty years ago. Taking the body as an intersection of pulsing life and destructive cruelty on a global scale, Nancy's account becomes more vivid, more physical, than ever, even as it ventures into language that is as lyrical as it is profound. This vividness is manifest in blood: as it flows, in all its pulsing and forceful circulation, and as it spills, in the cruelty of existences confronted daily by countless destructions. This can be described as sanguis and cruor, the two Latin words for blood's intermingled but distinct aspects. This distinction allows Nancy to highlight an almost mystical sense of the body (yet one that remains soberly on this side of its manifest insistence), alongside the cruelty that pervades our world—a world whose very existence is threatened by its reduction to mere objects.The exceptional writings brought together in Corpus III comprise a masterful work of philosophy that marries rigorous erudition—on Freud, Nietzsche, and others—with rich poetic language and an actual poem. Nancy's thought opens the body onto its own unaccountable origins, its plural singularities, its enmeshed instantiations, and its excessive irreducibles, which are also the elusive excesses of language. Whereas in earlier texts Nancy has referred to this excess as poetry, here he performs it in the form of a poem, in the extraordinary hymn entitled Stoma. While the publication of a poem by Nancy is a notable event, equally noteworthy is a remarkable essay entitled "Scandalous Death," in which Nancy meditated on a subject that was to come to him too soon after. Above all, the book is crucial for bringing into English Cruor, the very last book Nancy completed before his death, an evocative meditation offered by a great thinker on the complex conditions of his own—and our—singular survival.

Winner, French Voices Grand PrizeNostalgia makes claims on us both as individuals and as members of a political community. In this short book, Barbara Cassin provides an eloquent and sophisticated treatment of exile and of desire for a homeland, while showing how it has been possible for many to reimagine home in terms of language rather than territory.Moving from Homer's and Virgil's foundational accounts of nostalgia to the exilic writings of Hannah Arendt, Cassin revisits the dangerous implications of nostalgia for land and homeland, thinking them anew through questions of exile and language. Ultimately, Cassin shows how contemporary philosophy opens up the political stakes of rootedness and uprootedness, belonging and foreignness, helping us to reimagine our relations to others in a global and plurilingual world.

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised enormous influence over several generations of writers, artists, and philosophers. In works such as Thomas the Obscure, The Instant of my Death, The Writing of the Disaster, The Unavowable Community, Blanchot produced some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century.As a journalist and political activist, Blanchot had a public side that coexisted uneasily with an inclination to secrecy, a refusal of interviews and photographs, and a reputation for mysteriousness and seclusion. These public and private Blanchots came together in complicated ways at some of the twentieth century's most momentous occasions. He was among the public intellectuals participating in the May '68 revolution in Paris and helped organize opposition to the Algerian war. During World War II, he found himself moments away from being executed by the Nazis. More controversially, he had been active in far-right circles in the '30s.Now translated into English, Christophe Bident's magisterial, scrupulous, much-praised critical biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot's itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer's close friends. But the book is both a biography and far more. Beyond filling out a life famous for its obscurity, Bident's book will transform the way readers of Blanchot respond to this major intellectual figure by offering a genealogy of his thought, a distinctive trajectory that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend to philosophy.The book is also a historical work, unpacking the 'transformation of convictions' of an author who moved from the far-right in the 1930s to the far-left in the 1950s and after. Bident's extensive archival research explores the complex ways that Blanchot's work enters into engagement with his contemporaries, making the book also a portrait of the circles in which he moved, which included friends such as Georges Bataille, Marguerite Duras, Emmanuel Levinas, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida.Finally, the book traces the strong links between Blanchot's life and an oeuvre that nonetheless aspires to anonymity. Ultimately, Bident shows how Blanchot's life itself becomes an oeuvre—becomes a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly. In its even-handed appraisal, Bident's sophisticated reading of Blanchot's life together with his work offers a much-needed corrective to the range of cruder accounts, whether from Blanchot's detractors or from his champions, of a life too easily sensationalized.This definitive biography of a seminal figure of our time will be essential reading for anyone concerned with twentieth-century literature, thought, culture, and politics.

