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The Ethics of Ernst Lubitsch
Against the idea that comedy offers us a relief from the horrors of the real world, the German-Jewish-American filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch defended his masterpiece To Be or Not to Be, a comedy from 1942 about the concurrent Nazi occupation of Poland, with the claim that he had made up his mind “to make a picture with no attempt to relieve anybody from anything at any time.” The essays included in The Ethics of Ernst Lubitsch consider Lubitsch’s work from his early Berlin years to his Hollywood fame, emphasizing the idea of ‘comedy without relief’ as the fundamental ethical premise of his special cinematic ‘touch.’ In this edited collection, contributors take a closer look at how Lubitsch addresses delicate and controversial topics like sexuality, love, and revolution, and set out a picture of an engaged ethics without moralism. The Ethics of Ernst Lubitsch is a vital contribution to film scholarship and a tribute to an essential filmmaker.
A Permanent Beginning
Situates a Hasidic master in the context of his time, demonstrating his formative influence on Jewish literary modernity. The Hasidic leader R. Nachman of Braslav (1772–1810) has held a place in the Jewish popular imagination for more than two centuries. Some see him as the (self-proclaimed) Messiah, others as the forerunner of modern Jewish literature. Existing studies struggle between these dueling readings, largely ignoring questions of aesthetics and politics in his work. A Permanent Beginning lays out a new paradigm for understanding R. Nachman’s thought and writing, and, with them, the beginnings of Jewish literary modernity. Yitzhak Lewis examines the connections between imperial ...
After Life
Dreams and fantasies of immorality date back to the first human being who was expelled from the Garden of Eden and fell into time, as Augustine recounts. Falling into time, into mortality, living with the consciousness of death and the decline of the body, bear a terrifying—and yet for some pacifying—burden that comes with the weight of being human. Today, with the advancement of technology, accompanied by the emergence of trends such as posthumanism and transhumanism, the idea of overcoming death is presented as no longer a mere fantasy, but a legitimate discursive stance. While death is often seen as the Muse of philosophy, what would it mean (philosophically and psychically) to live in a world where death is no longer necessary? After Life: Recent Philosophy and Death is a collection of 11 essays addressing the place of death and its denial from a philosophical, psychoanalytic and literary perspectives. This collection offers contemporary and fresh insights on these timely questions. It was originally published as a special issue of Angelaki.
The Animal in the Synagogue
The Animal in the Synagogue explores Franz Kafka’s sense of being a Jew in the modern world and its literary and linguistic ramifications. It falls into two parts. The first is organized around the theme of Kafka’s complex and often self-derogatory understanding and assessment of his own Jewishness and of the place the modern Jew occupies in “the abyss of the world” (Martin Buber). That part is based on a close reading of Kafka’s correspondence with his Czech lover, Milena Jesenska, and on a meticulous analysis, thematic, stylistic, and structural, of Kafka’s only short story touching openly and directly upon Jewish social and ritual issues, and known as “In Our Synagogue” (t...
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight
The latest book from "the most dangerous philosopher in the West" (New Republic) considers the new dangers and radical possibilities set in motion by advances in Big Tech. In recent years, techno-scientific progress has started to utterly transform our world--changing it almost beyond recognition. In this extraordinary new book, renowned philosopher Slavoj Žižek turns to look at the brave new world of Big Tech, revealing how, with each new wave of innovation, we find ourselves moving closer and closer to a bizarrely literal realization of Marx's prediction that "all that is solid melts into air." With the automation of work, the virtualization of money, the dissipation of class communiti...
What Money Wants
One thing all mainstream economists agree upon is that money has nothing whatsoever to do with desire. This strange blindness of the profession to what is otherwise considered to be a basic feature of economic life serves as the starting point for this provocative new theory of money. Through the works of Karl Marx, Thorstein Veblen, and Max Weber, What Money Wants argues that money is first and foremost an object of desire. In contrast to the common notion that money is but an ordinary object that people believe to be money, this book explores the theoretical consequences of the possibility that an ordinary object fulfills money's function insofar as it is desired as money. Rather than conc...
The Sexual Economy of Capitalism
Economics has long modeled its theories on bakers and butchers rather than husbands, wives, lovers, and prostitutes. This book argues that exchanges involving sex and intimacy, far from being external or exceptional in relation to the workings of the economy, come closest to the reality of capitalist money. Undertaking an inquiry into the sexual economy of capitalism, Noam Yuran analyzes the erotic and gendered meanings that suffuse basic economic concepts, from money to the commodity. It is not entirely true, Yuran shows, that in capitalism everything has its price. In fact, the category of things money cannot buy, including love, forms a central axis around which capitalist economic life i...
Rumors
When Socrates was standing before the Athenian tribunal in 399 BC, he said in his defence that the opponents he feared most were the invisible ones, those who had been spreading rumors against him for years but none of whom were being brought to court – it was like fighting shadows. The moment was iconic: Socrates, the harbinger of logos and true knowledge, was eventually defeated by rumors and mendacious slander. Where does the strange power of rumors come from? Everyone knows that rumors are unfounded and based on thin air, but still they pass them on: rumors spread, and what appeared as a small breeze can grow into a mighty whirlwind and produce serious effects, ruin people’s lives an...
What's That Smell?
How our sense of smell engages with philosophy, psychoanalysis, and political economy—and how it can help enrich our understanding of the nature of truth, language, economy, and sexuality. Why is it that, in Indo-European languages at least, we have no language to describe smells, leaving us (and famously Juliet) no choice but to call the scent of a rose simply “sweet”? In What's That Smell?, a groundbreaking exploration of the intersection between philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the oft-neglected sense of smell, Simon Hajdini sets out to answer this complex question. Through new readings of traditional and modern philosophical texts, Hajdini places smell at the very center of a philos...
On Power in Architecture
Architecture has always been a decisive manifestation of power. This volume represents an attempt to question and reflect on the relationship between power and architecture from three philosophical perspectives: materialistic, phenomenological and post-structuralist. This collection opens an interdisciplinary investigation that aims to reflect on architecture and its interconnectedness with power within philosophy and cultural theory at large while presenting these concepts using practical examples from the built environment. Internationally recognised authors – philosophers, architectural theorists and historians – Andrew Benjamin, Andrew Ballantyne, Mladen Dolar, Hilde Heynen, Nadir La...
