Product Description: What if political rhetoric is unavoidable, an irreducible part of politics itself? In contrast to the familiar denunciations of political horse-trading, grandstanding, and corporate manipulation from those lamenting the crisis in liberal democracy, this book argues that the "politics of politics," usually associated with rhetoric and sophistry, is, like it or not, part of politics from the start...read more

Following on from The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, this book extends Jacques Derrida’s exploration of the connections between animality and sovereignty.  In this second year of the seminar, originally presented in 2002–2003 as the last course he would give before his death, Derrida focuses on two markedly different texts: Heidegger’s 1929–1930 course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. As he moves back and forth between the two works, Derrida pursuesthe relations between solitude, insularity, world, violence, boredom and death as they supposedly affect humans and animals in different ways. Hitherto unnoticed or underappreciated aspects of Robinson Crusoe are brought out in strikingly original readings of questions such as Crusoe’s belief in ghosts, his learning to pray, his parrot Poll, and his reinvention of the wheel. Crusoe’s terror of being buried alive or swallowed alive by beasts or cannibals gives rise to a rich and provocative reflection on death, burial, and cremation, in part provoked by a meditation on the death of Derrida’s friend Maurice Blanchot.  Throughout, these readings are juxtaposed with interpretations of Heidegger's concepts of world and finitude to produce a distinctively Derridean account that will continue to surprise his readers.

Product Description: Gathers Bennington's essays since the death of his friend Jacques Derrida in 2004. These 16 continue the work of elucidating Derrida's difficult and complex thought, often with reference to his persistent interrogation of the concepts of life and death, mourning and melancholia, and what he sometimes calls 'half-mourning'...read more

Product Description: The second volume in the series Jean-François Lyotard―Writings on Contemporary Art and Artists introduces forty-two poetical reflections and comments on the work of the well-known Californian painter Sam Francis (1923–1994). This new edition reprints the English text, which is no longer available, with the previously unpublished French original on facing pages...read more

This challenging study of the eighteenth-century French novel engages with recent post-structuralist thought to present a more theoretical than historical approach to the genre. Dr Bennington's focus of interest is sententiousness - maxims, aphorisms, generalising truth-claims of all sorts - in texts of narrative fiction. He exposes the inadequacy of both traditional and more modem analyses which have attempted to separate sententious elements from fictional contexts thereby underestimating the function of sententiousness to lay down the law, in both descriptive and prescriptive senses of the term. The author's approach to his chosen texts is pragmatic rather than formal, reading the eighteenth-century novel of worldliness in the light of the discourse of pedagogy, and exploring the relationship of the fictional and political in the work of Rousseau and Sade. The upshot of this investigation demonstrates both how the law is laid down in fiction and how fiction undermines the law which attempts to control it.

Product Description: A collection of occasional pieces and interviews, in English and French, on philosophy, literature, art, architecture and politics.

Product Description: Rare book: Price in USD

Product Description: Something of a historical event, this book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Hélène Cixous, is a brief but densely layered account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia, an experience that ends with the unexpected turn of grieving for what is lost...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: In this investigation of Virginia Woolf's narrative strategies Daniel Ferrer shows how her writing insistently raises the question of its origins and its connection with madness and suicide. This book should be of interest to students and lecturers of twentieth century English literature, literary theory and women's studies...read more