Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics – serie

What exactly does "Europe" mean for philosophy today? Putting aside both Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism, Gasché returns to the old name "Europe" to examine it as a concept or idea in the work of four philosophers from the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Patočka, and Derrida. Beginning with Husserl, the idea of Europe became central to such issues as rationality, universality, openness to the other, and responsibility. Europe, or The Infinite Task tracks the changes these issues have undergone in phenomenology in order to investigate "Europe's" continuing potential for critical and enlightened resistance in a world that is progressively becoming dominated by the mono-perspectivism of global market economics. Rather than giving up on the idea of Europe as an anachronism, Gasché aims to show that it still has philosophical legs.

For the past half century, Maurice Blanchot has been an extraordinarily influential figure on the French literary and cultural scene. He is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy.This collection of 29 critical essays and reviews on art, politics, literature, and philosophy documents the wide range of Blanchot's interests, from the enigmatic paintings in the Lascaux caves to the atomic era. Essays are devoted to works of fiction (Louis-René des Forêts, Pierre Klossowski, Roger Laporte, Marguerite Duras), to autobiographies or testimonies (Michel Leiris, Robert Antelme, André Gorz, Franz Kafka), or to authors who are more than ever contemporary (Jean Paulhan, Albert Camus).Several essays focus on questions of Judaism, as expressed in the works of Edmond Jabès, Emmanuel Levinas, and Martin Buber. Among the other topics covered are André Malraux's "imaginary museum," the Pléiade Encyclopedia project of Raymond Queneau, paperback publishing, the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss, Benjamin's "Task of the Translator," Marx and communism, writings on the Holocaust, and the difference between art and writing. The book concludes with an eloquent invocation to friendship on the occasion of the death of Georges Bataille.

Using the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy as an anchoring point, Jacques Derrida in this book conducts a profound review of the philosophy of the sense of touch, from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ground-breaking book Corpus he discusses in detail. Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Didier Franck, Martin Heidegger, Francoise Dastur, and Jean-Louis Chrétien are discussed, as are René Descartes, Diderot, Maine de Biran, Félix Ravaisson, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and others. The scope of Derrida's deliberations makes this book a virtual encyclopedia of the philosophy of touch (and the body).Derrida gives special consideration to the thinking of touch in Christianity and, in discussing Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "Deconstruction of Christianity," devotes a section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels. Another section concentrates on "the flesh," as treated by Merleau-Ponty and others in his wake. Derrida's critique of intuitionism, notably in the phenomenological tradition, is one of the guiding threads of the book.On Touching includes a wealth of notes that provide an extremely useful bibliographical resource. Personal and detached all at once, this book, one of the first published in English translation after Jacques Derrida's death, serves as a useful and poignant retrospective on the work of the philosopher. A tribute by Jean-Luc Nancy, written a day after Jacques Derrida's death, is an added feature.

Psyche: Inventions of the Other is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. In Volume I, Derrida advances his reflection on many topics: psychoanalysis, theater, translation, literature, representation, racism, and nuclear war, among others. The essays in this volume also carry on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: Barthes, Benjamin, de Man, Flaubert, Freud, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, Levinas, and Ponge. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal essays (for example, "Psyche: Invention of the Other," "The Retrait of Metaphor," "At This Very Moment in This Work Here I Am," "Tours de Babel" and "Racism's Last Word"), as well as three essays that appear here in English for the first time.

What is a technical object? At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars.Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers—Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.

Disorientation is the first publication in English of the second volume of Technics and Time, in which French philosopher Bernard Stiegler engages in a close dialogue with Husserl, Derrida, and other philosophers who have devoted their energies to technics, such as Heidegger and Simondon.The author's broad intent is to respond to Western philosophy's historical exclusion of technics and techniques from its metaphysical questionings, and in so doing to rescue critical and philosophical thinking. For many years, Stiegler has explored the origins and philosophical, ethical, and political stakes of a global process he calls "the industrial temporalization of consciousness." Here, demonstrating that technology—including alphabetical writing—is memory, he argues that through new technologies of retention and inscription we have come to live in a world where time devours space, a disoriented world in which we have lost our bearings. Immersed in the multimedia of an over-connected world, with time and space as we know them abolished, we no longer find "cardinal points" to guide us and may even be led where we do not wish to go. We must therefore prepare to confront new spheres of ideological control and discover new possibilities in the digital environment.

