Bøker i Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics-serien

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.

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.

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.

Arguing that Western power is both "government" and "glory," this book reveals the "theological-economic" paradigm at the origin of several of the most important components of modern politics and illuminates the function of consent and the media in today's democracies.

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.

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

This book consists of a series of essays that all turn around questions of the address of speech or writing. They argue and demonstrate that meaning is not just a matter of the active intention of a subject (for example, speaker, writer, or other signatory of a meaningful act), but also of its reception at another's address.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Generally considered the least lively and most bleak of casts, gray is the taint of vagueness and uncertainty. This book situates itself in a region beyond criticism but this side of literature, characterized by forgetting and finitude, and investigating important yet seemingly inaccessible "gray areas" in texts as old as those of Homer, and as recent as those of Beckett.

The eminent scholar and critic Louis Marin considered the paintings and the writings of Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) an enduring source of inspiration, and he returned to Poussin again and again over the years. The ten major essays in this volume constitute his definitive statement on the painter who inspired his most eloquent and probing commentary. 17 illustrations.

The Sarah Kofman Reader is a comprehensive anthology of significant essays and book excerpts by the postwar French philosopher and theorist Sarah Kofman (1934-1994).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Housing Problems provides fresh readings of major writers, Goethe, Walpole, Freud, Heidegger, Poe, H.D., and Oppen, by bringing together the fields of literature, philosophy and architecture.

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.

Open Secrets contests the dominant influences of utilitarianism, expressive individualism, and imperatives to self-improvement by examining a series of texts in which "nothing happens" and arguing that these works, far from hiding from narrative demands, make an open secret of fulfilled experience and yield a revelation without insistence or rhetorical underscoring.

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.

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.

W.H. Auden and Hannah Arendt belonged to a generation that experienced the catastrophic events of the mid-20th century, and they both sought to respond to the enormity of the novel phenomena they witnessed. "Regions of Sorrow" explores the remarkable affinity between their works.

Ranging over all George Eliot's fiction and drawing as well on her letters, essays, and translations, in this book the distinguished critic Neil Hertz documents Eliot's lifelong questioning of the nature of authorship and of what it might mean, in the language of one of her early letters, for her "not simply to be, but to utter."

This volume reflects Jacques Derrida's engagement in the late 1970s with French political debates on the teaching of philosophy and the reform of the French university system.

Traces, a masterwork of twentieth-century philosophy, is the most modest and beautiful proof of Bloch's utopian hermeneutics, taking as its source and its result the simplest, most familiar and yet most striking stories and anecdotes.

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.