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This second volume in The Deconstruction of Christianity explores the stance or bearing that would be appropriate for us now, in the wake of the dis-enclosure of religion and the retreat of God: that of adoration. Adoration is stretched out toward things, but without phenomenological intention. In our present historical time, we have come to see relation itself as the divine. The address and exclamation—the salut!—that constitutes adoration celebrates this relation: both the relation among all beings that the world is and what is beyond relation, the outside of the world that opens in the midst of the world. This book clarifies and builds upon not only dis-enclosure, the first volume in this project, but also other previous writings on sense, the world, and the singular plurality of being.

Blanchot’s writings are distinctive for the ways that negativity takes place in them in terms of the experience of literature, the possibility of the work, and the nature of its language. However, this role in his thinking is unique and is not to be subsumed to the negativity found in the thought of Hegel or Heidegger, although it partakes of aspects of both. Instead, negativity for Blanchot operates at the level of the ontological status of language, which oscillates undecidably between the assertion and negation of meaning and thereby affects the experience of literature and the possibility of the work with an irreducible ambiguity. To explicate the significance of this negativity it is necessary to turn to another figure for whom it has become as central, Adorno, whose Hegelian background is much stronger, but who also works against this tradition to form his own negative understanding of dialectics that is crucially exemplified in the work of art. For Adorno, the work of art exists as a particular model of its historical and material context, one that both demonstrates its contradictions and also indicates what has been obscured by them. The negativity of the work is thus both that of the critique that it levels against this context and of the possibilities that it negatively raises in its place. To study the two writers together it is necessary to find the place where their thinking converges, which occurs most critically in the area of post-Kantian aesthetics and the question of autonomy.

This book examines the nature of catastrophes in the era of globalization and technology. Can a catastrophe be an isolated occurrence? Is there such a thing as a “natural” catastrophe when all of our technologies nuclear energy, power supply, water supply are necessarily implicated, drawing together the biological, social, economic, and political? The book examines these questions and more. Included in this edition are two interviews.

The world of international politics has been recently rocked by a seemingly endless series of scandals that are all tied to various practices of auditory surveillance: the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping, Edward Snowden’s revelations, and the “News of the World” scandal are just the most sensational examples of what appears to be a universal practice today. What is the source of this unceasing battle of different forms of listening? Whence this generalized principle of eavesdropping? Peter Szendy’s All Ears: The Aesthetics of Espionage answers these questions by tracing the long history of moles from the Bible, through Jeremy Bentham’s “panacoustic” project, all the way to the intelligence gathering network called “Echelon.” This archeology of auditory surveillance runs parallel with the analysis of its representations in literature (Sophocles, Shakespeare, Joyce, Kafka, Borges), opera (Monteverdi, Mozart, Berg), and film (Lang, Hitchcock, Coppola, De Palma). Following in the footsteps of Orpheus, the book proposes a new concept of “overhearing” that connects the act of spying to an excessive intensification of listening. Relying on the works of Freud, Deleuze, Foucault, Adorno, and Derrida, Szendy’s work attempts to locate at the heart of listening the ear of the Other that manifests itself as the originary division of a “split-hearing” that turns the drive for mastery and surveillance into the death drive.

This book seeks to elucidate Nietzsche and Merleau-Ponty’s treatments of the question of truth by using each of their philosophies to shed light on the other. For both philosophers, the question of truth arises from the fact that even though truth is an illusion, it remains a meaningful concept. What authentic experience is truth an inauthentic expression of? By following the trajectory of this question in both authors’ works, this book demonstrates how this question structures both their philosophies and how its answer constitutes the systematic and intrinsic link between them: the concept of truth arises from the authentic experience of Being as an endless movement of falsification. For Being must be defined as the very movement whereby the world transforms itself into truths.

The form and content of the study of theology in the modern epoch are marked by a vast quantity and variety of the most diverse and, in part, the most divergent points of departure. The classical unity and perspicuity of the world of theological thought, so typical in earlier centuries, have dissolved with the plurality of the horizons and problems of modern thinking. The reality of the world, science, and theology appears no longer as a single “orbis,” but rather as an open and unbounded space. Indeed, precisely for the study of theology in modern universities, the catchphrase, the “new vastness,” thus appear to hold as well. This book provides an access to Karl Rahner to unpack his thinking and to make a theological inspection of his work possible. In this respect it is essential to locate the central point of departure for the theology of Karl Rahner in the concerns and questions of human beings and, to take a cue from the key concept of the “anthropological point of departure,” to make understandable the underlying tendency of Rahner's work.

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.

