Browse

The Becoming of the Body: Contemporary Women's Writing in French

Amaleena Damlé

Following a long tradition of objectification, twentieth-century French feminism has often sought to liberate the female body from the confines of patriarchal logos and to inscribe its rhythms in ... More

Following a long tradition of objectification, twentieth-century French feminism has often sought to liberate the female body from the confines of patriarchal logos and to inscribe its rhythms in writing. But how has the promotion of ‘women’s writing’ in such thought and literature evolved in the years preceding and following the turn of the millennium? What sorts of bodily questions and problems do contemporary female writers evoke? How are traditional conceptions of the boundaries of the female body contested, exceeded or transformed? And how do contemporary philosophical discourses correspond to the ways that literary authors conceptualize, and write, the female body? This book addresses such questions by exploring the intersections between a range of contemporary texts, including the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, recent feminist and queer thought, and contemporary writers Amélie Nothomb, Ananda Devi, Marie Darrieussecq and Nina Bouraoui. Revealing an emphasis on the becoming of the body in recent culture, it illuminates the implications of such a concept for a feminist politics, for women’s writing and for the cultural signification of contemporary female corporeality.Less

Contemporary Encounters with Ancient Metaphysics

Abraham Jacob Greenstine and Ryan J. Johnson (eds)

This volume is the world’s first exploration of a series of encounters between ancient philosophical texts and contemporary continental metaphysics. The ancient texts under consideration originated ... More

This volume is the world’s first exploration of a series of encounters between ancient philosophical texts and contemporary continental metaphysics. The ancient texts under consideration originated in the greater Mediterranean, and in particular the Greek and Roman worlds, from the 6th-century B.C.E. to the end of antiquity, around the 4th-century C.E. More specifically, our volume is organized by three sites of engagement with the ancient world: (1) Plato and the Academy, (2) Aristotle and the Lyceum, and (3) and the schools of the Epicureans, Skeptics, Stoics, and Neo-Platonists. On the other side of the engagement, the tradition of contemporary continental metaphysics stretches from Deleuze’s self-nomination as a “pur métaphysicien,” through the renewed attention to ontology in thinkers such as Agamben and Badiou, up to the various New Materialisms and Speculative Realisms that populate the 21st-century continental landscape.   Through this collection of resonating voices and interlocking ideas, this volume expresses the profusion of new continental approaches to classic problems of metaphysics. These essays do not merely rehearse overlooked contemporary interpretations of the ancients, but do something entirely original: to reconsider what it means to think, with the ancients, about the nature of things. At their most ambitious, these essays even “do metaphysics,” using ancient philosophers as collaborators to make new contributions to contemporary problems. The questions of metaphysics persist through changing cultural tastes, and they remain because they constantly demand our response. This volume confronts this demand and responds with a new collection of classically-informed yet progressive-minded philosophical encounters.Less

Continental Realism and Its Discontents

Marie-Eve Morin (ed.)

A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approaches and traditions ranging from transcendental and speculative idealism to phenomenology and ... More

A new realist movement in continental philosophy has emerged to challenge philosophical approaches and traditions ranging from transcendental and speculative idealism to phenomenology and deconstruction for failing to do justice to the real world as it is ‘in itself’, that is, as independent of the structures of human consciousness, experience, and language. This volume presents a collection of essays that take up the challenge of realism from a variety of historical and contemporary philosophical perspectives. This volume includes essays that engage the fundamental presuppositions and conclusions of this new realism by turning to the writings of seminal figures in the history of philosophy, including Kant, Schelling, and others. Also included are essays that challenge anti-realist readings of Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Nancy. Finally, several essays in this volume propose alternative ways of understanding realism through careful readings of key figures in German idealism, pessimism, phenomenology, existentialism, feminism, and deconstruction.Less

The Contingency of Necessity: Reason and God as Matters of Fact

Tyler Tritten

This book shows how all necessity – logical, mathematical, physical, transcendental or metaphysical - is consequent. It argues that reason and God, although necessary with respect to essence, are, ... More

