Meridian

This volume reflects Jacques Derrida's engagement in the late 1970s with French political debates on the teaching of philosophy and the reform of the French university system. [In the volume], the essays are linked by the extraordinary care and precision with which Derrida undertakes a political intervention into, and a philosophical analysis of, the institutionalization of philosophy in the university.

"The book consists of The Instant of My Death, a powerful short prose piece by Blanchot, and an extended essay by Derrida that reads it in the context of questions of literature and of bearing witness. Blanchot's narrative concerns a moment when a young man is brought before a firing squad during World War II and then suddenly finds himself released from his near death. The incident, written in the third person, is suggestively autobiographical - from the title, several remarks in the text, and a letter Blanchot wrote about a similar incident in his own life - but only insofar as it raises questions for Blanchot about what such an experience might mean. The accident of near death becomes, in the instant the man is released, the accident of a life he no longer possesses."--BOOK JACKET.

"Theodor Adorno is one of this century's most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and music. Throughout the essays in this book, all of which concern musical matters, he displays an astonishing range of cultural reference, demonstrating that music is invariably social, political, even ethical."--BOOK JACKET. "This volume includes essays on prominent figures in music (Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, Arturo Toscanini), compositional technique (the prehistory of the twelve-tone row, the function of counterpoint in new music), and the larger questions of musical sociology for which Adorno is most famous, including the relation of interpretation to audience, the ideological function of opera, and the historical meaning of musical technique."--BOOK JACKET.

354p. ; 21 cm

Bloch's literary essays are not, strictly speaking, "theoretical" pieces, certainly not applications to literature of some pre-existing conceptual apparatus. Collectively they represent a field of experiment in which a thinker of astonishing originality exposes his thought to the provocation of literary, musical, and artistic works, but also to such phenomena as advertisements, landscapes, cliches and obsessive images, films, and forms of interaction in country and city. The pieces gathered here, which date from 1913 to 1964, are held together by Bloch's view of the human as being always beyond itself, as anticipating itself and never positively there. This thrust beyond the horizon of positivity expresses itself in wishes, hopes, fantasies, dreams, imaginative creations, and utopian projects.

This volume presents a close reading of Kant's "Critique of Judgment" looking specifically at the complex paragraphs 23-29: "The Analytic of the Sublime."