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Carnal Hermeneutics

Richard Kearney and Brian Treanor (eds)

Building on a tradition in which accounts of carnal embodiment are overlooked, misread, or underdeveloped, this book initiates a focus on carnal hermeneutics as such, as distinct field of study and ... More

Building on a tradition in which accounts of carnal embodiment are overlooked, misread, or underdeveloped, this book initiates a focus on carnal hermeneutics as such, as distinct field of study and concern. Carnal hermeneutics seeks to provide a philosophical approach to the body as interpretation. It begins with the recognition that human existence requires an art of understanding as well as a science of explanation. The former is rooted in our finite, spatio-temporal being-in-the-world, which calls for an account of meanings involving corporeal sensation, orientation, and linguistic articulation. The resulting hermeneutics transcends the traditional dualism of rational understanding and embodied sensibility, arguing that our most carnal sensations are already interpretations. Therefore, carnal hermeneutics truly goes “all the way down,” rejecting the opposition of language and sensibility, word to flesh, text to body. The essays collected in this volume are committed, each it its own way, to the interpreting the surplus of meaning arising from our carnal embodiment, its role in our experience and understanding, and its engagement with the wider world.Less

Coming

Jean-Luc Nancy and Adèle Van Reeth

Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French notion of jouissance. How did jouissance evolve from referring to the pleasure of possessing a material thing (property, wealth) to the pleasure ... More

Coming is a lyrical, erudite examination of the French notion of jouissance. How did jouissance evolve from referring to the pleasure of possessing a material thing (property, wealth) to the pleasure of orgasm, from appropriation to dis-appropriation, from consumption to consummation? The philosophers Adèle van Reeth and Jean-Luc Nancy engage in a lively dialogue touching on authors as varied as Spinoza, Hegel, Saint Augustine, the Marquis de Sade, Marguerite Duras, and Henry Miller, and on subjects ranging from consumerism to video games to mysticism. Four additional essays were added to the American edition: “The Body of Pleasure,” a philosophical examination of the body and the senses; “Rühren, Berühren, Aufruhr (Moving, Touching, Uprising),” on the nature of touch; “Neither Seeing Nor Having,” an essay on the philosopher Gérard Granel’s meditations on the obsessive love of Paolo and Francesca in Canto V of Dante’s Inferno; and finally a lyrical and evocative prose-poem called “Nude Enumerated.”Less

Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University

Simon Morgan Wortham

This book provides a definitive account of Jacques Derrida's involvement in debates about the university. Derrida was a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching ... More

This book provides a definitive account of Jacques Derrida's involvement in debates about the university. Derrida was a founding member of the Research Group on the Teaching of Philosophy (GREPH), an activist group that mobilized opposition to the Giscard government's proposals to “rationalize” the French educational system in 1975. He also helped to convene the Estates General of Philosophy, a vast gathering in 1979 of educators from across France. Furthermore, he was closely associated with the founding of the International College of Philosophy in Paris, and his connection with the International Parliament of Writers during the 1990s also illustrates his continuing interest in the possibility of launching an array of literary and philosophical projects while experimenting with new kinds of institutions in which they might take their specific shape and direction. Derrida argues that the place of philosophy in the university should be explored as both a historical question and a philosophical problem in its own right. He argues that philosophy simultaneously belongs and does not belong to the university. In its founding role, it must come from “outside” the institution in which, nevertheless, it comes to define itself. In this book, the author opens up a key question: Can deconstruction's insight into the paradoxical institutional standing of philosophy form the basis of a meaningful political response by “theory” to a number of contemporary international issues, such as concerning citizenship, rights, the nation-state and Europe, asylum, immigration, terror, and the “return” of religion?Less

Ego Sum

Jean-Luc Nancy

Published in 1979, Ego sum challenges, through a careful and unprecedented reading of Descartes’s writings, the picture of Descartes as the father of modern philosophy: the thinker who founded the ... More