This book shows how all necessity – logical, mathematical, physical, transcendental or metaphysical - is consequent. It argues that reason and God, although necessary with respect to essence, are, with respect to existence, eternal contingencies. The first chapter critically reverses Meillasssoux’s claim for the necessity of contingency. The second chapter positively outlines the possibility of contingent necessity by means of Boutroux’s neglected book The Contingency of the Laws of Nature. The third chapter further grounds this possibility by means of the early Schelling’s reading of Plato’s Timaeus. Chapters four and five turn to Schelling’s late philosophy, detailing an ontology that treats reason and God as matters of fact rather than as truths of reason. Chapter six draws parallels and differences between Schelling’s approach and the “passing by” of the last God in Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy. The book’s final chapter argues for a new typology for philosophical theology, theomonism, and how this conception can provide a contemporary response to the Euthyphro Dilemma. While some authors, e.g. Meillassoux and Kearney, have recently argued for a possible God who does not exist now but may in the future, this book addresses an unexplored alternative, a contingent God that eternally exists but could have eternally never existed.Less

Deleuze and the Animal

Colin Gardner and Patricia MacCormack (eds)

Human-animal studies and the age of the anthropocene are prevalent across many disciplines at this time and this book is among the first to explore the usefulness of Deleuze for extensions and ... More

Human-animal studies and the age of the anthropocene are prevalent across many disciplines at this time and this book is among the first to explore the usefulness of Deleuze for extensions and debates in these fields which only Deleuzian understandings of human subjectivity can provide. While Deleuzian studies has always been critical of the structure and status of human subjectivity, utilizing Deleuze in discussions of the contentious and unstable concept of the animal underlines the utility of his work for altering both theories and practices from art to philosophy to everyday activism. This book collects essays by established scholars in the field of Deleuze studies, and new scholars, to show not only the diversity of Deleuze’s applicability to human-animal studies but to call into question what we mean by the seemingly simple idea of ‘the animal’. Through 16 chapters Deleuze’s entire oeuvre is used in analysing television, film, music, art, drunkenness, mourning, virtual technology, protest, activism, animal rights and abolition. Each chapter questions the premise of the animal as a discrete, easily understood concept and thereby simultaneously places the human as animal and critiques the centrality of the human. The book aims to create new questions in reference to what the age of the anthropocene means by ‘animal’ as much as to analyse and explore examples of the unclear boundaries between human and animal.Less

Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence

Daniel Colucciello Barber

Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, because it vigorously rejects every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. This book argues against such a ... More

Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence, because it vigorously rejects every appeal to the beyond, is often presumed to be indifferent to the concerns of religion. This book argues against such a presumption. It does so, first of all, by emphasising how both Deleuze’s thought and the notion of religion are motivated by a demand to create new modes of existence, or to imagine and enact a future that would substantively break with the present configuration of being. If Deleuze’s thought and the notion of religion intersect in this regard, then their divergence must be located elsewhere, namely in the distinction between immanence and transcendence. The book thus argues that the enemy of Deleuze’s thought is not religion in general but instead the specific operation of transcendence. Furthermore, it argues that since Deleuze’s thought is not simply anti-religious, it cannot be identified with secularism. Along these lines, the book shows how Deleuzian immanence is able both to oppose religious transcendence and to enter an allliance with immanent accounts of the name of God. The effect of this is to suspend the paralysing debate between religion and the secular in order to attend to the ways in which immanence – whether “religious” or “secular” – is able to break with the present and to create the future.Less

The Deleuze-Lucretius Encounter

Ryan J. Johnson

This book explores how Deleuze's thought was shaped by Lucretian atomism — a formative but often-ignored influence from ancient philosophy. More than any other 20th-century philosopher, Gilles ... More

This book explores how Deleuze's thought was shaped by Lucretian atomism — a formative but often-ignored influence from ancient philosophy. More than any other 20th-century philosopher, Gilles Deleuze considers himself an apprentice to the history of philosophy. But scholarship has ignored one of the more formative influences on Deleuze: Lucretian atomism. Deleuze's encounter with Lucretius sparked a way of thinking that resonates throughout all his writings: from immanent ontology to affirmative ethics, from dynamic materialism to the generation of thought itself. Filling a significant gap in Deleuze Studies, this book tells the story of the Deleuze-Lucretius encounter that begins and ends with a powerful claim: Lucretian atomism produced Deleuzianism.Less

Diagrammatic Immanence: Category Theory and Philosophy

Rocco "Gangle

This book integrates insights from Spinoza’s metaphysics, Peirce’s semiotic theory and Deleuze’s philosophy of difference in conjunction with the formal operations of category theory. Spinoza, Peirce ... More

