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The Quest For Liberation - Philosophy And The Making Of World Culture In China And The West

by Chunjie Zhang

~~37,84€~~ 34,06€ 10% OFF

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 Contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism routinely refers to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual origin. A group of Chinese and German-speaking thinkers in the early twentieth century, however, used classical Chinese philosophy as an alternative intellectual genealogy to reimagine ethics, politics, society, and modernity for the entire world.
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Defective Institutions - A Protocol For The Republic

by Jacques Lezra

~~35,76€~~ 32,18€ 10% OFF

 Defective Institutions overturns the basis of institutionalism. Faith in classic institutions—exposed as clamorously inadequate by the failure of governance under neoliberalism--does not result in greater democracy, greater horizontality, or more equitable living. Nor does trust in the standing of decisions, in the authority of antecedent cases, in the coherence, strength, continuity, or solidity of the institutions that frame and render legitimate these decisions and the rules they buttress. To the contrary: the classically-imagined institution and our faith in it lie at the heart of neoliberal unfreedom and racialized violence. Working at the point of contact and conflict between socialist and anarcho-philosophical traditions, Defective Institutions offers an alternative, which is also an alternative to the figures of governance associated with the liberal conception of the state: an aberrant republicanism comprised of defective institutions, run through with the necessity of their abolition. Lezra’s book moves from the primitive scenes of Western political institution—the city; the family; the university; the first person; "race"—through recent work in the philosophy of translation, decolonial studies, abolitionism, Afropessimism and its critiques, psvchoanalysis, and musicology. To offer an original wedding of abolition and institution, Lezra brings together genealogies of contemporary institutionalism (from Durkheim and Hauriou to Searle); post-Marxist accounts of the state (Balibar, Abensour); philosophical and anthropological anarchism (Wolff, Malabou, Graeber, Scott); critical legal theory (analyses of Marbury v. Madison as well as Dobbs v. Jackson); continental and analytic versions and critiques of foundationalism (Heidegger, Lyotard and Butler; Quine, Searle and Fine); and political and sociological abolitionism (Lewis, O’Brien). At a time when some call for strengthening institutions and for defending liberties ostensibly protected by such institutions, and others long for the destruction of institutions that have long been oppressive, Lezra’s book offers today’s Left a new framework for confronting institutions’ necessity and their necessary abolition.
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Catastrophic Historicism - Reading Julia De Burgos Dangerously

by Ronald Mendoza-De Jesus

35,76€ + 10% CARD

 Catastrophic Historicism unsettles the historicist constitution of Julia de Burgos (1914-53), Puerto Rico’s most iconic writer—a critical task that necessitates redefining the concept of historicism. Through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Frank Ankersmit, Mendoza-de Jesús shows that historicism grounds historical objectivity in the historian’s capacity to compose totalizing narratives that domesticate the contingency of the past. While critiques of historicism as a realism leave untouched the sovereignty of the historian, the book insists that reading the text of history requires an attunement to danger—a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation. After desedimenting the monumental tradition that has reduced de Burgos to a totemic figure, Catastrophic Historicism reads the poet’s first collection, Poema en 20 surcos (1938). Mendoza-de Jesús argues that the historicity of Poema crystallizes in the lyrical speaker’s self-institution as an embodied ipseity, which requires producing racialized/gendered allegorical figures—the bearers of an abject flesh—that lack any ontological resistance to modern alienation. Rather than treating de Burgos’s poetics of selfhood as the ideal image of Puerto Rican sovereignty, Mendoza-de Jesús endangers this idealization by drawing attention to the abjection that sustains our attachments to ipseity as the form of a truly sovereign life. In this way, Catastrophic Historicism not only resets the terms of ongoing critiques of historicism in the humanities—it also intervenes in Puerto Rican historicity for the sake of its transformation.
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The Philology Of Life - Walter Benjamin'S Critical Program