Contents• Shibboleth: For Paul Celan• "A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text": Poetics and Politics of Witnessing• Language Does Not Belong: An Interview• The Majesty of the Present: Reading Celan's "The Meridian"• Rams: Uninterrupted Dialogue—between Two Infinities, the PoemThis book brings together five powerful encounters. Themes central to all ofDerrida's writings thread the intense confrontation between the most famousphilosopher of our time and the Jewish poet writing in German who, perhapsmore powerfully than any other, has testified to the European experience ofthe twentieth century.They include the date or signature and its singularity; the notion of the trace;temporal structures of futurity and the "to come"; the multiplicity of languageand questions of translation; such speech acts as testimony and promising, butalso lying and perjury; the possibility of the impossible; and, above all, the questionof the poem as addressed and destined beyond knowledge, seeking to speak toand for the irreducibly other.The memory of encounters with thinkers who have also engaged Celan's workanimates these writings, which include a brilliant dialogue between twointerpretative modes—hermeneutics and deconstruction. Derrida's approach toa poem is a revelation on many levels, from the most concrete ways of reading—for example, his analysis of a sequence of personal pronouns—to the mostsweeping imperatives of human existence (and Derrida's writings are alwaysa study in the imbrication of such levels). Above all, he voices the call toresponsibility in the ultimate line of Celan's poem: "The world is gone,I must carry you," which sounds throughout the book's final essay like a refrain.Only two of the texts in this volume do not appear here in English for the first time. Of these, Schibboleth has been entirely retranslated and has been set following Derrida's own instructions for publication in French; "A Self-Unsealing Poetic Text" was substantially rewritten by Derrida himself and basically appears here as the translation of a new text. Jacques Derrida's most recent books in English translation include Counterpath: Traveling with Jacques Derrida (with Catherine Malabou). He died in Paris on October 8, 2004. Thomas Dutoit teaches at the Université de Paris 7. He translated Aporias and edited On the Name, both by Jacques Derrida.

From prehistoric stone tools, to machines, to computers, things have traveled a long road along with human beings. Changing with the times, places, and methods of their production, emerging from diverse histories, and enveloped in multiple layers of meaning, things embody ideas, emotions, and symbols of which we are often unaware.The meaning of "thing" is richer than that of "object," which is something that is manipulated with indifference or according to impersonal technical procedures.Things also differ from merchandise, objects that can be sold or exchanged or seen as status symbols. Things, in the philosophical sense, are nodes of relationships with the life of others, chains of continuity among generations, bridges that connect individual and collective histories, junctions between human civilizations and nature.Things incite us to listen to reality, to make them part of ourselves, giving fresh life to an otherwise suffocating interiority. Things also reveal the hidden aspect of a "subject" in its most secret and least explored side. Things are the repositories of ideas, emotions, and symbols whose meaning we often do not understand.In an unexpected but coherent journey that includes the visions of classic philosophers from Aristotle to Husserl and from Hegel to Heidegger, along with the analysis of works of art, Bodei addresses issues such as fetishism, the memory of things, the emergence of department stores, consumerism, nostalgia for the past, the self-portraits of Rembrandt and Dutch still-lifes of the seventeenth century. The more we are able to recover objects in their wealth of meanings and integrate them into our mental and emotional horizons, he argues, the broader and deeper our world becomes.

When Anne Dufourmantelle drowned in a heroic attempt to save two children caught in rough seas, obituaries around the world rarely failed to recall that she was the author of a book entitled In Praise of Risk, implying that her death confirmed the ancient adage that to philosophize is to learn how to die. Now available in English, this magnificent and already much-discussed book indeed offers a trenchant critique of the psychic work the modern world devotes to avoiding risk.Yet this is not a book on how to die but on how to live. For Dufourmantelle, risk entails an encounter not with an external threat to life but with something hidden in life that conditions our approach to such ordinary risks as disobedience, passion, addiction, leaving family, and solitudeKeeping jargon to a minimum, Dufourmantelle weaves philosophical reflections together with clinical case histories. The everyday fears, traumas, and resistances that therapy addresses brush up against such broader concerns as terrorism, insurance, addiction, artistic creation, and political revolution. Taking up a project than joins the work of many French thinkers, such as Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Hélène Cixous, Giorgio Agamben, and Catherine Malabou, Dufourmantelle works to dislodge Western philosophy, psychoanalysis, ethics, and politics from the redemptive logic of sacrifice. She discovers the kernel of a future beyond annihilation where one might least expect to find it, hidden in the unconscious.In an era defined by enhanced security measures, border walls, trigger warnings, and endless litigation, Dufourmantelle's masterwork provides a much-needed celebration of the risks that define what it means to live.

