UNITED KINGDOM AUTHOR · CRITICISM AND INTERPRETATION · HISTORY
Timothy Clark
British chemist
Most acclaimed
Kabuki heroes on the Osaka stage, 1780-1830
2005
Kabuki Heroes is about collective participation in urban culture - on the stage, in poetry salons, in art studios and in fan clubs. Focusing on the culture of Kabuki theatre in Osaka and Kyoto, it illustrates the passionate hero worship of actors by all levels of society. Fans vigorously engaged in the creation of celebrity and fame for their idols, and thereby won their own moments of glory and glamour in the spotlight. Many of these participants are represented here - most of them ordinary townsmen, but also a few samurai and courtiers. This interactive nature of Kabuki culture is particularly intriguing: the actors themselves not only appeared on stage, but involved themselves in other cultural circles such as poetry salons. Kabuki fan clubs, on the other hand, performed formal rituals at the theatre, individual fans became amateur performers, while others created lavish colour prints and books to support favourite actors and spread their fame." "This catalogue illustrates that our obsession with celebrity is not just a modern phenomenon: in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Osaka we can rediscover many elements in common with our own times. Most importantly, after the spread of new colour-woodblock printing technology in the late 1760s, a golden age of popular Kabuki culture was promoted far and wide with beautifully coloured prints and books. The fine examples brought together here from leading public and private collections in Europe and Japan evoke a fascinating period when theatre, art and poetry were essential elements of social and cultural life.
Derrida, Heidegger, Blanchot
1992
Jacques Derrida is undoubtedly one of the foremost figures in the development of twentieth-century literary theory. The school of 'deconstruction' that has grown out of his work has been either absorbed into the corpus of modern literary theory or, more recently, criticized for its departures from the original texts of Derrida in whose name it is practised. Timothy Clark's innovative book traces instead sources of Derrida's practice of 'literature' as a form of philosophical thinking in the work of Heidegger and Blanchot. It offers a welcome stylistic clarity in a field beleaguered by its philosophical and linguistic difficulty. Clark gives close readings of key texts including Heidegger's Conversation on a Country Path, Blanchot's L'attente l'oubli, and Derrida's Pas and Signsponge, and widens the scope of his discussion of philosophical cultivation of 'literary' forms to include in addition the issues of creativity, influence and responsibility as they appear in the work of Lyotard and Levinas.
Martin Heidegger
1998
One of the century's greatest philosophers, without whom there would be no Sartre, no Foucault, no Frankfurt School, Martin Heidegger was also a man of great failures and flaws, a Faustus who made a pact with the devil of his time, Adolf Hitler. The story of Heidegger's life and philosophy, a quintessentially German story in which good and evil, brilliance and blindness are inextricably entwined and the passions and disasters of a whole century come into play, is told in this biography. Heidegger grew up in Catholic Germany where, for a chance at pursuing a life of learning, he pledged himself to the priesthood. Soon he turned apostate and sought a university position, which set him on the path to becoming the star of German philosophy in the 1920s. Rudiger Safranski chronicles Heidegger's rise along with the thought he honed on the way, with its debt to Heraclitus, Plato, and Kant, and its tragic susceptibility to the conservatism that emerged out of the nightmare of Germany's loss in World War I. A chronicle of ideas and of personal commitments and betrayals, Safranski's biography combines clear accounts of the philosophy that won Heidegger eternal renown with the fascinating details of the loves and lapses that tripped up this powerful intellectual. Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil does not shy away from full coverage of Heidegger's shameful transformation into a propagandist for the National Socialist regime; nor does it allow this aspect of his career to obscure his accomplishments.