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Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the art of law. Tracking the thread of philosophical influences upon the community of legal interpretation, both reception and resistance, the essays move from the translation and wake of Derrida to the work of Agamben, from deconstruction to oikononmia. Sharing roots in the philological excavation of the political theology of modern law, contributors assess the failure of secularism and the continuing theological borrowings of juridical interpretation. Contemporary critique is brought to bear upon the interpretative apparatuses of exclusion, the law of spectacular sovereignty, and the bodies that lie in its wake.

Allied Encounters: The Gendered Redemption of World War II Italy is the first-ever monograph to analyze cultural representations of Allied-occupied Italy, one of the war’s most unstable spaces. While the U.S. military viewed itself as a redemptive force, competing narratives emerged in the Italian imaginary. Both national paradigms, however, are deeply entangled with the gendering of redemption long operative in Anglo-American and Italian discourse, emerging from a Dantean topos that depicts Italy as a whore in need of redemption. Tracing the formation of these gendered paradigms and pointing to their intersection with sexualized and racialized identities, this book examines literary, cinematic, and military representations of the soldier-civilian encounter, by Anglo-Americans and Italians, set in two major occupied cities, Naples and Rome. Informed by the historical context as well as their respective representational traditions, these texts—produced during and in the immediate aftermath—become more than mirrors of the intercultural encounter or generic allegories about U.S.–Italian relations. Instead, they are sites in which to explore other repressed traumas—including the Holocaust, the American Civil War, and European colonialism, as well as individual traumatic events like the massacre of the Fosse Ardeatine and the mass civilian rape near Rome by colonial soldiers— that inform how the occupation unfolded and is remembered. In addition to challenging canonical interpretations of emblematic texts, this book introduces several little-known diaries, novels, and guidebooks.

Parishes are the missing middle in studies of American Catholicism. Between individual Catholics and a global institution, the thousands of local parishes are where Catholicism gets remade. American Parishes showcases what social forces shape parishes, what parishes do, how they do it, and what this says about the future of Catholicism in the United States. Expounding an embedded field approach, this book displays the forces currently reshaping American parishes. It draws from sociology of religion, culture, organizations, and race to illuminate basic parish processes—like leadership and education—and ongoing parish struggles—like conflict and multiculturalism. American Parishes brings together contemporary data, methods, and questions to establish a sociological reengagement with Catholic parishes and a Catholic reengagement with sociological analysis. This book highlights how community, geography, and authority intersect within parishes. It illuminates and analyzes how growing racial diversity, an aging religious population, and neighborhood change influence the inner workings of parishes. Five parts explore thematic topics: (1) seeing parishes with a sociological lens; (2) parish trends; (3) race, class, and diversity in parish life; (4) young Catholics in (and out) of parishes; and (5) the practice and future of a sociology of Catholic parishes. Contributors explore the history of sociological studies on parishes; consider parish research vis-à-vis the larger field of congregational studies; empirically examine parishes using multiple methods; highlight parish diversity and particularity; explore cultural and identity production within parishes; consider the tenuous relationship of younger Catholics to parishes; and provide direction for future sociological research on parishes.

This book employs postcolonial critique to analyze the transformations of Greek and Latin religious identity in the wake of the Fourth Crusade. Through close readings of texts from the period of Latin occupation, the book argues that the experience of colonization splintered the Greek community over how best to respond to the Latin other while illuminating the mechanisms by which Western Christians authorized and exploited the Christian East. The experience of colonial subjugation opened permanent fissures within the Orthodox community, which struggled to develop a consistent response to aggressive demands for submission to the Roman Church. This internal fracturing has done more lasting damage to the modern Orthodox Church than any material act perpetrated by the crusaders. Ultimately, the statements of Greek and Latin religious polemic that emerged in the context of the Fourth Crusade should be interpreted as having been produced in a colonial setting and, as such, reveal more about the political, economic, and cultural uncertainty of communities in conflict than they offer genuine theological insight.

This work is an exploration of possible experiential traces of Orthodox Christian ontology and soteriology in the healing of the psyche as known and experienced through depth psychology. It explores a possible relationship between theology and depth psychology as mediated through a lens of the sacramentality of creation. Using a variety of patristic soteriological images, all of which converge around the central theme of “that which is not assumed is not healed,” it then goes on to offer a possible psychological exegesis of that key patristic maxim, seeking to understand how this might be experienced psychologically. This is done through the lens of the assumption of being qua being as explored through insights into the natural healing impetus of the psyche qua psyche. The exploration then turns to the ontological energies of eros, desire, and will and looks for traces of the assumption of eros in psychological healing, as seen primarily through the lens of object-relations theory.

