European perspectives

"Les Lieux de memoire is perhaps one of the most profound historical documents on the history and culture of the French nation. Assembled by Pierre Nora during the Mitterand years, this multivolume series has been hailed as a magnificent achievement ... Written during a time when French national identity was undergoing a pivotal change and the nation was struggling to define itself, this unprecedented series consists of essays by prominent historians and cultural commentators which take, as their points of departure, Lieux de memoire, a site of memory used to order, concentrate, and secure notions of France's past. The first volume, La Republique, brings together works addressing the omnipresent role of the state in French life. As in the other volumes, Les Lieux de memoire serve as entries into the French past, whether they are actual sites, political traditions, rituals, or even national pastimes and textbooks."--Google Books.

An extraordinary journey into the past and present of the lands east of Poland and west of Russia - an area defined throughout its history by colliding empires, and only now emerging from the clamp of Soviet rule. Traveling from the former Soviet naval center of Kaliningrad on the Baltic to the Black Sea port of Odessa, Anne Applebaum encounters a rich range of competing cultures, religions, and national aspirations as inhabitants of the borderlands attempt to build a future grounded in their ancestral legacies. In reasserting their heritage, neighbors often unearth old conflicts: in Vilnius, a Lithuanian professor charts a historical conspiracy against his language by the Poles, while his Polish neighbors rail against the Lithuanian determination to deny their ancient claims to the city. In Minsk, a young "post-modernist" couple, seeking a rallying point for Belarusian nationalism, piece together cultures and legends to create tradition where none is remembered, while another resident of the city devotes himself to recovering the Jewish culture that once predominated. Rich in surprising encounters and vivid characters, Between East and West brilliantly illuminates the soul of the borderlands and the shaping power of the past.

"A marriage of philosophy and practical politics, this collection is the first of Gianni Vattimo's many books to combine his intellectual pursuits with his public and political life. Vattimo is a paradoxical figure, at once a believing Christian and a vociferous critic of the Catholic Church, an outspoken liberal but not a former communist, and a recognized authority on Nietzsche and Heidegger as well as a prominent public intellectual and member of the European parliament. Building on his unique position as a philosopher and politician. Vattimo takes on some of the most pressing questions of our times: Is it still possible, long after Nietzsche proclaimed the death of God, to talk of moral imperatives, individual rights, or political freedom? Are these values still relevant in today's world?"--BOOK JACKET.

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The award-winning novelist and author of the international bestseller Racism Explained to My Daughter uses his own experience to illuminate the experience of the Other in his adopted land and everywhere. A Moroccan who emigrated to France in 1971, Tahar Ben Jelloun draws upon his own encounters with racism along with his insights as a practicing psychologist and gifted novelist to elucidate the racial divisions that plague contemporary society. In a modern France where openly racist leaders such as National Front spokesman Jean-Marie Le Pen have made significant strides toward broad popular acceptance, Ben Jelloun's book is more topical now than ever. His profound and compelling appeal for tolerance in both public discourse and the law is a passionate yet reasoned argument that racism simply does not make sense in the multicultural world of today.^ French Hospitality confronts issues of international resonance: the relationship of a formerly colonized people to their onetime colonizers, the encounter between Islam and the modern Judeo-Christian West, and the status of the non-European minorities in Europe today. Underlying these issues is a heartfelt nostalgia for simple, traditional North African hospitality as practiced since time immemorial by a relatively poor and unsophisticated society. Ben Jelloun supplements this rather noble ideal of generosity and welcoming by borrowing the philosophical concept of hospitality the opening of oneself to another from the works of Emmanuel Lévinas and Jacques Derrida in order to illustrate the moral conception of a nation's unconditional acceptance of foreigners.^ Isn't the belief in welcoming strangers a fundamental mark of civilization? In a political climate where increasingly repressive immigration laws are a national trend as well as an international phenomenon, he contends, it is not surprising that racism has gained a foothold. Most hurt by racist polemic and politics, he points out, are children of immigrants born in France, their memories are those of the French people, and they deserve to be treated with the full respect afforded to any citizen. With his elegant and imaginative prose, Ben Jelloun shows us both racism's face and the immigrant's heartbreak; but he also evokes the wind of freedom and the ideal of hospitality, and with this gesture offers a kind of hope in extricating ourselves from racism's recidivist incoherencies. --

Drawing on biological examples, Badinter offers a highly suggestive account of the new man. Exploring the shifting inscriptions of male identity in the popular imagination, Badinter examines changing role models for masculine identity and suggests the need for new role models which may reduce the profound effects of homophobia and misogyny.