This book integrates insights from Spinoza’s metaphysics, Peirce’s semiotic theory and Deleuze’s philosophy of difference in conjunction with the formal operations of category theory. Spinoza, Peirce and Deleuze are all, in different ways, philosophers of immanence. The methodological questions raised by a commitment to immanence in their respective philosophies are addressed by author Rocco Gangle in terms of diagrammatic practices understood in a highly general sense. The link between philosophical immanence and diagrammatic practice is established by demonstrating with the tools of category theory how diagrams may be used both as tools and as objects of philosophical inquiry via diagrammatic reasoning. Category theory reveals deep structural connections among logic, topology and diverse other areas of mathematics, and it provides constructive and rigorous concepts for investigating how diagrams work in a variety of contexts. Gangle offers a basic introduction to the relevant methods of category theory from a philosophical and diagrammatic perspective that allows philosophers with little or no mathematical training to come to grips with this important field. This coordination of immanent metaphysics, diagrammatic method and category theoretical mathematics opens a new horizon for contemporary thought.Less

The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead

Leemon B. McHenry

What kinds of things are events? Battles, explosions, accidents, crashes, rock concerts would be typical examples of events and these would be reinforced in the way we speak about the world. Events ... More

What kinds of things are events? Battles, explosions, accidents, crashes, rock concerts would be typical examples of events and these would be reinforced in the way we speak about the world. Events or actions function linguistically as verbs and adverbs. Philosophers following Aristotle have claimed that events are dependent on substances such as physical objects and persons. But with the advances of modern physics, some philosophers and physicists have argued that events are the basic entities of reality and what we perceive as physical bodies are just very long events spread out in space-time. In other words, everything turns out to be events. This view, no doubt, radically revises our ordinary common sense view of reality, but as our event theorists argue common sense is out of touch with advancing science. In The Event Universe: The Revisionary Metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, Leemon McHenry argues that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a more adequate basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. He investigates the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compares Whitehead’s theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as another key proponent of this theory, W. V. Quine. In this manner, McHenry defends the naturalized and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.Less

Foucault's Archaeology: Science and Transformation

David Webb

The book proposes that Foucault's archaeology is a direct response to the predicament for thought in modernity that he described in the closing chapters of The Order of Things, and that science and ... More

The book proposes that Foucault's archaeology is a direct response to the predicament for thought in modernity that he described in the closing chapters of The Order of Things, and that science and mathematics are fundamental to the possibility of this response. Centered around the figure of man, Foucault described thinking in modernity as split between empirical and transcendental forms of enquiry, neither of which is able to secure a foundation. To understand how Foucault responds to this situation, the book sets out a series of key ideas in the work of Gaston Bachelard, Jean Cavaillès, and Michel Serres that pave the way for Foucault's account of the historical character of the formal conditions of knowledge. In this way, Foucault's conception of discourse, and above all of the historical a priori, can be understood against the background of what he calls the mathematical a priori. The book also provides an analysis of what Foucault calls ‘temporal dispersion’, tracing this idea back to his critique of Kant. Employing these ideas, the book goes on to provide a detailed commentary on Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge.Less

Garcian Meditations: The Dialectics of Persistence in Form and Object

Jon Cogburn

Tristan Garcia holds that what makes something some thing is its resistance to reductionism, the attempt to explain it in terms of its constituents and relations to other things. For Garcia, ... More

Tristan Garcia holds that what makes something some thing is its resistance to reductionism, the attempt to explain it in terms of its constituents and relations to other things. For Garcia, something just is the differentiation between those things that constitute it and the things that it helps constitute. Tristan Garcia and the Dialectics of Persistence situates Garcia’s systematic unfolding of this idea via both classical thinkers such as Aristotle, Hegel, Heidegger, and Kant as well as modern and contemporary luminaries in analytic and continental philosophy such as A.J. Ayer, Alain Badiou, Jacque Derrida, Graham Harman, Paul Livingston, John McDowell, W.V.O. Quine, and Graham Priest. The metaphysics, differential ontology, and militant anti-reductionism from Book I of Form and Object are first charitably evaluated by the way Garcia dialectically moves through a series of seemingly incompatible oppositions concerning: substance and process, analysis and dialectic, simple and whole, and discovery and creation. After explicating Garcia’s general ontology, some of the regional ontologies of Book II, those involving intensity (events, time, life, goodness, truth, and beauty) and Garcia’s own tragic aporetic dialectics (gender, adolescence, and death), are presented. Tristan Garcia and the Dialectics of Persistence bridges analytic and continental philosophy and is moreover accessible to devotes of both traditions. The marriage of analytic and continental philosophy gives rise to original argumentation, including a new understanding of the process philosophical route to metaphysical holism, a new enclosure paradox concerning metaphysical explanation, and a new argument for the existence of an empty set.Less

Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology

Arne De Boever, Shirley S. Y. Murray, and Jon Roffe (eds)

Gilbert Simondon's work has recently come to prominence in America and around the Anglophone world, having been of great importance in France for many years. This collection of essays presents the ... More

Gilbert Simondon's work has recently come to prominence in America and around the Anglophone world, having been of great importance in France for many years. This collection of essays presents the first sustained exploration of Simondon's work to be published in English. Including an essay by Simondon himself, the book outlines the central tenets of Simondon's thought, the implication of his thought for numerous disciplines and his relationship to other thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Canguilhem. Complete with a contextualising introduction and a glossary of technical terms, it offers an entry point to this important thinker and will appeal to people working in philosophy, philosophy of science, media studies, social theory and political philosophy. Contributors include: Miguel de Beistegui, University of Warwick; Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University, New Jersey; Anne Sauvagnargues, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon; and Bernard Stiegler, Centre Pompidou, Paris.Less

Gilles Deleuze's Transcendental Empiricism: From Tradition to Difference

Marc Rölli

Subjectivity is itself an event that philosophy has tried to situate in an evanescent present as a dominating self-awareness equipped with common sense. But Deleuze insists that it requires a ... More

Subjectivity is itself an event that philosophy has tried to situate in an evanescent present as a dominating self-awareness equipped with common sense. But Deleuze insists that it requires a lifetime of effort to extract out of a multitude of potential a particular biography one can call one’s own. Empiricism’s disconnected bits and pieces cannot be arbitrarily separated into subject and object by transcendent laws and logic to assure a single fixed and truthful world running with a dialectical motor. Deleuze suggests a univocity based in difference. Being must be said, in a single and same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. The plane of immanence coexists with the nomadic, unblocked distribution of things.Less

Lacan Deleuze Badiou

A.J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens, and Jon Roffe

abstracts and keywords to be supplied.

Lyotard and the Inhuman Condition: Reflections on Nihilism, Information and Art

Ashley Woodward

This book offers an incisive argument for the contemporary importance of Lyotard in light of posthuman trends. Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the leading French philosophers of his generation, ... More

This book offers an incisive argument for the contemporary importance of Lyotard in light of posthuman trends. Jean-Francois Lyotard was one of the leading French philosophers of his generation, whose wide ranging and highly original contributions to thought were overshadowed by his association with 'postmodernism.' This book demonstrates what a new generation of scholars are now discovering: that Lyotard's work is incisive and essential for current debates in the arts and humanities, especially those concerning the posthuman and the information society. The book presents a series of studies which explain Lyotard's specific interventions in areas such as information theory, new media arts, and the changing nature of the human, and assesses their relevance and impact. It brings to light new aspects of Lyotard’s work by focusing on underappreciated themes and connections, particularly around the topics of nihilism, information, and art. Lyotard's thought is positioned in current debates through critical comparisons with contemporary philosophers such as Paul Virilio, Bernard Stiegler, Luciano Floridi, and Ray Brassier.Less

Narrative, Identity and the Kierkegaardian Self

John Lippitt and Patrick Stokes (eds)

Narrative accounts of selfhood have been an increasingly prominent feature of personal identity debates over the last three decades. Yet many questions remain about the precise content and limits of ... More

Narrative accounts of selfhood have been an increasingly prominent feature of personal identity debates over the last three decades. Yet many questions remain about the precise content and limits of such narrative approaches, including the extent to which life-narratives are to be understood on analogy with literature, the relationship between diachronic narrative personhood and subjectivity, and the significance of mortality for self-narration. More recently, Kierkegaard has been invoked as a thinker with a contribution to make to the narrativist approach. But the extent to which Kierkegaard’s discussions of selfhood, agency, time, and death contribute to, complicate, or contradict the narrative approach has also attracted considerable debate. For the first time, this collection brings together figures in both Kierkegaard Studies and contemporary philosophy more broadly, to explore pressing issues in the philosophy of personal identity and moral psychology. It serves both to advance important ongoing discussions of selfhood and to explore the light that, 200 years after his birth, Kierkegaard is still able to shed on contemporary problems – and the challenges he still poses.Less

