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What happens to poetic beauty when history turns the poet from one who contemplates natural beauty and the sublime to one who attempts to reconcile the practice of art with the hustle and noise of the city?An Atmospherics of the City traces Charles Baudelaire¿s evolution from a writer who practices a form of fetishizing aesthetics in which poetry works to beautify the ordinary to one who perceives background noise and disorder¿the city¿s version of a transcendent atmosphere¿as evidence of the malign work of a transcendent god of time, history, and ultimate destruction.Analyzing this shift, particularly as evidenced in Tableaux parisiens and Le Spleen de Paris, Ross Chambers shows how Baudelaire¿s disenchantment with the politics of his day and the coincident rise of overpopulation, poverty, and Haussmann¿s modernization of Paris influenced the poet¿s work to conceive a poetry of allegory, one with the power to alert and disalienate its otherwise inattentive reader whose senses have long been dulled by the din of his environment.Providing a completely new and original understanding of both Baudelaire¿s ethics and his aesthetics, Chambers reveals how the shift from themes of the supernatural in Baudelaire to ones of alienation allowed a new way for him to articulate and for his fellow Parisians to comprehend the rapidly changing conditions of the city and, in the process, to invent a ¿modern beauty¿ from the realm of suffering and the abject as they embodied forms of urban experience.

The book Chronicle of Separation is an attempt to write on Derrida, to Derrida and from Derrida on the basis of a pathetic experience, which, in various ways, describes and enacts the pathetic experience of deconstruction itself. The book tackles the weight of emotions that is at the heart of deconstructive reading.

A coherent and practical philosophy of interdependence, drawing on vivid examples from the biological sciences.

New Men uncovers the narrative of veteran reentry into civilian life and exposes a growing gap between how former soldiers of the Civil War saw themselves and the representations of them created by late nineteenth-century American society. This gap generated a new conception of the "veteran" still influential today.

Earth, Life & System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet explores the multiple themes of Lynn Margulis's science: microbial evolution, ecology and symbiosis, the coupled interactions of environment and life in Gaia theory, and the connections of these newer scientific ideas to cultural and creative productions.

Negative Ecstasies discusses the contribution and significance of the work of Georges Bataille to the contemporary study of religion and theology, collecting essays that examine specific case studies and make connections to other significant scholars in the field.

Negative Ecstasies discusses the contribution and significance of the work of Georges Bataille to the contemporary study of religion and theology, collecting essays that examine specific case studies and make connections to other significant scholars in the field.

Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, opens by asking a fundamental first question: What is flirtation, and how does it differ from seduction? The essays thereby address the under-theorized terrain of flirtation not as a subgenre of seduction but rather as a phenomenon in its own right.

By analyzing many films, by drawing on the philosophy of Lyotard, Nancy, and Derrida, this book suggest that in the apocalyptic genre, cinema is at work on its limit. Apocalypse-cinema is both the end of the world and the end of the film, the consummation and the (self)consumption of cinema.

Bruno Latour is one of the major figures of contemporary thought. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, spanning from his early work in the sociology and anthropology of science to his recent philosophy of multiple "modes of existence."

How can one experience the apocalypse in the present? Lyric Apocalypse argues that John Milton's and Andrew Marvell's lyrics depict revelation as an immediately perceptible event. In so doing, their lyrics explore the nature of events, the modern question of what it means for something to happen in the present.

A Derrida scholar traces the evolution of the philosopher's final seminar in Paris as he contemplates the state of the world and his own mortality. For decades, philosopher Jacques Derrida held weekly seminars in Paris, spending years at a time on a single, complex theme. From 2001 to 2003, he delivered the final work in this series, entitled ';The Beast and the Sovereign.' As this final seminar progressed, its central theme was diverted by questions of death, mourning, memory, and, especially, the end of the world. Now philosopher and Derrida scholar Michael Naas takes readers through the remarkable itinerary of Derrida's final seminar in The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments. The book begins with Derrida's analyses of the question of the animal in the context of his other published works on that subject. It then follows Derrida as a very different tone begins to emerge, one that wavers between melancholy and extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end of life. Focusing the entire second year on Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger's seminar ';The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,' Derrida explores questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that is both creative and destructive. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida from week to week as he responds to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world eventsthe aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraqand more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away.

