Bøker i Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics-serien

In this book, literary critic and political theorist Werner Hamacher shows how Hoelderlin's late poetry develops and enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique, unprecedented, and still revolutionary concept of revolution that begins with a groundbreaking understanding of language.

In the three essays that make up this stimulating and often startling book, Jacques Derrida argues against the notion that the basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through, argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychoanalysis is here examined in the various "resistances" to analysis--conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself, an insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of analysis itself. Derrida not only shows how the interest of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing can be renewed today, but these essays afford him the opportunity to revisit and reassess a subject he first confronted (in an essay on Freud) in 1966. They also serve to clarify Derrida's thinking about the subjects of the essays--Freud, Lacan, and Foucault--a thinking that, especially with regard to the last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood.The first essay, on Freud, is a tour de force of close reading of Freud's texts as philosophical reflection. By means of the fine distinctions Derrida makes in this analytical reading, particularly of The Interpretation of Dreams, he opens up the realm of analysis into new and unpredictable forms--such as meeting with an interdiction (when taking an analysis further is "forbidden" by a structural limit).Following the essay that might be dubbed Derrida's "return to Freud," the next is devoted to Lacan, the figure for whom that phrase was something of a slogan. In this essay and the next, on Foucault, Derrida reencounters two thinkers to whom he had earlier devoted important essays, which precipitated stormy discussions and numerous divisions within the intellectual milieus influenced by their writings. In this essay, which skillfully integrates the concept of resistance into larger questions, Derrida asks in effect: What is the origin and nature of the text that constitutes Lacanian psychoanalysis, considering its existence as an archive, as teachings, as seminars, transcripts, quotations, etc.?Derrida's third essay may be called not simply a criticism but an appreciation of Foucault's work: an appreciation not only in the psychological and rhetorical sense, but also in the sense that it elevates Foucault's thought by giving back to it ranges and nuances lost through its reduction by his readers, his own texts, and its formulaic packaging.

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. The essays consider several figures in the history of philosophy; the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics.

This analysis of art and its modes of existence by a contemporary French philosopher begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones.

This is a collection of twenty-two essays by an eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist that appeared between 1971 and 1992. The book interrogates the theory and practice of representation as it is carried out by both linguistic and graphic signs, and thus the complex relation between language and image, between perception and conception.

In "The Open", contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the "human" has been thought of as either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether.

This is a succinct and elegant argument for the specificity of a philosophy of tragedy, as opposed to a poetics of tragedy espoused by Aristotle.

In 1980, deconstructive and psychoanalytic literary theorist Barbara Johnson wrote an essay on Mary Shelley for a colloquium on the writings of Jacques Derrida. The essay marked the beginning of Johnson's lifelong interest in Shelley as well as her first foray into the field of "e;women's studies,"e; one of whose commitments was the rediscovery and analysis of works by women writers previously excluded from the academic canon. Indeed, the last book Johnson completed before her death was Mary Shelley and Her Circle, published here for the first time. Shelley was thus the subject for Johnson's beginning in feminist criticism and also for her end. It is surprising to recall that when Johnson wrote her essay, only two of Shelley's novels were in print, critics and scholars having mostly dismissed her writing as inferior and her career as a side effect of her famous husband's. Inspired by groundbreaking feminist scholarship of the seventies, Johnson came to pen yet more essays on Shelley over the course of a brilliant but tragically foreshortened career. So much of what we know and think about Mary Shelley today is due to her and a handful of scholars working just decades ago. In this volume, Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman have united all of Johnson's published and unpublished work on Shelley alongside their own new, insightful pieces of criticism and those of two other peers and fellow pioneers in feminist theory, Mary Wilson Carpenter and Cathy Caruth. The book thus evolves as a conversation amongst key scholars of shared intellectual inclinations while closing the circle on Johnson's life and her own fascination with the life and circle of another woman writer, who, of course, also happened to be the daughter of a founder of modern feminism.

In this philosophical detective story, Giorgio Agamben reads the mysterious 1938 disappearance of atomic physicist Ettore Majorana as an intentional and decisive objection to how quantum physics had reduced the real to probability.

The 13 essays in this volume-touching on ethics and philosophical questions concerning politics, language, and religion-investigate the possibility that the word "God" can be understood now, at the end of the 20th century, in a meaningful way. Nine of the essays appear in English for the first time.

Cacciari discusses Vienna at a crucial turning point in Western thinking, as the 19th century ended, treating this extraordinarily rich concentration of people and events as the hub upon which wheeled into the 20th century.

This latest collection of texts, which focus on the "mystery" of literature, as well as on language as a laboratory for conceiving an ethical-political perspective that places us beyond sovereign power, offer a window onto Giorgio Agamben's most current research.

This book consists of transcripts from two lecture courses on ethical relation Levinas delivered at the Sorbonne. In seeking to explain his thought to students, he utilizes a clarity and an intensity altogether different from his other writings.

Taking Benedict XVI's abdication as his point of departure, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben offers some reflections on the unresolved dialectics of political theology and the continued relevance of eschatological thinking.

A collection of articles, lectures, and interviews whose apparent variety, touching on social criticism, psychoanalysis, philosophy, poetry and science, among others, is actually strongly focused on one main idea: that of autonomous, creative action at the individual and collective levels.

This book, by one of the most innovative and challenging contemporary thinkers, rethinks community and the very idea of the social. Nancy's fundamental argument is that being is always "being with," that "I" is not prior to "we," that existence is essentially co-existence.

This volume collects twenty-three interviews given over the course of the last two decades by Jacques Derrida. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of his concerns, touching upon such subjects as the teaching of philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, AIDS, language and translation, nationalism, politics, and Derrida's early life and the history of his writings.

This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking-nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante.

In his new collection of essays, Giorgio Agamben addresses the most urgent themes of his recent research.

In this work, begun during the German occupation, the eminent French poet and philosopher began to turn away from the small, perfect poem toward a much more open form, a kind of prose poem that recounted its own process of coming into being along with the final result.

Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature with man-made objects, which did not have the source of production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.

Radical Atheism challenges the religious appropriation of Derrida's work and offers a compelling new account of his thinking on time and space, life and death, good and evil, self and other.

This volume presents three essays by the French philosopher and theorist Jacques Derrida on the ethical, political and linguistic issues posed by the act of "naming"

This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship between music and the problem of mimesis, of presentation and re-presentation. Four "scenes" compose this book, all four of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarme), two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno).

The powerful thesis of this book is that in order to achieve full selfhood we must all repeatedly and endlessly kill the phantasmatic image of ourselves instilled in us by our parents-the projection of the child our parents wanted.

One of Italy's most original philosophers aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding.

The final volume in Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben's wide-ranging investigation of the foundations of Western politics and culture.

In this book, Agamben investigates monasticism from its beginnings up through the Franciscan movement in an attempt to find a new form-of-life that escapes from the logic of Western politics as put forth in his Homo Sacer series.

This is the definitive edition (including drafts, notes, and ancillary materials) of Paul Celan's Meridian, the most important poetological manifesto of the second half of the twentieth century.

The influential French philosopher, Derrida, discusses the analytic of death in Heidegger's Being and Time. This new book will not fail to set new standards for the discussion of Heidegger and for dealing with philosophical texts.