Michael Jackson

"Hannah Arendt argued that the 'political' is best understood as a power relation between private and public realms, and that storytelling is a vital bridge between these realms - a site where individualised passions and shared views are contested and interwoven. In his new book, Michael Jackson explores and expands Arendt's ideas through a cross-cultural analysis of storytelling that includes Kuranko stories from Sierra Leone, Aboriginal stories of the stolen generation, stories recounted before the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and stories of refugees, renegades, and war veterans. Focusing on the violent and volatile conditions under which stories are and are not told, and exploring the various ways in which narrative reworkings of reality enable people to symbolically alter subject-object relations, Jackson shows how storytelling may restore to the intersubjective fields of self and other, self and state, self and cosmos, the conditions of viable sociality. The book concludes in a reflexive vein, exploring the interface between public discourse and private experience."--BOOK JACKET.

Recent world-wide political developments have persuaded many people that we are again living in what Hannah Arendt called "dark times." Jackson's response to this age of uncertainty is to remind us how much experience falls outside the concepts and categories we habitually deploy in rendering life manageable and intelligible. Drawing on such critical thinkers as Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Karl Jaspers, whose work was profoundly influenced by the catastrophes that overwhelmed the world in the middle of the last century, Jackson explores the transformative and redemptive power of marginalized voices in the contemporary conversation of humankind.

"This new translation of the Buddha's most important, most studied teaching offers a radical new interpretation. In September, 2014 Thich Nhat Hanh completed a profound and beautiful new English translation of the Prajñaparamita Heart Sutra, one of the most important and well-known sutras in Buddhism. The Heart Sutra is recited daily in Mahayana temples and practice centers throughout the world. This new translation came about because Thich Nhat Hanh believes that the patriarch who originally compiled the Heart Sutra was not sufficiently skillful with his use of language to capture the intention of the Buddha's teachings--and has resulted in fundamental misunderstandings of the central tenets of Buddhism for almost 2,000 years. In The Other Shore: A New Translation of the Heart Sutra with Commentaries, Thich Nhat Hanh provides the new translation with commentaries based on his interpretation. Revealing the Buddha's original intention and insight makes clear what it means to transcend duality and pairs of opposites, such as birth and death, and to touch the ultimate reality and the wisdom of nondiscrimination. By helping to demystify the term "emptiness," the Heart Sutra is made more accessible and understandable. Prior to the publication of The Other Shore, Thich Nhat Hanh's translation and commentaries of the Heart Sutra, called The Heart of Understanding, sold more than 120,000 copies in various editions and is one of the most beloved commentaries of this critical teaching. This new book, The Other Shore, supersedes all prior translations"--