| New Books by ASCP Members |
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The ASCP community is prolific in producing work that encompasses a variety of areas of scholarship in Continental Philosophy. The following book descriptions provide some recent examples of this work. Further details about each book can be found by clicking on the links to Amazon Books. If you purchase any books from Amazon after linking from this site, Amazon will track your trajectory and part profits will be returned to the ASCP. Thank you for supporting the ASCP community!
Books Published in 2010
Andrew Benjamin, Place, Commonality and Judgment: Continental Philosophy and the Ancient Greeks (Continuum) This title presents a highly original examination of topics in ancient philosophy through the lens of modern European thought. In this important and highly original book, place, commonality and judgment provide the framework within which works central to the Greek philosophical and literary tradition are usefully located and reinterpreted. Greek life, it can be argued, was defined by the interconnection of place, commonality and judgment. Similarly within the Continental philosophical tradition topics such as place, judgment, law and commonality have had a pervasive centrality. Works by Ed Casey, Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben amongst others attest to the current exigency of these topics. Yet the ways in which they are interrelated has been barely discussed within the context of Ancient Philosophy. The conjecture of this book is that not only are these terms of genuine philosophical importance in their own right, but they are also central to Ancient Philosophy. Andrew Benjamin ultimately therefore aims to underscore the relevance of Ancient Philosophy for contemporary debates in Continental Philosophy. _________________________________________________
"Andrew Benjamin has written an original and provocative meditation on the place of the 'figure' of the animal in modern philosophy and culture. The book is remarkable for its sensitivity to the issue of visibility and the use of visual material. The engagement with the philosophical history of art is beautifully sustained and serves not only to work through the theme of figuration but also to make the philosophical narrative available to a wider range of readers". -- Howard Caygill, Goldsmith's College "A stimulating book which will help those readers who, interested in the work of Agamben and the late Derrida, wish to reflect more on the image of the animal in classical continental philosophy". -- Peter Fenves, NorthWestern University ______________________________________________________ Simone Bignall, Postcolonial Agency: Critique and Constructivism (Edinburgh University Press) This book complements and balances the attention given by postcolonial theory to the revitalisation and recognition of the agency of colonised peoples. It offers new conceptual scaffolding to those who have inherited the legacy of colonial privilege, and who now seek to responsibly transform this historical injustice. Simone Bignall attends to a minor tradition within Western philosophy including Spinoza, Nietzsche, Bergson and Deleuze, to argue that a non-imperial concept of social and political agency and a postcolonial philosophy of material transformation are embedded within aspects of poststructuralist social philosophy. Contributing to contemporary philosophical inquiry about desire, power and transformative agency, Postcolonial Agency constitutes a timely intervention to debates in poststructuralist, postcolonial and postmodern studies. The resulting rapprochement between poststructuralism and postcolonialism coincidentally provides a fresh perspective on the political potential of Deleuzian thought. It is of interest to students in political and postcolonial studies, cultural studies, critical theory and Continental philosophy. "Theoretically sophisticated and meticuously situated at the fraught scene of reconciliation between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples in contemporary Australia, Postcolonial Agency is an inspiring manifesto for non-imperial mutuality. Bignall's advocacy of an ethics of joy opens up a new direction for postcolonial studies " - Leela Gandhi, Professor of English, University of Chicago Buy This Book From Amazon______________________________________________________________