The ancient doctrine of negative theology or apophasis—the attempt to describe God by speaking only of what cannot be said about the divine perfection and goodness—has taken on new life in the concern with language and its limits that preoccupies much post-modern philosophy, theology, and related disciplines. How does this mystical tradition intersect with the concern with material bodies that is simultaneously a focus in these areas? This volume pursues the unlikely conjunction of apophasis and the body, not for the cachet of the “cutting edge” but rather out of an ethical passion for the integrity of all creaturely bodies as they are caught up in various ideological mechanisms—religious, theological, political, economic—that threaten their dignity and material well-being. The book rethinks the relationship between the concrete tradition of negative theology and apophatic discourses widely construed. It further endeavors to link these to the theological theme of incarnation and more general issues of embodiment, sexuality, and cosmology. Along the way, the book engages and deploys the resources of contextual and liberation theology, post-structuralism, postcolonialism, process thought, and feminism. The result not only recasts the nature and possibilities of theological discourse but explores the possibilities of academic discussion across and beyond disciplines in concrete engagement with the well-being of bodies, both organic and inorganic. The volume interrogates the complex capacities of religious discourse both to threaten and positively to draw upon the material well-being of creation.

The chapters of this book revolve around the notion of the other in Jacques Derrida's work. How does Derrida write of and on the other? Arguing that Derrida offers the most attentive and responsible thinking about “the undeniable experience of the alterity of the other”, this book examines exemplary instances of the relation to the other, e.g. the relation of Moses to God, Derrida's friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, and Derrida's relation to a recently departed actress caught on video, to demonstrate how Derrida forces us to reconceive who or what the other may be. For Derrida, the singularity of the other, always written in the lower case, includes not only the formal or logical sense of alterity, the otherness of the human other, but also the otherness of the nonliving, the no longer living, or the not yet alive. The book explores welcoming and hospitality, salutation and greeting, “approaching”, and mourning as constitutive facets of the relation to these others. Addressing Derrida's readings of Husserl, Levinas, Barthes, Blanchot, and Nancy, among other thinkers, and ranging across a number of disciplines, including art, literature, philosophy, and religion, this book explores the apparitions of the other by attending to the mode of appearing or coming on the scene, the phenomenality and visibility of the other. Analyzing some of Derrida's essays on the visual arts, the book also demonstrates that video and photography display an intimate relation to “spectrality”, as well as a structural relation to the absolute singularity of the other.

“Every other is truly other, but no other is wholly other”. This is the claim that this book defends. Taking up the question of otherness that so fascinates contemporary continental philosophy, this book asks what it means for something or someone to be other than the self. Emmanuel Levinas and those influenced by him point out that the philosophical tradition of the West has generally favored the self at the expense of the other. In response, postmodern thought insists on the absolute otherness of the other, epitomized by the deconstructive claim “every other is wholly other”. But absolute otherness generates problems and aporias of its own. This has led some thinkers to reevaluate the notion of relative otherness in light of the postmodern critique, arguing for a chiastic account that does justice to both the alterity and the similitude of the other. These latter two positions—absolute otherness and a rehabilitated account of relative otherness—are the main contenders in the contemporary debate. This book traces the transmission and development of these two conceptions of otherness by examining the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Gabriel Marcel. Levinas's version of otherness can be seen in the work of Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo, while Marcel's understanding of otherness influences the work of Paul Ricoeur and Richard Kearney. Ultimately, this book makes a case for a hermeneutic account of otherness. Otherness itself is not absolute, but is a chiasm of alterity and similitude.

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.

Jean-Luc Nancy provides an analysis of the anti-Semitic aspects of Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks. Referring to Hannah Arendt’s notion of the “banality of evil,” Nancy offers an analysis of the philosophical or “historial” anti-Semitism found in the Black Notebooks. He notes especially that this anti-Semitism is marked by the “banality” of ordinary anti-Semitism pervading Europe. He does this by linking Heidegger’s remarks to the well-known anti-Semitic forgery, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, whose terms are strikingly similar. Heidegger’s thought is also placed in the broader context of Western thought and culture, particularly in relation to the notion of a “decline” and to the sense of crisis pervading Europe in the first half of the twentieth century, to which anti-Semitism was a frequent response. Nancy critiques Heidegger’s continual evocation of a “beginning,” to be found solely in Greek thought, that has been covered over but whose destiny must be renewed in “another beginning,” and he links this to the impulse in European thought, and especially in Christianity, toward ever more initial foundations of “self.” The rejection of Judaism by Christianity, in its very foundation, is compared with Heidegger’s insistence on “another beginning.” Nancy finds in this complex ensemble a hatred of self at the heart of the West.

Now back in print, and in paperback, these two classic volumes illustrate the scope and quality of Josiah Royce's thought, providing the most comprehensive selection of his writings currently available. They offer a detailed presentation of the viable relationship Royce forged between the local experience of community and the demands of a philosophical and scientific vision of the human situation. The selections reprinted here are basic to any understanding of Royce's thought and its pressing relevance to contemporary cultural, moral, and religious issues.