The Renaissance was the Ruin-naissance, the birth of the ruin as a distinct category of cultural discourse, one that inspired voluminous poetic production. For humanists, the ruin became the material sign that marked the rupture between themselves and classical antiquity. In the first full-length book to document this cultural phenomenon, Andrew Hui explains how the invention of the ruin propelled poets into creating works that were self-aware of their absorption of the past as well as their own survival in the future.

The notion of the "impolitical" developed in this volume draws its meaning from the exhaustion of modernity's political categories, which have become incapable of giving voice to any genuinely radical perspective. The impolitical is not the opposite of the political but rather its outer limit: the border from which we might glimpse a trajectory away from all forms of political theology and the depoliticizing tendencies of a completed modernity.The book's reconstruction of the impolitical lineage—which is anything but uniform—begins with the extreme conclusions reached by Carl Schmitt and Romano Guardini in their reflections on the political and then moves through a series of encounters between several great twentieth-century texts: from Hannah Arendt's On Revolution to Hermann Broch's The Death of Virgil, to Elias Canetti's Crowds and Power; from Simone Weil's The Need for Roots to Georges Bataille's Sovereignty to Ernst Junger's An der Zeitmauer.The trail forged by this analysis offers a defiant counterpoint to the modern political lexicon, but at the same time a contribution to our understanding of its categories.

The Animal Side is a manifesto on the importance of animals for human thought. It attempts to characterize the importance, for human beings, of the fact that animals exist. Adopting a philosophical and poetic approach, the book seeks to show that animals' ways of inhabiting the earth are, for human consciousness, an expansion and an exploration of what philosophers and poets have tried to name by speaking of the Open.Beginning with the story of an encounter with a deer on a road at night, the book proceeds by showing that, beyond the diversity of animal life and the ways animals differ from human beings, there is a "layer of the perceptible" on which we all draw, humans and animals alike, in our own ways. At present, however, this layer itself is at risk. Thus the book can also be read as a defense and illustration of animals' modes ofbeing, and as a plea for their survival.

From rumors about gnostic orgies in antiquity to the explicit erotic symbolism of alchemical texts, from the subtly coded eroticism of medieval kabbalah to the sexual magic practiced by contemporary occultists and countercultural translations of Asian Tantra, the history of Western esotericism is rich in references to the domains of eros and sexuality. This volume, which brings together an impressive array of top-level specialists, is the first to analyze the eroticism of the esoteric without sensationalism or cheap generalizations, but on the basis of expert scholarship and attention to textual and historical detail. While there are few domains where the imagination may so easily run wild, the various contributions seek to distinguish fact from fiction—only to find that historical realities are sometimes even stranger than the fantasies. In doing so, they reveal the outlines of a largely unknown history spanning more than twenty centuries.

Winner, Alan Bray Memorial Book Award2022 Lammy Finalist, LGBTQ StudiesCan queer theory be erotophobic? This book proceeds from the perplexing observation that for all of its political agita, rhetorical virtuosity, and intellectual restlessness, queer theory conforms to a model of erotic life that is psychologically conservative and narrow. Even after several decades of combative, dazzling, irreverent queer critical thought, the field remains far from grasping that sexuality's radical potential lies in its being understood as "exogenous, intersubjective and intrusive" (Laplanche). In particular, and despite the pervasiveness and popularity of recent calls to deconstruct the ideological foundations of contemporary queer thought, no study has as yet considered or in any way investigated the singular role of psychology in shaping the field's conceptual impasses and politico-ethical limitations.Through close readings of key thinkers in queer theoretical thought—Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Leo Bersani, Lee Edelman, Judith Butler, Lauren Berlant, and Jane Gallop—Homo Psyche introduces metapsychology as a new dimension of analysis vis-à-vis the theories of French psychoanalyst Jean Laplanche, who insisted on "new foundations for psychoanalysis" that radically departed from existing Freudian and Lacanian models of the mind. Staging this intervention, Ashtor deepens current debates about the future of queer studies by demonstrating how the field's systematic neglect of metapsychology as a necessary and independent realm of ideology ultimately enforces the complicity of queer studies with psychological conventions that are fundamentally erotophobic and therefore inimical to queer theory's radical and ethical project.

