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Soviet-era philosopher Merab Mamardashvili developed an original and subtle philosophical system distinct from both his orthodox and dissident colleagues. This volume provides English-speaking audiences with a range of his lectures and writings on ancient philosophy, civil society, the European project, and literature. After many decades hiding in plain sight, he emerges as a Soviet thinker who writes in the double-voiced manner of an ideologically surveilled academic and a potent literary and theoretical innovator independent of his context.
Struck by the contrast between the prestige of their literary tradition and their apparent philosophical insignificance, modern writers from Spain have devoted themselves to exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. This Side of Philosophy focuses on four major authors—Miguel de Unamuno, José Ortega y Gasset, Antonio Machado, and María Zambrano—who engage literary resources in order to reach beyond philosophy to the essential sources of life. Connecting their work to that of other European thinkers dedicated to illuminating the fertile interaction of literature and philosophy—especially Plato, Schlegel, Heidegger, and Derrida—Stephen Gingerich makes a case for the relevance of Spanish thought to contemporary efforts to expand the ethical and theoretical powers of thinking through literature. At the same time, Gingerich challenges the conventional view that contemporary Spanish thought fuses or reconciles literature and philosophy, instead discerning a call to appreciate their difference in relation. For these writers, literature and philosophy are repulsed by each other as inexorably as they are drawn together.
This book intends to present Mamardashvili’s philosophical perspective on modern society by exemplifying in different ways its distinctive contribution to the greater philosophical landscape. The authors aim to define both Mamardashvili’s place in the history of philosophy—among the currents of twentieth-century European thought and, in particular, phenomenology—and his relations with authors like Hegel, Proust, Deleuze, and Wittgenstein, while identifying the basic methodological instruments and substantive concepts of his thought—language, migration, citizenship, or “the freedom of complaint.” The volume will be useful both for preparatory courses (by supplying an introduction to Mamardashvili’s thought and forming the key necessary concepts) and for advanced research exigencies, allowing a professional audience to discover the remarkable insights of Mamardashvili’s philosophy.
In his preface to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, Michel Foucault notes that in the late sixties, there is a turn away from Freud anda movement toward what he calls an “experience and technology of desire that is no longer Freudian”. Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari were interested in, and engaged with this shift and their collective work in these areas spawned a larger post-Freudian literature. This book gathers contributions from international scholars with the aim of exploring the social, political, and philosophical dimension of Deleuze and Guattari’s, and Foucault’s critical encounters with psychoanalytic thought: Their possible connections, their divergences, the fields o...
Volume 7 (2013): The Mystical Text (Black Clouds Course Through Me Unending . . . )Editors: Nicola Masciandaro & Eugene ThackerContributors: Cinzia Arruzza, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Ron Broglio, Aaron Dunlap, Kevin Hart, Karmen MacKendrick, Beatrice Marovich, Timothy Morton, Joshua Ramey, Christopher Roman, Daniel Whistler.
Scribes of Space posits that the conception of space—the everyday physical areas we perceive and through which we move—underwent critical transformations between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. Matthew Boyd Goldie examines how natural philosophers, theologians, poets, and other thinkers in late medieval Britain altered the ideas about geographical space they inherited from the ancient world. In tracing the causes and nature of these developments, and how geographical space was consequently understood, Goldie focuses on the intersection of medieval science, theology, and literature, deftly bringing a wide range of writings—scientific works by Nicole Oresme, Jean Buridan, the Merton School of Oxford Calculators, and Thomas Bradwardine; spiritual, poetic, and travel writings by John Lydgate, Robert Henryson, Margery Kempe, the Mandeville author, and Geoffrey Chaucer—into conversation. This pairing of physics and literature uncovers how the understanding of spatial boundaries, locality, elevation, motion, and proximity shifted across time, signaling the emergence of a new spatial imagination during this era.
Philosophy, Society and the Cunning of History in Eastern Europe charts the intellectual landscape of twentieth century East-Central Europe under the unifying theme of 'precariousness' as a mode of historical existence. Caught between empires, often marked by catastrophic historic events and grand political failures, the countries of East-Central Europe have for a long time developed a certain intellectual self-representation, a culture that not only helps them make some sense of such misfortunes, but also protects them somehow from a collapse into nihilism. An interdisciplinary study of this sophisticated culture of survival and endurance has been long overdue. Not only is it charming and w...
The recent turns to affect and aesthetics in the humanities and the interpretive social sciences have been productive for reflecting on the crucial role sensibility plays in the constitution of the social. However, these scholarly developments construct their interventions by dismissing the attention to language that was central to the linguistic and cultural turns of previous eras and by claiming that language is an obstacle to experiencing the reality of difference to which they maintain only sensibility can grant access. By analyzing the figure of the voice in the work of Martin Heidegger and the continental thinkers who follow him, The Scene of the Voice shows that the dismissal of language in favor of sensibility requires overlooking their common connection in the problem of mimesis. As this book ultimately argues, artificially separating language and sensibility results in a failure to encounter affect, the relation to difference affect is said to name, and the experience of thinking affect is taken to provoke.
From Edison’s invention of the phonograph through contemporary field recording and sound installation, artists have become attracted to those domains against which music has always defined itself: noise, silence, and environmental sound. Christoph Cox argues that these developments in the sonic arts are not only aesthetically but also philosophically significant, revealing sound to be a continuous material flow to which human expressions contribute but which precedes and exceeds those expressions. Cox shows how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, philosophers and sonic artists have explored this “sonic flux.” Through the philosophical analysis of works by John Cage, Maryanne Amacher, Max Neuhaus, Christian Marclay, and many others, Sonic Flux contributes to the development of a materialist metaphysics and poses a challenge to the prevailing positions in cultural theory, proposing a realist and materialist aesthetics able to account not only for sonic art but for artistic production in general.
This book offers a much-needed new political theory of an old phenomenon. The last decade alone has marked the highest number of migrations in recorded history. Constrained by environmental, economic, and political instability, scores of people are on the move. But other sorts of changes—from global tourism to undocumented labor—have led to the fact that to some extent, we are all becoming migrants. The migrant has become the political figure of our time. Rather than viewing migration as the exception to the rule of political fixity and citizenship, Thomas Nail reinterprets the history of political power from the perspective of the movement that defines the migrant in the first place. Applying his "kinopolitics" to several major historical conditions (territorial, political, juridical, and economic) and figures of migration (the nomad, the barbarian, the vagabond, and the proletariat), he provides fresh tools for the analysis of contemporary migration.