Simone Bignall and Paul Patton (eds), Deleuze and the Postcolonial (Edinburgh UP) This is the first anthology to unite Deleuzian philosophy and postcolonial theory. Paul Patton and Simone Bignall assemble leading figures, including Reda Bensmaïa, Timothy Bewes, Rey Chow, Philip Leonard, Nick Nesbitt, John K. Noyes, Patricia Pisters, Marcelo Svirsky and Simon Tormey. They deal with colonial and postcolonial social, cultural, and political issues in Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia and Palestine. Topics include colonial government, nation building, and ethics in the contemporary context of globalization and decolonization; issues relating to resistance, transformation and agency; and questions of "representation" and discursive power as practiced through postcolonial art, cinema, and literature. ___________________________________________________________ Andy Blunden, An Interdisciplinary Theory of Activity (Brill) Andy Blunden presents an immanent critique of Cultural-Historical Activity Theory, the current of psychology originating from Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934). Tracing the roots of this theory from Goethe, Hegel and Marx, the author draws out the principles with which Vygotsky developed a theory of the mind in which the individual and their social situation form a single Gestalt, transcending the problems of mind-body dualism. Blunden follows the efforts of later members of the School to resolve outstanding problems in Vygotsky’s work. This includes a critical appropriation of Leontyev’s Activity Theory and Michael Cole’s cross-cultural research on the role of context in learning. The outcome is a concept of activity which transcends the division between individual and social domains in human sciences. _____________________________________________________________
Michael Fagenblat, A Covenant of Creatures: Levinas' Philosophy of Judaism (Stanford) "I am not a particularly Jewish thinker," said Emmanuel Levinas, "I am just a thinker." This book argues against the idea, affirmed by Levinas himself, that Totality and Infinity and Otherwise Than Being separate philosophy from Judaism. By reading Levinas's philosophical works through the prism of Judaic texts and ideas, Michael Fagenblat argues that what Levinas called "ethics" is as much a hermeneutical product wrought from the Judaic heritage as a series of phenomenological observations. Decoding the Levinas's philosophy of Judaism within a Heideggerian and Pauline framework, Fagenblat uses biblical, rabbinic, and Maimonidean texts to provide sustained interpretations of the philosopher's work. Ultimately he calls for a reconsideration of the relation between tradition and philosophy, and of the meaning of faith after the death of epistemology. "This is a rich and sophisticated study of one of the most vital and influential thinkers of the twentieth century. Exploring Levinas's philosophy of Judaism from his philosophical rather than his confessional writings, Michael Fagenblat provides a fresh model that breaks down simplistic distinctions and opens the in-between space wherein the claim of the individual is held accountable through the response to the other and the challenge of the other is redeemed by the demand of the individual."—Elliot R. Wolfson, New York University Buy This Book From Amazon__________________________________________________________________
Joanne Faulkner, Dead Letters to Nietzsche: Or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy (Ohio UP) Dead Letters to Nietzsche examines how writing shapes subjectivity through the example of Nietzsche’s reception by his readers, including Stanley Rosen, David Farrell Krell, Georges Bataille, Laurence Lampert, Pierre Klossowski, and Sarah Kofman. More precisely, Joanne Faulkner finds that the personal identification that these readers form with Nietzsche’s texts is an enactment of the kind of identity-formation described in Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis. This investment of their subjectivity guides their understanding of Nietzsche’s project, the revaluation of values. Not only does this work make a provocative contribution to Nietzsche scholarship, but it also opens in an original way broader philosophical questions about how readers come to be invested in a philosophical project and how such investment alters their subjectivity. ___________________________________________________________
Timothy O'Leary and Chris Falzon (eds), Foucault and Philosophy (Blackwell) Foucault and Philosophy presents a collection of essays from leading international philosophers and Foucault scholars that explore Foucault’s work as a philosopher in relation to philosophers who were important to him and in the context of important themes and problems in contemporary philosophy. "Was it important that Michel Foucault thought philosophically?That among his major partners in reflection were Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Habermas?That Foucault's experiments in thought intersected with analyses of subjectivity, theories of knowledge, philosophies of experience? The outstanding contributions to this volume respond to these questions by leading its readers into an excavation of Foucault's philosophical curiosity and his unfinished road map to the good life" James Bernauer _______________________________________________________________
