Bøker i Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics-serien

In this accessible collection of short meditations on various topics, Blumenberg works as a detective of ideas scouring the periphery of intellectual and philosophical history for clues-metaphors, gestures, anecdotes-essential to grasping human finitude.

"The Spirit of Utopia", written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in this version is presented for the first time in English translation.

Over the past decade, radical questioning of the grounds of Western epistemology has revealed that some antinomies of the aesthetic experience can be viewed as a general, yet necessarily open, model for human understanding. This book is a rigorous explication de texte of a central text for this thesis, Kant's Analytic of the Sublime.

This is a collection of twenty-two essays by an eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist that appeared between 1971 and 1992. The book interrogates the theory and practice of representation as it is carried out by both linguistic and graphic signs, and thus the complex relation between language and image, between perception and conception.

This collection of writings by Jean-Luc Nancy, the renowned French critic and poet, delves into the history of philosophy to locate a fundamentally poetic modus operandi there. The book represents a daring mixture of Nancy's philosophical essays, writings about artworks, and artwork of his own.

This is a succinct and elegant argument for the specificity of a philosophy of tragedy, as opposed to a poetics of tragedy espoused by Aristotle.

The essays collected here question the growing tendency to orient research and teaching towards a programmable and profitable end. The volume is therefore invaluable for the light it throws upon an underappreciated aspect of Derrida's own engagement, both philosophical and political, in struggles against the stifling of philosophical research and teaching.

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.

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.

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.

"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.

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.

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.

This is an experiment in critical writing that both analyses and performs certain questions about the body as an "artificial" construction. The book deals with the mechanical (e.g., a mechanical prosthesis like an artificial leg) in that most humanistic of discourses, the artistic.

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.

This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary work.

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.

Philosopher, literary critic, translator, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading intellectual figures in France. This volume of six essays deals with the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, particularly the role of mimesis in a metaphysics of representation.

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 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.

This first book-length study of what Heidegger called "thinking poetics" expounds the sense of language from the perspective of fundamental ontology. It is based on readings of the pertinent chapters of Being and Time, the lectures on Hoelderlin, "The Origin of the Work of Art," and On the Way to Language.

In this stimulating and often startling book, Derrida examines the various "resistances" to analysis-conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself. The book comprises three essays devoted to Freud, Lacan, and Foucault.

This study of four major poets--Mallarme, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Holderlin--examines the self-reflexivity of modern poetry, exploring questions concerning what it means for a poem to be "about" its own process of saying.

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."

In this book, Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism.

In "The Open", contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the "human" has been thought of as either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether.

This volume constitutes the largest collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben hitherto published in any language. The essays consider several figures in the history of philosophy; the relation of linguistic and metaphysical categories; messianism in Islamic, Jewish, and Christian theology; and the state and future of contemporary politics.