Responding to Loss: Heideggerian Reflections on Literature, Architecture, and Film provides detailed explications of The Crossing by Cormack McCarthy, the Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, and Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. The interpretations-thinking via Heidegger, Marion, Arendt, and Levinas-call for an adequate response to loss, violence, witnessing.

Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of life's becoming on earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche.

How does one most profitably read the Bible? The answer, according to Chretien, must include allowing the Bible to read us. With the help of the great patristic writings as well as Protestant theologians and using his own poet's sensibility, he creatively explores such scriptural doctrines as joy, hope, and witness/testimony.

Analyzes Aristotle's natural philosophy and metaphysics from a feminist, deconstructive, psychoanalytic perspective, showing that Aristotelian teleology relies on the disparagement of chance and the feminine simultaneously and finding resources therein for contemporary feminist thought.

The Trace of God treats Derrida's discussion and use of religious ideas. Examining his writings both early and late, it provides accounts of his engagement with the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions, offering a variety of perspectives on the meaning of his work and its implications today.

Focusing on low-income neighborhoods in Delhi, this book stitches together three different sets of issues. It examines the different trajectories of illness: What are the circumstances under which illness is absorbed within the normal and when does it exceed the normal putting resources, relationships, and even one's world into jeopardy?

This book puts Merleau-Ponty's philosophy into dialogue with literature, evolutionary biology, and animal studies to argue for evolutionary continuity between human cultural and linguistic behaviors and the semiotic activities of other animals. It restores our species to its place within the co-evolved animal community now threatened by environmental change.

Explores the relation between religion, philosophy and literature.

A philosophical analysis of the works of Franz Kafka, Maurice Blanchot and Samuel Beckett laying stress on the aesthetic notion of the sublime, especially as defined by philosopher Immanuel Kant, and arguing that these authors incorporate sublimity into their writing while also undermining the grandeur this traditionally implies.

The contributors to this volume re-assess literary practice at the edges of paper, electronic media, and film. They show how the emergence of a new medium reinvigorates the book and the page as literary media, rather than announcing their impending death.

Speaks to a contemporary world about human rights, religious tolerance, international peace, and environmental protection. This book presents a selection of major addresses and significant messages as well as public statements by His All Holiness Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, 'first among equals' and spiritual leader of Orthodox Christians.

How does Derrida write of and on the other? This book examines exemplary instances of the relation to the other - the relation of Moses to God, Derrida's friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, Derrida's relation to a departed actress caught on video - to demonstrate how Derrida forces us to reconceive who or what the other may be.

A moving memoir of childhood in Dutch colonial Java, coming of age in wartime, and the trauma of life in WWII Labor Camps run by the Japanese. As a boy growing up the Dutch island colony of Java, John K. Stutterheim spent hours exploring his exotic surroundings, taking walks with his younger brother and dachshund along winding jungle roads. It was a fairly typical life for a colonial family in the Dutch East Indies, but their colonial idyll ended when the Japanese invaded in 1942, when John was fourteen. With the surrender of Java, John's father was taken prisoner. Soon thereafter, John, his younger brother, and his mother were imprisoned. A year later he and his brother were moved to a forced labor camp for boys, where disease, starvation, and the constant threat of imminent death took their toll. Throughout all of these travails, John kept a secret diary hidden in his mattress. His memories now offer a unique perspective on an often-overlooked episode of World War II. What emerges is a compelling story of a young man caught up in the machinations of a global warstruggling to survive while caring for his gravely ill brother.

What does such a way of life mean? How are we to understand the meaning of ethicality? What are the obstacles to ethical living? And should we assume that an ethical life is a better life? This book brings the insights of Continental philosophy to bear on some of the challenging difficulties of ethical life.

How have we thought 'the body'? How can we think it anew? This title incorporates the body of mortal creatures, the body politic, the body of letters and of laws, and the 'mystical body of Christ'. It offers us an encyclopedia and a polemical program - reviewing classical takes on the "corpus" from Plato, Aristotle, and Saint Paul to Descartes.

Written in the wake of Jacques Derrida's death in 2004, this title attempts both to do justice to the memory of Derrida and to demonstrate the significance of his work for contemporary philosophy and literary theory. It presents an analysis of Derrida's attachment to the French language, to Europe, and to European secular thought.

How are we to interpret Jacques Derrida's writings, after so much commentary has been devoted to his thought and his own astonishing productivity has come to an end? The author presents his earlier contextualizing of Derrida's work in relation to Husserl by arguing that we must begin from a frame different from that provided by Derrida himself.