In the first two volumes of Technics and Time, Bernard Stiegler worked carefully through Heidegger's and Husserl's relationship to technics and technology. Here, in volume three, he turns his attention to the prolematic relationship to technics he finds in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, particularly in the two versions of the Transcendental Deduction. Stiegler relates this problematic to the "cinematic nature" of time, which precedes cinema itself but reaches an apotheosis in it as the exteriorization process of schema, through tertiary retentions and their mechanisms. The book focuses on the relationship between these themes and the "culture industry"— as defined by Adorno and Horkheimer—that has supplanted the educational institutions on which genuine cultural participation depends. This displacement, Stiegler says, has produced a malaise from which current global culture suffers. The result is potentially catastrophic.

This book collects fifteen major philosophical essays written over a period of more than twenty years by acclaimed Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben. The volume opens with an introduction in which the editor situates Agamben's work with respect to both the history of philosophy and contemporary European thought. The essays that follow articulate a series of theoretical confrontations with privileged figures in the history of philosophy, politics, and criticism, from Plato to Spinoza, Aristotle to Deleuze, Carl Schmitt to Benjamin, Hegel to Aby Warburg, and Heidegger to Derrida. Three fundamental concepts organize the collection as a whole: language, in the sense not of particular statements but rather the very taking place of speech, the pure fact of language's existence; history, as it appears from a perspective in which tradition, transmission, and memory reach their messianic fulfillment; and potentiality, understood as a fundamental problem of metaphysics, ethics, and the philosophy of language. All these topics converge in the final part of the book, in which Agamben offers an extensive reading of Melville's short story "Bartleby the Scrivener" as a work that puts potentiality and actuality, possibility and reality, in an altogether new light.

Completing the translation of Derrida's monumental work Right to Philosophy (the first part of which has already appeared under the title of Who's Afraid of Philosophy?), Eyes of the University brings together many of the philosopher's most important texts on the university and, more broadly, on the languages and institutions of philosophy.In addition to considerations of the implications for literature and philosophy of French becoming a state language, of Descartes' writing of the Discourse on Method in French, and of Kant's and Schelling's philosophies of the university, the volume reflects on the current state of research and teaching in philosophy and on the question of what Derrida calls a "university responsibility."Examining the political and institutional conditions of philosophy, the essays collected here question the growing tendency to orient research and teaching towards a programmable and profitable end. The volume is therefore invaluable for the light it throws upon an underappreciated aspect of Derrida's own engagement, both philosophical and political, in struggles against the stifling of philosophical research and teaching.As a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy and as one of the conveners of the Estates General of Philosophy, Derrida was at the forefront of the struggle to preserve and extend the teaching of philosophy as a distinct discipline, in secondary education and beyond, in the face of conservative government education reforms in France. As one of the founders of the Collège International de Philosophie, he worked to provide a space for research in and around philosophy that was not accepted or legitimated in other institutions. Documenting and reflecting upon these engagements, Eyes of the University brings together some of the most important and incisive of Derrida's works.

