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Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Adam Smith are two of the foremost thinkers of the European Enlightenment, thinkers who made seminal contributions to moral and political philosophy and who shaped some of the key concepts of modern political economy. Among Smith’s first published works was a letter to the Edinburgh Review where he discusses Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Smith continued to engage with Rousseau’s work and to explore many shared themes such as sympathy, political economy, sentiment, and inequality. This collection brings together an international and interdisciplinary group of Adam Smith and Rousseau scholars to provide an exploration of the key shared concerns of these two great thinkers in politics, philosophy, economics, history, and literature.

Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of sovereignty was profoundly influential for critical theory as it grappled with issues of security and state violence in the wake of September 11 2001. Yet his work was criticised for its lack of attention to capitalism and liberal governmentality, and it was argued that he ignored the problem of political action. Issues of economy and political praxis have become even more urgent for critical theory over the past decade as it has confronted the crisis of neoliberal capitalism and an increasingly turbulent and populist politics. Agamben and Radical Politics suggests that Agamben’s work retains its urgency for understanding the issues that underpin the politics of our time. It does so by focusing on his recent work on the theological history of economy, his account of a non-sovereign politics, and his longstanding engagement with the revolutionary tradition. The book includes a newly translated essay by Agamben, entitled ‘Capitalism as Religion,’ and ten chapters that critically engage with him on issues including the genealogy of economy, the practices of monasticism and use, temporality and historical method, and his relationship to Marxism and anarchism. The volume sheds new light on Agamben’s work by focusing on his treatment of economy and poitical action and, through this, opens up new ways of thinking about politics and critical theory in an age of financial crisis and political revolts.

One of the greatest challenges Agamben presents to his readers is the vast and often bewildering range of sources he draws upon in his work. This volume is a one-stop reference for clarifying Agamben’s relationship to the many figures he engages with, providing a wide range of articles by scholars with special expertise in Agamben and the figure in question. It covers his primary interlocutors, his more occasional and secondary points of reference as well as figures who are often lurking in the background of his arguments but are seldom directly mentioned. The result is a thorough overview of Agamben’s philosophy, as illuminated by his practices of reading.

This book shows how democratic progressive politics can happen and how it is happening in very different arenas. The author takes an intensive look at a range of contemporary political movements and shows how, to one degree or another, they exemplify the political thought of Jacques Rancière. Following an overview of Rancière's thought, the author considers the following groups: the Algerian refugee movement in Montreal for citizenship, the first Palestinian intifada, the politics of equality and identity politics in relation to the Zapatista movement, a local food co-op in South Carolina and an anarchist press in Oakland. Essentially, the book shows how political theory and practice can enlighten one another, and in an age of cynicism, fear and despair, the author suggests that there is hope for the possibility of progressive democratic action.

Deleuze was intensely aware of the need for philosophy to take an active part in shaping and critiquing the world. Philosophy, as he saw it, engages in politics by inventing new concepts and using them as weapons against opinion, the ultimate barrier to thought. Deleuze did not specify a particular political program, nor espouse a particular political dogma. For him, politics was always a matter of experimentation and invention in the search for the revolutionary path that would finally deliver us from the baleful enchantments of capitalism. This book brings together some of the most important Deleuze scholars in the field today to explore and explain Deleuze's political philosophy.

For Deleuze, sexuality is a force that can capture as well as liberate life. Its flows tend to be repressed and contained in specific forms while at the same time they retain revolutionary potential. There is immense power in the thousand sexes of desiring-machines, and sexuality is seen as a source of becoming. This book gathers prominent Deleuze scholars to explore the restricting and liberating forces of sexuality in relation to a spread of central themes in Deleuze's philosophy, including politics, psychoanalysis and friendship as well as specific topics such as the body-machine, disability, feminism and erotics.

This book is a full-length study of hospitality in the writings of Jacques Derrida. Hospitality is critically important in Derrida's writings, and his insights in this have been influential across a range of disciplines from geography, politics and sociology to literary studies and philosophy. It functions as a way of both thinking about relations between individuals, and analysing the (often inhospitable) reception of outsiders, such as refugees or migrants, by the community or state. Still also follows the thread of sexual difference in Derrida's writing in order to shed light on his exploration of the complex and delicate, strange yet familiar, political, and ethical dilemmas of how to be those impossible things, a good host and a good guest. This book sets Derrida's work in a series of contexts including the socio-political history of France, especially in relation to Algeria, and the writing on hospitality of other key thinkers, most importantly Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigaray and Emmanuel Levinas.

Against the backdrop of a series of recent political events (the Snowden Affair, the Manning Affair, Wikileaks, Clinton’s private email account, and so forth), this book argues that secrecy is a condition, rather than a negation, of the social bond – that we can only relate to one another insofar as, at the same moment, we separate from one another as well. It pursues this argument via a close consideration of Derrida’s thought, and especially his discussion of the concepts of perjury, testimony, and oath in his later work. It shows that, for Derrida, precisely because the other, or some crucial aspect of the other, remains absolutely other (unknown, opaque, a secret), every interaction presupposes an oath to say what one means and believe what the other says. Put differently, and paradoxically, our capacity for deception that compels us to trust or have faith in one another. This is an aspect of Derrida’s work that is often confused with a ‘religious’ or ‘theological turn’ in his later writings.