Exterranean is a book about the extraction of stuff from the Earth, a process in which matter goes from being sub to exterranean. By opening up a rich archive of specifically nonmodern texts and images, this work offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. Eschewing the self-congratulatory claims of posthumanism, instead engineering conceptual clashes between the materially situated homo of nonmodern humanism and the abstract and aggregated anthropos of the Anthropocene, arguing against the omnipresence of Earthrise-like globes in attempts to think at planetary scales, and shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, this book pleads for an alertness to the material and immaterial connections between the Earth from which we extract, the human and nonhuman agents of extraction, and the extracted matter with which we live daily. Divided into three sections (“Terra Global Circus,” “Welcome to Mineland,” and “Hiding in Exterranean Matter”), each of which approaches this entanglement from a different perspective, this book gives shape to a sense of the exterranean via readings of authors from France, Germany, Poland, and elsewhere as well as via discussion of mines, objects, engravings, and architecture. In dialogue with Michel Serres, the recent thought of Bruno Latour, and the interdisciplinary turn to the Environmental Humanities more generally, both historicist and speculative in approach, Exterranean lays the groundwork for a comparative ecocriticism that reaches across and untranslates theoretical affordances between periods and languages.

For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida is a book about what exceeds or resists calculation—in life and in death. It is a book about what emerges, and perhaps only emerges, from the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy. Part I, “Freuderrida,” opens with a nontraditional Freud: a Freud associated not with sexuality, repression, unconsciousness, and symbolization, but with accidents and chance. It begins with the accidents both in and of Freud’s writing, the unexpected insights that simultaneously produce and disrupt our received ideas of psychoanalytic theory. Whether this disruption is figured as a “foreign body,” as “traumatic temporality,” as “spatial unlocatability,” or as the “death drive,” it points to something that is neither simply inside nor simply outside the psyche, neither psychically nor materially determined. Where Part I, “Freuderrida,” leaves us open to the accidents of psychoanalytic writing, Part II, “Freuderrida,” addresses itself to what transports us back and limits the openness of our horizon. And here the example par excellence is the death penalty and the cruelty of its calculating decision. If “Freuderrida” insists on the death penalty, if it returns to it compulsively, it is not only because its calculating drive is inseparable from the history of reason as philosophical reason; it is also because the death penalty provides us with one of the most spectacular and spectacularly obscene expressions of Freud’s death drive.

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 tells the story of a Jewish Studies that hasn’t yet happened—at least not fully. At bottom, the modest version of a swerve it performs is to ask: what do we mean when we say, “Jewish Studies,” when we conjoin its component terms, when a field takes up its past and projects its future, when we imagine it not as mere amalgam but project? JS offers a unique lens through which to view the horizon of the academic humanities because, though it arrived belatedly, it has spanned a range of disciplinary locations and configurations, from an “origin story” in nineteenth-century historicism and philology to the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment, to the ethnicity-driven pluralism of the postwar decades, to more recent configurations within an interdisciplinary cultural studies. The conflicted allegiances in respect to traditions, disciplines, divisions, stakes, and stakeholders represent the structural and historical situation of the field as it comes into contact with the humanities more broadly. JSAC reconceives Jewish Studies as an agent of that force Jacques Derrida calls “leverage” both in relation to the humanities and to its own multiple possibilities, its pluralities of position, practice, and method. As one of several images marshaled, the lever functions not just to theorize or conjure JS but to figure it, to recast the enterprise through a series of elastic and catalytic tropes. In that way, the book seeks to harness the dialogical possibilities offered by the evolving collection of forces by which JS is constituted and practiced in order to open, refashion, and exemplify possibilities for a humanities to come.