"My death—is it possible?"That is the question asked, explored, and analyzed in Jacques Derrida's new book. "Is my death possible?" How is this question to be understood? How and by whom can it be asked, can it be quoted, can it be an appropriate question, and can it be asked in the appropriate moment, the moment of "my death"? One of the aporetic experiences touched upon in this seminal essay is the impossible, yet unavoidable experience that "my death" can never subject to an experience that would be properly mine, that I can have, and account for, yet that there is, at the same time, nothing closer to me and more properly mine than "my death."This book bears a special significance because in it Derrida focuses on an issue that has informed the whole of his work up to the present. For the last thirty years, Derrida has repeatedly, in various contexts and various ways, broached the question of aporia. Making it his central concern here Derrida stakes out a new frontier, at which the debate with his work must take place from now on: the debate about the aporia between singularity and generality, about the national, linguistic, and cultural specificity of experience and the trans-national, trans-cultural law that protects this specificity of experience and of the necessity to continue working in the tradition of critique and of the idea of critique, yet the corresponding necessity to transcend it without compromising it; the aporetical obligation to host the foreigner and the alien and yet to respect him, her, or it as foreign.The foreign or the foreigner has always been considered a figure of death, and death a figure of the foreign. How this figure has been treated in the analytic of death in Heidegger's Being in Time is explored by Derrida in analytical tour de force that will not fail to set new standards for the discussion of Heidegger and for dealing with philosophical texts, with their limits and their aporias. The detailed discussion of the theoretical presuppositions of recent cultural histories of death (Ariès, for example) and of psychological theorizations of death (including Freud's) broaden the scope of Derrida's investigation and indicate the impact of the aporia of "my death" for any possible theory.

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." Agamben's philosophical exploration of the problem of messianism leads to the other major figure discussed in this book, Walter Benjamin. Advancing a claim without precedent in the vast literature on Benjamin, Agamben argues that Benjamin's philosophy of history constitutes a repetition and appropriation of Paul's concept of "remaining time." Through a close reading and comparison of Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and the Pauline Epistles, Agamben discerns a number of striking and unrecognized parallels between the two works.

Rogues, published in France under the title Voyous, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term "État voyou" is the French equivalent of "rogue state," and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida rigorously and exhaustively examines.Derrida examines the history of the concept of sovereignty, engaging with the work of Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and others. Against this background, he delineates his understanding of "democracy to come," which he distinguishes clearly from any kind of regulating ideal or teleological horizon. The idea that democracy will always remain in the future is not a temporal notion. Rather, the phrase would name the coming of the unforeseeable other, the structure of an event beyond calculation and program. Derrida thus aligns this understanding of democracy with the logic he has worked out elsewhere. But it is not just political philosophy that is brought under deconstructive scrutiny here: Derrida provides unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current political realities, and these essays are highly engaged with events of the post-9/11 world.

Radical Atheism presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious "turn" in Derrida's thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs Derrida's work from beginning to end. Proceeding from Derrida's insight into the constitution of time, Hägglund demonstrates how Derrida rethinks the condition of identity, ethics, religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the logic of radical atheism. Hägglund challenges other major interpreters of Derrida's work and offers a compelling account of Derrida's thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other. Furthermore, Hägglund does not only explicate Derrida's position but also develops his arguments, fortifies his logic, and pursues its implications. The result is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the perennial philosophical themes of time and desire as well as pressing contemporary issues of sovereignty and democracy.

Radical Atheism presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious "turn" in Derrida's thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs Derrida's work from beginning to end. Proceeding from Derrida's insight into the constitution of time, Hägglund demonstrates how Derrida rethinks the condition of identity, ethics, religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the logic of radical atheism. Hägglund challenges other major interpreters of Derrida's work and offers a compelling account of Derrida's thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other. Furthermore, Hägglund does not only explicate Derrida's position but also develops his arguments, fortifies his logic, and pursues its implications. The result is a groundbreaking deconstruction of the perennial philosophical themes of time and desire as well as pressing contemporary issues of sovereignty and democracy.

The Problem of a Chinese Aesthetic calls for and applies a new model of comparative literature - one that, instead of taking for granted the commensurability of traditions and texts, gives incompatibility and contradiction their due. Exposing contemporary literary theory to the risks of ancient Chinese literature (and vice versa), this book considers a linked series of case studies. To what degree does the translation between languages and texts that we call comparative literature depend on allegory or translation within a single text or language? The author offers an important, new perspective on the reading of the Shih-ching or Book of Odes and the question of allegory and metaphor in the Chinese poetic tradition.

A Stanford University Press classic.

