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In the years leading up to India’s independence, a young Punjabi woman known to us only as Mrs. A., ill at ease in her marriage and eager for personal and national freedom, sat down with psychiatrist Dev Satya Nand for an experiment in his new and “Oriental” method of dream analysis. Her analysis, which appeared in a case self-published by Satya Nand, included a surge of emotion and reflections on sexuality, gender, marriage, ambition, trauma, and art. She turned to female figures from Hindu myth to reimagine her social world and its ethical arrangements. The stories of Draupadi and Shakuntala, from the Mahabharata, and Ahalya, from the Ramayana, helped her envision a future beyond marriage, colonial rule, and gendered constraints. This book is an exploration of Mrs. A.’s case, its window onto gender and sexuality in late colonial Indian society, and the ways her case put ethics in motion, creating alternatives to ideals of belonging, recognition, and consciousness. It finds in Mrs. A.’s musings repertoires for the creative transformation of ethical ideals and explores the possibilities of thinking with a concept of “counter-ethics” and from a position that sees ethics as plural in both content and form. Following Mrs. A. in pursuing mythic narratives and turning in its conclusion to art as a guide for theorizing, this book asks what perspectives on gender, power, meaning, and imagination are possible from the position of the counter-ethic and its orientation toward movement and change.

Tradition, secularization and fundamentalism—all three categories are contested, yet in their contestation, they shape our sensibilities and are mutually implicated, the one with the others. The discussion around the mutually implicated meanings of the “secular” and “fundamentalism” bring to the foreground more than ever, and in a way unprecedented in the pre-modern context, the question of what it means to think and live as Tradition. The Orthodox theologians of the twentieth century, in particular, have always emphasized Tradition not as a dead letter but as a living presence of the Holy Spirit. But how can we discern when Tradition as living discernment is not fundamentalism? And what does it mean to think as a Tradition and live in Tradition when surrounded by something like the “secular”? The essays in this volume continue both the interrogation of the categories of the “secular” and “fundamentalism,” all the while either implicitly or explicitly exploring ways of thinking about tradition in relation to these interrogations. In this interrogation, however, one witnesses a consensus that whatever the secular or fundamentalism may mean, it is not Tradition, which is historical, particularistic, in motion, ambiguous and pluralistic, while simultaneously not being relativistic. If the wider debates about the secular and fundamentalism seem interminable and often frustrating, perhaps the real contribution of those discussions is a clearer sense of what it means to live and think like—to be as Tradition.

This collection of essays explores how the body became a touchstone for late antique practice and the religious imagination. When we read the stories and testimonies of late ancient Christians, what different types of bodies stand before us in such stories and what do they tell us? How do we understand the range of bodily experiences—solitary and social, private and public—that clothed ancient Christians? How might such experiences and the body as garb itself serve as a productive metaphor by which to explore this attention to matters of gender, religious identity, class, and ethnicity? The essays in this book explore these and related questions through stories from the eastern Christian world of antiquity: monks and martyrs, families and congregations, and textual bodies from antiquity subject to modern interpretations.

This book considers the day-to-day lives of young Muslims on the island of Lamu (Kenya) who live simultaneously “on the edge and in the center”: they are situated at the edge of the (inter)national economy and at the margins of Western notions of modernity; yet they are concurrently the focus of (inter)national campaigns against Islamic radicalization and are at the heart of Western (touristic) imaginations of the untouched and secluded. What does it mean to be young, modern, and Muslim in this context? And how are these denominators differently imagined and enacted in daily encounters? Documenting the everyday lives of Lamu youth, this ethnography explores how young people negotiate different cultural, religious, political and economic pressures and expectations through nuanced deployments of language, dress, and bodily comportment. It thereby illustrates how seemingly mundane practices—from how young people greet others, to how they walk, dress, and talk—can become tactics in the negotiation of moral personhood. A central concern of the book lies with the shifting meaning and ambiguity of such everyday signs and thus the dangers of semiotic misconstrual. By examining this uncertainty of interpretation in projects of self-fashioning, the book highlights how shifting and scalable discourses of tradition, modernity, secularization, nationalism, and religious piety inform changing notions of moral subjectivity. Documenting how Lamu youth navigate this contested field in a fast-changing place with a fascinating history, this book offers a distinctly linguistic anthropological approach to discussions of ethical self-fashioning and everyday Islam.

Tales of neoliberalism’s death are serially overstated. Seemingly repudiated by historical events and yet staggering on like an undead cadaver, neoliberalism was proclaimed a “zombie” ideology following the 2008 financial crisis. After the major political shocks of 2016, the global rise of the far right, and the rebirth of democratic socialist politics, commentators declared “the end of neoliberalism” once again. Yet even as new political forces emerge from decades of neoliberal hegemony, it remains far from certain whether they will sound neoliberalism’s death knell or rather propel new movements within its dynamic development. Mutant Neoliberalism brings together leading scholars of neoliberalism from an array of disciplines—political theorists, historians, philosophers, sociologists, and anthropologists—to reappraise ongoing transformations within our historical moment. Rethinking the shifting relationship between market rule and political rupture, the authors interrogate the decades of neoliberal governance, policy, and depoliticization that created conditions for thriving reactionary forces, while also investigating how recent trends may challenge, reconfigure, or extend neoliberalism’s reach. Facing the challenges of our dystopic present not only requires moving beyond expectations of neoliberalism’s inevitable death, but also grasping its ongoing mutations across spheres of political, economic, and social life. Mutant Neoliberalism recasts the stakes of contemporary debate, asking us to rethink what we know about neoliberalism in order to reorient critique and resistance within a rapidly changing landscape.

