Maurice Blanchot is arguably the key figure after Sartre in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. Blanchot developed a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing; these essays, in form and substance, left their imprint on the work of the most influential French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are unimaginable without Blanchot.

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...

Published in France in 1943, Faux Pas is the first collection of Maurice Blanchot's essays on literature and language, consisting of fifty-four short pieces that were originally issued as reviews in literary journals, and one long introductory meditation that defines the trajectory of the whole volume. These essays--like those collected in the other five books of criticism published over several decades--have established Blanchot as the most lucid and powerful French critic of the second half of the twentieth century. Sober reconstructions of the main tenets of both classical and...

This is the first authoritative, book-length study of what Heidegger called "thinking poetics." That Is to Say conducts its analysis of Heideggerian poetics by expounding the sense of language from the perspective of fundamental ontology. This project is carried out in readings of the pertinent chapters of Being and Time, the lectures on Holderlin, "The Origin of the Work of Art," and On the Way to Language. The book is guided by a question that no other writer on Heidegger has yet asked: Why should poiesis provide a privileged access to the specificity of the...

Theodor Adorno is one of this century's most influential thinkers in the areas of social theory, philosophy, aesthetics, and music. Throughout the essays in this book, all of which concern musical matters, he displays an astonishing range of cultural reference, demonstrating that music is invariably social, political, even ethical. Adorno's insistence on the social character of aesthetic works will come as no surprise to those familiar with his writings, although many may be surprised by the volume's somewhat colloquial tone. This colloquialism, in dialogue with Adorno's unceasing rigor,...

This is the definitive analysis of art as a social and perceptual system by Germany's leading social theorist of the late twentieth century. It not only represents an important intellectual step in discussions of art--in its rigor and in its having refreshingly set itself the task of creating a set of distinctions for determining what counts as art that could be valid for those creating as well as those receiving art works--but it also represents an important advance in systems theory. Returning to the eighteenth-century notion of aesthetics as pertaining to the -knowledge of the senses, -...

Speech act theory has taught us "how to do things with words." Arresting Language turns its attention in the opposite direction--toward the surprising things that language can undo and leave undone. In the eight essays of this volume, arresting language is seen as language at rest, words no longer in service to the project of establishing conventions or instituting legal regimes. Concentrating on both widely known and seldom-read texts from a variety of philosophers, writers, and critics--from Leibniz and Mendelssohn, through Kleist and Hebel, to Benjamin and...

At his death in 1992, the eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist Louis Marin left, in addition to a dozen influential books (including Sublime Poussin, Stanford, 1999), a corpus of some three hundred articles and essays published in journals and anthologies. A collection of twenty-two essays that appeared between 1971 and 1992, this book interrogates the theory and practice of representation as it is carried out by both linguistic and graphic signs, and thus the complex relation between language and image, between perception and conception. The essays are grouped in four parts that...

This book demonstrates the presence of literature within speech act theory and the utility of speech act theory in reading literary works. Though the founding text of speech act theory, J. L. Austin's How to Do Things with Words, repeatedly expels literature from the domain of felicitous speech acts, literature is an indispensable presence within Austin's book. It contains many literary references but also uses as essential tools literary devices of its own: imaginary stories that serve as examples and imaginary dialogues that forestall potential objections. How to Do Things with...

In this posthumous collection of writings, Cornelius Castoriadis (1922-1997) pursues his incisive analysis of modern society, the philosophical basis of our ability to change it, and the points of intersection between his many approaches to this theme. His main philosophical postulate, that the human subject and society are not predetermined, asserts the primacy of creation and the possibility of creative, autonomous activity in every domain. This argument is combined with penetrating political and social criticism, opening numerous avenues of critical thought and action. The book's...