Meridian : crossing aesthetics

In The Time That Remains, Agamben seeks to separate the Pauline texts from the history of the Church that canonized them, thus revealing them to be "the fundamental messianic texts of the West." He argues that Paul's letters are concerned not with the foundation of a new religion but rather with the "messianic" abolition of Jewish law. Situating Paul's texts in the context of early Jewish messianism, this book is part of a growing set of recent critiques devoted to the period when Judaism and Christianity were not yet fully distinct, placing Paul in the context of what has been called "Judaeo-Christianity." Agamben's philosophical exploration of the problem of messianism leads to the other major figure discussed in this book, Walter Benjamin. Advancing a claim without precedent in the vast literature on Benjamin, Agamben argues that Benjamin's philosophy of history constitutes a repetition and appropriation of Paul's concept of "remaining time." Through a close reading and comparison of Benjamin's "Theses on the Philosophy of History" and the Pauline Epistles, Agamben discerns a number of striking and unrecognized parallels between the two works.

"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general. "Subject position" is widely invoked today, yet Hamacher is the first to thoroughly investigate the premises for this invocation. He demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable - and thus produces more and more fundamentalisms - but is also unattainable and therefore always open to innovation, revision, and unexpected transformation. In a book that is both philosophical and literary, Hamacher gives us the fullest account of the vast disruption in the very nature of our understanding that was first unleashed by Kant's critique of human subjectivity.

"My death - is it possible?". That is the question asked, explored, and analyzed in Jacques Derrida's new book. "Is my death possible?" How is this question to be understood? How and by whom can it be asked, can it be quoted, can it be an appropriate question, and can it be asked in the appropriate moment, the moment of "my death"? One of the aporetic experiences touched upon in this seminal essay is the impossible, yet unavoidable experience that "my death" can never be subject to an experience that would be properly mine, that I can have and account for, yet that there is, at the same time, nothing closer to me and more properly mine than "my death.". This book bears a special significance because in it Derrida focuses on an issue that has informed the whole of his work up to the present. For the last thirty years, Derrida has repeatedly, in various contexts and various ways, broached the question of aporia. Making it his central concern here Derrida stakes out a new frontier, at which the debate with his work must take place from now on: the debate about the aporia between singularity and generality, about the national, linguistic, and cultural specificity of experience and the trans-national, trans-cultural law that protects this specificity; the aporia of the necessity to continue working in the tradition of critique and of the idea of critique, yet the corresponding necessity to transcend it without compromising it; the apoetical obligation to host the foreigner and the alien and yet to respect him, her, or it as foreign.

Passions: "An Oblique Offering" is a reflection on the question of the response, on the duty and obligation to respond, and on the possibility of not responding - which is to say, on the ethics and politics of responsibility. Sauf le nom (Post Scriptum) considers the problematics of naming and alterity, or transcendence, raised inevitably by a rigorous negative theology. Much of the text is organized around close readings of the poetry of Angelus Silesius. The final essay, Khora, explores the problem of space or spacing, of the word khora in Plato's Timaeus. Even as it places and makes possible nothing less than the whole world, khora opens and dislocates, displaces, all the categories that govern the production of that world, from naming to gender. In addition to readers in philosophy and literature, Khora will be of special interest to those in the burgeoning field of "space studies" (architecture, urbanism, design.).

This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking - nothing less than an attempt to rethink the nature of poetic language and to rearticulate relationships among theology, poetry, and philosophy in a tradition of literature initiated by Dante. The book opens with a discussion of just how Dante's poem is a "comedy," and it concludes with a discussion of the "ends of poetry" in a variety of senses: enjambment at the ends of lines, the concluding lines of poems, and the end of poetry as a mode of writing this sort of literature. Of course, to have poetry "end" does not mean that people stop writing it, but that literature passes into a period in which it is concerned with its own ending, with its own bounds and limits, historical and otherwise. Though most of the essays make specific reference to various authors of the Italian literary tradition (including Dante, Polifilo, Pascoli, Delfini, and Caproni), they transcend the confines of Italian literature and engage several other literary and philosophical authors (Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Boethius, the Provencal poets, Mallarme, and Holderlin, among others).

