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Maurice Blanchot: A Critical Biography

Christophe Bident

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 ... More

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 It does so by drawing on unpublished letters and on interviews with the writer’s very close friends.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.Less

The Forgiveness to Come: The Holocaust and the Hyper-Ethical

Peter Banki

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 ... More

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.Less

Atopias: Manifesto for a Radical Existentialism

Frédéric Neyrat

Atopias argues for a transcendence that is a relation between thought and the world, rather than an object or a substance that escapes the world. In doing so, Atopies intervenes within the fields of ... More

Atopias argues for a transcendence that is a relation between thought and the world, rather than an object or a substance that escapes the world. In doing so, Atopies intervenes within the fields of object-oriented ontology and speculative realism, as well as classical philosophy, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, ecology, and global studies. The book posits that existence must be thought prior to being. Neyrat’s radical existentialism becomes the basis for a new theory of being, understood as the self-differentiation of the existent. Such self-differentiation, or spacing, is fundamentally different than the “Grand Divides” that postructuralist theories have critiqued. The first part of the book develops a critique of saturated immanence, or a world that attempts to immunize itself by rejecting forms of transcendence. From here the book turns to an internal divergence at the heart of philosophy, offering a new reading of Socrates. The second part of the book is a theory of the “trans-ject,” or an existing living being that is formed from the outside. The third section of the book examines the creation of metaphysical propositions through the transgression of the law of the excluded middle. Elaborating a politics of existence, Atopias calls us to defend the eccentricity of the living against that which prevents the living from existing.Less

Wilderness in America: Philosophical Writings

Henry Bugbee

David W. Rodick (ed.)

The philosophy of Henry Bugbee defies traditional academic categorization. Calvin O. Schrag, Professor Emeritus of Purdue University, once lamented that Bugbee was one of the more marginalized ... More

The philosophy of Henry Bugbee defies traditional academic categorization. Calvin O. Schrag, Professor Emeritus of Purdue University, once lamented that Bugbee was one of the more marginalized philosophers of the twentieth century, while the late Willard van Orman Quine of Harvard University, world-renown analytic philosopher and logician, described him as the ultimate exemplar of the examined life. Bugbee’s most recognized work, The Inward Morning: A Philosophical Exploration in Journal Form, consists of sequences of journal entries. Bugbee’s writings are remarkably different than most anything written in twentieth-century American philosophy. As an undergraduate, already aware of the need to overcome the limitations of formal philosophical writing, Bugbee acknowledged: “Certainly anyone who throws his entire personality into his work must to some extent adopt an aesthetic attitude and medium.” The purpose of this book is to remove the philosophical writings of Henry Bugbee from relative obscurity, making them more accessible to the wider public. Beginning with an introductory account of Bugbee’s “experiential naturalism,” the development of his thought is traced from his student writings in Part One to some select published writings in Part Two, followed by heretofore unpublished writings in Part Three. Part Four consists of an in-depth interview conducted during the twilight years of his life. The book concludes with a rich collection of appendices that are intended to shed light upon the unique person Bugbee in fact was. The end-in-view throughout has been to allow Bugbee the opportunity to speak in his own words and, when appropriate, through the words of others: those both familiar with the man as well as his philosophy.Less

The Future Life of Trauma: Partitions, Borders, Repetition

Jennifer Yusin (ed.)

The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a ground-breaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourses. It unfolds a new ... More

The Future Life of Trauma elaborates a transformation in the concepts of trauma and event by situating a ground-breaking encounter between psychoanalytic and postcolonial discourses. It unfolds a new materialism that asserts the coincidence between the symbolic and empirical domains of life. Proceeding from the formation of psychical life as it is presented in the Freudian metapsychology, Future Life thinks anew the relation between temporality and the traumatized subjectivity, demonstrating how the psychic event, understood as a traumatic event, is a material reality that alters the determining character of the structure of repetition. It comprises two major sections. The first elucidates how the case of the psychoanalytic concept of trauma discloses the self-transformative tendency of life as the movement immanent to the real. Through a focus on the role of borders in the history of the 1947 Partition of British India and the politics of memorialization in post-genocide Rwanda, the second brings to light the implications of trauma as a material event in pressing contemporary issues of nation-formation, sovereignty, and geopolitical violence. In showing how the form of the psyche changes in the encounter, Future Life presents a challenge to the category of difference in the condition of identity. The epilogue pushes toward a new approach to ethical and political responsibility that breaks the deconstructive loops perpetuated by the idea of promise. The result is the formation of a form of life that elaborates a new relation to destruction and finitude by asserting its innate power to transform itself.Less

Heidegger, Philosophy, and Politics: The Heidelberg Conference

Jacques Derrida, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe

Mireille Calle-Gruber (ed.)

