Bøker i Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics-serien

This book represents the first publication of one of the seminars (transcribed) of Cornelius Castoriadis, a renowned and influential figure in 20th-century thought. A close reading of Plato's Statesman is an exemplary instance of Castoriadis's discriminating approach to thinking about and reading a great work.

Carrying forward the problematic of measure and measurelessness that Plato, Aristotle, and Hoelderlin posited at the center of their ethics and politics, this book explores ways in which, as the very condition of their freedom, our gestures bear within their most originary sense and sensibility the values, norms, ideals, and prophetic, messianic dreams of a redeemed ethical and political life.

This book is an exploration of the notion of "drive" as it passes from Kant's need of reason, to Freud's concept of hallucinatory wish fulfillment, to the relentless force of indifferentiation in Flaubert's Bouvard and Pecuchet.

Nancy's classic study of the role of language in Kant demonstrates why the question of how to write philosophy, of philosophical style, is not just ancillary to critical philosophy but goes to the heart of the project of establishing human reason in its autonomy and freedom.

This single book brings together for the first time all nine volumes that make up Giorgio Agamben's groundbreaking magnum opus.

This collection presents a broad and compelling overview of the most recent work in philosophy, politics, and psychoanalysis by a world-renowned figure in contemporary thought.

Ludwig Tieck's 1797 rewriting of Charles Perrault's famous Bluebeard tale (1697) explicitly claims to be an "arabesque" book "without any sense and coherence." The author's close reading of this capricious narrative, based on Kant's theory of what it means to produce nonsense, reveals a specifically Romantic type of nonsense.

In this book, Agamben investigates the roots of the modern moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy.

Concentrating on both widely known and seldom-read texts from a variety of philosophers, writers, and critics-from Leibniz and Mendelssohn, through Kleist and Hebel, to Benjamin and Irigaray-the book analyzes the genesis and structure of interruption, a topic of growing interest to contemporary literary studies, continental philosophy, legal studies, and theological reflection.

Matchbook consists of nine essays written around, or in response to, work published by Jacques Derrida since 1980. The focal point of the essays is the "Envois," which forms part of The Post Card (1980 in French). Particular attention is paid to how that text articulates with the ethical and political emphases of Derrida's more recent work, but also to its autobiographical conceit.

Agamben seeks to separate the Pauline texts from the history of the Church that canonized them, thus revealing them to be "the fundamental messianic texts of the West." He argues that Paul's Letters are concerned not with the foundation of a new religion but rather with the "messianic" abolition of Jewish law.

This book synthesizes Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida on interpretation and difference in order to provide a new theory of how interpretation functions in psychoanalysis.

Skirting the Ethical presents highly original readings of six pivotal works that, disrupting our conventional concept of morality, point us towards a non-prescriptive mode of ethics, as an ever-to-be-renewed rethinking that has much to do with the act of interpretation.

Gasche's latest book explores the concept or idea of Europe in the philosophies of Husserl, Heidegger, Patoka, and Derrida, and how it is linked to the notions of rationality, universality, world, the relation the other, and responsibility.

An analysis of the historical position of Paul Celan's poetry, this book addresses the question of a lyric language that would not be the expression of subjectivity. Lacoue-Labarthe defines the subject as the principle that founds, organizes, and secures both cognition and action, a figure not only of domination but of the extermination of everything other than itself.

The book presents a powerful reminder of adults' responsibility for the development of long-term attention (and thus of maturity) in children, particularly in the face of the techniques of attention-destruction practiced by the programming industries.

Ambiguities of Witnessing explores the complex relationship between law and literature in testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the body that investigated crimes of the apartheid era in South Africa.

The book offers the first systematic analysis of Kafka's only work of nonfiction, the so-called Zurau fragments, and develops his proposals there for a controversial solution to human suffering and the drive toward moral betterment.

By focusing on what is outside the frame, this book offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the arts of modernity in general.

"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself", wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general.

This book argues for a deconstructive approach to the past by looking at deconstruction's impact on American historians and then presenting an alternative hauntological theory and method of history influenced by, but not beholden to, the work of Jacques Derrida.

This is an analysis of the ways a linked set of ethico-political concepts responsibility, rights, freedom, equality, and justice might be re-thought, not simply jettisoned or reactively defended, in view of the linguistic deconstruction of their underlying principle, the individual human subject.

"Originally published in Italian in 2017 under the title Karman: breve trattato sull'azione, la colpa e il gesto."

"Originally published in Italian in 2017 under the title Creazione e anarchia: l'opera nell'etaa della religione capitalistica."

In this book, one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He probes the meaning and historical consequences of the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a "self-annulling" mode, in the process offering an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetics from Kant to Heidegger.

Acting Out brings together two short books (the autobiographical I>How I Became a Philosopher and To Love, To Love Me, To Love Us) by Bernard Stiegler, the fruit of the discipline he developed in prison and of the passion he brings to his political, philosophical, and technical diagnoses of contemporary life.

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.