Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The Hermeneutic Tradition
Here are the major statements of the leading figures in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century German and French hermeneutic traditions--the major statements on the aims, methods, and techniques of interpretation. Some of these appear here for the first time in English. This book establishes the context for contemporary analyses of interpretation. Part I traces the evolution of hermeneutics from Friedrich Ast and Friedrich Schleiermacher through Wilhelm Dilthey to Martin Heidegger's placing of hermeneutics at the center of the ontological analysis of human being. Part II follows the development of the Heideggerian tradition in the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer's "philosophical hermeneutics" is then located at the center of several important exchanges with more traditional, objective hermeneutical methodologists like Emilio Betti, ideology-critics like Jürgen Habermas, and linguistic-phenomenological thinkers like Paul Ricoeur.
Premises
"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general. In Premises Hamacher demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable--and thus operates as a structural imperative--but is also unattainable and therefore by necessity open to possibilities other than that defined as "position," to redefinitions and unexpected transformations of the merely thetical act. Proceeding along the lines of both philosophical argument and critical reading, Hamacher presents the fulle...
Manufacturing Babies and Public Consent
On Christmas day, 1993, a 59-year-old British woman gave birth to healthy twins. In Italy the very same week, a black woman bore a white baby, produced from the semen of her white husband and an egg donated by a white woman. Heated debates ensued across the United States and Europe. Fifteen years ago the very idea of conception outside a woman's womb triggered science fiction fantasies and alarmist speculations. Today, thousands of babies are manufactured with the help of in-vitro fertilization and related technologies each year. The application of these procedures has continuously shifted the boundaries of conception and reproduction. In the public debate on new reproductive technologies, m...
Phenomenology or Deconstruction?
Phenomenology or Deconstruction? challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between phenomenology and deconstruction through new readings of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricur and Jean-Luc Nancy. A constant dialogue with Jacques Derrida's engagement with phenomenological themes provides the impetus to establishing a new understanding of 'being' and 'presence' that exposes significant blindspots inherent in traditional readings of both phenomenology and deconstruction. In reproducing neither a stock phenomenological reaction to deconstruction nor the routine deconstructive reading of phenomenology, Christopher Watkin provides a fresh assessment of the possibilities f...
Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression
In this book, the first in English devoted exclusively to Maurice Blanchot, John Gregg examines the problematic interaction between the two forms of discourse, critical and fictional, that comprise this writer's hybrid oeuvre. The result is a lucid introduction to the thought of one of the most important figures on the French intellectual scene of the past half-century. Gregg organizes his discussion around the notion of transgression, which Blanchot himself took over from Georges Bataille--most palpably in his interpretation of the myth of Orpheus--as a paradigm capable of accounting for the relationships that exist in the textual economies formed by author, work, and reader. Chapters on th...
Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious
Representations of violence are often said to generate cathartic effects, but what does “catharsis” mean? And what theory of the unconscious made this concept so popular that it reaches from classical antiquity to the digital age? In Violence and the Oedipal Unconscious, Nidesh Lawtoo reframes current debates on (new) media violence by tracing the philosophical, aesthetic, and historical vicissitudes of the “catharsis hypothesis” from antiquity to modernity and into the present. Drawing on theorists of mimesis from Aristotle to Nietzsche, Bernays to Breuer, Freud to Girard to Morin, Lawtoo offers a genealogy of the relationship between violence and the unconscious with at least two aims: First, this study gives an account of the birth of the Oedipal unconscious—out of a “cathartic method.” Second, it provides new theoretical foundations to solve a riddle of (new) media violence that may no longer rest on Oedipal solutions. In the process, Lawtoo outlines a new theory of violence, mimesis, and the unconscious that does not have desire as a via regia, but rather, the untimely realization that all affects spread contagiously and thus mimetically.
A Covenant of Creatures
"I am not a particularly Jewish thinker," said Emmanuel Levinas, "I am just a thinker." This book argues against the idea, affirmed by Levinas himself, that Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being separate philosophy from Judaism. By reading Levinas's philosophical works through the prism of Judaic texts and ideas, Michael Fagenblat argues that what Levinas called "ethics" is as much a hermeneutical product wrought from the Judaic heritage as a series of phenomenological observations. Decoding the Levinas's philosophy of Judaism within a Heideggerian and Pauline framework, Fagenblat uses biblical, rabbinic, and Maimonidean texts to provide sustained interpretations of the philosopher's work. Ultimately he calls for a reconsideration of the relation between tradition and philosophy, and of the meaning of faith after the death of epistemology.
Genesis and Trace
Paola Marrati considers the philosophical sources of Derrida's thought through his reading of both Husserl and Heidegger. Notions such as the contamination of the empirical and the transcendental, dissemination and writing, are explained as a guiding thread that runs through Derrida's early and later works.
At the Limits of Presentation
This study explores the significance of art in Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy. The main object of the work is to discuss the notion of art and its contribution to some of Nancy's central ontological ideas. Art's importance is considered in its own right - the main questions being whether art does have ontological significance, and if so, how one should describe this with respect to the theme of presentation. According to the work's central argument, with his thinking on art Nancy attempts to give one viewpoint to what is called the metaphysics of presence and to its deconstruction. On which grounds may one say that art is not reducible to philosophy? These topics are examined by highlighting the differentiation between the notions of «presentation» and «representation» with regard to the influence of Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida on Nancy's thought.
Kaleidophonic Modernity
What stories remain hidden behind one of the most significant inventions of the nineteenth century? Kaleidophonic Modernity reexamines the development of mechanical sound recording technology by charting the orbits of writers, scientists, and artists in France and the United States. Working between comparative literature, the history of science, and urban studies, Brehm builds a bridge between visual culture and sound studies. Kaleidophonic Modernity places the poet and inventor Charles Cros and his lover, the celebrated concert pianist and salonnière Nina de Villard at the heart of modern aesthetic and scientific vanguards. Cros's scientific endeavors ranged from color photography, to tele...