In a world in which interreligious engagement is both more dangerous and more imperative than ever, and in which the category of “religion” itself has come under increasing scrutiny, the discipline of comparative theology has reemerged as a fruitful strategy that enables one to avoid the most egregious problems of the category of “religion” and to foster encounter between different traditions with attention to particularity. At the same time, in the past few years, scholars of Karl Barth have begun to bring this major twentieth-century Protestant theologian into conversation with religious pluralism. This volume seeks to bring these two scholarly developments together. Featuring contributions from a variety of scholars including Francis Clooney, Mark Heim, Paul Knitter, Anantanand Rambachan, and Randi Rashkover, the volume builds on recent engagements with Barth in the area of theologies of religion and opens a new conversation between Barth’s theology and comparative theology. The opening essay summarizes the intra-Christian conversation about how Barth’s theology can helpfully inform theology of religious pluralism. The bulk of the volume that follows features comparative theological experiments, bringing Barth’s theology into conversation with theological claims from other religious traditions for the purpose of modeling deep learning across religious borders from a Barthian perspective. For each tradition addressed in this volume, two Barth-influenced theologians offer focused engagements of Barth with themes and figures from another religious tradition, with a response from a theologian from that tradition itself. Scant attention has been given to Barth as a conversation partner in the discipline of comparative theology, and we seek to open up new trajectories for comparative theology with this unlikely interlocutor.

Killing Times starts from the deceptively simple observation— made by Jacques Derrida—that the death penalty mechanically interrupts mortal time, preempting our normal experience of not knowing when we will die. The book examines more broadly what constitutes mortal temporality and how the “machinery of death” exploits and perverts time. It first examines Eighth Amendment challenges to the death penalty in the U.S, from the late nineteenth-century introduction of execution by firing squad and the electric chair to current cases involving lethal injection. Although defining the instant of death emerges as an insoluble problem, all the machines of execution of the post-Enlightenment period presume to appropriate and control that instant, ostensibly in service of a humane death penalty. That comes into particular focus with the guillotine, introduced in France in 1791–92, at the same moment as the American Bill of Rights. Later chapters analyze how the instant of the death penalty works in conjunction with forms of suspension, or extension of time and how its seeming correlation between egregious crime and painless execution is complicated in various ways. The book’s emphasis on time then allows it to expand the sense of the death penalty into suicide bombing, where the terrorist seeks to bypass judicial process with a simultaneous crime and “punishment”; into targeted killing by drone, where the time-space coordinates of “justice” are compressed and disappear into the black hole of secrecy; and into narrative and fictive spaces of crime, court proceedings, and punishment.

This book brings together a diverse group of scholars whose work concerns the reign of Alfonso VIII (1158–1215). This was a critical period in the history of the Iberian Peninsula, when the conflict between the Christian north and the Moroccan empire of the Almohads was at its most intense, while the political divisions between the five Christian kingdoms reached their high-water mark. From his troubled ascension as a child to his victory at Las Navas de Tolosa near the end of his fifty-seven-year reign, Alfonso VIII and his kingdom were at the epicenter of many of the most dramatic events of the era.

Last Acts: The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered playwrights, actors, and audiences important opportunities to practice arts of dying. Early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grieving than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie the narratives of helplessness and loss most often used to analyze representations of mortality and instead suggest ways that marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Some of these strategies for dying resonate with ecclesiastical forms or with descriptions of biopolitics within the recent work of Giorgio Agamben and Roberto Esposito. Yet the art of dying is not solely a discipline imposed upon recalcitrant subjects. Since it offers suffering individuals a way to enact their deaths on their own terms, it discloses both political and dramatic action in their most minimal manifestations. Rather than mournfully marking what we cannot recover, the practice of dying reveals what we can do, even in death. By analyzing representations of dying in plays by writers including Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson alongside both devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.

Phenomenology, biology, and the human sciences combine in this work to support an original systematic philosophy of nature, organic life, and human existence. A sequence of increasingly complex modes of boundary relations—or relations between the insides and outsides of a thing—is presented and analyzed. The sequence supports distinctions between living and nonliving things, plants and animals, lower animals and higher ones, and nonhuman animals and humans. “Organic life” is defined and its characteristic features—the “organic modals”—are elucidated. The boundary relations of living things can be understood as “positionality”—that is, orientation to and within an environment. Human positionality is both centric (as in many animals) and excentric insofar as the relation between inside and outside is something to which the human being is “positioned.” This excentric positionality enables human beings to stand outside of the boundaries of their own body, a possibility with significant implications for human knowledge, culture, religion, and technology. Through articulation of the essential features of organic life, its distinction from and relation within nonliving nature, and the distinctions among living things, including between the nonhuman and human, the work provides foundations for a philosophical anthropology.

