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Theory has often been coded as “Jewish”—not merely because Jewish intellectuals have been central participants, but also, this book argues, because certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theoretical questions across the humanities. In the range of violence and agency that can attend the appellation “Jew,” Jewishness is revealed as a rhetorical and not just social fact, one tied to profound questions of power, subjectivity, identity, figuration, language, and relation that are also central to modern theory and modern politics. Understanding Jewishness in its fluidity, this book helps articulate theory's potential to mediate pessimistic and utopian impulses, experiences, and realities.

Figuring Violence catalogs the affects that define the latter stages of the war on terror and the imaginative work that underpins them. These affects—apprehension, affection, admiration, gratitude, pity, and righteous anger—are far more pleasurable and durable than their predecessors. Hence, they are deeply compatible with the ambitions of a state embroiling itself in a perpetual and essentially unwinnable war. Surveying the cultural landscape of this sprawling conflict, Figuring Violence reveals the varied mechanisms by which these affects have been militarized. This book tracks their convergences around six types of beings: civilian children, military children, military spouses, veterans with PTSD and TBI, Guantánamo detainees, and military dogs. All of these groups have become preferred objects of sentiment in wartime public culture, but they also have in common their status as political subjects who are partially or fully unknowable. They become visible to outsiders through a range of mediated and imaginative practices that are ostensibly motivated by concern or compassion. However, these practices actually function to reduce these beings to abstracted figures and so make them easy targets for affective investment. This is a paradoxical and conditional form of recognition that eclipses the actual beings upon whom those figures are patterned, silencing their political subjectivities and obscuring their suffering. As a result, they are erased and rendered hypervisible at once. Figuring Violence demonstrates that this dynamic ultimately propagates the very militarism that begets their victimization.

Maurice Blanchot (1907–2003) was one of the most important writers of the French twentieth century. His novels, shorter narratives, literary criticism, and fragmentary texts exercised great influence over writers, artists, and philosophers. As a journalist and political activist, he had a public side that matched his secret and mysterious side as someone who refused to be interviewed or photographed. Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography, the only full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, therefore attempts to carry out an impossible bio-graphy. It does so by drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s very close friends. Beyond this, it is a theoretical work that follows the genealogy of a thinking that is at once imaginative and speculative, at once aligned with literary modernity and a close companion and friend of philosophy. It is 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. And it is of course a biography, showing the strong links between the author’s life and an œuvre which nonetheless aspires to anonymity. In these ways, this book claims that Blanchot’s is a life that has become the œuvre, become a literature that bears the traces of that life secretly, even if they are what drives it. Blanchot’s œuvre is reconstituted in all its contexts, at a time when the critics who attack it, just like those who elevate it in unthinking fascination, often produce one-dimensional readings.

People's Car explores one of the major movements for resisting the acquisition of land by the government in the interests of siting a Tata Motors car factory in Singur, India. The factory becomes the alibi for nuanced interrogations that are both material and theoretical on resistance, changing rural realities in globalizing India and the very nature and idea of land. It asks why such long drawn resistances against corporate industrialization coexist with political rhetoric and slogans promoting fast paced industrialization. It argues that such contradictory rhetoric and promises target divided sentiments in rural India where land is more than a simple agricultural plot to middle caste small and marginal landowners aspiring nonfarm futures. People's Car breaks new ground by ethnographically establishing the incommensurability between land and money. Such incommensurability or non-equivalence, the book shows, simultaneously drives protests against land acquisition and fuels the demands for non-farm jobs and industrialization, the crux of rural middle-caste aspirational politics. It questions the dominant trend of romanticizing rural life and associated anti-development protests that uses the clichéd dichotomous tropes—rural Bharat vs. urban India.