The debate on "political theology" that ran throughout the twentieth century has reached its end, but the ultimate meaning of the notion continues to evade us. Despite all the attempts to resolve the issue, we still speak its language—we remain in its horizon.The reason for this, says Roberto Esposito, lies in the fact that political theology is neither a concept nor an event; rather, it is the pivot around which the machine of Western civilization has revolved for more than 2,000 years. At its heart stands the juncture between universalism and exclusion, unity and separation: the tendency of the Two to make itself into One by subordinating one part to the domination of the other. All the philosophical and political categories that we use, starting with the Roman and Christian notion of "the person," continue to reproduce this exclusionary dispositif.To take our departure from political theology, then—the task of contemporary philosophy—we must radically revise our conceptual lexicon. Only when thought has been returned to its rightful "place"—connected to the human species as a whole rather than to individuals—will we be able to escape from the machine that hasimprisoned our lives for far too long.

The most important work by a key figure in German thought, Helmuth Plessner's Levels of Organic Life and the Human, originally published in 1928, appears here for the first time in English, accompanied by a substantial Introduction by J. M. Bernstein, after having served for decades as an influence on thinkers as diverse as Merleau-Ponty, Peter Berger, Habermas, and the new naturalists.The Levels, as it has long been known, draws on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources as part of a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence. The book considers non-living nature, plants, non-human animals, and human beings in turn as a sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary dynamics—simply put, interactions between a thing's insides and surrounding world. On Plessner's unique account, living things are classed and analyzed by their "positionality," or orientation to and within an environment. "Life" is thereby phenomenologically defined, and its universal yet internally variable features such as metabolism, reproduction, and death are explained.The approach provides a foundation not only for philosophical biology but philosophical anthropology as well. According to Plessner's radical view, the human form of life is excentric—that is, the relation between body and environment is something to which humans themselves are positioned and can take a position. This "excentric positionality" enables human beings to take a stand outside the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for knowledge, culture, religion, and technology.Plessner studied zoology and philosophy with Hans Driesch in the 1910s before embarking on a highly productive philosophical career. His work was initially obscured by the superficially similar views of Max Scheler and Martin Heidegger and by his forced exile during World War II. Only in recent decades, as scholarship has moved more squarely into engagement with issues like animality, embodiment, human dignity, social theory, the philosophy of technology, and the philosophy of nature, has the originality and depth of Plessner's vision been appreciated.A powerful and sophisticated account of embodiment, the Levels shows, with reference both to science and to philosophy, how life can be seen on its own terms to establish its own boundaries, and how, from the standpoint of life, the human establishes itself in relation to the nonhuman. As such, the book is not merely a historical monument but a source for invigorating a range of vital current conversations around the animal, posthumanism, the material turn, and the biology and sociology of cognition.This modern philosophical classic, long-awaited in English translation, is a key book both historically and for today's interest in understanding philosophy and social theory together with science, without reducing the former to the latter.

In certain key respects, 1943 marked a turning point in the war. Increasingly, victory seemed assured. However, the backdrop to this gradually improving situation was one of widespread and unremitting destruction.In the essays from that year, Blanchot writes from a position of almost total detachment from day-to-day events, now that all of his projects and involvements have come to naught. As he explores and promotes works of literature and ideas, he privileges those with the capacity to sustain a human perspective that does not merely contemplate ruin and disaster but sees them as the occasion for a radical revision of what "human" is capable of signifying.Consigning all that the name "France" has hitherto meant to him to a past that is now in ruins, Blanchot begins to sketch out a counter-history that is international in nature, and whose human field is literature.

