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Twenty-first century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. In this important intervention, Nathan Brown argues that the key to overcoming this antinomy is rethinking the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant’s transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing claims of those competing schools, any speculative critique of Kant will have to reopen and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to both extend and delimit one another has always been at the core of philosophy and science, and that coordinating their discrepant powers is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique. Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux, while showing how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism is a book that reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.

Merleau-Ponty’s Poetics of the World offers detailed studies of the philosopher’s engagements with Proust, Claudel, Claude Simon, André Breton, Mallarmé, Francis Ponge, and more. From Proust, Merleau-Ponty developed his conception of “sensible ideas,” from Claudel, his conjoining of birth and knowledge as “co-naissance,” from Valéry came “implex” or the “animal of words” and the “chiasma of two destinies.” Thus also arise the questions of expression, metaphor, and truth and the meaning of a Merleau-Pontyan poetics. The poetic of Merleau-Ponty is, inseparably, a poetic of the flesh, a poetic of mystery, and a poetic of the visible in its relation to the invisible. This poetics is worked out across each co-author’s chapters in dialogue with Husserl, Walter Benjamin, Heidegger, and Sartre. A new optic proposes the conception of literature as a visual “apparatus” in relation to cinema and screens. Recent transcriptions of Merleau-Ponty’s first two 1953 courses at the Collège de France The Sensible World and the World of Expression and Research on the Literary Usage of Language, as well as the course of 1953–54, The Problem of Speech, lend timeliness, urgency and energy to this project. Our goal is to specify more precisely the delicate nature and properly philosophical function of literary works in Merleau-Ponty’s thought as the literary writer becomes a partner of the phenomenologist. Ultimately, theoretical figures that appear at the threshold between philosophy and literature enable the possibility of a new ontology. What is at stake is the very meaning of philosophy itself and its mode of expression.

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.

During the 1975–76 academic year, Jacques Derrida delivered a seminar, La vie la mort, at the Paris ENS. Based on archival translations of this as-yet untapped seminar, McCance’s The Reproduction of Life Death offers an unprecedented study of Derrida’s engagement with molecular biology and genetics, particularly François Jacob’s interpretation of DNA reproduction in his 1970 book La Logique du vivant (The Logic of the Living). Structured on an itinerary of “three rings,” each departing from and coming back to Nietzsche, Derrida’s seminar ties Jacob’s logocentric account of reproduction to the reproductive program of teaching that characterizes the academic institution, challenging this mode of teaching as auto-reproduction along with the concept of academic freedom on which it is based. McCance’s The Reproduction of Life Death makes another decisive contribution in bringing together Derrida’s critique of Jacob’s theory of auto-reproduction with his reading of reproductivity, the tendency to repeat-reproduce, that is theorized and enacted in Freud’s “speculative” Beyond the Pleasure Principle. The book includes Derrida’s analyses of life death in relation to autobiography and the signature. The book will be of interest to all theorists and disciplines concerned with the question of life.

What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Thinking with Adorno: The Uncoervice Gaze is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to think with Adorno—which is to say, both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations. These contexts and constellations range from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the difficulty of inheriting a tradition, from one’s orientation in the work of art and the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one to the primacy of the object and beyond. Along the way, the book makes vivid the notion that Adorno can best be understood through the lens of his highly suggestive—yet often overlooked—concept of the “uncoercive gaze.” This gaze designates a specific kind of comportment in relation to an object of critical analysis: it moves close to the object and tarries with it while struggling to decipher the singularities and non-identities that are lodged within it. As this book also shows, Adorno is best understood as a thinker in dialogue, whether with long-deceased historical predecessors in the German tradition such as Kant and Hegel, with writers such as Kafka, with contemporaries such as Benjamin and Arendt, or with philosophical voices that succeeded him, such as those of Derrida and Agamben.

Edmund Husserl, generally regarded as the founding figure of the philosophical movement of phenomenology—or, more precisely, transcendental phenomenology—exerted an enormous influence on the course of twentieth- and twenty-first-century philosophy. This influence was both positive and negative. The subsequent developments of existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and so on were defined in part by how they both assimilated and departed from Husserlian views. The course of what has come to be called “continental philosophy” cannot be described without reference to this assimilation and departure, and, among the many successor approaches, phenomenology remains a viable alternative. In addition, problems addressed by Husserl—most notably, intentionality, consciousness, the emotions, and ethics—are of central concern in so-called analytic philosophy. Husserl’s views remain central to many contemporary philosophical discussions. This volume collects and translates previously untranslated articles written by important German-speaking commentators on Husserl. These German perspectives not only detail Husserl’s phenomenology but point toward his confrontation with other significant German philosophers, both ancestors and heirs. The articles focus primarily on three problematics within phenomenology: the nature and method of phenomenology; intentionality—the “main theme of phenomenology”—along with its attendant problems of temporality and subjectivity; and intersubjectivity and culture. The commentators selected for inclusion in the volume range over a time span encompassing both Husserl’s contemporaries and our own.

This book opens with a philosophical scene: in the context of a reading of Hölderlin, Heidegger dismisses Rousseau as irrelevant to the true concerns of philosophy, and thus shows his own blindness to Rousseau’s very evident influence. This dismissal is motivated in part by Heidegger’s pro-German posture, but also by a disregard of Rousseau’s thinking, particularly his thinking of mimêsis. In what follows, Lacoue-Labarthe’s task is, first, to show that Rousseau articulates a genuine transcendental thinking of origins, one that will be read and retained by the major philosophers who follow him (notably Kant). This demonstration is carried out with reference especially to Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, in which, in the wake of readings by Jacques Derrida and Jean Starobinski, Lacoue-Labarthe locates a thinking of technê (as a supplement of nature) that is properly transcendental and originary. Lacoue-Labarthe calls this Rousseau’s “onto-technology,” showing that it is linked with a scene, and therefore with the theater, in a broad sense. The second task, then, is to show that in his discourse on the theater, especially in the Letter to d’Alembert, Rousseau thinks in specifically philosophical terms, and that, despite an apparently conventional reading of Aristotle’s Poetics, he actually articulates a more genuine understanding of mimêsis and katharsis that is more faithful to Aristotle’s text. Katharsis becomes a form of speculative sublation, an Aufhebung, and Rousseau’s apparently reactionary interpretation of theater places him at a crucial initiating point of modern philosophy in the grips of a paradoxical dialectic.

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.

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.

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.