Is Europe’s crisis merely a financial one? It has been widely understood as such, yet its scope and implications far exceed Europe’s financial markets. As the crisis deepens, and the possibility of Europe’s dissolution emerges on the horizon, the authors of this volume argue that the contemporary crisis points to a much older, more fundamental and yet not unrelated crisis: the crisis of European identity. Diagnosed two decades ago by Jacques Derrida, it is a crisis to which Europe has thus far been unable to respond, yet one to which it must respond if it is to survive. Tackling issues ranging from Europe’s legal, institutional and cultural identity to its border, citizenship and integration policies, and its legacy for the future the book interrogates the various dimensions and contours of Europe’s contemporary crisis. By revisiting Derrida’s diagnosis of the crisis of European identity, it simultaneously proposes a new direction for Europe, and an alternative response to today’s crisis.

G. W. F. Hegel's Elements of the Philosophy of Right is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important works in the history of political philosophy. It is broadly agreed that Hegel intended this work to be interpreted as a significant part of his greater system of speculative philosophy. Where disagreement occurs is on the question of the relevance of Hegel's larger philosophical system to understanding the Philosophy of Right. This is the first book on the subject to take Hegel's system of speculative philosophy seriously as an important component of any robust understanding of the Philosophy of Right. It sets out the difference between ‘systematic’ and ‘non-systematic’ readings of the text before discussing important, relevant features of Hegel's system, in particular, the unique structure of his philosophical arguments. The greater part of the book demonstrates the results of this systematic reading by exploring several areas of Hegel's political philosophy: his theories of property, punishment, morality, law, monarchy, and war. It is shown that by looking beyond the text to Hegel's larger philosophical system, we can achieve an improved understanding of the Philosophy of Right.

The book examines the writings of the Scottish Enlightenment, focusing on their conception of a commercial society. This focus captures both what the Scottish Enlightenment is now best known for as well as what contemporaneously most engaged its participants. This engagement critically involved a re-calibration of social norms and that, in turn, entailed a re-thinking of the constituents (institutions, behaviour and so on) of ‘society’. Central to this re-thinking was the Scots’ appreciation that the present had to be understood via the past. Among the book's key themes is the argument that the Scots’ idea of a commercial society represents simultaneously their diachronic analysis, where it is the latest stage in development from a society of hunter-gatherers, and their synchronic analysis of it as a society with a set of interlocking institutions. The book pays full attention to internal debates and conveys thereby some of the intellectual excitement that the development of these arguments occasioned. While the work of Adam Smith, David Hume, Adam Ferguson, John Millar, William Robertson and Lord Kames feature prominently other thinkers and pamphleteers are discussed.

The idea of Continental Philosophy has never been properly explained in philosophical terms. This book attempts finally to succeed where others have failed, although not by giving an account of its internal unity but by showing instead why no such account can be given. Providing a clear picture of the current state of the contemporary philosophical culture, it traces the origins and development of the idea of a distinctive Continental tradition, critiquing current attempts to survey the field of contemporary philosophy. The main argument of the book is that the very idea of a fruitfully distinguishable philosophical tradition of Continental philosophy is part of the mythological history of the movement that came to call itself analytic philosophy: the very idea of such a tradition is best thought of as an item that has its original home in the conceptual armoury of analytic philosophy. In this respect, “Continental philosophy” is less the name for another kind of philosophy than analytic philosophy, but a term that functions within analytic philosophy as the name of its own other, that part of its lexicon which represents what is not part of it: it is “the Other” of analytic philosophy.

This book identifies the original impetus and the driving force behind Deleuze's philosophy as a whole and the many concepts it creates. It seeks to extract the inner consistency of Deleuze's thought by returning to its source, or to what, following Deleuze's own vocabulary, it calls the event of that thought. The source of Deleuzian thought, the book argues, is immanence. In six chapters dealing with the status of thought itself, ontology, logic, ethics, and aesthetics, the author reveals the manner in which immanence is realised in each and every one of those classical domains of philosophy. Ultimately, he argues, immanence turns out to be an infinite task, and transcendence the opposition with which philosophy will always need to reckon.

One of the terminological constants in the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze is the word ‘immanence’, and it has therefore become a foothold for those wishing to understand exactly what ‘Deleuzian philosophy’ is. Deleuze's philosophy of immanence is held to be fundamentally characterised by its opposition to all philosophies of ‘transcendence’. On that basis, it is widely believed that Deleuze's project is premised on a return to a materialist metaphysics. The author of this book argues that such an interpretation is fundamentally misconceived, and has led to misunderstandings of Deleuze's philosophy, which is rather one of the latest heirs to the post-Kantian tradition of thought about immanence. This will be the first book to assess Deleuze's relationship to Kantian epistemology and post-Kantian philosophy, and will attempt to make Deleuze's philosophy intelligible to students working within that tradition. But it also attempts to reconstruct our image of the post-Kantian tradition, isolating a lineage that takes shape in the work of Schelling and Wronski, and which was developed in the twentieth century by Bergson, Warrain and Deleuze.