These essays provide important interpretations and analyze critical developments of the political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. They situate his thought in the contemporary intellectual landscape by comparing him with contemporaries such as Derrida, Rorty, and Rawls and show how elements of his philosophy may be usefully applied to key contemporary issues including colonization and decolonization, the nature of liberal democracy, and the concepts and critical utopian aspirations of political philosophy. Patton discusses Deleuze's notion of philosophy as the creation of concepts and shows how this may be helpful in understanding the nature of political concepts such as rights, justice, and democracy. Rather than merely commenting on or explaining Deleuze's thought, Patton offers a series of attempts to think with Deleuzian concepts in relation to other philosophers and other problems. His book represents a significant contribution to debates in contemporary political theory, continental philosophy, and Deleuzian studies. _______________________________________________________________ Jack Reynolds & James Chase, Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy (Acumen) Throughout much of the twentieth century, the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy has been one of disinterest, caution or hostility. Recent debates in philosophy have highlighted some of the similarities between the two approaches and even envisaged a post-continental and post-analytic philosophy. Opening with a history of key encounters between philosophers of opposing camps since the late-nineteenth century - from Frege and Husserl to Derrida and Searle - the book goes on to explore in detail the main methodological differences between the two approaches. This covers a very wide range of topics, from issues of style and clarity of exposition to formal methods arising from logic and probability theory. The final section presents a balanced critique of the two schools' approaches to key issues such as time, truth, subjectivity, mind and body, language and meaning, and ethics. "Analytic versus Continental" is the first sustained analysis of both approaches to philosophy, examining the limits and possibilities of each. It provides a clear overview of a much-disputed history and, in highlighting the strengths and weaknesses of both traditions, also offers future directions for both continental and analytic philosophy. ___________________________________________________________________
Andrew Schaap, Danielle Celermajer and Vrasidas Karalis, eds. Power, Judgment and Political Evil (Ashgate) "Power, Judgment and Political Evil" examines Hannah Arendt's ideas about thinking, acting and political responsibility. In an interview with Gunther Gaus for German television in 1964, Hannah Arendt insisted that she was not a philosopher but a political theorist. Disillusioned by the cooperation of German intellectuals with the Nazis, she said farewell to philosophy when she fled the country. This book investigates the relationship between the life of the mind and the life of action that preoccupied Arendt throughout her life. By joining in the conversation between Arendt and Gaus, each contributor probes her ideas about thinking and judging and their relation to responsibility, power and violence. An insightful and intelligent treatment of the work of Hannah Arendt, this book will appeal to a wide number of fields beyond political theory and philosophy, including law, literary studies, social anthropology and cultural history. _____________________________________________________________
Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher, Zizek and Politics: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh University Press) Slavoj Zizek was born in 1949 and is a Slovenian political philosopher, sociologist, and cultural critic best known for work with French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. Zizek writes on many topics, including the Iraq War, political correctness, globalization, human rights, and multiculturalism. His thought has received mixed receptions, from celebratory to deeply critical, but his politics are the element that most needs critical reassessment. This book introduces Zizek's primary areas of interest and the fields in which he has made his most influential contributions: ideology and political subjectivity; political totalitarianism; and contemporary culture. It explores political topics about which Zizek's interventions have been called partial or flawed, including liberalism, capitalism, the politics of religion, and political decisionism. A final section assesses Zizek and politics today. Each chapter considers the debates in which Zizek has intervened, his position, his positive contribution, and the limits of his position. _______________________________________________________
