Philosophy, Literature, and Politics - Böcker

In Machiavelli’s Art of Politics Alejandro Bárcenas offers a reexamination of Niccolò Machiavelli’s political thought in order to propose a concise and historically accurate portrayal of his ideas and intellectual context. This study provides a nuanced view of the complexities of Machiavelli’s thought by analyzing his classical background, taking into particular consideration the influence of Xenophon, and his view of the ideal ruler as someone who creates the conditions for a flourishing human life. In addition, Bárcenas explains why Machiavelli defends a republican political order that encourages citizens to live according to their own laws while serving a common good and revises his legacy through the writings of Leo Strauss, Eric Voegelin and Maurizio Viroli.

In Literature and the Encounter with Immanence Brynnar Swenson collects nine original essays that approach the relationship between literature and immanence through methodologies grounded in the philosophy of Spinoza. One of Spinoza’s most provocative claims is a simple declaration of ignorance: “We do not know what a body can do.” A literary theory based on immanence privileges the ontological status of the text and the material act of reading. Rather than ask what a text means, the essays here ask what a text can do. Each essay documents a distinct literary and philosophical encounter with immanence and, as a result, opens up a space to read literature as one would read philosophy and vice versa.

In Encountering Ability, Scott DeShong considers how ability and its correlative, disability, come into existence. Besides being articulated as physical, social, aesthetic, political, and specifically human, ability signifies and is signified such that signification itself is always in question. Thus the language of ability and the ability of language constitute discourse that undermines foundations, including any foundation for discourse or ability. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s theory of primary differentiation and Emmanuel Levinas’s philosophy of ethical relationality, Encountering Ability finds implications of music, theology, and cursing in the signification of ability, and also examines various literary texts, including works by Amiri Baraka and Marguerite Duras.

This work closely examines the trial of Dmitri Karamazov as the springboard to explaining and critically assessing Dostoevsky’s legal and moral philosophy. The author connects Dostoevsky’s objections to Russia’s acceptance of western juridical notions such as the rule of law and an adversary system of adjudication with his views on fundamental human nature, the principle of universal responsibility, and his invocation of unconditional love. Central to Dostoevsky’s vision is his understanding of the relationship between the dual human yearnings for individualism and community. In the process, the author related Dostoevsky’s conclusions to the thought of Plato, Augustine, Anselm, Dante, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Sartre. Throughout the work, the author compares, contrasts, and evaluates Dostoevsky’s analyses with contemporary discussions of the rule of law, the adversary system, and the relationship between individualism and communitarianism.

In Roman Ingarden’s Philosophy of Literature Wojciech Chojna discusses Ingarden’s theory of literary works and develops a phenomenological account of identity which accommodates differences in interpretations and value judgments without succumbing to relativism. The latter is overcome not through falling back on essentialism but from within relativism.Literature offers us diverse experiences changing our perceptions of ourselves and the worlds we live in. Absolutism proclaiming unmitigated access to the meaning of literary texts is intolerant of differences and leads to violence in life. Conversely, relativism, in the illusory spirit of radical tolerance, turns meanings and values into historically contingent, incompatible interpretations, where communication and reconciliation is impossible, thus justifying ideological conflicts and violence.

By way of dialogues, Michael Krausz offers philosophical reflections about his life as philosopher, artist, and musician. He also rehearses his views about relativism, interpretation, creativity, and self-realization. Much of Krausz’s work has been inspired by conversations with thinkers such as Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Isaiah Berlin, the Dalai Lama, and musicians such as Josef Gingold, Frederik Prausnitz, and Luis Biava. While the death of his grandparents in Auschwitz continues to disquiet his consciousness, Krausz’s critiques of versions of Advaitic Hinduism and Tibetan Buddhism led him to a distinctive humanism. This thought-provoking book includes personal and professional accounts about particular philosophers, artists, and musicians. It will edify anyone who, like Krausz, has confronted issues of self-identity and human existence.

