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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.
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.
This is an in-depth investigation into the life and work of one of the most prominent philosophers of Russian and Russian-Soviet history, Merab Mamardashvili, all of whose ideas are collected here in one book. However, each of his ideas leads much further - deep into philosophy itself, its cultural origins, and to the basis and roots of all human thought.
Russian Liberalism charts the development of liberal ideas and political organizations in Russia as well as the implementation of liberal reforms by the Russian and Soviet governments at various points in time. Paul Robinson's comprehensive survey covers the entire period from the late eighteenth century to the present day. Robinson demonstrates that liberalism has always lacked strong roots in the Russian population, being largely espoused by a narrow group of intellectuals whose culture it has reflected, and has tended toward a form of historical determinism that sees Russia as destined to become like the West. Many see the current political struggle between Russia and the West as being in part a conflict between the liberal West and an illiberal Russia. By explaining the historical causes of liberalism's failure in that country, Russian Liberalism offers an understanding of a significant aspect of contemporary international affairs. After Putin's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, understanding Russian political thought is a matter of considerable importance.
A Lacanian look at how comedy might come to philosophy's rescue, with examples ranging from Hegel and Molière to George W. Bush and Borat. Why philosophize about comedy? What is the use of investigating the comical from philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives? In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupančič considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and the logic involved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize some of the crucial mechanisms and vicissitudes of what is called humanity. Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice comedy ...
The Politics of Transindividuality re-examines social relations and subjectivity through the concept of transindividuality. Transindividuality is understood as the mutual constitution of individuality and collectivity, and as such it intersects with politics and economics, philosophical speculation and political practice. While the term transindividuality is drawn from the work of Gilbert Simondon, this book views it broadly, examining such canonical figures as Spinoza, Hegel, and Marx, as well as contemporary debates involving Etienne Balibar, Bernard Stiegler, and Paolo Virno. Through these intersecting aspects and interpretations of transindividuality the book proposes to examine anew the intersection of politics and economics through their mutual constitution of affects, imagination, and subjectivity.
This original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega's project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identit...
Restoring Nietzsche to a Nietzschean context—examining the definitive element that animates his work. What is it that makes Nietzsche Nietzsche? In The Shortest Shadow, Alenka Zupančič counters the currently fashionable appropriation of Nietzsche as a philosopher who was "ahead of his time" but whose time has finally come—the rather patronizing reduction of his often extraordinary statements to mere opinions that we can "share." Zupančič argues that the definitive Nietzschean quality is his very unfashionableness, his being out of the mainstream of his or any time. To restore Nietzsche to a context in which the thought "lives on its own credit," Zupančič examines two aspects of his...
Mestizo: a person of mixed blood; specifically, a person of mixed European and American Indian ancestry. Serge Gruzinski, the renowned historian of Latin America, offers a brilliant, original critique of colonization and globalization in The Mestizo Mind. Looking at the fifteenth-century colonization of Latin America, Gruzinski documents the mélange that resulted: colonized mating with colonizers; Indians joining the Catholic Church and colonial government; and Amerindian visualizations of Jesus and Perseus. These physical and cultural encounters created a new culture, a new individual, and a phenomenon we now call globalization. Revealing globalization's early origins, Gruzinski then fast forwards to the contemporary mélange seen in the films of Peter Greenaway and Wong Kar-Wai to argue that over 500 years of intermingling has produced the mestizo mind, a state of mixed thinking that we all possess. A masterful alchemy of history, anthropology, philosophy and visual analysis, The Mestizo Mind definitively conceptualizes the clash of civilizations in the style of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak and Anne McClintock.
For the Greeks, the craft of Odysseus and the wisdom of Athena were examples of metis, an elusive cast of mind that ranged from wisdom and forethought to craft and cunning. Although it informed many aspects of Greek society, metis was all but absent from the language of Greek philosophy. Invoking indigenous Chinese debates, Lisa Raphals here examines the role and significance of metic intelligence in classical Chinese philosophy, literature, history, and military strategy. Raphals first examines the range of meanings of the Chinese word zhi. As with the Greek metis, the uses of zhi include "wisdom," "knowledge," "intelligence," "skill," "cleverness," and "cunning." Drawing on parallels betwe...