." . . And now, dear reader, for your intellectual toilet, here is a little piece of soap. Well handled, we guarantee it will be enough. Let us hold this magic stone." The poet Francis Ponge (1899-1988) occupied a significant and unchallenged place in French letters for over fifty years, attracting the attention and admiration of generations of leading intellectuals, writers, and painters, a notable feat in France, where reputations are periodically reassessed and undone with the arrival of new literary and philosophical schools. Soap occupies a crucial, pivotal position in...
." . . And now, dear reader, for your intellectual toilet, here is a little piece of soap. Well handled, we guarantee it will be enough. Let us hol...
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 "Delusion 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...
Despite Freud's enormous influence on twentieth-century interpretations of the humanities, there has never before been in English a complete collectio...
In this stimulating and often startling book, Derrida examines the various -resistances- to analysis-conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself. The book comprises three essays devoted to Freud, Lacan, and Foucault.
In this stimulating and often startling book, Derrida examines the various -resistances- to analysis-conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at t...
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.
This book, by one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers, represents a broad, general, and ambitious undertaking-nothing les...
The thirteen essays collected in this volume investigate the possibility that the word "God" can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth century, in a meaningful way. Nine of the essays appear in English translation for the first time. Among Levinas's writings, this volume distinguishes itself, both for students of his thought and for a wider audience, by the range of issues it addresses. Levinas not only rehearses the ethical themes that have led him to be regarded as one of the most original thinkers working out of the phenomenological tradition, but he also takes up philosophical...
The thirteen essays collected in this volume investigate the possibility that the word "God" can be understood now, at the end of the twentieth centur...
The powerful thesis of this book is that in order to achieve full selfhood we must all repeatedly and endlessly kill the phantasmatic image of ourselves instilled in us by our parents. We must all combat what the author calls "primary narcissism," a projection of the child our parents wanted. This idea--that each of us carries as a burden an unconscious secret of our parents, a hidden desire that we are made to live out but that we must kill in order to "be born"--touches on some of the fundamental issues of psychoanalytic theory. Around it, the author builds an intricate analysis of the...
The powerful thesis of this book is that in order to achieve full selfhood we must all repeatedly and endlessly kill the phantasmatic image of ourselv...
Assuming the burden of reading imposed by the correlation of the order of language and the order of events, this book argues that the possibility of reading and writing history is tied to the endurance of traces of the past and their coming to legibility, allegorically, at a given time. Through attentive readings of a range of texts--including theoretical writings, diaries, newspaper reports, and "live" television broadcasts--In the Event elaborates the ways in which allegory disrupts our presumptions of continuity and simultaneity between the image (whatever its medium) and what we...
Assuming the burden of reading imposed by the correlation of the order of language and the order of events, this book argues that the possibility of r...
This volume contains the speech given by Derrida at Emmanuel Levinas's funeral on December 27, 1995, and his contribution to a colloquium organized to mark the first anniversary of Levinas's death. For both thinkers, the word adieu names a fundamental characteristic of human being: the salutation or benediction prior to all constative language (in certain circumstances, one can say adieu at the moment of meeting) and that given at the moment of separation, sometimes forever, as at the moment of death, it is also the a-dieu, for God or to God before and in any relation to...
This volume contains the speech given by Derrida at Emmanuel Levinas's funeral on December 27, 1995, and his contribution to a colloquium organized to...
Philosopher, literary critic, translator (of Nietzsche and Benjamin), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading intellectual figures in France. This volume of six essays deals with the relation between philosophy and aesthetics, particularly the role of mimesis in a metaphysics of representation. Comment 1997] -Typography is a book whose importance has not diminished since its first publication in French in 1979. On the contrary, I would say, it is only now that one can truly begin to appreciate the groundbreaking status of these essays. The points it makes, the way it...
Philosopher, literary critic, translator (of Nietzsche and Benjamin), Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe is one of the leading intellectual figures in France. T...
Sarah Kofman (1934-1994), Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and the author of over twenty books, was one of the most significant postwar thinkers in France. Kofman's scholarship was wide-ranging and included work on Freud and psychoanalysis, Nietzsche, feminism and the role of women in Western philosophy, visual art, and literature. The child of Polish Jewish immigrants who lost her father in the Holocaust, she also was interested in Judaism and anti-Semitism, especially as reflected in works of literature and philosophy. This book is an anthology of some of Kofman's most...
Sarah Kofman (1934-1994), Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris and the author of over twenty books, was one of the most significant postwa...