Since Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end.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 is Hamacher's topic. Starting from Hegel's commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature works—the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of History—focusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual movements.Because the concept for Hegel is the end of the thing—the point where it peaks—because it occurs by severance from its representational content, the trace of this splitting appears imprinted into its discursive articulation. The Hegelian text is punctuated by a series of terms and topics that operate according to the logic of the turning point: one function activating its opposite, they serve as pores between mutually exclusive experiences and establish their unity. This dialectical procedure falters, its unity dissolves, the pores turn into aporias, wherever conceptual exigencies surpass the reality they have instilled. Hamacher shows that dialectics, proceeding by way of aporias, remains unable to account for its own movement. Hegel's system must be read from the point where its rupture fails to converge with its end.Analyzing both the historical and the systematic aspects of Hegel's philosophy, addressing Kant and religious fetishism, Nietzsche and the impossible repetition of the same, Marx and the aroma of religion, Freud and the hysterical body, Hamacher's argument is directed toward what in Hegel's philosophy of spirit resists spiritualization and defeats philosophy. Aspiring to be the last philosophy, speculative idealism has to incorporate all previous systems and spiritualize its incorporation. Its logic of ingestion must, however, reject with repulsion and nausea (Ekel) everything that resists appropriation.Emphasizing Hegel's claim to present the political theology of modern society, Hamacher shows that the mechanism of nausea meant to keep the system intact is in fact itself a mechanism foreign to its body; it averts the promised incorporation, defeats idealization, leaves the body politic disintegrated, and voids the claim of the most powerful ontology of modern society to mark the end, the completion and plenitude—the pleroma—of philosophy and history. What remains—the indigestible, the unreadable, the nondiscursive—demands yet another kind of discourse and another practical gesture: toward a pleroma other than Hegel's.

Since Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end.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 is Hamacher's topic. Starting from Hegel's commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature works—the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of History—focusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual movements.Because the concept for Hegel is the end of the thing—the point where it peaks—because it occurs by severance from its representational content, the trace of this splitting appears imprinted into its discursive articulation. The Hegelian text is punctuated by a series of terms and topics that operate according to the logic of the turning point: one function activating its opposite, they serve as pores between mutually exclusive experiences and establish their unity. This dialectical procedure falters, its unity dissolves, the pores turn into aporias, wherever conceptual exigencies surpass the reality they have instilled. Hamacher shows that dialectics, proceeding by way of aporias, remains unable to account for its own movement. Hegel's system must be read from the point where its rupture fails to converge with its end.Analyzing both the historical and the systematic aspects of Hegel's philosophy, addressing Kant and religious fetishism, Nietzsche and the impossible repetition of the same, Marx and the aroma of religion, Freud and the hysterical body, Hamacher's argument is directed toward what in Hegel's philosophy of spirit resists spiritualization and defeats philosophy. Aspiring to be the last philosophy, speculative idealism has to incorporate all previous systems and spiritualize its incorporation. Its logic of ingestion must, however, reject with repulsion and nausea (Ekel) everything that resists appropriation.Emphasizing Hegel's claim to present the political theology of modern society, Hamacher shows that the mechanism of nausea meant to keep the system intact is in fact itself a mechanism foreign to its body; it averts the promised incorporation, defeats idealization, leaves the body politic disintegrated, and voids the claim of the most powerful ontology of modern society to mark the end, the completion and plenitude—the pleroma—of philosophy and history. What remains—the indigestible, the unreadable, the nondiscursive—demands yet another kind of discourse and another practical gesture: toward a pleroma other than Hegel's.

The epoch of representation is as old as the West. Indeed, representation is the West, understood as what at once designates and expands its own limits. But what comes after the West? What comes after representation's disclosure of its own limit?The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade of work, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, the birth that characterizes being. We are now at the limit of representation, where objects as we experience them have been show to be merely objects of representation—or rather, of presentation, since there is nothing to (re)present. The first part of this book, "Existence," asks how, today, one can give sense of meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it comes nude into the world, must now be our "sense."In examining what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what presence "is"; rather we should conceive presence as presence to someone, including to presence itself. This birth is not the constitution of an identity, but the endless departure of an identity from, and from within, its other, or others. Its coming is not desire but jouissance, the joy of averring oneself to be continually in the state of being born—a rejoicing of birth, a birth of rejoicing.The second section, "Poetry," asks: What art exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe (or rather, "exscribe," in a term the book develops) the coming existence as such? The author's trajectory in this book crosses those of Hegel, Schlegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, in their comments on art and politics, existence and corporeality, everyday life and its modes of existence and ecstasy. An analysis that dares this crossing involves all the varied accounts of existence, political as well as philosophical, and all the realms of poverty.