The definitive biography of a South Asian genius who conquered the international chess world on the eve of decolonizationIn the late 1920s and ’30s, the international chess scene was rocked by the success of Sultan Khan, a self-taught prodigy from colonial Punjab. In a brief international career, Khan stunned the chess elite by repeatedly defeating the world’s best players and winning the British Chess Champion­ship three times. Despite his dazzling creativity and peerless endgame technique, Khan’s legacy has long been marginalized or inaccurately portrayed. Written by Khan’s son and granddaughter, Endgame of Empire offers a comprehensive biography of this trailblazing genius who became the first Asian and first person of color to rise to the top of international chess.From its origins in South Asia, chess had developed into an emblem of European culture. With Khan’s arrival to reclaim the game, it became a catalyst for the many ways in which individuals, ideologies, and empires clashed in the interwar period. Endgame of Empire offers a vivid portrait of Khan as he navigated challenges on and off the chessboard. His rise was meteoric, but also fraught with prejudice and ultimately cut short by the political realities of his time. Set in the broader context of race, empire, and decolonization, the book celebrates Khan’s genius as a strategist while also uncovering the difficult circumstances under which he conquered international chess. It also provides the first extended accounts of Khan’s life in colonial India before his chess career and his life after professional chess in the Pakistan whose arrival he had long desired.In an appendix, former US Chess Champion Sam Shankland walks the reader through six of Khan’s finest victories. This instructive commentary provides both an account of Khan’s style and a lesson for beginning and experienced chess players alike in the strategic ideas at which Khan was ahead of his time.At a moment of emergent nationalism in South Asia, Khan’s unassuming brilliance on the chessboard came to represent something greater: a graceful assertion of equality and a prelude to independence. Blending intimate family recollections, archival discoveries, and sharp historical analysis, Endgame of Empire reclaims a legacy long overshadowed by race, empire, and myth and offers a playbook in holding one’s own through adversity.

Available in a new digital edition with reflowable text suitable for e-readersFor over a thousand years, Eastern Christendom had as its center the second capital of the Roman Empire—Constantinople, the "New Rome," or Byzantium. The geographical division between the Eastern and Western Churches was only one manifestation of deeper rifts, characterized by a long history of conflicts, suspicions, and misunderstandings. Although the art, monasticism, and spirituality of Byzantium have come to be recognized as inspirational and influential in the shaping of Eastern European civilization, and of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance as well, the West has been in the main ignorant of the historical evolution and the doctrinal significance of Byzantine theology.Here, for the first time in English, is presented a synthesis of Byzantine Christian thought. The reader is guided through its complexities to an understanding of Byzantium: its view of man and his destiny of "deification"; its ability to transcend the "Western captivity"; its survival under quite adverse historical circumstances. In the end, he may well find himself receptive to the basic positions of Byzantine thought, which have attained, in this time of need for the reintegration of Christianity itself, a surprising, contemporary relevance.

When Jean-Luc Nancy first encountered the work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s, he knew he was hearing something new, a voice genuinely of its time. Thinking with and against each other over the course of their long friendship, the two thinkers reshaped the European intellectual landscape. Nancy's writings on Derrida, collected in this volume, reflect on the elements of their shared concerns with politics, the arts, religion, the fate of deconstruction, and the future of sense. Rather than studies, commentaries, or interpretations of Derrida's thought, they are responses to his presence—not exactly a presence to self, but a presence in the world.

In certain key respects, 1943 marked a turning point in the war. Increasingly, victory seemed assured. However, the backdrop to this gradually improving situation was one of widespread and unremitting destruction.In the essays from that year, Blanchot writes from a position of almost total detachment from day-to-day events, now that all of his projects and involvements have come to naught. As he explores and promotes works of literature and ideas, he privileges those with the capacity to sustain a human perspective that does not merely contemplate ruin and disaster but sees them as the occasion for a radical revision of what "human" is capable of signifying.Consigning all that the name "France" has hitherto meant to him to a past that is now in ruins, Blanchot begins to sketch out a counter-history that is international in nature, and whose human field is literature.