Now back in print, and in paperback, these two classic volumes illustrate the scope and quality of Josiah Royce's thought, providing the most comprehensive selection of his writings currently available. They offer a detailed presentation of the viable relationship Royce forged between the local experience of community and the demands of a philosophical and scientific vision of the human situation. The selections reprinted here are basic to any understanding of Royce's thought and its pressing relevance to contemporary cultural, moral, and religious issues.

This is a collection of articles written over the space of twenty years on various subjects connected to the rationality of faith and its presentation in the contemporary world. Marion discusses the role of the intellectual in the church, the rationality of faith, the infinite worth and incomprehensibility of the human, the phenomenality of the sacraments, and the phenomenological nature of miracles and of revelation more broadly. Throughout he stresses that faith has its own rationality, which is one of love, gift, and givenness, which can be outlined phenomenologically and hence expressed with philosophical rigor. He also criticizes various movements within Catholicism to intellectualize the role of the laity and instead argues for the simple responsibility of the baptized as church of Christ in need of the sacraments and unfolding their particular rigor and “logic.” Marion outlines the gift-character of faith and sacraments and their essential phenomenality of giveness, which calls forth a response of love and devotion in the sense of kenotic abandon. He ends with an analysis of sanctity.

In contemporary race and sexuality studies, the topic of animality emerges almost exclusively in order to index the dehumanization that makes discrimination possible. Bestial Traces argues that a more fundamental disavowal of human animality conditions the bestialization of racial and sexual minorities. Hence, when conservative politicians equate homosexuality with bestiality, they betray an anxious effort to deny the animality inherent in all sexuality. Focusing on literary texts by Edgar Allan Poe, Joel Chandler Harris, Richard Wright, Philip Roth, and J. M. Coetzee, together with philosophical texts by Derrida, Heidegger, Agamben, Freud, and Nietzsche, Peterson maintains that the representation of social and political others as animals can be mitigated but never finally abolished. All forms of belonging inevitably exclude some others as “beasts.” Though one might argue that absolute political equality and inclusion remain desirable, even if ultimately unattainable, ideals, Bestial Traces shows that, by maintaining such principles, we exacerbate rather than ameliorate violence because we fail to confront how discrimination and exclusion condition all social relations.

Plato's chora as developed in the Timaeus is a creative matrix in which things arise and stand out in response to the lure of the Good. Chora is paired with the Good, its polar opposite; both are “beyond being” and the metaphors hitherto thought to disclose the transcendent. They underlie Plato's distinction of a procreative gap between being and becoming. The chiasmus between the Good and chora makes possible their mutual participation in one another. This gap makes possible both phenomenological and cosmological interpretations of Plato. Metaphor is restricted to beings as they appear in this gap through the crossing of metaphor's terms, terms that dwell with, rather than subulate, one another. Hermeneutically, through its“is”we can see something being engendered or determined by that crossing. The book's larger goal is to align the primacy of the Good in Plato and Christian Neoplatonism with the creator God of Genesis and the God of love in the New Testament.

The French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour (*1947) is a major figure of contemporary thought. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, from his early anthropological studies in Abidjan (Ivory Coast) to his influential books like Laboratory Life and Science in Action and his most recent reflections on an empirical metaphysics of “modes of existence.” The book argues that the basic problem to which Latour’s work responds is that of social tradition, i.e. the complex relationship of culture, knowledge, and time. It shows that Latour’s understanding of this problem is deeply informed by his early involvement with Biblical exegesis, in particular the work of the German theologian Rudolf Bultmann. Against this background, the book questions the innovative potential of actor-network theory (ANT) and the fruitfulness of Latour’s philosophical attempts to understand the plurality of “modes of existence.”

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.

This book is the first systematic reconstruction of Castoriadis's philosophical trajectory, and pays particular attention to his dialogue with phenomenology. It critically interprets the shifts in his ontology by reconsidering the ancient problematic of “human institution” (nomos) and “nature” (physis), on the one hand, and the question of “being” and “creation,” on the other. Unlike the order of physis, the order of nomos has played no substantial role in the development of Western thought. The first part of the book suggests that Castoriadis sought to remedy this by elucidating the social-historical as the region of being that eludes the determinist imaginary of inherited philosophy. This ontological turn was announced in his 1975 magnum opus, The Imaginary Institution of Society. With the aid of archival sources, the second half of the book reconstructs a second ontological shift in Castoriadis's thought that occurred during the 1980s. The book argues that Castoriadis extends his notion of “ontological creation” beyond the human realm and into nature. This move has implications for his overall ontology and signals a shift toward a general ontology of creative physis.