Interpassivity is a widespread, but mostly unacknowledged form of cultural behavior. It consists in letting others (other people, or animals, machines etc.) not work, but consume in one’s place. When certain people, for example, take care that others drink their beer for them, fotocopy or print texts out instead of reading them, let recording devices watch TV programmes in their place, use ritual machines that pray or believe for them vicariously, or are happy that certain TV-comedies already laugh about themselves, we have to speak of interpassivity. These actions are based on certain subjects’ preference to delegate their enjoyment instead of having it themselves. This, obviously, raises a number of quite uncanny, fundamental questions: Why do certain people do not want to have their enjoyment? And why do they, if the do not want to enjoy, go to such great pains in order to ensure that somebody else enjoys in their place? The theory of interpassivity has had considerable impacts on several disciplines such as philosophy, art theory, psychoanalysis, media theory, political theory, anthropology, theory of religion etc. This volume assembles essays that reach from the fundamental philosophical questions, concerning the paradoxical pleasure gained from delegated enjoyment, to their most current consequences: for example concerning interactivity and participation in the arts and in politics, generosity in culture, the status of belief, ritual and magic, cultural capitalism, civilized urban role-play etc.

Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature: Sartre, Kristeva, Badiou, Rancière recounts the radical readings of Mallarmé’s seminal poems by some of France’s most important 20th century thinkers. The book attempts to answer the question of why Mallarmé — one of modernity’s most ingenious yet obscure poets — was so important to French philosophers. With in-depth studies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Julia Kristeva, Alain Badiou and Jacques Rancière, along with shorter analyses of Jean-Claude Milner and Quentin Meillassoux, Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature situates Mallarmé with these thinkers’ philosophical and political projects. As the first work of English-language scholarship on each of these thinker’s readings of Mallarmé, Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature is also the first to bring these thinkers into dialogue, locating the points of contact and difference between their readings of the great Symbolist poet. Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature also includes a sustained reflection on the various ways literature has been conceived of politically by 20th century French thinkers, and argues that these modalities of reading literature politically have today reached a point of exhaustion. Mallarmé and the Politics of Literature thus culminates in a plea for renewed formulations of the link between politics and literature.

Focussed around three core themes “capitalism, the metaphysics of democracy and aesthetics” these 11 essays emphasise the potential of Nancy's political thought, and collectively situate it within a broader intellectual context which includes engagements with Badiou, Rancière, Foucault, Agamben and Lefort.

This book aims to rehabilitate a thinking of negativity within and against the usual forms of contemporary Continental Theory. It identifies and presents an analysis of the dominant tone of ‘affirmationism’ in contemporary theory: the insistence on starting from the affirmation of metaphysical ontologies, the inventive potential of the subject, the necessity for the production of novelty, and a concomitant suspicion of the negative and negativity. Despite all the conflicts and ‘wars’ of contemporary theory, this tone remains an unstated point of unification. Although it was often developed to resist the corrosive effects of contemporary capitalism, this work argues that affirmationism remains bound to its ideological coordinates in its emphasis on production, creativity, and invention. Critically reconstructing this ‘affirmationism’ through the work of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Bruno Latour, Antonio Negri, and Alain Badiou, the book also recovers from their work a disavowed thinking of negativity. Dependent on negativity, despite their claims to affirmation, this dependence allows a critique of the reliance on affirmation. Also, this negativity is turned against this affirmative tone to develop a more sharply-focused political analysis of theory, and to suggest the possible politics emerging from a relational thinking of negativity.

Phenomenology or Deconstruction? challenges traditional understandings of the relationship between two important movements in European thought through new readings of the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Paul Ricœur and Jean-Luc Nancy. A constant dialogue with Jacques Derrida's discussion of phenomenological themes provides the impetus to establishing a new understanding of ‘being’ and ‘presence’ that exposes significant blind spots inherent in traditional readings of both phenomenology and deconstruction, wedded as such readings often are to an ideology of antagonism or succession. In reproducing neither a stock phenomenological reaction to deconstruction nor the routine deconstructive reading of phenomenology, this book provides a fresh assessment of the possibilities for the future of phenomenology, along with a new reading of the deconstructive legacy. It shows how a phenomenological tradition much wider and richer than Husserlian or Heideggerean thought alone can take account of Derrida's critique of ontology and yet still hold a commitment to the ontological. Its new reading of being and presence fundamentally re-draws our understanding of the relation of deconstruction and phenomenology, and provides the first sustained discussion of the possibilities and problems for any future ‘deconstructive phenomenology’.