An inventive literary account of Cixous's remarkable journey to her mother's birthplace Winner, French Voices Award for Excellence in Publication and TranslationFor about eighty years, the Jonas family of Osnabrück were part of a small but vibrant Jewish community in this mid-size city of Lower Saxony. After the war, Osnabrück counted not a single Jew. Most had been deported and murdered in the camps, others emigrated if they could and if they managed to overcome their own inertia. It is this inertia and failure to escape that Hélène Cixous seeks to account for in Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem.Vicious anti-Semitism hounded all of Osnabrück's Jews long before the Nazis' rise to power in 1933. So why did people wait to leave when the threat was so patent, so in-their-face? Drawn from the stories told to Cixous by her mother, Ève, and grandmother, Rosalie (Rosi), this literary work reimagines fragments of Ève's and Rosi's stories, including the death of Ève's uncle, Onkel André. Piecing together the story of Andreas Jonas from what she was told and from what she envisages, Cixous recounts the tragedy of the one she calls the King Lear of Osnabrück, who followed his daughter to Jerusalem only to be sent away by her and to return to Osnabrück in time to be deported to a death camp.Cixous wanders the streets of the city she had heard about all her life in her mother's and grandmother's stories, digs into its archives, meets city officials, all the while wondering if she should have come. These hesitations and reflections in the present, often voiced in dialogues staged with her own son or daughter, are woven with scenes from her childhood in Algeria and the half-remembered, half-invented stories of the Jonas family, making Osnabrück Station to Jerusalem one of the author's most intensely engaging books.This work received the French Voices Award for excellence in publication and translation. French Voices is a program created and funded by the French Embassy in the United States and FACE (French American Cultural Exchange).

A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles' Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture.There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles' Antigone. The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all these readings and rewritings keep emerging? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular "obsessions" have driven the author's thinking and writing about Antigone. First is the issue of violence. The violence in Antigone is the opposite of "graphic" as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific "undeadness" that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted the author to look at the relationship between language, sexuality, death, and "second death." The third issue, which constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone's statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. The author asks, how does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the "unwritten law" she follows, tally with Antigone's universal appeal and compelling power? Attempting to answer this leads to the question of what this particular (Oedipal) family's misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, shares with the general condition of humanity. Which in turn forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: "What is incest?"Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupančič's absorbing and succinct guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising intervention into the broad and prominent field of study related to Sophocles' Antigone illuminates the classical text's ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.

Draws on queer theories of temporality and subjectivity to challenge the telos of a singular Christian identity within feminist theological accounts of formation.How Not to be Christian theologically and theoretically explores ethical and political questions around identity and intersectionality. How do we think about our identities theologically? How do we think about how the different aspects of our identities relate to each other theologically? And, how do we think about religious identity in relation to other social identities? In particular, this project explores formation—how we become selves with identities. It examines how theologians have turned to formation in the pursuit of a generous orthodoxy, exploring how a diverse range of theologians and ethicists shaped by postliberalism have looked to Christian identity as an ethical resource in the pursuit of inclusion and justice with regards to other social identities—what this project refers to as forms of intrasubjective difference. Focusing particularly on prominent feminist and queer theologies (looking to the work of Elizabeth Stuart, Sarah Coakley, and Serene Jones), this book critically examines how they presume and posit a singular, stable vision of religious identity as the telos to which gender and sexual identities must bend. It argues that the gender and sexual difference they aim to make space for is effaced by and subsumed into Christian identity. Engaging with poststructuralist thought (especially the work of Michel Foucault) and queer theories around performativity (Judith Butler) and temporality (Lee Edelman and José Esteban Muñoz), as well as theological reflections on method, anthropology, and sin, this book considers both the limits and costs of the teleological thrust underlying these accounts of formation. From there, it explores the possibilities of unformation, and (de)constructively considers what it might mean to pursue unformation in both theological method and ethics—in how we do theology and in how we live

