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Examines independent documentary film production in India within a political context.
Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopower” has been a highly fertile concept in recent theory, influencing thinkers worldwide across a variety of disciplines and concerns. In The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, Foucault famously employed the term to describe “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” With this volume, Vernon W. Cisney and Nicolae Morar bring together leading contemporary scholars to explore the many theoretical possibilities that the concept of biopower has enabled while at the same time pinpointing their most important shared resonances. Situating biopower as a radical alternative to traditional conceptions of power—what Foucault called “sovereign power”—the contributors examine a host of matters centered on life, the body, and the subject as a living citizen. Altogether, they pay testament to the lasting relevance of biopower in some of our most important contemporary debates on issues ranging from health care rights to immigration laws, HIV prevention discourse, genomics medicine, and many other topics.
What has happened since de Man and Derrida first read Austin? How has the encounter between deconstruction and the performative affected each of these terms? In addressing these questions, this book brings together scholars whose works have been provoked in different ways by the encounter of deconstruction and the performative. Following Derrida's appeal to any rigorous deconstruction to reckon with Austin's theorems and his ever growing commitment to rethink and rewrite the performative and its multiple articulations, it is now urgent that we reflect upon the effects of a theoretical event that has profoundly marked the contemporary scene. The contributors to this book suggest various ways of re-reading the heritage and future of both deconstruction and the performative after their encounter, bringing into focus both the constitutive aporia of the performative and the role it plays within the deconstruction of the metaphysical tradition.
Amid all the controversy, criticism, and celebration of Terrence Malick's award-winning film The Tree of Life, what do we really understand of it? The Way of Nature and the Way of Grace thoughtfully engages the philosophical riches of life, culture, time, and the sacred through Malick's film. This innovative collection traverses the relationships among ontological, moral, scientific, and spiritual perspectives on the world, demonstrating how phenomenological work can be done in and through the cinematic medium, and attempting to bridge the gap between narrow "theoretical" works on film and their broader cultural and philosophical significance. Exploring Malick's film as a philosophical engagement, this readable and insightful collection presents an excellent resource for film specialists, philosophers of film, and film lovers alike.
The essential toolkit for anyone reading this seminal Derrida text for the first timePublished in 1967, ''Voice and Phenomenon'' marked a crucial turning point in DerridaOCOs thinking: the culmination of a 15-year-long engagement with the phenomenological tradition. It also introduced the concepts and themes that would become deconstruction."e;
Since its publication in 2003, Understanding David Foster Wallace has served as an accessible introduction to the rich array of themes and formal innovations that have made Wallace's fiction so popular and influential. A seminal text in the burgeoning field of David Foster Wallace studies, the original edition of Understanding David Foster Wallace was nevertheless incomplete as it addressed only his first four works of fiction—namely the novels The Broom of the System and Infinite Jest and the story collections Girl with Curious Hair and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. This revised edition adds two new chapters covering his final story collection, Oblivion, and his posthumous novel, The...
Explores the biographical, historical and philosophical connections between Jacques Derrida and Michel FoucaultBetween Foucault and Derrida explores the notorious Cogito debate and includes: the central articles, an important piece by Jean-Marie Beyssade, along with a letter Foucault wrote to Beyssade in response both these pieces available for the first time in English translation. In the second part of the book, 10 essays written by some of the most well-known scholars working in contemporary continental philosophy address the various philosophical intersections and divergences of these two profoundly important thinkers.Key FeaturesThe first collection of the central essays involved in the...
A step-by-step guide to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Thus Spoke Zarathustra is one of Nietzsche's greatest books, a cross-over text that combines philosophical innovation with literary experimentation. With Zarathustra Nietzsche has attempted a redefinition of the form-content correlation in philosophical writing and as such the text is considered an experiment in philosophical style. It therefore represents a large hurdle for undergraduate students. This projected commentary works on the assumption that access to the philosophical core of the text can only be gained through taking its literary ambitions seriously and that, moreover, these literary ambitions can only be understood as an attempt to realise philosophical ideas. This is a book that is designed to be read alongside Nietzsche and will therefore make the reading and appreciation of the primary material achievable. This approach will be welcomed by students and lecturers alike.
'I should have written you after my first reading of The Living Currency; it was already breath-taking and I should have responded. After reading it a few more times, I know it is the best book of our times.' Letter to Pierre Klossowski from Michel Foucault, winter 1970. Living Currency is the first English translation of Klossowski's La monnaie vivante. It offers an analysis of economic production as a mechanism of psychic production of desires and is a key work from this often overlooked but wonderfully creative French thinker.
This book analyzes the nature and functions of horror films from the vantage of a theoretical reconstruction of George Santayana’s account of beauty. This neo-Santayanan framework forms the conceptual backdrop for a new model of horror’s aesthetic enjoyment, the nature of which is detailed through the examination of plot, cinematic, and visual devices distinctive of the popular genre. According to this model, the audience derives pleasure from the films through confronting the aversive scenarios they communicate and rationalizing a denial of their personal applicability. The films then come to embody these acts of self-assertion and intellectual overcoming and become objects of pride. How horror films can acquire necropolitical functions within the context of abusive systems of power is also clarified. These functions, which exploit the power of anti-tragedy, downward social comparison, or vicarious emotion, work to remediate aggressive, ascetic, or revolutionary impulses in ways that are not injurious to the status quo. This book champions horror as a source of self-empowerment and unmitigated beauty, but also attests to the potential social harms of the genre.