In the French Canton of Brienne in November 1799, local authorities were scandalized when a crowd of girls broke through the doors of the church and rang the bells in order to mark the festival of St. Catherine. Religious use of the bells was forbidden by law, but the villagers boldly insisted on their right to celebrate with peals the feast of a beloved saint. So begins Village Bells, Alain Corbin's exploration of the "auditory landscape" of nineteenth-century France, a story of lost sensory experiences and forgotten passions. In the nineteenth century, these instruments were symbols of their towns and objects of both ecclesiastic and civic pride. Bell-ringing served practical purposes of communication, marking both religious and secular time, as well as calling citizens to pray, assemble, take arms, or beware of danger. As Corbin shows, the bells also reflected the social, political, and religious struggles of the time. To control the bells was to control the symbolic order, rhythm, and loyalties of French village and country life. Using church archives and local documents, Corbin forges a unique history of the role of bells from the aftermath of the Revolution to the dawn of the twentieth century.

A prominent member of the French structuralist movement, Louis Althusser was influential for reinvigorating Marxist thought in France in the 196Os with celebrated works such as For Marx and Reading Capital. Yet many readers are not as familiar with the profound impact of psychoanalysis on Althusser's life and work. Writings on Psychoanalysis gathers, for the first time, Althusser's major essays on psychoanalytic thought. The volume begins with Freud and Lacan, which lays the groundwork for comprehending Althusser's entry into psychoanalysis. Letters to D. was the result of Althusser's fervent reading of Rene Diatkine's paper "Aggressiveness and Fantasies of Aggression," years before Diatkine was his psychoanalyst. Invited by Leon Chertok to participate in the "International Symposium on the Unconscious," at the Tbilisi colloquium, the chapter The Tbilisi Affair presents Althusser's essay "The Discovery of Dr. Freud." The chapter In the Name of the Analysands... reprints Althusser's "Open Letter to Analysands and Analysts in Solidarity with Jacques Lacan," written the day after the famous meeting on the dissolution of the Ecole Freudienne de Paris. Characterizing Lacan as a "magnificent and pitiful Harlequin," the 'open letter' relates Althusser's untimely outburst at that assembly and the "spectacular and violent intervention he subsequently made in the presence of Lacan." The volume closes with the correspondence between Althusser and Lacan, detailing their first and last meetings with each other and the launching of one of the central alliances of contemporary French thought.

""I am a Jew who was born and who grew up in a Catholic country; I never had a religious education; my Jewish identity is in large measure the result of persecution." This brief autobiographical statement is a key to understanding Carlo Ginzburg's interest in the topic of his latest book: distance. In nine linked essays, he addresses the question: "What is the exact distance that permits us to see things as they are?""--BOOK JACKET.

"Regis Debray redefines communication as the inescapable conditioning of civilization's meanings and messages by their technologies of transmission and lays the groundwork for a science of the transmission of cultural forms - in a word, mediology." "Transmitting Culture examines the difference between communication and transmission and argues that ideas and their legacies should be rethought not in terms of "communication" from sender to receiver but of "mediation" by the vectors and messengers of meaning. Transmitting Culture stresses the technologies and institutions long overlooked by philosophy and the human sciences in the study of symbols and signs throughout the history of civilizations. Ranging widely from the history of religion and the printing press to the French and industrial revolutions, from the role and place of authority to scientific inquiry, Transmitting Culture establishes a new approach to the cultural history of communication."--BOOK JACKET.

This title anticipates and explains the post-structuralist turn to empiricism. Presenting a reading of David Hume's philosophy, the work assists in understanding the progress of Deleuze's thought.

Martin Heidegger and European Nihilism makes available in English Lowith's major writings concerning the origins of cultural breakdown in Europe that paved the way for the Third Reich. Including incisive discussions of Heidegger and Carl Schmitt, a noted legal theorist of the same period who also supported the Third Reich, Heidegger and European Nihilism helps to illuminate the allure of Nazism for scholars committed to revolutionary nihilism. Lowith's landmark essay on European nihilism is also included in its entirety here, along with two never-before-published letters from Heidegger to Lowith. In a work of impressive historical depth, Lowith traces the abandonment of higher European ideals in favor of a fatal flirtation with nihilism. These essays explore the enthronement of man above God, a trend that had begun to appear in European thought by the mid-nineteenth century in the works of Nietzsche and Marx and one that informed the nihilist philosophies of Heidegger and other theorists of the early twentieth century. An introduction by editor Richard Wolin provides lucid commentary, placing the three essays gathered here in a broad historical context, along with suggestions for further reading. This seminal work of intellectual history sheds light on the fascist impulses of nihilism in the first half of the twentieth century, but also offers unique perspective on the intellectual malaise of today.

"We are awash in time, savoring a few moments of it; we project ourselves into it, reinvent it, play with it; we take our time or let it slip away: it is the raw material of our imagination. Age, on the other hand, is the detailed account of the days that pass, the one-way view of the years whose total sum when set forth can stupefy us. Age wedges each of us between a date of birth that, at least in the West, we know for certain and an expiration date that, as a general rule, we would like to defer. Time is a freedom, age a constraint." Marc Augé remembers his beloved childhood cat, who seemed to grow wise with age, though her essential nature remained unchanged. He considers our belief that objects mature, when it is our perception of them that evolves over time. He wonders why public demonstrations of affection between the elderly make the young so uncomfortable and why we torture ourselves with regret at what might have been. Time can be liberating, he finds; it is a resource we can squander or relish. Yet age is a burden, bound by our personal and cultural neuroses. With an ethnologist's understanding of construct and practice, Augé isolates age from the development of consciousness, desire, and representations of the self. In bold, eye-opening strokes, he casts age as a physical marker and treats one's youthful approach to the world as the true measure of life's value.--

"Kristeva is one of the leading voices in contemporary French criticism, on a par with such names as Genette, Foucault, Greimas and others ... [Powers of Horror is] an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse. The sections on Céline, for example, are indispensable reading for those interested in this writer and place him within a context that is both illuminating and of general interest"--Paul de Man, p. of cover.

