This work argues that if the logic of the Oedipus myth were subjected to analysis with the tools of anthropology, comparative mythology and narratology, it might invalidate the approach to the Oedipus complex that Freud derived from his psychoanalytic experience.

Since Hegel, philosophy cannot stop thinking its end. The violent transformations which Hegel's philosophy has uncovered and caused in the structure of philosophical terms and in the terms under which philosophy is possible is Hamacher's topic. Starting from Hegel's commentaries on biblical scripture, Hamacher traces the genealogy and unfolding of Hegel's thought into his mature works--the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Encyclopedia, the Philosophy of History--focusing throughout on the limits and borders, the limitations and extremities of its conceptual and textual...

This volume consists of fourteen pieces selected by Levinas himself in 1987 from a large body of uncollected essays.

-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 subject to an experience that would be properly mine, that I can have, and account for, yet that there is,...

This is a pioneering attempt to rearticulate the relationship between music and the problems of mimesis, between presentation and re-presentaion. Four -scenes- comprise the book, all four of them responses to Wagner: two by French poets (Baudelaire and Mallarme), two by German philosophers (Heidegger and Adorno). It is dificult to realize how profoundly Wagner affected the cultural and ideological sensibilities of the nineteenth century. Wagnerism rapidly spread throughout Europe, partly because of Wagner's propagandizing talent and the zeal of his adherents. But the main reason for his...

What does it mean to oppose AIDS, to be at odds with AIDS? What kind of rupture with history does AIDS represent? How does AIDS and what is said about AIDS relate to gay identity? How does AIDS relate to thinking and acting, particularly deconstructive thinking? The author confronts these questions from a broad philosophical background that ranges from Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger to contemporary thought concerning gay activism and AIDS research, all brought together in an effort to find a philosophical language capable of doing justice to the singularity of lived experience in...

This volume collects twenty-three interviews given over the course of the last two decades by Jacques Derrida. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of his concerns, touching upon such subjects as the teaching of philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, AIDS, language and translation, nationalism, politics, and Derrida's early life and the history of his writings. Often, as in the interview on Heidegger, or that on drugs, or on the nature of poetry, these interviews offer not only an introduction to other discussions, but something available nowhere else in his work....

Friedrich Neitzsche 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 capitol of posthumous people at a crucial turning point in Western...

Scarcely any theoretical discourse has had greater impact on literary and cultural studies than psychoanalysis, and yet hardly any theoretical discourse is more widely misunderstood and abused. In Psychoanalyzing, Serge Leclaire offers a thorough and lucid exposition of the psychoanalysis that has emerged from the French "return to Freud," unfolding and elaborating the often enigmatic pronouncements of Jacques Lacan and patiently working through the central tenets of the "Ecole freudienne." As a concise but nuanced introduction to the subject, Psychoanalyzing will prove...