Henk van Leeuwen, Only a God Can Save Us: Heidegger, Poetic Imagination and the Modern Malaise (Common Ground) In the shadow of a looming global environmental catastrophe humanity is at an unprecedented crossroad where crucial and difficult decisions must be made about how we are to live. This book questions where the desire for certainty and mastery is taking us and argues that reliance on technology and information alone cannot avoid an ecological catastrophe. It attends to an existential poverty of spirit that, it suggests, is at the root of contemporary problems. It tackles the association between a metaphysical void, with its growing sense of meaninglessness, and the ecological predicament. While many find the consolations of traditional religion increasingly untenable, a hunger for a spiritual dimension in life persists. In a rare excursion, yet one which continues the uniquely human search for a transcendent ground of being, the book explores an unfamiliar kind of thinking which shelters and liberates the poetic imagination that counters the modern malaise. In a scholarly yet accessible account van Leeuwen uncovers from Martin Heidegger's middle/late philosophy an extraordinary pathway of transformative thinking where this imagination is nurtured. "I have found [this] book very stimulating and helpful. It has set me off on something of a Heidegger quest, as a way of seeking a deeper understanding of how humanity allowed itself to generate the climate crisis that will unfold this century and beyond" - Clive Hamilton ____________________________________________________________________
The Doppelganger or Double presents literature as the "double" of philosophy. There are historical reasons for this. The genesis of the Doppelganger is literature's response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity. The Doppelganger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism's assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality and human agency. This critique prefigures post-War extrapolations of the subject as decentred. From this perspective, the Doppelganger has a "family resemblance" to current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It becomes the emblematic subject of modernity. This is the first significant study on the Doppelganger's influence on philosophical thought. The Doppelganger emerges as a hidden and unexplored element both in conceptions of subjectivity and in philosophy's relation to literature. Vardoulakis demonstrates this by employing the Doppelganger to read literature philosophically and to read philosophy as literature. The Doppelganger then appears instrumental in the self-conception of both literature and philosophy. ___________________________________________________________________ James Williams, James Chase, Ed Mares and Jack Reynolds (eds), Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides (Continuum) This is an important and original collection of essays examining the relationship between Analytic and Continental philosophy. Analytic and Continental philosophy have become increasingly specialised and differentiated fields of endeavour. This important collection of essays details some of the more significant methodological and philosophical differences that have separated the two traditions, as well as examining the manner in which received understandings of the divide are being challenged by certain thinkers whose work might best be described as post-analytic and meta-continental. Together these essays offer a well-defined sense of the field, of its once dominant distinctions and of some of the most productive new areas generating influential ideas and controversy. In an attempt to get to the bottom of precisely what it is that separates the analytic and continental traditions, the essays in this volume compare and contrast them on certain issues, including truth, time and subjectivity. The book engages with a range of key thinkers from phenomenology, post-structuralism, analytic philosophy and post-analytic philosophy, examines the strengths and weaknesses of each tradition, and ultimately encourages enhanced understanding, dialogue and even rapprochement between these sometimes antagonistic adversaries. ________________________________________________________
Magdalena Zolkos, Reconciling Community and Subjective Life: Trauma Testimony As Political Theorizing in the Work of Jean Amery and Imre Kertesz (Continuum) This title examines issues of transitional justice and reconciliation from a critical, political theory perspective rarely applied in this area of study. This is an examination of the difficult interplay between the collective pursuit of justice and reconciliation on one hand and the individual subjective experience of trauma on the other, proposing that it be thought as a potentially productive tension. To do so, Zolkos looks at how texts from Jean Amery and Imre Kertesz speak to the question of the politics of the past and, ultimately, to the post-foundational notions of community and justice. The text works with issues of reconciliation at a theoretical level that bring together insights from political theory, trauma studies, holocaust studies, history and literary theory. The book has the greatest relevance for the critical reconciliation theory, as well as for those working on the concept of community within the continental tradition. _______________________________________________________________________
Books Published in 2009