Published in 1979, Ego sum challenges, through a careful and unprecedented reading of Descartes’s writings, the picture of Descartes as the father of modern philosophy: the thinker who founded the edifice of knowledge on the absolute self-certainty of a Subject fully transparent to itself. While other theoretical discourses, such as psychoanalysis, have also attempted to subvert this Subject, Nancy shows how they always inadvertently reconstituted the Subject they were trying to leave behind. Nancy’s wager is that it is by returning to the moment of the foundation of modern subjectivity, a foundation which always already included all the possibilities of its own exhaustion, that another thought of “the subject” is possible. By paying attention the mode of presentation of Descartes’s subject, to the masks, portraits, feints, and fables that populate his writings, Jean-Luc Nancy shows how Descartes’s ego is not the Subject of metaphysics, but a mouth that spaces itself out and distinguishes itself. This “subject” speaks but he is not the speaking subject or the subject of the utterance; he is not even the neuter, impersonal ça of ça parle; it is a mouth that opens and says, in turn: dum scribo, larvatus pro Deo, mundus est fabula, unum quid.Less

For the Love of Psychoanalysis: The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida

Elizabeth Rottenberg

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 ... More

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.Less

Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory

Clayton Crockett

This book represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Žižek, as well as major expressions of contemporary continental philosophy, including ... More

This book represents a powerful theological engagement with psychoanalytic theory in Freud, Lacan, Kristeva, and Žižek, as well as major expressions of contemporary continental philosophy, including Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, and Badiou. Through creative and constructive psycho-theological readings of topics such as sublimation, schizophrenia, God, and creation ex nihilo, this book contributes to a new form of radical theological thinking that is deeply involved in the world. Here the idea of the Kantian sublime is read into Freud and Lacan, and compared with sublimation. The sublime refers to a conflict of the Kantian faculties of reason and imagination, and involves the attempt to represent what is intrinsically unrepresentable. Sublimation, by contrast, involves the expression and partial satisfaction of primal desires in culturally acceptable terms. The sublime is negatively expressed in sublimation, because it is both the “source” of sublimation as well as that which resists being sublimated. That is, the Freudian sublime is related to the process of sublimation, but it also distorts or disrupts sublimation, and invokes what Lacan calls the Real. The effects of the sublime are not just psychoanalytic but, importantly, theological, because the sublime is the main form that “God” takes in the modern world. A radical postmodern theology attends to the workings of the sublime in our thinking and living, and provides resources to understand the complexity of reality. This book is one of the first sustained theological readings of Lacan in English.Less

The Matter of Voice

Karmen MacKendrick

Though a new and more vibrant materialism has made its way into theory, the words we use to theorize are treated even now as abstractions, and not rematerialized themselves. We still pretend that ... More

Though a new and more vibrant materialism has made its way into theory, the words we use to theorize are treated even now as abstractions, and not rematerialized themselves. We still pretend that meanings live beyond the sounds of words and the movements of flesh. But we give voice to these separations, and so we give the lie to them as well. Voices resonate among bodies, among texts, and across denotation and sound. They are material, somatic, and musical—all aspects that have unnerved theoreticians since the Pre-Socratics. Philosophers for millennia have tried to silence the physical musicality of voice in favor of the purity of ideas without matter, souls without bodies. Voices are made dangerous, belonging to monstrously beautiful Sirens and beautifully monstrous opera singers, but not to those whose medium is language. Voice belongs to women, but men’s voices readily speak over others. But voices are also meaningful—they give body to concepts that cannot exist in abstractions, essential to sense yet in excess of it too. They can be neither reduced to neurology nor silenced in abstraction. Through explorations of theology and philosophy, pedagogy, translation, and more, this book works toward reintegrating our thinking about both speaking and authorial voice as fleshy combinings of meaning and music.Less

On the Commerce of Thinking

Jean-Luc Nancy

This book concerns the particular communication of thoughts that takes place by means of the business of writing, producing, and selling books. The author's reflection is born out of his relation to ... More