In Machiavelliana Michael Jackson and Damian Grace offer a comprehensive study of the uses and abuses of Niccolò Machiavelli’s name in society generally and in academic fields distant from his intellectual origins. It assesses the appropriation of Machiavelli in didactic works in management, social psychology, and primatology, scholarly texts in leaderships studies, as well as novels, plays, commercial enterprises, television dramas, operas, rap music, Mach IV scales, children’s books, and more. The book audits, surveys, examines, and evaluates this Machiavelliana against wider claims about Machiavelli. It explains the origins of Machiavelli’s reputation and the spread of his fame as the foundation for the many uses and misuses of his name. They conclude by redressing the most persistent distortions of Machiavelli.

Words, Deeds, Bodies by Jerry H. Gill concentrates on the interrelationships between speech, accomplishing tasks, and human embodiment. Ludwig Wittgenstein, J. L. Austin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Michael Polanyi have all highlighted these relationships. This book examines the, as yet, unexplored connections between these authors’ philosophies of language. It focuses on the relationships between their respective key ideas: Wittgenstein’s notion of “language game,” Austin’s concept of “performative utterances,” Merleau-Ponty’s idea of “slackening the threads,” and Polanyi's understanding of “tacit knowing,” noting the similarities and differences between and amongst them.

This edited volume brings together authors from a wide variety of disciplines in the social sciences and humanities. A historian first investigates understudied samizdat literature, a film critic then analyzes Balkan cinema via psychoanalysis, a psychologist examines contemporary European border policies, and a political scientist analyzes the Confederate-memorial debate. Philosophers consider the space of those memorials, ethno-national narratives in India, the Anthropocene and the mind’s historical imaginary, and the notion of home. Literary critics examine recent developments in modes of storytelling and images of Orientalism. What emerges is a new understanding of history, memory, and time.

This volume is an attempt to rethink Niccolò Machiavelli, one of the most challenging political thinkers in the history of European political thought. In 2013, we will mark 500 years since Machiavelli wrote his puzzling letter to Lorenzo de’ Medici, Il Principe. This book is an endeavor to cover some of the most complex aspects of Machiavelli’s life and work.

The book is comprised of essays that utilize Shakespeare as a productive window into topics of contemporary social and political relevance. Its interdisciplinary qualities make the book relevant for students of political studies, literature, philosophy, cultural studies, and history.

Wittgenstein on the Human Spirit provides a new understanding of Wittgenstein’s discourse as an insightful philosophy of culture, pursued through self-reflection. It offers an edifying perspective on the conceptual underpinnings of culture as a shared expressive spiritual form of life. The ideas investigated in it are highly relevant for discussions in philosophy, aesthetics, anthropology, and cultural studies. The book embraces three studies: The Spirit of Jews, The Spirits of Culture and Civilization, and The Common Spirit of Human Beings. The first discusses Wittgenstein's remarks about Jews, focusing on their place within his philosophical thinking, self-reflection, and European discourse about culture and Jews. It shows how overcoming the anti-Semitic attitude implicit in them set off the major change in his philosophy. The second discusses Wittgenstein’s reflections on the “deterioration of culture” in the modern period, showing how they are related to his remarks about following rules. The third discusses Wittgenstein’s insights regarding the symbolic nature of myth, magic and religion. It suggests that modern human beings and those of ancient cultures possess a common expressive spiritual nature. This enables us to understand expressive practices in other cultures without interpretation. Nonetheless religious belief during the modern period is problematic.

Much of the debates in this book revolves around Milan Kundera and his 1984 essay “The Tragedy of Central Europe.” Kundera wrote his polemical text when the world was pregnant with imminent social and political change, yet that world was still far from realizing that we would enter the last decade of the twentieth century with the Soviet empire and its network of satellite states missing from the political map. Kundera was challenged by Joseph Brodsky and György Konrád for allegedly excluding Russia from the symbolic space of Europe, something the great author deeply believes he never did. To what extent was Kundera right in assuming that, if to exist means to be present in the eyes of those we love, then Central Europe does not exist anymore, just as Western Europe as we knew it has stopped existing? What were the mental, cultural, and intellectual realities that lay beneath or behind his beautiful and graceful metaphors? Are we justified in rehabilitating political optimism at the beginning of the twenty-first century? Are we able to reconcile the divided memories of Eastern or Central Europe and Western Europe regarding what happened to the world in 1968? And where is Central Europe now?