This is the most systematic, the most radical, and the most lucid treatise on freedom that has been written in contemporary Continental philosophy. Finding its guiding motives in Kant's second Critique and working its way up to and beyond Heidegger and Adorno, this book marks the most advanced position in the thinking of freedom that has been proposed after Sartre and Levinas. One could call it a fundamental ontology of freedom if freedom, according to the author, did not entail liberation from foundational acts and the overcoming of any logic that determines the way ontology does, by positing being either as self-sufficient position or as subjected to strictly immanent laws.Once existence no longer offers itself as an empiricity that must be related to its conditions of possibility or sublated in a transcendence beyond itself, but instead as sheer factuality, we must think this fact, the fact of existence as the essence of itself, as freedom. The question is no longer "Why is there something rather than nothing?" Instead, it becomes "Why these very questions by which existence affirms itself and abandons itself in a single gesture?" If we do not think being itself as a freedom, we are condemned to think of freedom as pure "Idea" or "right," and being-in-the-world, in turn, as a blind and obtuse necessity. Since Kant, philosophy and our world have relentlessly confronted this scission.

One of the most influential philosophers of our day has selected 16 previously uncollected pieces that are unified by Levinas's project of revising the phenomenological description of the world in light of our experience of other persons.

"Chatter" cannot always be taken lightly, for the insignificance and insubstantiality of "idle talk," "prattle," "nonsense," and so forth challenge the very notions of substance and significance through which rational discourses seek justification. This book shows that in "chatter" Kierkegaard uncovered a specfically linguistic mode of negativity—not that of the Hegelian concept—became the medium in which a non-speculative and non-historicist presentation of history could be carried out.The author examines in detail those writings of Kierkegaard in which he undertook complex negotiations with the threat—and also the promise—of "chatter." One effect of these negotiations is revealed as an insistence on "existence," which alone could appear as a counterweight to the lightness and insubstantiality of mere language. The author's readings of both well-known and neglected works do not simply show how indirect communication affects this insistence on "existence"; they also show how the negation of direct communication (which in genderal makes reading necessary) undoes the distinctions through which weighty "existence" and insubstantial "chatter" are set apart.

Philosophical aesthetics has seen an amazing revival over the past decade, as a radical questioning of the very grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of aesthetic experience—and in particular of the limits of the aesthetical—can be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open model for human understanding. In this revival, no text in the classical corpus of Western philosophy has been more frequently discussed than the complex paragraphs modestly inserted into Kant's Critique of Judgment as sections 23-29: the Analytic of the Sublime.This book is a rigorous explication de texte, a close reading of these sections. First, Lyotard reconstitutes, following the letter of Kant's analysis, the philosophical context of his critical writings and of the European Enlightenment. Second, because the analytic of the sublime reveals the inability of aesthetic experience to bridge the separate realms of theoretical and practical reason, Lyotard can connect his reconstitution of Kant's critical project with today's debates about the very conditions—and limits—of presentation in general.Lyotard enables us to see the sublime as a model for reflexive thinking generally via his concept of the "differend," which emphasizes the inevitability of conflicts and incompatibilities between different notions and "phrases." The Analytic of the Sublime, he points out, tries to argue that human thought is always constituted through a similar incompatibility between different intellectual and affective faculties. These lessons thus highlight the analysis of a "differend of feeling" in Kant's text, which is also the analysis of a "feeling of differend," and connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits.