Jennifer Ang Mei Sze, Sartre and the Moral Limits of War and Terrorism (Routledge) Reinterpreting Sartre’s main methodologies and removing Hegelian dialectics from his notion of violence, this book demolishes the supposed hostile intersubjective relations that characterizes all concrete relations. Furthering this stance, it reconstructs an interpretation of the "violent Sartre" and crafts an alternative response: one that rejects terrorist tactics, preemptive war and Western hegemony through democratization. Based on the latest debate on Sartre’s works on ethics and politics, this project examines the relevancy and new importance they hold for contemporary concerns -- the reactionary nature of terrorism, the extremity of counter-violence, and limitations of democratization efforts -- all claiming to be justified in the name of "freedom" and "liberation." While it is the concern over the "terrorist’" nature of his writings that dominates the current debate, this project starts from the premise that it is as important to ask why violence is unjustified when it can put an end to a situation that disparages humanity. In arguing for the need for moral limitations to all violent struggles, and the need for seeing others as ends-for-themselves, it proceeds to outline a response based on existential humanist ethics that can reaffirm our moral compass. _______________________________________________
Andrew Benjamin and Charles Rice (eds) Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity (re:press) Walter Benjamin is universally recognised as one of the key thinkers of modernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theology and law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet the problem of architecture in and for Benjamin's work remains relatively underexamined. Does Benjamin's project have an architecture and, if so, how does this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us? In what ways are Benjamin's writings centrally caught up with architectural concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How can Benjamin's theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of our own present. __________________________________________________________________________
Moira Gatens (ed), Feminist Interpretations of Benedict Spinoza (Pennsylvania State UP) This volume brings together international scholars working at the intersection of Spinoza studies and critical and feminist philosophy. It is the first book-length study dedicated to the re-reading of Spinoza's ethical and theologico-political works from a feminist perspective. The twelve outstanding chapters range over the entire field of Spinoza's writings—metaphysical, political, theological, ethical, and psychological—drawing out the ways in which his philosophy presents a rich resource for the reconceptualization of friendship, sexuality, politics, and ethics in contemporary life. The clear and accessible Introduction offers a historical sketch of Spinoza's life and intellectual context and indicates how Spinoza s philosophy might be seen as a rich cultural resource today. Topics treated here include the mind-body problem and its relation to the sex-gender distinction; relational autonomy; the nature of love and friendship; sexuality and normative morality; free will and determinism and their relation to Christian theology; imagination and recognition between the sexes; emotion and the body; and power, imagination, and political sovereignty. The essays engage in a rich and challenging conversation that opens new paths for feminist research. Contributors, besides the editor, are Aurelia Armstrong, Sarah Donovan, Paola Grassi, Luce Irigaray, Susan James, Genevieve Lloyd, Alexandre Matheron, Heidi Ravven, Amelie Rorty, and David West. _____________________________________________________
The first edition of The Mind and its Discontents was a powerful analysis of how, as a society, we view mental illness. In the ten years since the first edition, there has been a growing interest in the philosophy of psychiatry, and a new edition of this text is more timely and important than ever. InThe Mind and its Discontents, Grant Gillett argues that an understanding of mental illness requires more than just a study of biological models of mental processes and pathologies. As intensely social animals, he argues, we need to look for the causes of human mental disorders in our interactions with others; in social rule-following and its role in the organization of mental content; in the power relations embedded within social structures and cultural norms; in the way that our mental life is inscribed by a cumulative life of encounters with others. Drawing upon work from within the philosophy of mind, epistemology, post-modern continental philosophy, and philosophy of language, he tries to elucidate the nature of psychiatric phenomena involving disorders of thought, perception, emotion, moral sense, and action. Within this framework, a series of chapters analyze important psychiatric disorders, such as depression, attention deficiency, autism, schizophrenia, and anorexia. Along the way, Gillett explores the nature of memory and identity; of hysteria and what constitutes rational behavior, and of what causes us to lavel someone a psychopath or deviant. ____________________________________________________
