Mimesis and Theory brings together twenty of Rene Girard's uncollected essays on literature and literary theory, which, along with his classic, Deceit, Desire, and the Novel, have left an indelible mark on the field of literary and cultural studies. Spanning over fifty years of critical production, this anthology offers unique insights into the origin, development, and expansion of Girard's -mimetic theory---a groundbreaking account of human interaction and of the genesis of cultural forms. The essays run the gamut of Western literary culture, from Racine and Shakespeare to the...

Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism asks what happened when the world was shaken by challenges to the sacred order as people had known it, an order that regulated both their actions and beliefs. When Reformers gave up the doctrine of transubstantiation (even as they held onto revised forms of the Eucharist), they lost a doctrine that infuses all materiality, spirituality, and signification with the presence of God. That presence guaranteed the cleansing of human fault, the establishment of justice, the success of communication, the possibility of union with God and another,...

Thomas Hobbes is an iconic figure who serves as an easy reference for pundits commenting on the brutality of war as well as for critics of a distinctly modern individualism in which calculating and rapacious self-interest is the cause of the violence, destruction, and exploitation endemic to the contemporary world. Frost's reading of Hobbes's philosophy shows us that underlying such visions of self and politics is another iconic figure: that of the Cartesian subject. What gives the iconic Hobbes his hardcore individualism and its corollary accounts of instrumentalism, conflict, and absolutism...

In this book of brilliantly erudite and precise discussions, Pierre Hadot explains that for the Ancients philosophy was not reducible to the building of a theoretical system: it was above all a choice about how to live one's life. One of the most influential historians of ancient philosophy in the world today, Hadot is adept at using ancient philosophers to illuminate the relevance of their ideas to contemporary life. In this book, which is an ideal introduction to Hadot's more scholarly What is Ancient Philosophy?, we learn that to be an Epicurean is not merely to think like one; it...

Samira Haj conceptualizes Islam through a close reading of the writings of Muhammad ibn 'Abdul Wahhab (1703-87) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849-1905)-each of whom is representative of a distinct trend, chronologically as well as philosophically, in the constitution of modern Islam.

The Image of Law is the first book to examine law through the thought of twentieth-century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Lefebvre challenges the truism that judges must apply and not create law. In a plain and lucid style, he activates Deleuze's key themes--his critique of dogmatic thought, theory of time, and concept of the encounter--within the context of adjudication in order to claim that judgment has an inherent, and not an accidental or willful, creativity. The book begins with a critique of the neo-Kantian tradition in legal theory (Hart, Dworkin, and Habermas) and proceeds...

In The Angel of History, Moses looks at three Jewish philosophers--Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem--who formulated a new vision of history in 1920s Germany by moving away from the spirit of assimilation and the Enlightenment belief in humanity's inevitable progress. Instead, they imagined history as discontinuous, made of moments that form no totality but whose ruptures are both more significant--and more promising--than any apparent homogeneity. Their direct experience of the twentieth century's great upheavals led these three thinkers to abandon the old models...

Houses in Motion: The Experience of Place and the Problem of Belief in Urban Malaysia is about the transformation of urban space and the reordering of the demographic character of Brickfields, one of the oldest neighborhoods in Kuala Lumpur. Baxstrom offers an ethnographic account of the complex attempts on the part of the state and the community to reconcile techno-rational conceptions of law, development, and city planning with local experiences of place, justice, relatedness, and possibilities for belief in an aggressively changing world. The book combines classic methods of...

How is one to think the significance of the art of film for philosophy? What would it mean to introduce film as a question into the heart of the philosophical enterprise? How would this transform our understanding of film, on the one hand, and of philosophy and the philosophical tradition, on the other? These are the questions that guide this project on the hitherto critically neglected but seminal film director Brian De Palma. Becoming Visionary: Brian De Palma's Cinematic Education of the Senses is located at the intersection of philosophy and film studies, and makes each of these...