At one time, God was a bird. In ancient Egypt, Thoth was the Ibis-headed divinity of magic and wisdom. Winged divine beings—griffins and harpies—populated the pantheon of Greek antiquity, and Quetzalcoatl was the plumed serpent deity of the pre-Columbian Aztecs. It is said that in spite of—or better, to spite—this time-honored wealth of divine avifauna, Christianity divorced God from the avian world in order to defend a pure form of monotheism. This narrative, however, misses the startling scriptural portrayals of God as the beaked and feathered Holy Spirit, the third member of the Trinity who, alongside the Father and Son, is the “animal God” of historic Christian witness. Appearing as a winged creature at the time of Jesus’ baptism (Luke 3:21-22), the bird-God of the New Testament signals the deep grounding of archi-original biblical faith in the natural world. This book calls this new but ancient vision of the world “Christian animism” in order to signal the continuity of biblical religion with the beliefs of indigenous and non-Western communities that Spirit enfleshes itself within everything that grows, walks, flies, and swims in and over the Earth. To this end, it weaves together philosophy (Heidegger, Girard), theology (Augustine, Hildegard, Muir), and the author’s own birdwatching visitations (wood thrush, pileated woodpecker, great blue heron, American dipper, domestic pigeon) to argue that all things are alive with sacred personhood and worthy of human beings’ love and protection in a time of ecocidal, even deicidal, climate change.

Under Representation argues that the relation between the concepts of universality, freedom and humanity, and the racial order of the modern world is grounded in the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy. It challenges the absence of sustained thought about race in postcolonial studies and the lack of attention to aesthetics in critical race theory. Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful racial regime of representation whose genealogy runs from enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. For aesthetic philosophy, representation is an activity that articulates the various spheres of human practice and theory, from the most fundamental acts of perception and reflection to the relation of the subject to the political, the economic, and the social. Representation regulates the distribution of racial identifications along a developmental trajectory: the racialized remain “under representation,” on the threshold of humanity and not yet capable of freedom and civility as aesthetic thought defines those attributes. To ignore the aesthetic is thus to overlook its continuing force in the formation of the racial and political structures down to the present. In its five chapters, Under Representation investigates the aesthetic foundations of modern political subjectivity; race and the sublime; the logic of assimilation and the sterotype; the subaltern critique of representation; and the place of magic and the primitive in modernist concepts of art, aura, and representation.

Already widely debated upon its publication in French, this book offers a provocative account of Christ’s Passion in terms not of faith but of a “credible Christianity” that can remain meaningful to nonbelievers. For Falque, anxiety, suffering, and death are not simply the “ills” of our society but the essential horizon of what we confront as humans. Doubtful of Heidegger’s famous statement that the notion of salvation renders Christians unable authentically to experience anxiety in the face of death, Falque explores the Passion with a radical emphasis on the physicality and corporeality of Christ’s suffering and death, and on continuities with the mortality of our bodies. Written in the wake of a friend’s death, Falques’s study is theologically and philosophically rigorous, yet engagingly written and deeply humane.

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.

This book pursues Derrida’s assertion, in The Death Penalty, Volume I, that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” The main question this book poses is: How does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind, a Christian-inspired death penalty in what professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty? These are among the questions that guide the analyses of four literary works, each a depiction or an account of an execution, in the search for deconstructive leverage on the concepts that prop up capital punishment. Different pertinent features are isolated in these texts: the “mysteries” of literary or poetic witness; the publicness of punishment in an era of secrecy around the death penalty; the undecidable difference between death by capital punishment and by suicide—a difference that Kant enforces and that Derrida contests; and even the collapse of the distinction between the sovereign powers to put to death and to pardon, a possibility that is shown up by a poetic work when, performatively, it “plays the law.” In relation to the death penalties they represent, these literary survivals may be seen as the ashes or remains of the phantasm that the death penalty has always been, the phantasm of calculating and thus ending finitude.

The Space Age is over? Not at all! A new planet has appeared: Earth. In the age of the Anthropocene, the Earth is a post-natural planet that can be remade at will, controlled and managed thanks to the prowess of geoengineering. This new imaginary is also accompanied by a new kind of power—geopower—which takes the entire Earth—in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions—as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. Far from merely being the fruit of the spirit of geo-capitalism, this new grand narrative has been championed by the theorists of the constructivist turn (be them ecomodernist, postenvironmentalist, or accelerationist to name a few) who have also called into question the great divide between nature and culture; but in the aftermath of the collapse of this divide, a cyborg, hybrid, flexible nature was built, an impoverished nature that does not exist without being performed by the technologies, human needs, and capitalist imperatives. Underneath this performative vision resides a hidden “a-naturalism” denying all otherness to nature and the Earth, no longer by externalizing it as a thing to be dominated, but by radically internalizing it as something to be digested. Constructivist ecology can hardly present itself in opposition to the geo-constructivist project, which also claims that there is no nature and that nothing will prevent human beings from replacing Earth with an Earth 2.0.