Product Description: A reappraisal of deconstruction from one of its leading commentators, focusing on the themes of force and violence. In this book, Rodolphe Gasché returns to some of the founding texts of deconstruction to propose a new and broader way of understanding it—not as an operation or method to reach an elusive outside, or beyond, of metaphysics, but as something that takes place within it...read more

Product Description: Rodolphe Gasché’s commentary on Deleuze and Guattari’s last book, What Is Philosophy?, homes in on what the two thinkers define as philosophy in distinction from the sciences and the arts and what it is that they understand themselves to have done while doing philosophy...read more

Product Description: This book investigates what Bataille, in "The Pineal Eye," calls mythological representation: the mythological anthropology with which this unusual thinker wished to outflank and undo scientific (and philosophical) anthropology. Gasché probes that anthropology by situating Bataille's thought with respect to the quatrumvirate of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud...read more

Product Description: What exactly does "Europe" mean for philosophy today? Putting aside both Eurocentrism and anti-Eurocentrism, Gasché returns to the old name "Europe" to examine it as a concept or idea in the work of four philosophers from the phenomenological tradition: Husserl, Heidegger, Patocka, and Derrida...read more

Product Description: The Honor of Thinking investigates the limits of criticism, theory, and philosophy in light of what Martin Heidegger and French post-Heideggerian philosophers have established about the nature and tasks of thinking. In addition to in-depth analyses of Walter Benjamin's conception of critique―and in particular the relation of critique to ethics, as well as alternative models of criticism (such as Heidegger's notion of "Auseinandersetzung," and Derridean deconstruction)―this book contains essays on the notion of theory from the Greeks and the early German Romantics to the contemporary use of this notion in literary studies...read more

Product Description: Against the assumption that aesthetic form relates to a harmonious arrangement of parts into a beautiful whole, this book argues that reason is the real theme of the Critique of Judgment as of the two earlier Critiques. Since aesthetic judgment of the beautiful becomes possible only when the mind is confronted with things of nature, for which no determined concepts of understanding are available, aesthetic judgment is involved in an epistemological or, rather, para-epistemological task...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Product Description: Of Minimal Things is an exploration and reassessment of the philosophical notion of relation. In contrast to the scholastic, ontological conception of relation as a thing of diminished being, this book views relation as the minimal and elemental theme and structure of philosophy...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: One of the most knowledgeable and provocative explicators of Paul de Man's writings, Rodolphe Gasché, a philosopher by training, demonstrates for the first time the systematic coherence of the critic's work, insisting that de Man continues to merit close attention despite his notoriously difficult and obscure style...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

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Deconstruction is no game of mirrors, revealing the text as a play of surface against surface. Its more radical philosophical effort is to get behind the mirror and question the very nature of reflection. "The Tain of the Mirror" (tain names the tinfoil, or lusterless back of the mirror) explores that gritty surface without which no reflection would be possible. Gasche does what no one has done before in many discussions of Derrida, namely to tie his work in an authoritative way to its origins in the history of the criticism of reflexivity.