You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
The volume begins with a major statement by the French feminist culture critic Julia Kristeva and includes essays by well-known and also younger continental philosophers writing in the North American context and reassessing the European heritage, its limits and effective futures. The future of postmodernism is assessed in terms of key themes: from the language of desire, the limits of representation, and the revaluation of values, to the feminist rewriting of patriarchy and the critical archeology of deconstruction. Eighteen essays review the postmodernist difference inscribed in modern philosophy. Traditional concerns and preoccupations--the subject, the will, the body, language, representation, and metaphysics--are placed in question through re-readings of rationalist, dialectical, psychoanalytic, aesthetic, and patriarchical values incorporated into modernist thinking. The figures of Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Derrida are treated in their multiple facets, and in relation to their importance for postmodernism within the continental philosophical framework.
This book addresses the question of deconstruction by asking what it is and discussing its alternatives. To what extent does deconstruction derive from a philosophical stance, and to what extent does it depend upon a set of strategies, moves, and rhetorical practices that result in criticism? Special attention is given to the formulations offered by Jacques Derrida (in relation to Heidegger's philosophy) and by Paul de Man (in relation to Kant's theory of the sublime and its implications for criticism). And what, in deconstructive terms, does it mean to translate from one textual corpus into another? Is it a matter of different theories of translation or of different practices? And what of d...
Explores Merleau-Ponty's approach of taking the phenomenon of the body out of the dualistic constraints of interior and exterior, and the consequences thereof.
This book offers a radically new interpretation of the entire philosophy of J. G. Fichte by showing the impact of nineteenth-century psychological techniques and technologies on the formation of his theory of the imagination—the very centerpiece of his philosophical system. By situating Fichte’s philosophy within the context of nineteenth-century German science and culture, the book establishes a new genealogy, one that shows the extent to which German idealism’s transcendental account of the social remains dependent upon the scientific origins of psychoanalysis in the material techniques of Mesmerism. The book makes it clear that the rational, transcendental account of spirit, imagination, and the social has its source in the psychological phenomena of affective rapport. Specifically, the imagination undergoes a double displacement in which it is ultimately subject to external influence, the influence of a material technique, or, in short, a technology.
Taken together, these intimate self-portraits provide a vibrant overview of the multiplicity and depth of continental philosophy in America."--Jacket.
Thresholds of Western Culture explores identity, postcoloniality and transnationalism--three closely related issues which redefine contemporary cultural identity. The book opens with an analysis of subjectivity and the cultural meltdown that accompanied fascism in the West. The situation in Africa is then explored which, while recalling modernity's dark side, highlights the intricacy of postcolonial identity. Post-Soviet Eastern Europe presents a separate case of neglected postcoloniality which emphasizes how ethnocentrism and cultural tensions have exposed the fragility of transnationalism. The book concludes with an examination of East Asia, a region which offers transnational options potentially much more fruitful than Balkanization.
A comprehensive guide to Foucault, from his early work on madness to his history of sexuality.
In Signifiers and Acts, Ed Pluth examines Lacan's views on language and sexuality to argue that Lacan's theory of the subject is best read as a theory of freedom and agency—a theory that is especially compelling precisely because of its structuralist and seemingly antihumanist framework. Presenting new aspects of Lacan's work and commenting extensively on the important yet unpublished seminars that still make up the majority of his contribution to contemporary thought, the book aims to make a Lacanian intervention into contemporary theory. In addition to Saussure, Sartre, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, Pluth discusses works in political theory and identity theory by Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zðizûek.
Simone de Beauvoir developed her philosophy of lived experience as she actually wrote fiction. Hence Beauvoir should be placed among major philosophical novelists of the twentieth-century like Toni Morrison and Nadine Gordimer, and Beauvoir's theory of the metaphysical novel acknowledges multicultural traditions of story-telling and song which are not locked into the theoretical abstractions of the Greek philosophical tradition. In Simone de Beauvoir's Philosophy of Lived Experience, Eleanore Holveck presents Simone de Beauvoir's theory of literature and metaphysics, including its relationship to the philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Immanuel Kant, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jean...
Hugh J. Silverman was an inspiring scholar and teacher, known for his work engaging and shaping phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, structuralism, poststructuralism, and deconstruction. As Professor of Philosophy and Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies at Stony Brook University, State University of New York, Silverman's work was marked by "the between," a concept he developed to think the postmodern in the space between philosophy and non-philosophy. In this volume, leading scholars explore and extend Silverman's philosophical contributions, from reflections on the notions of care, time, and responsibility, to presentations of the practices and possibilities of deconstruction itself. They provide an assessment of Silverman's life and work at the intersection of philosophy, ethics, and politics.