When it comes to giving, philosophers love to be the most generous. For them, every form of reciprocity is tainted by commercial exchange. In recent decades, such thinkers as Derrida, Levinas, Henry, Marion, Ricoeur, Lefort, and Descombes, have made the gift central to their work, haunted by the requirement of disinterestedness. As an anthropologist as well as a philosopher, the author of this book worries that philosophy has failed to distinguish among various types of giving. This book returns to Mauss to reexamine these thinkers through the anthropological tradition. Reciprocity, rather than disinterestedness, the book shows, is central to ceremonial giving and alliance, whereby the social bond specific to humans is proclaimed as a political bond. From the social fact of gift practices, the book develops an original and profound theory of symbolism, the social, and the relationship between self and other, whether that other is an individual human being, the collective other of community and institution, or the impersonal other of the world.

Thinking through Crisis turns to 1930s African American literature to offer a critical response to Trauma Theory. This theoretical discourse carries a nostalgia for “European Man” that limits its understanding of racial and class antagonisms. Consequently, its version of “bearing witness” yields a political passivity that cannot address the injustices of racism as they are linked to class conflict. Against the political passivity produced by this idealist approach, this book offers a materialist theory of trauma that develops concepts for identifying the agency that Black life produces amid social breakdown.

“The psychoanalyst is a sign of the presence of the sophist in our time, but with a different status.” The surprising confluence of Lacanian psychoanalysis and the texts of the Ancient Greek sophists in Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis becomes a springboard for Barbara Cassin’s highly original re-reading of the writings and seminars of Jacques Lacan. Sophistry, since Plato and Aristotle, has been represented as philosophy’s negative alter ego, its bad other, and this allows her to draw out the “sophistic” elements of Lacan’s own language or how, as she puts it, Lacan “philosophistises”. What both sophists and Lacan have in common is that they radically challenge the very foundations of scientific rationality, and of the relationship of meaning to language, which is shown to operate performatively, at the level of the signifier, and to distance itself from the primacy of truth in philosophy. Our time is said to be the time of the subject of the unconscious, bound to the sexual relationship which does not exist, by contrast with the Greek political animal. As Cassin demonstrates, in a remarkable tour de force, this can be expressed variously in terms of discourse as a social link that has to be negotiated between medicine and politics, between sense and non-sense, between mastery and jouissance. Published originally in French in 2012, Cassin’s book is translated into English for the first time by Michael Syrotinski and includes his translator’s notes, commentary, and index.

Henri Bergson has been the subject of keen interest within French philosophy ever since being championed by Gilles Deleuze and others. Yet his influence extends well beyond European philosophy, especially within Africa and South Asia. Postcolonial Bergson traces the influence of Bergson’s thought through the work of two major figures in the postcolonial struggle, Muhammad Iqbal and Léopold Sédar Senghor. Poets and statesmen as well as philosophers, both of these thinkers—the one Muslim and the other Catholic—played an essential political and intellectual role in the independence of their respective countries. Both found, in Bergson’s work, important support for their philosophical, cultural, and political projects. For Iqbal, a founding father of independent Pakistan, Bergson’s conceptions of time and creative evolution resonated with the need for the “reconstruction of religious thought in Islam,” a religious thought newly able to incorporate innovation and change. For Senghor, Bergsonian ideas of perception, intuition, and élan vital—filtered in part through the work of the French philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—proved crucial for thinking about African art, as well as foundational for his formulations of African socialism and his visions of an unalienated African future. At a moment of renewed interest in Bergson’s philosophy, this book, by a major figure in both French and African philosophy, gives an expanded idea of the political ramifications of Bergson’s thought in a postcolonial context.

A Desire Called America examines the relationship between American exceptionalism and U.S. literature. It focuses on how literary works by Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William S. Burroughs, and Thomas Pynchon draw on the utopian energies of American exceptionalism only to overturn exceptionalism’s investments in capitalism and the nation-state. The book analyzes what it terms the excluded middle between American exceptionalism and its critique, or the conceptual and libidinal space in which critique and complicity mutually determine one another. The book also offers a theory of the relationship between biopolitics and utopia, arguing that in the context of American literature, bodies become figures for alternative forms of social life. It pays particular attention to how these figures contribute to a literary commons, or the imagination of non-capitalist forms of cooperation and non-sovereign forms of democratic self-governance. In doing so, it articulates a model of literary history linking nineteenth-century literature to contemporary literature by way of the rise and decline of American hegemony. The book draws on and contributes to the fields of American Studies, American literary history, Marxist criticism, queer theory, political theory, continental philosophy, and utopian studies.