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This book seeks to elucidate Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty’s treatments of the question of truth by using each of their philosophies to shed light on the other. For both philosophers, the question of truth arises from the fact that even though truth is an illusion, it remains a meaningful concept. What authentic experience is truth an inauthentic expression of? By following the trajectory of this question in both authors’ works, this book demonstrates how this question structures both their philosophies and how its answer constitutes the systematic and intrinsic link between them: the concept of truth arises from the authentic experience of Being as an endless movement of falsification. For Being must be defined as the very movement whereby the world transforms itself into truths.

Apocalypse-cinema is not only the end of time that has so often been staged as spectacle in films like 2012, The Day After Tomorrow, and Terminator. By looking at blockbusters that play with general annihilation while also paying close attention to films like Melancholia, Cloverfield, Blade Runner, and Twelve Monkeys, this book suggests that in the apocalyptic genre, film gnaws at its own limit. Apocalypse-cinema is, at the same time and with the same double blow, the end of the world and the end of the film. It is the consummation and the (self)consumption of cinema, in the form of a cinema that Lyotard evoked as the nihilistic horizon of filmic economy. The innumerable countdowns, dazzling radiations, freeze-overs, seismic cracks, and crevices are but other names and pretexts for staging film itself, with its economy of time and its rewinds, its overexposed images and fades to white, its freeze frames and digital touch-ups. The apocalyptic genre is not just one genre among others: it plays with the very conditions of possibility of cinema. And it bears witness to the fact that, every time, in each and every film, what Jean-Luc Nancy called the cine-world is exposed on the verge of disappearing. In a postface specially written for the English edition, the book extends its argument into a debate with speculative materialism. Apocalypse-cinema, it argues, announces itself as cinders that question the “ultratestimonial” structure of the filmic gaze. The cine-eye, it argues, eludes the correlationism and anthropomorphic structure that speculative materialists have placed under critique, allowing only the ashes it bears to be heard.

In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. All forms of belonging inevitably exclude some others as “beasts.” Though one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable, even if ultimately unattainable, ideals, Bestial Traces shows that, by maintaining such principles, we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence because we fail to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.

This book is the first systematic reconstruction of Castoriadis's philosophical trajectory, and pays particular attention to his dialogue with phenomenology. It critically interprets the shifts in his ontology by reconsidering the ancient problematic of “human institution” (nomos) and “nature” (physis), on the one hand, and the question of “being” and “creation,” on the other. Unlike the order of physis, the order of nomos has played no substantial role in the development of Western thought. The first part of the book suggests that Castoriadis sought to remedy this by elucidating the social-historical as the region of being that eludes the determinist imaginary of inherited philosophy. This ontological turn was announced in his 1975 magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society. With the aid of archival sources, the second half of the book reconstructs a second ontological shift in Castoriadis's thought that occurred during the 1980s. The book argues that Castoriadis extends his notion of “ontological creation” beyond the human realm and into nature. This move has implications for his overall ontology and signals a shift toward a general ontology of creative physis.

Committing the Future to Memory: History, Experience, Trauma seeks to rethink the relation between history and memory by revisiting the temporality of experience and its narrative representation. Whereas historical determinacy conceives the past to be a complex and unstable network of causalities, asks how history can be related to a more radical future. To pose that question, it does not reject determinacy outright but rather seeks to explore how it works. In examining what it means to be “determined” by history, it also asks what kind of openings there might be in our encounters with history for interruptions, re-readings and re-writings. Engaging texts spanning multiple genres and several centuries-from John Locke to Maurice Blanchot, from G. W. F. Hegel to Hannah Arendt and Walter Benjamin-this book looks at experiences of time that exceed the historical narration of experiences said to have occurred in time. It focuses on the co-existence of multiple temporalities and opens up the quintessentially modern notion of historical succession to other possibilities. The alternatives the book draws out include the mediations of language and narration, temporal leaps, oscillations and blockages, and the role played by contingency in representation. The book argues that such alternatives compel us to reassess the ways we understand history and identity in a traumatic, or indeed in a post-traumatic, age.

How does our understanding of the reality (or lack thereof) of race as a category of being affect our understanding of racism as a social phenomenon, and vice versa? How should we envision the aims and methods of our struggles against racism? Traditionally, the Western political and philosophical tradition held that true social justice points toward a race-less future — that racial categories are themselves inherently racist, and a sincere advocacy for social justice requires a commitment to the elimination or abolition of race altogether. This book focuses on the underlying assumptions that inform this view of race and racism, arguing that it is ultimately bound up in a politics of purity — an understanding of human agency, and reality itself, as requiring all-or-nothing categories with clear and unambiguous boundaries. Racism, being organized around a conception of whiteness as the purest manifestation of the human, thus demands a constant policing of the boundaries among racial categories. Drawing upon a close engagement with historical treatments of the development of racial categories and identities, the book argues that races should be understood not as clear and distinct categories of being but rather as ambiguous and indeterminate (yet importantly real) processes of social negotiation. The author takes seriously the way in which racial categories, in all of their variety and ambiguity, situate and condition our identity, while emphasizing our capacity, as agents, to engage in the ongoing contestation and negotiation of the meaning and significance of those very categories.