by Kevin Mclaughlin

35,76€ + 10% CARD

 The Philology of Life retraces the outlines of the philological project developed by Walter Benjamin in his early essays on Hölderlin, the Romantics, and Goethe. This philological program, McLaughlin shows, provides the methodological key to Benjamin’s work as a whole. According to Benjamin, German literary history in the period roughly following the first World War was part of a wider "crisis of historical experience"—a life crisis to which Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) had instructively but insufficiently responded. Benjamin’s literary critical struggle during these years consisted in developing a philology of literary historical experience and of life that is rooted in an encounter with a written image. The fundamental importance of this "philological" method in Benjamin’s work seems not to have been recognized by his contemporary readers, including Theodor Adorno who considered the approach to be lacking in dialectical rigor. This facet of Benjamin’s work was also elided in the postwar publications of his writings, both in German and English. In recent decades, the publication of a wider range of Benjamin’s writings has made it possible to retrace the outlines of a distinctive philological project that starts to develop in his early literary criticism and that extends into the late studies of Baudelaire and Paris. By bringing this innovative method to light this study proposes "the philology of life" as the key to the critical program of one of the most influential intellectual figures in the humanities.
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Let Them Rot - Antigone’S Parallax

by Alenka Zupani

22,51€ + 10% CARD

 A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles’ Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture. There is probably no classical text that has inspired more interpretation, critical attention, and creative response than Sophocles’ Antigone. The general perspective from which the book is written could be summarized with this simple question: What is it about the figure of Antigone that keeps haunting us? Why do all these readings and rewritings keep emerging? To what kind of always contemporary contradiction does the need, the urge to reread and reimagine Antigone—in all kinds of contexts and languages—correspond? As key anchor points of this general interrogation, three particular "obsessions" have driven the author’s thinking and writing about Antigone. First is the issue of violence. The violence in Antigone is the opposite of "graphic" as we have come to know it in movies and in the media; rather, it is sharp and piercing, it goes straight to the bone. It is the violence of language, the violence of principles, the violence of desire, the violence of subjectivity. Then there is the issue of funerary rites and their role in appeasing the specific "undeadness" that seems to be the other side of human life, its irreducible undercurrent that death alone cannot end and put to rest. This issue prompted the author to look at the relationship between language, sexuality, death, and "second death." The third issue, which constitutes the focal point of the book, is Antigone’s statement that if it were her children or husband lying unburied out there, she would let them rot and not take it upon herself to defy the decree of the state. The author asks, how does this exclusivist, singularizing claim (she would do it only for Polyneices), which she uses to describe the "unwritten law" she follows, tally with Antigone’s universal appeal and compelling power? Attempting to answer this leads to the question of what this particular (Oedipal) family’s misfortune, of which Antigone chooses to be the guardian, shares with the general condition of humanity. Which in turn forces us to confront the seemingly self-evident question: "What is incest?" Let Them Rot is Alenka Zupani’s absorbing and succinct guided tour of the philosophical and psychoanalytic issues arising from the Theban trilogy. Her original and surprising intervention into the broad and prominent field of study related to Sophocles’ Antigone illuminates the classical text’s ongoing relevance and invites a wide readership to become captivated by its themes.
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In The Beginning Was The State - Divine Violence In The Hebrew Bible

by Adi M. Ophir

39,74€ + 10% CARD

 This book explores God’s use of violence as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the Pentateuch, it reads biblical narratives and codes of law as documenting formations of theopolitical imagination. Ophir deciphers the logic of divine rule that these documents betray, with a special attention to the place of violence within it. The book draws from contemporary biblical scholarship, while also engaging critically with contemporary political theory and political theology, including the work of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Jan Assmann, Regina Schwartz, and Michael Walzer. Ophir focuses on three distinct theocratic formations: the rule of disaster, where catastrophes are used as means of governance; the biopolitical rule of the holy, where divine violence is spatially demarcated and personally targeted; and the rule of law where divine violence is vividly remembered and its return is projected, anticipated, and yet postponed, creating a prolonged lull for the text’s present. Different as these formations are, Ophir shows how they share an urform that anticipates the main outlines of the modern European state, which has monopolized the entire globe. A critique of the modern state, the book argues, must begin in revisiting the deification of the state, unpacking its mostly repressed theological dimension.
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In The Beginning Was The State - Divine Violence In The Hebrew Bible