A dramatic and necessary rethinking of the meaning of DemocracyDemocratic Anarchy grapples with an uncomfortable but obvious truth inimical to democracy: both aesthetics and politics depend on the structuring antagonism of inclusion and exclusion. Yet in Democratic Anarchy, Matthew Scully asks, how can "the people" be represented in a way that acknowledges what remains unrepresentable? What would it mean to face up to the constitutive exclusions that haunt U.S. democracy and its anxious fantasies of equality?Synthesizing a broad range of theoretical traditions and interlocutors—including Lacan, Rancière, Edelman, and Hartman—Democratic Anarchy polemically declares that there has never been, nor can there ever be, a realized democracy in the U.S. because democracy always depends on the hierarchical institution of a formal order by one part of the population over another. Engaging with an expansive corpus of American literature and art (Harriet Jacobs, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Louis Zukofsky, Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Nari Ward, Ocean Vuong, and Safiya Sinclair), Democratic Anarchy argues that many liberal concepts and institutions are in fact structurally opposed to democratic equality because they depend on regulating what can appear and in what form.By focusing on works that disrupt this regulatory impulse, Scully shows how rhetorical strategies of interruption, excess, and disorder figure the anarchic equality that inegalitarian fantasies of democracy disavow. Democratic Anarchy develops a rigorous theory of equality that refuses to repeat the inequalities against which it positions itself, and it does so by turning to moments of resistance—both aesthetic and political—inaugurated by the equality that inheres in and antagonizes the order of things.

What are we to make of Jacques Derrida's famous claim that "every other is every other," if the other could also be an object, a stone or an elementary particle? Derrida's philosophy is relevant not just for human ethical language and animality, but to profound developments in the physical and natural sciences, as well as ecology. Derrida After the End of Writing argues for the importance of reading Derrida's later work from a new materialist perspective. In conversation with Heidegger, Lacan, and Deleuze, and critically engaging newer philosophies of speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, Crockett claims that Derrida was never a linguistic idealist. Furthermore, something changes in his later philosophy something that cannot be simply described as a "turn." In Catherine Malabou's terms, there is a shift from a motor scheme of writing to a motor scheme of plasticity. Crockett explores some of the implications of interpreting Derrida through the new materialist lens of technicity or plasticity, attending to the significance of ethics, religion, and politics in his later work. By reading Derrida from a new materialist perspective, Crockett provides fresh readings of his ideas of sovereignty, religion, responsibility, and mourning. These new readings produce fruitful engagements with the thinkers who have followed Derrida, including Malabou, Timothy Morton, John D. Caputo, and Karen Barad. Here is a new reading of Derrida that moves beyond conventional understandings of poststructuralism and deconstruction, a reading that is responsive to and critical of some of the crucial developments shaping the humanities today.

During a tumultuous period when financial speculation began rapidly to outpace industrial production and consumption, Victorian financial journalists commonly explained the instability of finance by criticizing its inherent artifice—drawing persistent attention to what they called "fictitious capital." In a shift that naturalized this artifice, this critique of fictitious capital virtually disappeared by the 1860s, replaced by notions of fickle investor psychology and mental equilibrium encapsulated in the fascinating metaphor of "psychic economy."In close rhetorical readings of financial journalism, political economy, and the works of Dickens, Eliot, and Trollope, Kornbluh examines the psychological framing of economics, one of the nineteenth century's most enduring legacies, reminding us that the current dominant paradigm for understanding financial crisis has a history of its own. She shows how novels illuminate this displacement and ironize ideological metaphors linking psychology and economics, thus demonstrating literature's unique facility for evaluating ideas in process. Inheritors of this novelistic project, Marx and Freud each advance a critique of psychic economy that refuses to naturalize capitalism.

For Strasbourg consists of a series of essays and interviews about the city of Strasbourg and the philosophical friendships Jacques Derrida developed there over a period of some forty years.Written just months before his death, the opening essay, "The Place Name(s): Strasbourg," recounts in detail, and in very moving terms, Derrida's deep attachment to this French city on the border between France and Germany. More than just a personal narrative, however, the essay is a profound interrogation of the relationship between philosophy and place, philosophy and language, and philosophy and friendship. As such, it raises a series of philosophical, political, and ethical questions that might all be placed under the aegis of what Derrida once called "philosophical nationalities and nationalism."The other three texts included in the book are long interviews/conversations between Derrida and his two principal interlocutors in Strasbourg, Jean-Luc Nancy and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. These interviews are significant both for the themes they focus on (language, politics, friendship, death, life after death, and so on) and for what they reveal about Derrida's relationships to Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe. Filled with sharp insights into one anothers' work and peppered with personal anecdotes and humor, the interviews bear witness to the decades-long intellectual friendships of these three important contemporary thinkers.This collection thus stands as a reminder of and testimony to Derrida's unique relationship to Strasbourg and to the two thinkers most closely associated with that city.