"For more than forty years, Gianni Vattimo has been a leading participant in the postwar turn that has brought Nietzsche back to the center of philosophical enquiry. In this collection of his essays on the subject, which is a dialogue both with Nietzsche and with the Nietzschean tradition, Vattimo explores the German philosopher's most important works and discusses his views on the Ubermensch, time, history, truth, hermeneutics, ethics, and aesthetics. He also presents a different, more "Italian" Nietzsche, one that diverges from German and French characterizations."--Jacket.

"These days, who still has a soul?" asks Julia Kristeva in her latest psychoanalytic exploration, New Maladies of the Soul. Drawing on her fifteen years of experience as a practicing psychoanalyst, Kristeva reveals to readers a new kind of patient, symptomatic of an age of political upheaval, mass mediated culture, and the dramatic overhaul of familial and sexual mores. New Maladies of the Soul poses a troubling question about the human subject in the West today: Is the psychic space that we have traditionally known disappearing? Kristeva finds that the psychoanalytic models of Freud and Lacan need to be reread in light of this new patient, a product of the contemporary moral crisis of values resulting from a loss of ideology and a deterioration of belief. By revisiting Freud and Lacan, Kristeva offers the hope of a new psychoanalysis. Each patient, she contends, suffers from a unique malady which must be targeted. In the first half of New Maladies of the Soul, Kristeva offers a series of detailed and fascinating case studies that reinforce her provocative theoretical notions. These case studies illustrate today's "new maladies" - common psychiatric disturbances such as hysteria, obsessional neurosis, and perversion - as they are manifested in today's patient. Drawing on the work of psychologist Helene Deutsch and the writer Germaine de Stael. Kristeva turns her attention in the second half of New Maladies of the Soul to women's experience and contributions within the broader context of contemporary history. Delving into art, literature, autobiography, and theories of language, she continues with an exploration of cultural products ranging from the Bible to the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Julia Kristeva offers the hope that these maladies harbor new creative potential, and new hope for the soul - if we can comprehend their effect on the individual and collective experiences of our time.

Linguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist, Julia Kristeva is one of the most influential and prolific thinkers of our time. Acclaimed for her contributions over the past three decades in many areas of the humanities, her works have broken new ground in the study of the self, the mind, and the ways in which we communicate through language. The Portable Kristeva is the first up-to-date, fully representative selection of Kristeva's most important writings of the last two decades. Here are Kristeva's insights on depression and melancholy from Black Sun, on the highly influential study of abjection from Powers of Horror, and on the nation and territorial space at a time when foreigners can no longer be understood as an aberration, and the impact that has on both our national and our psychic identities in Strangers to Ourselves. Excerpts from New Maladies of the Soul consider psychoanalysis and its tropes in light of the dramatic overhaul of familial and sexual mores at the end of the millennium. Passages from the recent Time and Sense show that book to be much more than an illuminating meditation on Proust's work; it is also a commentary on how the experience of literature is manifested in time and sensation, feeling and language. The essays not only reflect Kristeva's most salient contributions to philosophy, literary and cultural theory, linguistics, psychoanalytic theory, and feminist theory but also testify to her erudition and prominence in those fields. Enriched by a lucid introduction that provides an overview of Kristeva's contributions to the intellectual life of our time, The Portable Kristeva will serve as an essential tool for those familiar with her oeuvre, and will provide a succinct and complete introduction for those new to her writings.

The book is an introduction to linguistics which presents the reader with an incredible amount of information, ranging from Egyptian hieroglyphs to the communication of dolphins, from the anatomy of the vocal apparatus to the basic mechanisms of the unconscious in dreamwork. The bulk of the book is devoted to a review of the different systems used by various societies to think about their languages (primitive societies, the Egyptians, the Sumerians and the Akkadians, China, India, the Phoenicians, the Hebrews) and then continues with a description of linguistic theories in the West through the ages (Greece, Rome, Arab Grammar, Medieval theories, Renaissance theories, the seventeenth century and the grammar of Port Royal, the eighteenth century and the Encyclopédie, the nineteenth century, structural linguistics in the twentieth century). Throughout this survey Kristeva's main purpose is to show the different ways in which different societies, or different ages, thought of the relation between the concept, the sound, and the thing (Saussure's signified, signifier, and referent). -- from www.jstor.org (Feb. 5, 2014).