by Adi M. Ophir

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 This book explores Godâ€™s use of violence as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Ophir shows how the Bibleâ€™s varied formations of divine violence anticipate the main outlines of the modern European state. A critique of the modern state, the book argues, must begin in unpacking its mostly repressed theological dimension.
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Let Them Rot - Antigone'S Parallax

by Alenka Zupancic

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 A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophoclesâ€™ Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture.
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The Fact Of Resonance - Modernist Acoustics And Narrative Form

by Julie Beth Napolin

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 The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. The book shows how the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic.
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Under Representation - The Racial Regime Of Aesthetics

by David Lloyd

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 Under Representation argues that the relation between the concepts of freedom and universality and modernityâ€™s racial order is grounded in aesthetic philosophy. Late Enlightenment aesthetics provide the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood by forging a â€œracial regime of representationâ€ whose genealogy runs from Kant to Adorno and Benjamin.
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Literature And The Remains Of The Death Penalty

by Peggy Kamuf

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 How does literature contest capital punishment? The central question of this book, taken over from Derridaâ€™s seminar The Death Penalty, is pursued in the analyses of four fictional texts. The context of the remains of the death penalty in the contemporary U.S. frames these engagements and extends their pertinence today.
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Poetry And Mind - Tractatus Poetico-Philosophicus

by Laurent Dubreuil

31,79€ + 10% CARD

 What one cannot compute, one must poetize: this essay theorizes the extraordinary regimes of human mental experience by putting the emphasis on poetry. Poetry grants us the ability to move "beyond the limits of thought" and to explore the beyond of cognition. It teaches us to think differently. An elliptic response to Wittgenstein’s point of arrival in the Tractatus, this book is first and foremost an interdisciplinary study of poetry, drawing on literary theory, philosophy, and cognitive science. The work conducted on minds and brains over the last decades in psychology, artificial intelligence, or neuroscience cannot be ignored, if, as "humanists," we are ever interested in the way we think. Thus, a constant dialogue with the positive examination of cognition serves to better situate the normal regimes of thought—and to underline the other mental possibilities that literature opens up. This essay shows that poetry—a very widespread and possibly universal phenomenon among humans—arises through syntactic structures, cognitive binding, and mental regulations; but that, in going through them, it also exceeds them. The best poems, then, are not only thought experiments but actual thinking experiments for the unthinkable. They expand the usual semantics of natural languages, they singularly deploy the rhetorical armature of speech. They tend to exceed their own algorithms, made of iterations and linguistic re-organizations. They are often reflexive, strange, cognitively dissonant. They provide detachable, movable, and livable significations to our selves. The literary scope of this book is more than "global:" it is uniquely broad and comparative, encompassing dozens of different traditions, oral or written, from all continents, from Ancient times to the contemporary era, with some thirty specific readings of texts, ranging from Sophocles to Gertrude Stein, from Wang Wei to Aimé Césaire, or from cuneiform tablet to rap music.
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Political Concepts - A Critical Lexicon