This book concerns the particular communication of thoughts that takes place by means of the business of writing, producing, and selling books. The author's reflection is born out of his relation to the bookstore, in the first place his neighborhood one, but beyond that any such “perfumery, rotisserie, patisserie,” as he calls them; dispensaries “of scents and flavors through which something like a fragrance or bouquet of the book is divined, presumed, sensed.” The book is thus not only something of a semiology of the specific cultural practice that begins with the unique character of the writer's voice and culminates in a customer crossing the bookstore threshold, package under arm, on the way home to a comfortable chair, but also an understated yet persuasive plea in favor of an endangered species. In evoking the peddler who, in times past, plied the streets with books and pamphlets literally hanging off him, the author emphasizes the sensuality of this commerce and reminds us that this form of consumerism is like no other, one that ends in an experience—reading—that is the beginning of a limitless dispersion, metamorphosis, and dissemination of ideas. Making, selling, and buying books has all the elements of the exchange economy that Marx analyzed—from commodification to fetishism—yet each book retains throughout an absolute and unique value, that of its subject. With reading, it gets repeatedly reprinted and rebound. For the author, the book thus functions only if it remains at the same time open and shut, like some Moebius strip. Closed, it represents the idea and takes its place in a canon by means of its monumental form and the title and author's name displayed on its spine. But it also opens itself to us, indeed consents to being shaken to its core, in being read each time anew.Less

Power of Gentleness: Meditations on the Risk of Living

Anne Dufourmantelle

Gentleness is an enigma. Taken up in a double movement of welcoming and giving, it appears on the threshold of passages signed off by birth and death. Because it has its degrees of intensity, because ... More

Gentleness is an enigma. Taken up in a double movement of welcoming and giving, it appears on the threshold of passages signed off by birth and death. Because it has its degrees of intensity, because it is a symbolic force, and because it has a transformative ability over things and beings, it is a power. The simplicity of gentleness is misleading. It is an active passivity that may become an extraordinary force of symbolic resistance and, as such, become central to both ethics and politics. Gentleness is a force of secret life-giving transformation linked to what the ancients called potentiality.Less

Thinking about Thinking: What Kind of Conversation is Philosophy?

Adriaan T. Peperzak

This book examines philosophy from a variety of perspectives as a practice realized by persons who communicate with one another while reflecting on the meaning of human life and thought. Without ... More

This book examines philosophy from a variety of perspectives as a practice realized by persons who communicate with one another while reflecting on the meaning of human life and thought. Without forgetting the logical and methodological conditions of systematic thought, the author insists on the intimate connections that tie all philosophical texts and conversations to the lives from which they emerge. As the product of an individual thinker, who, thanks to individual teachers, has been familiarized with particular traditions of a particular culture, each philosophy is unique. If it is a good one, it is also revealing for many—perhaps even for all—other philosophers. At the same time, all thinking is addressed to individual interlocutors, each of whom responds to it by transforming it into a different philosophy. This fact invites us to explore the dialogical dimension of thinking, which, in turn, refers us to the communitarian and historical contexts from which solitude, as well as solidarity, competition, alliances, and friendships in thought, emerge.Less

A Time for the Humanities: Futurity and the Limits of Autonomy

Tim Dean and Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

James J. Bono (ed.)

This book brings together scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the ... More

This book brings together scholars from disciplines including philosophy, political theory, intellectual history, and literary studies to address the conceptual foundations of the humanities and the question of their future. What notions of the future, of the human, and of finitude underlie recurring anxieties about the humanities in our current geopolitical situation? How can we think about the unpredictable and unthought dimensions of praxis implicit in the very notion of futurity? The essays here argue that the uncertainty of the future represents both an opportunity for critical engagement and a matrix for invention. Broadly conceived, the notion of invention, or cultural poiesis, questions the key assumptions and tasks of a whole range of practices in the humanities, beginning with critique, artistic practices, and intellectual inquiry, and ending with technology, emancipatory politics, and ethics. The essays discuss a wide range of key figures, e.g. Deleuze, Freud, Lacan, Foucault, Kristeva, Irigaray, and problems such as becoming, kinship and the foreign, “disposable populations” within a global political economy, queerness and the death drive, the parapoetic, electronic textuality, invention and accountability, and political and social reform in Latin America. Also discussed are disciplines and methodologies such as philosophy, art and art history, visuality, political theory, criticism and critique, psychoanalysis, gender analysis, architecture, literature, and art.Less