In the three essays that make up this stimulating and often startling book, Jacques Derrida argues against the notion that the basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through, argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychoanalysis is here examined in the various "resistances" to analysis - conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself, an insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of analysis itself. These essays serve to clarify Derrida's thinking about the subjects of the essays - Freud, Lacan, and Foucault - a thinking that, especially with regard to the last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood.

"This book, which collects fifteen essays in philosophy written over a period of more than twenty years, constitutes the largest and most significant collection of writings by the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben to be published in any language.". "The volume opens with an introduction in which the editor situates Agamben's work with respect to both the history of philosophy and contemporary European thought. The essays that follow articulate a series of theoretical confrontations with privileged figures in the history of philosophy, politics, and criticism, from Plato to Spinoza, Aristotle to Deleuze, Carl Schmitt to Benjamin, Hegel to Aby Warburg, and Heidegger to Derrida."--BOOK JACKET.

Spuren ist eine Prosasammlung des deutschen Philosophen Ernst Bloch (1885–1977). Das Buch wurde 1930 veröffentlicht und ist Teil seiner zu Lebzeiten erschienen Werkausgabe. Darin bildet es als Band 1 gleichsam einen Prolog. (Quelle: [Wikipedia](

Despite Freud's enormous influence on twentieth-century interpretations of the humanities, there has never before been in English a complete collection of his writings on art and literature. These fourteen essays cover the entire range of his work on these subjects in chronological order, beginning with his first published analysis of a work of literature, the 1907 "Delusions and Dreams in Jensen's Gradiva," and concluding with the 1940 posthumous publication of "Medusa's Head." Many of the essays included in this collection have been crucial in contemporary literary and art criticism and theory.

CONTENT: The two paradigms -- The mystery of the economy -- Being and acting -- The kingdom and the government -- The providential machine -- Archaeology and bureaucracy -- The power and the glory -- The archaeology of glory -- Appendix : The economy of the moderns -- The law and the miracle -- The invisible hand.

Despite Nicolas Abraham's fame as a psychoanalyst and philosopher, few people are aware of the direct relevance of his work to issues of poetics and literary theory. The fourth volume of his posthumous publication, Rhythms explores the relationship between the interpretation of texts and psychoanalysis. The three essays offer a new approach to the problem of literary creation and a psychoanalytic definition of temporality. In contradistinction to both Husserl and Heidegger in the German tradition, and Sartre and Merleau-Ponty in France, Abraham links the emergence of human time to a form of poetic creation. He identifies in rhythm a previously unexplored mode of inquiry elicited by poetry and by what may be called one's life as a work of art. In Rhythms, Abraham develops a systematic theory of the poetic position of writers, readers, and psychoanalysts.

This book, by one of the most challenging contemporary thinkers, begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones: Why are there several arts and not just one? This question focuses on the point of maximal tension between the philosophical tradition and contemporary thinking about the arts: the relation between the plurality of the human senses--to which the plurality of the arts has most frequently been referred--and sense or meaning in general. Throughout the five essays, Nancy's argument hinges on the culminating formulation of this relation in Hegel's Aesthetics and The Phenomenology of Spirit--art as the sensible presentation of the Idea. Demonstrating once again his renowned ability as a reader of Hegel, Nancy scrupulously and generously restores Hegel's historical argument concerning art as a thing of the past, as that which is negated by the dialectic of Spirit in the passage from aesthetic religion to revealed religion to philosophy. --Publisher description.

Friedrich Nietzsche imagined himself belonging to a society of visionaries, thinkers, architects, poets, musicians, and artists running ahead of the mainstream. They were condemned to be misunderstood or ignored in the present, but their work would become significant in the future. To them he addressed the aphorism from which Massimo Cacciari's book takes its name, saying "It is only after death that we will enter our life and come alive, oh, very much alive, we posthumous people!". Cacciari isolates Vienna as the European capital of posthumous people at a crucial turning point in Western thinking, as the nineteenth century ended. There he finds Ludwig Wittgenstein, together with Peter Altenberg, Robert Walser, Lou Andreas-Salome, Adolf Loos, Martin Buber, Egon Schiele, Karl Kraus, Gustav Klimt, and many others. Cacciari treats this extraordinarily rich concentration of activity as the hub upon which European culture wheeled into the twentieth century. He reaches directly to the intellectual content in each of the various figures he discusses.