Philosophical aesthetics has seen an amazing revival over the past decade, as a radical questioning of the very grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of aesthetic experience—and in particular of the limits of the aesthetical—can be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open model for human understanding. In this revival, no text in the classical corpus of Western philosophy has been more frequently discussed than the complex paragraphs modestly inserted into Kant's Critique of Judgment as sections 23-29: the Analytic of the Sublime.This book is a rigorous explication de texte, a close reading of these sections. First, Lyotard reconstitutes, following the letter of Kant's analysis, the philosophical context of his critical writings and of the European Enlightenment. Second, because the analytic of the sublime reveals the inability of aesthetic experience to bridge the separate realms of theoretical and practical reason, Lyotard can connect his reconstitution of Kant's critical project with today's debates about the very conditions—and limits—of presentation in general.Lyotard enables us to see the sublime as a model for reflexive thinking generally via his concept of the "differend," which emphasizes the inevitability of conflicts and incompatibilities between different notions and "phrases." The Analytic of the Sublime, he points out, tries to argue that human thought is always constituted through a similar incompatibility between different intellectual and affective faculties. These lessons thus highlight the analysis of a "differend of feeling" in Kant's text, which is also the analysis of a "feeling of differend," and connect this feeling with the transport that leads all thought (critical thought included) to its limits.

This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship between music and the problems of mimesis, between presentation and re-presentaion. Four "scenes" comprise the book, all four of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarme), two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno).It is dificult to realize how profoundly Wagner affected the cultural and ideological sensibilities of the nineteenth century. Wagnerism rapidly spread throughout Europe, partly because of Wagner's propagandizing talent and the zeal of his adherents. But the main reason for his ascendance was the sudden appearance of what the century had desperately tried to produce since the beginnings of Romanticism - a work of art on the scale of great Greek and Christian art. At last, here it was: the secret of what Hegel called the "religion of art" rediscovered. The first two scenes of the book present a historical sequence that is punctuated by the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, in which the universal unbridling of nations and classes is prefigured. The second two register certain effects of Wagnerism that are not just ideological but make themselves felt in a new political configuration of the "national" and the "social."

A Stanford University Press classic.

A Stanford University Press classic.

This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship between music and the problems of mimesis, between presentation and re-presentaion. Four "scenes" comprise the book, all four of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarme), two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno).It is dificult to realize how profoundly Wagner affected the cultural and ideological sensibilities of the nineteenth century. Wagnerism rapidly spread throughout Europe, partly because of Wagner's propagandizing talent and the zeal of his adherents. But the main reason for his ascendance was the sudden appearance of what the century had desperately tried to produce since the beginnings of Romanticism - a work of art on the scale of great Greek and Christian art. At last, here it was: the secret of what Hegel called the "religion of art" rediscovered. The first two scenes of the book present a historical sequence that is punctuated by the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, in which the universal unbridling of nations and classes is prefigured. The second two register certain effects of Wagnerism that are not just ideological but make themselves felt in a new political configuration of the "national" and the "social."

This volume collects twenty-three interviews given over the course of the last two decades by Jacques Derrida. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of his concerns, touching upon such subjects as the teaching of philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, AIDS, language and translation, nationalism, politics, and Derrida's early life and the history of his writings. Often, as in the interview on Heidegger, or that on drugs, or on the nature of poetry, these interviews offer not only an introduction to other discussions, but something available nowhere else in his work.When did feminist discourse become an indispensable consideration for deconstruction? What was the impact on Derrida's work of his being an Algerian Jew growing up during World War II? Is there an ineradicable gap between language-based attitude such as those found in a deconstruction and subjectivity-oriented critical models such as those developed by Foucault and Lacan? Such questions as these are answered with great thoughtfulness and intensity.Derrida's oral style is patient, generous, and helpful. His tone varies with the questioners and the subject matter—militant, playful, strategic, impassioned, analytic: difference in modulation can sometimes be heard within the same dialogue. The informality of the interview process frequently leads to the most succinct and lucid explications to be found of many of the most important and influential aspects of Derrida's thought. Sixteen of the interviews appear here for the first time in English, including an interview, conducted especially for this volume, concerning the recent exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books.