Nietzsche on Epistemology and Metaphysics: The World in View

Tsarina Doyle

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Nietzsche. This book sets out to show that a specifically Kantian-informed methodology lies at the heart of Nietzsche's approach to ... More

Few philosophers are as widely read or as widely misunderstood as Nietzsche. This book sets out to show that a specifically Kantian-informed methodology lies at the heart of Nietzsche's approach to epistemology and metaphysics. The book claims that both Nietzsche's early and late writings may be understood as responses to Kant's constitutive-regulative distinction at the level of epistemology and to his treatment of force and efficient causality at the level of metaphysics.Less

Philosophy Outside-In: A Critique of Academic Reason

Christopher Norris

This book raises some very basic questions about the way that analytic philosophy has been going over the past quarter-century and more. It does so partly by way of direct engagement with various ... More

This book raises some very basic questions about the way that analytic philosophy has been going over the past quarter-century and more. It does so partly by way of direct engagement with various current debates, and partly through the range of topics addressed as a kind of demonstrative rejoinder to the chronic over-specialisation of much recent work in the academic mainstream. Thus the book includes chapters on (among other topics) the ‘extended mind’ hypothesis, experimental philosophy, speculative realism, the ontology of political song, Shakespearean language as a challenge to the norms of linguistic philosophy, and anti-realism as a (purported) antidote to epistemological scepticism. In each case Norris shows how the effect of certain prevailing analytic or professionally sanctioned codes of discourse has been a narrowing of sights to the point where other, more expansive or philosophically productive approaches are blocked from view. This argument is pursued to most vigorous and aptly heterodox effect in a chapter on the topic of greatness in philosophy and how it typically goes along with a certain willing exposure to the risk of error. Here as elsewhere Norris presents a strong claim that continental philosophy holds the resources for a creative renewal of analytic thought in just those quarters of specialist debate where this is most urgently needed.Less

The Problem of Nature in Hegel's Final System

Wes Furlotte

This book challenges the unanimous rejection that has followed Hegel’s Naturphilosohie (1830). Systematically reconstructing Hegel’s conception of nature, the book explores the ways in which it ... More

This book challenges the unanimous rejection that has followed Hegel’s Naturphilosohie (1830). Systematically reconstructing Hegel’s conception of nature, the book explores the ways in which it functions as a ground that, nevertheless, perpetually poses problems for human freedom. The book starts by taking seriously Hegel’s characterization of nature as monstrous, a register at odds with the comprehensive order demanded by conceptual thought. The book then critically reads Hegel against Hegel: it analyzes what such a conception of nature must mean in terms of his notions of finite subjectivity and socio-political freedom. The book reveals that Hegelian nature holds a paradoxical status in his late philosophy. As an anterior precondition, it is crucial to the emergence of free self-relating subjectivity. Yet, it also threatens freedom’s subjective structure with destruction: biological disease, psychopathology, and symptomatic tensions within the body politic. The book demonstrates the importance of the ambivalent significations of Hegel’s Naturphilosophie for the entirety of his final system. Indeed, the problem of nature resides at the core of his project of freedom. Hegel, therefore, presents our contemporary world with a strikingly relevant position, one that forces us to rethink not only our received understanding of his philosophy, but our situation within the world. His system can be used to think the timely philosophical problems revolving around the nature-culture distinction to great effects that are still to be exhaustively explored. This potential constitutes the intrinsic merit of the book.Less

The Psychoanalysis of Sense: Deleuze and the Lacanian School

Guillaume Collett

Guillaume Collett questions to what extent we can locate Deleuze within the Lacanian School during the late-1960s, prior to Guattari. In so doing, he offers a new, integrated reading of Deleuze’s The ... More

Guillaume Collett questions to what extent we can locate Deleuze within the Lacanian School during the late-1960s, prior to Guattari. In so doing, he offers a new, integrated reading of Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969) by understanding it as a ‘psychoanalysis of sense’, and gives a new interpretation of Deleuze’s conception of philosophy itself. The Psychoanalysis of Sense shows that Deleuze was not merely aware of the debates animating the Lacanian School during the 1960s: he sought to contribute to them. Emphasising his appropriation of the work of post-Lacanian Serge Leclaire, Collett shows how Deleuze constructed a more singular and immanent theory of the linguistic structure of the unconscious – granting the erogenous body a larger structuring role.Less