This book is an interdisciplinary work that weaves literary interpretation, legal theory, and philosophical doctrine about sex and love into a coherent mosaic in the context of two of Shakespeare’s plays: The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure. In the process, the work advances literary interpretations of the plays including character studies of some of the main protagonists. The aim is partly theoretical but mostly practical: to demonstrate what we can learn about living a robustly meaningful and significant human life by taking Shakespeare’s work seriously from contemporary philosophical and legal vantage points. Shakespeare does not reveal a tightly defined moral system that he is trying to urge upon his audience. Instead, Shakespeare challenges his audience to struggle with moral complexity as they confront conflicting elements surrounding legal and moral issues presented in his work and within the souls of his characters. His issues and their conflicts are also ours. Much of Shakespeare’s work consists of raising weighty questions inextricably connected to the human condition and inviting his audience to ponder possible answers. The philosophical lessons about living our lives meaningfully and significantly that we can derive from Shakespeare are simple yet powerful.

In September of 1701, events transpired in Naples that, through frequent retellings, became popularly known as “the conspiracy of the Prince of Macchia.” Rapidly gaining fame, this apparently anonymous narrative was soon incorporated by different historians in their history of the transition years between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. But who was the initial bard or narrator, the town clerk or citizen who first gave testimony of this event by creating a Latin text of the story of the Prince of Macchia? Giambattista Vico was not among the claimants to the authorship of the fabulous story that changed the future of the Kingdom of Naples. Nevertheless, four scholars across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were themselves convinced, and managed to convince the intellectual world as well, that Vico, then a young teacher of rhetoric at the University of Naples, was indeed the source of this original Latin narration of this oft retold Neapolitan history. This book provides the original Latin text with a parallel translation, as well as historical context and analysis of both the text’s authorship history and the account itself.

While Plato recommended expelling poets from the ideal society, W. H. Auden famously declared that poetry makes nothing happen. The 19 contributions to the present book avoid such polarized views and, responding in different ways to the “ethical turn” in narrative theory, explore the varied ways in which narratives encourage readers to ponder matters of right and wrong. All work from the premise that the analysis of narrative ethics needs to be linked to a sensitivity to esthetic (narrative) form. The ethical issues are accordingly located on different levels. Some are clearly presented as thematic concerns within the text(s) considered, while others emerge through (or are generated by) the presentation of character and event by means of particular narrative techniques. The objects of analysis include such well-known or canonical texts as Biblical Old Testament stories, Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones, Ann Radcliffe’s The Italian and Matthew Lewis’s The Monk. Others concentrate on less-well-known texts written in languages other than English. There are also contributions that investigate theoretical issues in relation to a range of different examples.

This book argues that a radical political gesture can be found in Søren Kierkegaard’s writings. The chapters navigate an interdisciplinary landscape by placing Kierkegaard’s passionate thought in conversation with the writings of Georg Lukács, Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. At the heart of the book’s argument is the concept of “indirect politics,” which names a negative space between methods, concepts, and intellectual acts in the work of Kierkegaard, as well as marking the dynamic relations between Kierkegaard and the aforementioned thinkers. Kierkegaard’s indirect politics is a set of masks that displaces identities from one field to the next: theology masks politics; law masks theology; political theory masks philosophy; and psychology masks literary approaches to truth. As reflected in Lukács, Schmitt, Benjamin, and Adorno, this book examines how Kierkegaard’s indirect politics sets into relief three significant motifs: intellectual non-conformism, indirect communication in and through ambiguous identities, and negative dialectics.