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French philosophy changed dramatically in the second quarter of the twentieth century. In the wake of World War I and, later, the Nazi and Soviet disasters, major philosophers such as Kojève, Levinas, Heidegger, Koyré, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and Hyppolite argued that man could no longer fill the void left by the "death of God" without also calling up the worst in human history and denigrating the dignity of the human subject. In response, they contributed to a new belief that man should no longer be viewed as the basis for existence, thought, and ethics; rather, human nature became dependent on other concepts and structures, including Being, language, thought, and culture. This argument, which was to be paramount for existentialism and structuralism, came to dominate postwar thought. This intellectual history of these developments argues that at their heart lay a new atheism that rejected humanism as insufficient and ultimately violent.
Time is the backdrop of historical inquiry, yet it is much more than a featureless setting for events. Different temporalities interact dynamically; sometimes they coexist tensely, sometimes they clash violently. In this innovative volume, editors Dan Edelstein, Stefanos Geroulanos, and Natasha Wheatley challenge how we interpret history by focusing on the nexus of two concepts—“power” and “time”—as they manifest in a wide variety of case studies. Analyzing history, culture, politics, technology, law, art, and science, this engaging book shows how power is constituted through the shaping of temporal regimes in historically specific ways. Power and Time includes seventeen essays on human rights; sovereignty; Islamic, European, Chinese, and Indian history; slavery; capitalism; revolution; the Supreme Court; the Anthropocene; and even the Manson Family. Power and Time will be an agenda-setting volume, highlighting the work of some of the world’s most respected and original contemporary historians and posing fundamental questions for the craft of history.
This volume brings together scholars from a range of disciplines to explore the intersections between crisis, scholarship, and action. The aim of this book is to think about the “moment of crisis,” through the concepts, writings, and methodologies awarded to us by Jewish thinkers in modernity. This book offers a broad gallery of accounts on the notion of crisis in Jewish modernity while emphasizing three terms: interpretation, heresy, and messianism. The main thesis of the volume is that the diasporic and exilic experience of the Jewish people turned their philosophers and theologians into “experts in crisis management” who had to find resources within their own religion, culture and...
The concept of sovereignty is a crucial foundation of the current world order. Regardless of their political ideologies no states can operate without claiming and justifying their sovereign power. The People's Republic of China (PRC)—one of the most powerful states in contemporary global politics—has been resorting to the logic of sovereignty to respond to many external and internal challenges, from territorial rights disputes to the Covid-19 pandemic. In this book, Pang Laikwan analyzes the historical roots of Chinese sovereignty. Surveying the four different political structures of modern China—imperial, republican, socialist, and post-socialist—and the dramatic ruptures between th...
“[A]n incisive and captivating reassessment of prehistory . . . In lucid prose, Geroulanos unspools an enthralling and detailed history of the development of modern natural science. It’s a must-read.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review “An astute, powerfully rendered history of humanity.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review An eminent historian tells the story of how we came to obsess over the origins of humanity—and how, for three centuries, ideas of prehistory have been used to justify devastating violence against others. Books about the origins of humanity dominate bestseller lists, while national newspapers present breathless accounts of new archaeological findings and specul...
An original exploration of the relationship between the Mughal emperor and his subjects in the space of the Mughal empire's capital, The King and the People overturns an axiomatic assumption in the history of premodern South Asia: that the urban masses were merely passive objects of rule and remained unable to express collective political aspirations until the coming of colonialism. Set in the Mughal capital of Shahjahanabad (Delhi) from its founding to Nadir Shah's devastating invasion of 1739, this book instead shows how the trends and events in the second half of the seventeenth century inadvertently set the stage for the emergence of the people as actors in a regime which saw them only a...
This book presents a new argument that reimagines modern theater's critical power and places innovative writing at the heart of the experimental stage.
A re-evaluation of the meaning and function of diaspora in contemporary Israeli culture. This thought-provoking exploration of literature and art examines contemporary Israeli works created in and about diaspora that exemplify new ways of envisioning a Jewish national identity. Diaspora has become a popular mechanism to imagine non-sovereign models of Jewish peoplehood, but these models often valorize powerlessness in sometimes troubling ways. In this book, Melissa Weininger theorizes a new category of "diaspora Israeli culture" that is formed around and through notions of homeland and complicate the binary between diaspora and Israel. The works addressed here inhabit and imagine diaspora fr...
"The nineteenth-century novel is generally assumed to be concerned with private lives and social relations. But Russian fiction, obsessively focused on scenarios of state power, was an exception to the rule. In Sovereign Fictions, Ilya Kliger shows that this encounter between realist fiction and political authority gave Russian novels a form unlike their counterparts in the west. Kliger explores Russian realism's distinctive construals of sociality through a broad range of texts from the 1830s to the 1870s, including works by Dostoevsky, Gogol, and Pushkin, and several lesser-known but influential books of the period, including Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (1840), Ivan Goncharov's The Same Old Story (1847), Ivan Turgenev's Rudin (1856), Aleksei Pisemsky's One Thousand Souls (1858), and Vasily Sleptsov's Hard Times (1865). Kliger's book offers an important intervention in socially inflected theories of the novel and in current thinking on representations of power and historical poetics"--
Life and Money uncovers the contentious history of the boundary between economy and politics in liberalism. Ute Tellmann traces the shifting ontologies for defining economic necessity. She argues that our understanding of the malleability of economic relations has been displaced by colonial hierarchies of civilization and the biopolitics of the nation. Bringing economics into conversation with political theory, cultural economy, postcolonial thought, and history, Tellmann gives a radically novel interpretation of scarcity and money in terms of materiality, temporality, and affect. The book investigates the conceptual shifts regarding economic order during two moments of profound crisis in th...