Anna Hickey-Moody, Unimaginable Bodies: Intellectual Disability, Performance and Becoming (Sense Publishers) Unimaginable Bodies radically resituates academic discussions of intellectual disability. Through building relationships between philosophy, cultural studies and communities of integrated dance theatre practice, Anna Hickey-Moody argues that dance theatre devised with and performed by young people with and without intellectual disability, can reframe the ways in which bodies with intellectual disability are known. This proposition is considered in terms of classic philosophical ideas of how we think the mind and body, as Hickey-Moody argues that dance theatre performed by young people with and without intellectual disability creates a context in which the intellectually disabled body is understood in terms other than those that pre-suppose a Cartesian mind-body dualism. Taking up the writings of Spinoza and Deleuze and Guattari, Hickey-Moody critiques aspects of medical discourses of intellectual disability, arguing that Cartesian methods for thinking about the body are recreated within these discourses. Further, she shows that Cartesian ways of conceiving corporeality can be traced through select studies of the social construction of intellectual disability. The argument for theorising corporeality and embodied knowledge that Hickey-Moody constructs is a philosophical interpretation of the processes of knowledge production and subjectification that occur in integrated dance theatre. Knowledge produced within integrated dance theatre is translated into thought in order to explore the affective nature of performance texts. This book is essential reading for those interested in theories of embodiment, disability studies and dance. __________________________________________________ Graham Jones and Jon Roffe (eds), Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage (Edinburgh University Press) The philosophy of Gilles Deleuze is increasingly gaining the prestige that its astonishing inventiveness calls for in the Anglo-American theoretical context. His wide-ranging works on the history of philosophy, cinema, painting, literature and politics are being taken up and put to work across disciplinary divides and in interesting and surprising ways. However, the backbone of Deleuze's philosophy - the many and varied sources from which he draws the material for his conceptual innovation - has until now remained relatively obscure and unexplored. This book takes as its goal the examination of this rich theoretical background. Presenting essays by a range of the world's foremost Deleuze scholars, and a number of up and coming theorists of his work, the book is composed of in-depth analyses of the key figures in Deleuze's lineage whose significance - as a result of either their obscurity or the complexity of their place in the Deleuzean text - has not previously been well understood. This work will prove indispensable to students and scholars seeking to understand the context from which Deleuze's ideas emerge.Included are essays on Deleuze's relationship to figures as varied as Marx, Simondon, Wronski, Hegel, Hume, Maimon, Ruyer, Kant, Heidegger, Husserl, Reimann, Leibniz, Bergson and Freud. "Written by the most respected and original scholars in the field, this book will prove essential reading for all those who want to understand in a clear, accessible and more nuanced way Deleuze's complex and multi-faceted relation to key (but sometimes forgotten) figures in the history of philosophy. I cannot imagine a better introduction to Deleuze as philosopher par excellence than this superb collection". --Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University _______________________________________________________________
Shane Mackinlay, Interpreting Excess: Jean-Luc Marion, Saturated Phenomena and Hermeneutics (Fordham) Jean-Luc Marion's theory of saturated phenomena is one of the most exciting developments in phenomenology in recent decades. It opens up new possibilities for understanding phenomena by beginning from rich and complex examples such as revelation and works of art. Rather than being curiosities or exceptions, these "excessive" or "saturated" phenomena are, in Marion's view, paradigms. He understands more straightforward phenomena, such as the objects of the natural sciences, as reduced and impoverished versions of the excess given in saturated phenomena.Interpreting Excess is a systematic and comprehensive study of Marion's texts on saturated phenomena and their place in his wider phenomenology of givenness, tracing both his theory and his examples across a wide range of texts spanning three decades.The author argues that a rich hermeneutics is implicit in Marion's examples of saturated phenomena but is not set out in his theory. This hermeneutics makes clear that attempts to overthrow the much-criticized sovereignty of the Cartesian ego will remain unsuccessful if they simply reverse the subject-object relation by speaking of phenomena imposing themselves with an overwhelming givenness on a recipient. Instead, phenomena should be understood as appearing in a hermeneutic space already opened by a subject's active reception. Thus, a phenomenon's appearing depends not only on its givenness but also on the way it is interpreted by the receiving subject. All phenomenology is, therefore, necessarily hermeneutic. Interpreting Excess provides an indispensable guide for any study of Marion's saturated phenomena. It is also a significant contribution to ongoing debates about philosophical ways of thinking about God, the relation between hermeneutics and phenomenology, and philosophy "after the subject." ______________________________________________________