Biography has played an important role in the canonization of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Each archive is saturated with stories of the life prematurely cut off or, in Coleridge’s case, of promise wasted in indolence; with reminiscences of contemporaries who describe subjects singularly unsuited to this world; and with stranger materials—death masks, bits of bone, locks of hair, a heart—preserved by circles and then sometimes circulating more widely, often in tandem with bits of the literary corpus. Especially when it centers on the early deaths of Keats and Shelley, biographical interest tends to be dismissed as a largely Victorian and sentimental phenomenon that we should by now have put behind us. And yet a line of verse by these poets can still, willy-nilly, trigger associations with biographical detail in a way that sparks pathos and produces intimations of prolepsis or fatality, even in readers suspicious of such effects. Biographical fascination—the untoward and involuntary clinging of attention to the biographical subject—is thus “posthumous” in Keats’s evocative sense of the term, its life equivocally sustained beyond its period. This book takes seriously the biographical fascination that has dogged the posthumous lives of the prematurely arrested figures of Keats, Shelley, and Coleridge. Arising in tandem with a sense of the threatened end of poetry’s allotted period, biographical fascination opens us to poetry’s modes of survival from the time of the romantic period, when it began to receive the first of its many death sentences, into our own present.

For many inside and outside the legal academy, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the "wrong places"-sites and spaces in which no formal law appears. These may be geographic regions beyond the reach of law, everyday practices ungoverned or ungovernable by law, or works of art that have escaped law's constraints. Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places brings together essays by leading scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, history, law, literature, political science, race and ethnic studies, religion, and rhetoric to look at law from the standpoint of the humanities. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of distinct cultural phenomena, the contributors show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture. Many essays look for law in the kinds of "wrong places" where there appears to be no law. They find in these places not only reflections and remains of law, but rules and practices that seem indistinguishable from law and raise challenging questions about the locations of law and law's meaning and function. Other essays do the opposite: rather than looking for law in places where law does not obviously appear, they look in statute books and courtrooms from perspectives that are presumed to have nothing to say about law. Looking at law sideways, upside down, or inside out defamiliarizes law. These essays show what legal understanding can be gained when law is denied its proper domain.

The Mathematical Imagination is an archaeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of the Second World War. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative and argues that it has obscured how mathematics provided three lesser-known German-Jewish thinkers—Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer—with metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Their theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique borrowed ideas from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. This vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing in the intellectual history of critical theory—from the work of second-generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas to contemporary critiques of technology. Building on the work of Martin Jay and Susan Buck-Morss, The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us confront and intervene in our digital, and increasingly mathematical, present.

This book details our implication in violence we do not directly inflict but in which we are structurally complicit: famines, civil wars, political repression in far-away places, and war, as it's classically understood. It insists on a bond between ethics and politics and attributes violence to our treatment of the two as separate spheres. We repeatedly resist the call to responsibility, as expressed by the appeal—by peoples across the world—for the care and attention that their vulnerability enjoins. But the book argues that this resistance is not ineluctable, and it searches for ways that enable us to mitigate it, through rebellion, kindness, irony, critique, and shame. In the process, it engages with a range of writers, from Camus, Sartre, and Freud, to Stefan Zweig and Karl Kraus, to Kenzaburō Ōe, Emmanuel Levinas and Judith Butler. The resulting exchange between philosophy and literature enables the book to delineate the contours of a possible/impossible ethicosmopolitics—an ethicosmopolitics to come. Pushing against the limits of liberal rationalism, the book calls for a more radical understanding of interpersonal responsibility. Not just a work of philosophy but an engagement with life as it's lived, the book works to redefine our global obligations, articulating anew what humanitarianism demands and what an ethically grounded political resistance might mean.

New Perspectives on the Union War explores, at a wide array of points along the political spectrum, the many shapes patriotic sentiment took in the loyal states during the Civil War. The essays provide new insights into well-known figures such as Secretary of the Treasury Salmon P. Chase, political philosopher Francis Lieber, African American author/entrepreneur Elizabeth Keckley, abolitionist Abby Kelly Foster, New York governor Horatio Seymour, and Attorney General Edward Bates. They also offer the perspectives of common soldiers, of the partisan press, of the clergy, and of social reformers.

This book explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality at the turn of the twentieth century. It tracks the transverse circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues that at stake in fin-de-siècle American writers’ aesthetic turn was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also a fashioning forth of an understanding of aesthetic form in relation to political arguments and debates about available modes of sociability and cultural expression. To track these practices it performs an interpretive method Seitler calls “lateral reading,” a mode of interpretation that moves horizontally through various historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to make sense of, and see in a new light, their connections, challenges, and productive frictions.