A Voice from Elsewhere represents one of Maurice Blanchot's most important reflections on the enigma and secret of "literature." The essays here bear down on the necessity and impossibility of witnessing what literature transmits, and--like Beckett and Kafka--on what one might call the "default" of language, the tenuous border that binds writing and silence to each other. In addition to considerations of Rene Char, Paul Celan, and Michel Foucault, Blanchot offers a sustained encounter with the poems of Louis-Rene des Forets and, throughout, a unique and important concentration on music--on...

Opposing both popular "neo-Spinozisms" (Deleuze, Negri, Hardt, Israel) and their Lacanian critiques (Zoizuek and Badiou), Surplus maintains that Lacanian psychoanalysis is the proper continuation of the Spinozian-Marxian line of thought. Author A. Kiarina Kordela argues that both sides ignore the inherent contradictions in Spinoza's work, and that Lacan's reading of Spinoza--as well as of Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Freud, and Wittgenstein--offers a much subtler balance of knowing when to take the philosopher at face value and when to read him against himself. Moving between abstract theory...