In February of 1988, philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political ... More

In February of 1988, philosophers Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe came together in Heidelberg before a large audience to discuss the philosophical and political implications of Martin Heidegger’s thought. This event took place in the very amphitheater in which, more than fifty years earlier, Heidegger, as Rector of the University of Freiburg and a member of the Nazi Party, had given a speech entitled “The University in the New Reich.” Heidegger’s involvement in Nazism has always been, and will remain, an indelible scandal, but what is its real relation to his work and thought? And what are the responsibilities of those who read this work, who analyze and elaborate this thought? Conversely, what is at stake in the wholesale dismissal of this important but compromised twentieth-century philosopher? In 1988, in the wake of the publication of Victor Farias’s Heidegger and Nazism, and of the heated debates that ensued, these questions had become more pressing than ever. The reflections presented by three of the most prominent of Heidegger’s readers, improvised in French and transcribed here, were an attempt to approach these questions before a broad public, but with a depth of knowledge and a complex sense of the questions at issue that were often lacking in the press at the time.Less

Nostalgia

Barbara Cassin

In Nostalgia: When Are We Ever At Home? Cassin explores with compelling force the question of nostalgia and the implications it has for us as both individuals and members of a political community. ... More

In Nostalgia: When Are We Ever At Home? Cassin explores with compelling force the question of nostalgia and the implications it has for us as both individuals and members of a political community. She provides an eloquent and sophisticated treatment of such universal themes as exile from one’s native land, the desire or nostalgia for a homeland, and the possibility of rethinking the homeland in terms of language rather than territory. She does so by revisiting with great incisiveness some of the founding texts of Western culture: Homer’s Odyssey and Virgil’s Aeneid and then moves on to an engaging analysis of the work of German philosopher Hannah Arendt to show that the dangerous implications of a nostalgia for land and homeland need to be revisited and rethought through the questions of exile and language. Cassin thus attempts to show how contemporary philosophy, via Hannah Arendt, and, to a lesser extent, Heidegger and Jacques Derrida, opens up the classic representation of the themes of rootedness and uprootedness, of belonging and foreignness, of one’s relationship to one’s native language, to a discussion of the political stakes of such concepts and how they might impact the current landscape of a global world.Less

Apocalypse-Cinema: 2012 and Other Ends of the World

Peter Szendy

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 ... More

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.Less

Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space

Sander van Maas (ed.)

This book addresses recent and historical changes in the ways listening has been conceived. Listening, having been emancipated from the passive, subjected position of reception, has come to be ... More

This book addresses recent and historical changes in the ways listening has been conceived. Listening, having been emancipated from the passive, subjected position of reception, has come to be asserted as an active force in culture and in collective and individual politics. The chapters here show that the exteriorization of listening—brought into relief by recent historical studies of technologies of listening—involves a renegotiation of the theoretical and pragmatic distinctions that underpin the notion of listening. Focusing on the manifold borderlines between listening and its erstwhile others, such as speaking, reading, touching, seeing, or hearing, the book maps new frontiers in the history of aurality. They suggest that listening's finitude—defined in some of the chapters as its death or deadliness—should be considered as a heuristic instrument rather than as a mere descriptor. Listening emerges where it appears to end or to run up against thresholds and limits—or when it takes unexpected turns. Listening's recent emergence on the cultural and theoretical scene may therefore be productively read against contemporary recurrences of the motifs of elusiveness, finitude, and resistance to open up new politics, discourses, and technologies of aurality.Less

The Perils of Uglytown: Studies in Structural Misanthropology from Plato to Rembrandt

Harry Berger, Jr.

This book considers a variety of texts and images ranging from those of Thucydides and Plato to those of William Shakespeare and Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. The Introduction explains the key concept ... More

This book considers a variety of texts and images ranging from those of Thucydides and Plato to those of William Shakespeare and Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn. The Introduction explains the key concept of the study, structural misanthropology, a variant on Claude Lévi-Strauss’s idea of structural anthropology. Part I explores its activity in several Platonic dialogues: Lysis, Crito, Phaedo, The Republic, and Timaeus. Part II turns to the Renaissance in Italy, England, and the Netherlands. Structural misanthropology is discussed first in the work of several Italian humanists (Leon Battista Alberti, Leonardo da Vinci, Baldessare Castiglione, and Giorgio Vasari), then in English drama (Gorbuduc and several plays by Shakespeare), and finally in group portraits by Frans Hals and Rembrandt. This book applies and brings up to date the methods of interpretation developed during the past half-century.Less