For more than twenty years, the author of this book has been in conversation with leading philosophers, literary theorists, anthropologists, and religious scholars. This book brings together twenty-one originally published and extraordinary conversations—the author's 1984 collection Dialogues: The Phenomenological Heritage, his 1992 Visions of Europe: Conversations on the Legacy and Future of Europe, and his 1995 States of Mind: Dialogues with Contemporary Thinkers. Featured interviewees include Stanislas Breton, Umberto Eco, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Herbert Marcus, George Steiner, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jean-François Lyotard. To this classic core, the book adds recent interviews, previously unpublished, with Paul Ricoeur, Jean-Luc Marion, Jacques Derrida, and Georges Dumézil, as well as six colloquies about the author's own work. These interviews provide a guide to the ideas, concerns, and personalities of thinkers who have shaped modern intellectual life.

In his early lecture courses, delivered at the University of Freiburg and the University of Marburg from 1919 to 1928, Martin Heidegger exhibited an abiding interest in human life. Focusing on the facticity of living and speaking in the early lecture courses, this book traces the development of Heidegger's ideas about factical life through his interest in Greek thought and its concern with Being. Heidegger's existential concerns about human life and his ontological concerns about the meaning of Being crystallize in the notion of Dasein in Being and Time. Dasein is the Being of factical human life. Primarily through an examination of these early lecture courses, this book investigates the interconnected relationships human life has to science, religion, history, phenomenology, hermeneutics, and ontology, as well as language, sophistry, and rhetoric in the work of Plato and Aristotle. With an emphasis on the positive aspects of everydayness, this book explores the contexts of meaning embedded within life; the intensity of average, everyday life; the temporal immediacy of life in early Christianity; the hermeneutic pursuit of life's self-alienation; factical spatiality; the temporalizing of history within life; the richness of the world; and the facticity of speaking in Plato and Aristotle.

This book follows the remarkable itinerary of Jacques Derrida's final seminar, “The Beast and the Sovereign” (2001–3), as the explicit themes of the seminar namely, sovereignty and the question of the animal come to be supplemented and interrupted by questions of death, mourning, survival, the archive, and, especially, the end of the world. The book begins with Derrida's analyses, in the first year of the seminar, of the question of the animal in the context of his other published works on the same subject. It then follows Derrida through the second year of the seminar, presented in Paris from December 2002 to March 2003, as a very different tone begins to make itself heard, one that wavers between melancholy and an extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end. Focusing the entire year on just two works, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger's seminar of 1929–30, “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,”the seminar comes to be dominated by questions of the end of the world and of an ordinary violence that at once gives rise to and effaces all things. The text follows Derrida as he responds from week to week to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world events the aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraq and more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away. All this, the book concludes, makes this final seminar an absolutely unique work in Derrida's corpus, one that both speaks of death as the end of the world and itself now testifies to that end just one, though hardly the least, of its many teachable moments.

The book addresses the difficulties posed by the Holocaust for a thinking of forgiveness inherited from the Abrahamic (i.e., monotheistic) tradition. As a way to approach these difficulties, it explores the often radically divergent positions in the debate on forgiveness in the literature of Holocaust survivors. Forgiveness is sometimes understood as a means of self-empowerment (Eva Mozes Kor); part of the inevitable process of historical normalization and amnesia (Jean Améry); or otherwise as an unresolved question, that will survive all trials and remain contemporary when the crimes of the Nazis belong to the distant past (Simon Wiesenthal). On the basis of an examination of Jacques Derrida’s concept of forgiveness (as forgiveness of the unforgivable) and its elaboration in relation to the juridical concept of Crimes Against Humanity, the book undertakes close readings of Simon Wiesenthal’s The Sunflower (Die Sonnenblume (1969)), Jean Améry’s At the Mind’s Limits (Jenseits von Schuld und Sühne (1966)), Vladimir Jankélévitch’s Forgiveness (Le Pardon (1967)), and Robert Antelme’s The Human Race (L’espèce humaine (1947)). In addition, it analyses the documentary film Forgiving Doctor Mengele (2006) on Eva Mozes Kor. Each of these works bears witness to “aporias,” or unsolvable impasses, of forgiveness, justice and responsibility in relation to the Holocaust. The book argues that Derrida’s concept of forgiveness has the capacity to transform the debate about forgiveness and the Holocaust and open new ways to read the literature, which turns around this question.