by Adi M. Ophir e Ann Laura Stoler

43,73€ + 10% CARD

 Deciding what is and what is not political is a fraught, perhaps intractably opaque matter. Just who decides the question; on what grounds; to what ends—these seem like properly political questions themselves. Deciding what is political and what is not can serve to contain and restrain struggles, make existing power relations at once self-evident and opaque, and blur the possibility of reimagining them differently. Political Concepts seeks to revive our common political vocabulary—both everyday and academic—and to do so critically. Its entries take the form of essays in which each contributor presents her or his own original reflection on a concept posed in the traditional Socratic question format "What is X?" and asks what sort of work a rethinking of that concept can do for us now. The explicitness of a radical questioning of this kind gives authors both the freedom and the authority to engage, intervene in, critique, and transform the conceptual terrain they have inherited. Each entry, either implicitly or explicitly, attempts to re-open the question "What is political thinking?" Each is an effort to reinvent political writing. In this setting the political as such may be understood as a property, a field of interest, a dimension of human existence, a set of practices, or a kind of event. Political Concepts does not stand upon a decided concept of the political but returns in practice and in concern to the question "What is the political?" by submitting the question to a field of plural contention. The concepts collected in Political Concepts are "Arche" (Stathis Gourgouris), "Blood" (Gil Anidjar), "Colony" (Ann Laura Stoler), "Concept" (Adi Ophir), "Constituent Power" (Andreas Kalyvas), "Development" (Gayatri Spivak), "Exploitation" (Étienne Balibar), "Federation" (Jean Cohen), "Identity" (Akeel Bilgrami), "Rule of Law" (J. M. Bernstein), "Sexual Difference" (Joan Copjec), and "Translation" (Jacques Lezra)
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The Limits Of Fabrication - Materials Science, Materialist Poetics

by Nathan Brown

49,03€ + 10% CARD

 Poetry, or poisis, has long been understood as a practice of making. But how are experiments in the making of poetic forms related to formal making in science and engineering? The Limits of Fabrication takes up this question in the context of recent developments in nanoscale materials science, investigating concepts and ideologies of form at stake in new approaches to material construction. Tracing the direct pertinence of fields crucial to the new materials science (nanotechnology, biotechnology, crystallography, and geodesic design) in the work of Shanxing Wang, Caroline Bergvall, Christian Bök, and Ronald Johnson back to the midcentury development of Charles Olson’s "objectist" poetics, Nathan Brown carves out a tradition of constructivist, nonorganic poetics that has developed in conversation with science and engineering. While proposing a new approach to the relation of techn (craft, skill) and poisis (making, forming), this book also intervenes in philosophical debates concerning the concept of the object, the distinction between organic and inorganic matter, theories of self-organization, and the relation between "design" and "nature." Engaging with Heidegger, Agamben, Whitehead, Stiegler, and Nancy, Brown shows that materials science and materialist poetics offer crucial resources for thinking through the direction of contemporary materialist philosophy.
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Baudelaire'S Shadow - On Poetic Determination

by Nathan Brown

~~31,08€~~ 27,97€ 10% OFF

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Baudelaire'S Shadow - On Poetic Determination

by Nathan Brown

~~113,56€~~ 102,20€ 10% OFF

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Moroccan Other-Archives - History And Citizenship After State Violence

by Brahim El Guabli

151,41€ + 10% CARD

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The Philology Of Life - Walter Benjamin'S Critical Program

by Kevin Mclaughlin

37,84€ + 10% CARD

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Spectacles And Specters - A Performative Theory Of Political Trials

by Basak Ertur

35,14€ + 10% CARD

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Rationalist Empiricism - A Theory Of Speculative Critique

by Nathan Brown

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Revolution And Restoration - The Politics Of Anachronism

by Massimiliano Tomba

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 Revolution and Restoration shows how new concepts that emerge from political conflicts can remake democratic systems in crisis
The Quest For Liberation - Philosophy And The Making Of World Culture In China And The West

by Chunjie Zhang

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE
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Catastrophic Historicism - Reading Julia De Burgos Dangerously

by Ronald Mendoza-De Jesus

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 Catastrophic Historicism shows that historicism is a transcendental ontology that must be challenged by endangering the reduction of the past to a possession. The book then endangers the historicist reception of Julia de Burgos, Puerto Ricoâ€™s most iconic writer, interpreting her work as the poetics of Puerto Rican modernity.
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Catastrophic Historicism - Reading Julia De Burgos Dangerously

by Ronald Mendoza-De Jesus

OUT OF STOCK OR NOT AVAILABLE

 Catastrophic Historicism shows that historicism is a transcendental ontology that must be challenged by endangering the reduction of the past to a possession. The book then endangers the historicist reception of Julia de Burgos, Puerto Ricoâ€™s most iconic writer, interpreting her work as the poetics of Puerto Rican modernity.
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