Bøker i Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics-serien

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.

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 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 the twenty interviews collected in this volume, seventeen of which appear in English for the first time, Levinas sets forth the central features of his ethical philosophy and discusses biographical matters not available elsewhere.

Adorno is one of this century's most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and music. Throughout the essays in this book, all of which concern musical matters, he displays an astonishing range of cultural reference, demonstrating that music is invariably social, political, even ethical.

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.

This book applies a new model of comparative literature that gives incompatibility and contradiction their due. In case studies that include Leibniz, the Book of Odes, and Hegel, it explores the intersection between translation and allegory.

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).

This book shows that in "chatter" Kierkegaard uncovered a specifically linguistic mode of negativity, which became the medium in which a non-speculative and non-historicism presentation of history could be carried out. The author examines in detail those writings of Kierkegaard in which he undertook complex negotiations with the threat-and also the promise-of "chatter."

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.

This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany's leading social theorist of the late 20th century. It combines three decades of research in the social sciences, phenomenology, evolutionary biology, cybernetics, and information theory with an intimate knowledge of art history, literature, aesthetics, and contemporary literary theory.

Two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term "Etat Voyou" is the French equivalent of "rogue state," and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida examines along with the history of the concept of sovereignty.

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.

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

This is a series of meditations on the question of place and the loss of place in relation to writing by one of the major voices in modern French poetry.

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.

Technics and Time, 3 furthers Stiegler's critique of technics, working (back) through Kant in order to examine the nature of "cinematic time" relative to phenomenology and hypertechnology.

The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben's recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of apparatus, a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on the singular relation with one's own time that we call contemporariness.

Published in France in 1943, Faux Pas is the first collection of essays on literature and language by Maurice Blanchot, the most lucid and powerful French critic of the second half of the 20th century.

Peter Szondi's Celan Studies marks the beginning of critical work on Paul Celan, the most important German poet of the second half of the twentieth century.

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 reign of paper files would seem to be over once files are reduced to the status of icons on computer screens, but Vismann's book, which examines the impact of the file on Western institutions throughout history, shows how the creation of order in medieval and early modern administrations makes its returns in computer architecture.

This is the first volume in any language that collects Hannah Arendt's remarkable series of essays and notes on literary figures and cultural questions.

This book, written out of Derrida's long-standing friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, examines the central place accorded to the sense of touch in the Western philosophical tradition.

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.

Originally published in Italian in 2016 under the title Che cos'ae la filosofia?