We like to imagine ourselves as rational beings who think and speak, yet to live means first and foremost to look, taste, feel, or smell the world around us. But sensibility is not just a faculty: We are sensible objects both to ourselves and to others, and our life is through and through a sensible life.This book, now translated into five languages, rehabilitates sensible existence from its marginalization at the hands of modern philosophy, theology, and politics. Coccia begins by defining the ontological status of images. Not just an internal modification of our consciousness, an image has an intermediate ontological status that differs from that of objects or subjects. The book's second part explores our interactions with images in dream, fashion, and biological facts like growth and generation. Our life, Coccia argues, is the life of images.

Rapp begins with a question posed by the poet Theodore Roethke: "Should we say that the self, once perceived, becomes a soul?" Through her examination of Plato's Phaedrus and her insights about the place of forgetting in a life, Rapp answers Roethke's query with a resounding Yes. In so doing, Rapp reimagines the Phaedrus, interprets anew Plato's relevance to contemporary life, and offers an innovative account of forgetting as a fertile fragility constitutive of humanity.Drawing upon poetry and comparisons with other ancient Greek and Daoist texts, Rapp brings to light overlooked features of the Phaedrus, disrupts longstanding interpretations of Plato as the facile champion of memory, and offers new lines of sight onto (and from) his corpus. Her attention to the Phaedrus and her meditative apprehension of the permeable character of human life leave our understanding of both Plato and forgetting inescapably altered. Unsettle everything you think you know about Plato, suspend the twentieth-century entreaty to "Never forget," and behold here a new mode of critical reflection in which textual study and humanistic inquiry commingle to expansive effect.

We have left the twentieth century, but this century of violence and extremes has not left us: Its shadow has become longer and blacker. Seventy years after the end of the Second World War, the memory of the Holocaust is less and less anchored in the lived experience of survivors and witnesses.Shadows of Trauma analyzes the transformation of the past from an individual experience to a collective construction, with special attention to the tensions that arise when personal experience collides with official commemoration.In addition to surveying memory's important terms and distinctions, Assmann traces the process that emerged after the fall of the Berlin Wall, of creating a new German memory of the Holocaust. Assmann revisits the pitfalls of "false memory" and lingering forms of denial and repression, as well as the new twenty-first-centurydiscourses, such as that of German "victimhood," as well as the new memory sites for a future in which German memory will be increasingly oriented toward a European context.Combining theoretical analysis with historical case studies, the book revisits crucial debates and controversial issues out of which "memory culture" has emerged as a collective project and a work in progress.

Invited to answer questions about his relationship to Judaism, Jacques Derrida spoke through Franz Kafka: "As for myself, I could imagine another Abraham."From the experience of a summons that surprises us and prompts the query "Who, me?" Derrida explores the movement between growing up Jewish, "becoming Jewish," and "Jewish being" or existence. His essay "The Other Abraham" appears here in English for the first time. We no longer confront "Judaism" but "judeity," multiple Judaisms and Jewishnesses, manifold ways of being and writing as a Jew—in Derrida's case, as a French-speaking Algerian deprived of, then restored to French nationality in the 1940s. What is it to be a Jew and a philosopher? How has the notion of "Jewish identity" been written into and across Jewish literature, Jewish thought, and Jewish languages? Here distinguished scholars address these questions, contrasting Derrida's thought with philosophical predecessors such as Rosenzweig, Levinas, Celan, and Scholem, and tracing confluences between deconstruction and Kabbalah. Derrida's relationship to the universalist aspirations in contemporary theology is also discussed, and his late autobiographical writings are evaluated. This multifaceted volume aims to open the question of Jewishness, above all, to hold it open as a question, though not one of practical or theoretical identity. As much a contestation of identity as a profound reflection on what it means today to seek, elude, and finally to wrestle with the significance of "being-jew," Judeities invites us to revisit the human condition in the twenty-first century.