This second volume in Nancy's The Deconstruction of Christianity explores the stance or bearing that would be appropriate for us now, in the wake of the dis-enclosure of religion and the retreat of God: that of adoration. Adoration is stretched out toward things, but without phenomenological intention. In our present historical time, we have come to see relation itself as the divine. The address and exclamation--the salut --that constitutes adoration celebrates this relation: both the relation among all beings that the world is and what is beyond relation, the outside of the world that opens...

Coming to Life: Philosophies of Pregnancy, Childbirth and Mothering is a superlative collection of essays that does what too few scholarly works have dared: it takes seriously the philosophical significance of women's lived experience. Every woman, regardless of her own reproductive story, is touched by the often restrictive beliefs and norms governing discourses about pregnancy, childbirth and mothering. Thus the concerns of this anthology are relevant to all women and central to any philosophical project that takes women's lives seriously. In this volume 16 authors- including both...

Coming to Life does what too few scholarly works have dared to attempt: It takes seriously the philosophical significance of women's lived experience. Every woman, regardless of her own reproductive story, is touched by the beliefs and norms governing discourses about pregnancy, childbirth, and mothering.

The volume's contributors engage in sustained reflection on women's experiences and on the beliefs, customs, and political institutions by which they are informed. They think beyond the traditional pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy, speak to the manifold nature of mothering by considering...

From Husserl's account of protention to the recent turn to eschatology in "theological" phenomenology, the future has always been a key aspect of phenomenological theories of time. This book offers the first sustained reflection on the significance of futurity for the phenomenological method itself. In tracing the development of this theme, the author shows that only a proper understanding of the two-fold nature of the future (as constitution and as openness) can clarify the way in which phenomenology brings the subject and the world together. Futurity therefore points us to the centrality of...

In this outstanding new collection, philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy take up his perennial themes--community, embodiment, being-with, literature, politics, sense and meaning--as part of a deep and mature appreciation of the fact that we are richly, joyfully, and thoroughly sexual beings.

In a concise but extremely important essay, "The 'There Is' of the Sexual Relation," Nancy responds to Lacan's dictum that "there is no sexual relation" and makes a radical argument for the central place of the sexual relation as our originary mode of being with one another. "The Birth of Breasts" is a...

Hospitality is a multi-faceted concept that has been received by, and worked into, various academic realms and disciplines, such as philosophy, politics, anthropology, aesthetics, ethics, and translation studies. The essays collected in this volume, by a wide range of international contributors, examine how, in the wake of the work of Levinas and the late Derrida, this concept has entered into and transformed the thinking of these disciplines.

This book offers a novel account of grace framed in terms of Bruno Latour's "principle of irreduction." It thus models an object-oriented approach to grace, experimentally moving a traditional Christian understanding of grace out of a top-down, theistic ontology and into an agent-based, object-oriented ontology. In the process, it also provides a systematic and original account of Latour's overall project. The account of grace offered here redistributes the tasks assigned to science and religion. Where now the work of science is to bring into focus objects that are too distant, too resistant,...

In complex philosophical ways, theology is, should, and can be a "theopoetics" of multiplicity. The ambivalent term theopoetics is associated with poetry and aesthetic theory; theology and literature; and repressed literary qualities, myths, and metaphorical theologies. On a more profound basis, it questions the establishment of the difference between philosophy and theology and resides in the dangerous realm of relativism. The chapters in this book explore how the term theopoetics contributes to cutting-edge work in theology, philosophy, literature, and sociology.

Sounding/Silence charts Heidegger's deep engagement with poetry, situating it within the internal dynamics of his thought and within the domains of poetics and literary criticism. Heidegger viewed poetics and literary criticism with notorious disdain: He claimed that his Erlauterungen ("soundings") of Holderlin's poetry were not "contributions to aesthetics and literary history" but rather stemmed "from a necessity for thought." And yet, the questions he poses--the value of significance of prosody and trope, the concept of "poetic language," the relation between language and body, the "truth"...

Jean-Luc Marion: The Essential Writings is the first anthology of this major contemporary philosopher's writings. It spans his entire career as a historian of philosophy, as a theologian, and as a theoretician of "saturated phenomena." The editor's long general Introduction situates Marion in the history of modern philosophy, especially phenomenology, and shorter introductions preface each section of the anthology. The entire volume enables professors to teach Marion by assigning a single book, and the editor's introductions makes it possible for students to learn enough about...