Too often, Levinas's thought is distanced from traditional ethical enterprises, especially from normative ethics. It is put into the service of directly normative ends such as a call for respect for women or disadvantaged social groups, or for new normative understandings of the relation of doctors to patients or teachers to students and the like. There is nothing wrong with using Levinas for normative purposes, but this demands that we be clear on what account of normativity can be found in his work. Perpich re-reads central ethical concepts in Levinas's thought (alterity, the face, and...

Piero della Francesca's Madonna del Parto, a celebrated fifteenth-century Tuscan fresco in which the Virgin gestures to her partially open dress and her pregnant womb, is highly unusual in its iconography. Hubert Damisch undertakes an anthropological and historical analysis of an artwork he constructs as a childhood dream of one of humanity's oldest preoccupations, the mysteries of our origins, of our conception and birth. At once parodying and paying homage to Freud's seminal essay on Leonardo da Vinci, Damisch uses Piero's enigmatic painting to narrate our archaic memories. He shows...

In times of intercultural tensions and conflicts, sincerity matters. Traditionally, sincerity concerns a performance of authenticity and truth, a performance that in intercultural situations is easily misunderstood. Sincerity plays a major role in law, the arts--literature, but especially the visual and performing arts--and religion. Sincerity enters the English language in the sixteenth century, when theatre emerged as the dominant idiom of secular representation, during a time of major religious changes. The present historical moment has much in common with that era; with its religious and...

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time. Employing a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the book makes a twofold argument about Holocaust memory in a global age by situating it in the unexpected context of decolonization. On the one hand, it demonstrates how the Holocaust has enabled the articulation of other histories of victimization at the same time that it has been declared "unique" among human-perpetrated horrors. On the other, it uncovers the more surprising and seldom acknowledged fact that public memory of...

The Impertinent Self provides a philosophical and cultural theory of modernity by constructing a parallel between the philosophical self and the hero figure found in certain cinematic genres. Fruchtl argues that modernity is not unified and should be conceived as a phenomenon consisting of three strata: the classical, the agonist, and the hybrid. He demonstrates this by following a dual trajectory: the shift in the concept of the self from German idealism to Romanticism and so-called postmodernism, and the evolution of the hero figure in the Western and in crime and science fiction...

Worlds Within tracks the changing forms of novels and nations against a long, postcolonial twentieth century. While globalization has sometimes been understood to supersede national borders, this book distances itself from before-and-after sequences in order to trace the intersection between national and global politics. Drawing from psychoanalytic and deconstructive accounts of identity, difference, and desire, Worlds Within explores the making and unmaking of ideas of nation, globe, race, and gender in the late imperialism of Joseph Conrad, the anticolonial nationalism and...

Is our ego but an illusion, a mere appearance produced by a reality that is foreign to us? Is it the main source of violence and injustice? Jacob Rogozinski calls into question these prejudices that dominate current philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the human sciences. Arguing that we must distinguish the true ego from the alienated and narcissistic construct, he calls for an end to egicide, or the destruction of the ego. Ego and the Flesh offers a critique of the two masters of egicide, Heidegger and Lacan, along with a rereading of Descartes, who was the first to discover the absolute...

Can exchange bring us together? Are there any physical or intangible goods that escape the logic of the marketplace? Is there a relationship between truth--the very purpose of philosophy--and money? Does truth have a price? Contrary to the Sophists, who demanded payment in return for their expertise, Socrates spoke for free. He had to do so, according to Aristotle, because knowledge cannot be measured--though he could accept gifts in return. Today, we expect artists and intellectuals to be compensated for their labors. But is giving merely a form of exchange that was replaced by commerce?...

This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror and its impact on Germany. Like many of his contemporaries, Hegel was struck by the seeming parallel between the political upheaval in France and the upheaval in German philosophy inaugurated by the Protestant Reformation and brought to a climax by German Idealism. Many thinkers reasoned that a political revolution would be unnecessary in Germany, because this intellectual "revolution" had preempted it. Having already been through its own cataclysm, Germany would be able to extract the energy of the Revolution and channel...

This memoir is less a chronicle of the life of a leading scholar and critic of matters French than a series of differently angled fragments, each with its attendant surprise, in what one commentator has called Jeffrey Mehlman's amour vache--his injured and occasionally injurious love--for France and the French. The reader will encounter masters of the art of reading in these pages, the exhilaration elicited by their achievements, and the unexpected (and occasionally unsettling) resonances those achievements have had in the author's life. With all its idiosyncrasies, Adventures in...