What do we mean when we say time passes? How do contingency and anachronism and other philosophical concepts bearing on time affect the more (seemingly) concrete realities of our political and cultural lives? In ways small and great, personal and cultural, we all experience the mutability of time. We feel it expand and contract, speed up and slow down, as it bends to the imperatives of memory, money, and the media. In our own time (itself a pregnant phrase) we have witnessed a disengagement with the past even as technological advances have allowed us to capture and reproduce past time as...

Who can say "I am Jewish?" What does "Jew" mean? What especially does it mean for Jacques Derrida, founder of deconstruction, scoffer at boundaries and fixed identities, explorer of the indeterminate and undecidable? In Portrait of Jacques Derrida as a Young Jewish Saint, French feminist philosopher Helene Cixous follows the intertwined threads of Jewishness and non-Jewishness that play through the life and works of one of the greatest living philosophers.

Cixous is a lifelong friend of Derrida. They both grew up as French Jews in Algeria and share a "belonging constituted of...

Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) is widely celebrated as the most original political thinker in Western Marxism and an all-around outstanding intellectual figure. Arrested and imprisoned by the Italian Fascist regime in 1926, Gramsci died before fully regaining his freedom. Nevertheless, in his prison notebooks, he recorded thousands of brilliant reflections on an extraordinary range of subjects, establishing an enduring intellectual legacy.

Columbia University Press's multivolume Prison Notebooks is the only complete critical edition of Antonio Gramsci's seminal writings in English....

On Christmas Eve 1951, Santa Claus was hanged and then publicly burned outside of the Cathedral of Dijon in France. That same decade, ethnologists began to study the indigenous cultures of central New Guinea, and found men and women affectionately consuming the flesh of the ones they loved. "Everyone calls what is not their own custom barbarism," said Montaigne. In these essays, Claude Levi-Strauss shows us behavior that is bizarre, shocking, and even revolting to outsiders but consistent with a people's culture and context.
These essays relate meat eating to cannibalism, female...