Giorgio Agamben has gained widespread popularity in recent years for his rethinking of radical politics and his approach to metaphysics and language. However, the extraordinary breadth of historical, legal and philosophical sources which contribute to the complexity and depth of Agamben's thinking can also make his work intimidating. Covering the full range of Agamben's work, this critical introduction outlines Agamben's key concerns: metaphysics, language and potentiality, aesthetics and poetics, sovereignty, law and biopolitics, ethics and testimony, and his powerful vision of post-historical humanity. Highlighting the novelty of Agamben's approach while also situating it in relation to the work of other continental thinkers, "The Philosophy of Agamben" presents a clear and engaging introduction to the work of this original and influential thinker. "Mills has written an important, original book that will transform the received understanding of Agamben's work in the humanities and social sciences. Her unapologetically philosophical interpretation is required reading for those who wish to assess the true impact and significance of Agamben's interventions in politics, aesthetics and culture." - Paul Fletcher, Lancaster University _______________________________________________________
This monograph develops a unique approach to thinking about the transformative power of literature by drawing upon the much-neglected concept of experience in Foucault's work. For Foucault, an 'experience book' is a book which transforms our experience by acting on us in a particular way. In this book, Timothy O'Leary develops a unique approach to thinking about the transformative power of literature by drawing upon this often neglected concept and applying it to literary texts. Starting from the premise that works of literature are capable of having a profound effect on their audiences, he suggests a way of understanding how these effects are produced.Offering extended analyses of a range of Irish writers, including Swift, Yeats, Joyce, Beckett, Friel and Heaney, O'Leary draws on Foucault's concept of experience as well as the work of Plato, Aristotle, Dewey and Deleuze and recent debates about literature and ethics. Of interest to readers in both philosophy and literature, this study offers new insights into Foucault's mature philosophy and an improved understanding of what it is to read and be affected by a work of fiction. ___________________________________________________________ Ashley Woodward, Nihilism in Postmodernity: Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo (The Davies Group, 2009) Nihilism in Postmodernity is an exploration of the nature of the problem of meaninglessness in the contemporary world through the philosophical traditions of nihilism and postmodernism. The author traces the advent of modern nihilism in the works of Nietzsche, Sartre, and Heidegger, before detailing the postmodern transformation of nihilism in the works of three major postmodern thinkers: Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Vattimo. He presents a qualified defense of their positions, arguing that while there is much under-appreciated value in their responses to nihilism, they fail to address adequately the problem of contingency in contemporary life. Drawing on the critical encounters with nihilism in both existentialist and postmodern traditions, the author concludes by staking out future directions for combating meaninglessness. "In this comprehensive and deep reflection on the problem of nihilism and postmodernity, Woodward offers a convincing and important thesis on the relations of postmodern life and thought to nihilism. He avoids the easy equation of postmodernism with nihilism and instead relies on careful interpretations of Nietzsche, Sartre, Heidegger, Baudrillard, Vattimo and Lyotard to demonstrate that these thinkers combine to offer not only one of the deepest diagnoses of our contemporary condition but also subtle and perhaps essential models for how to live beyond it. This book is proof not only of the high scholarly values of modern philosophical research, but also of its relevance and urgency." -James Williams, University of Dundee _______________________________________________________________________
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| Last Updated ( Saturday, 31 July 2010 00:07 ) |
Andrew Benjamin, Of Jews and Animals (Edinburgh University Press)
Dimitris Vardoulakis, The Doppelgänger: Literature's Philosophy (Fordham)
Grant Gillett, The Mind and its Discontents, 2nd Edition (Oxford UP)
Catherine Mills, The Philosophy of Agamben (Acumen, 2009)
Timothy O'Leary, Foucault and Fiction: The Experience Book (Continuum)
