Avital Ronell asks why there is no culture without drug culture. She deals with the usual drugs and alcohol (and their celebrities: Freud's cocaine, Baudelaire's hashish, the Victorians' laudanum), and moves beyond them to addictions that are culturally accepted--an insatiable appetite for romance novels, for instance, and romance itself. or counterculture deeply saturated with drugs, but such modern cultures needs subcultures, and need drugs on every level. Culture defines itself, its classes, its power structures, and its economy in terms of how it allows and encourages drugs to circulate....

Affective Genealogies is an incisive contribution to the current reassessment of postmodern culture and theory. Elizabeth J. Bellamy examines how the Holocaust and Jews have been represented in a wide range of French poststructuralist works. Central to Bellamy s study is her questioning of whether "the non-essentializing discourse of postmodernism can] ever enable a genuine working through to an understanding of the horror of the Holocaust." She concludes that much recent French thought "encrypts but does not fully confront the trauma of the Holocaust."Bellamy begins by surveying...

Sought, the Sphinx seems everywhere, whether the guardian of the pyramids on Egypt's Giza plateau or the beautiful man-eater with a deadly riddle, to be approached with awful caution. The Sphinx, that icon painted, sculpted, engraved, and exalted in poetry, fiction, and music, so impressed the philosopher Hegel that he pronounced the creature the symbol of the symbolic itself. With a wealth of illustrations, Book of the Sphinx confirms Hegel's lofty judgment, finding the Sphinx everywhere: in tragedies, paintings, opera, murder mysteries, brothels, bars, and advertisements.Pursuing the...

The Future of a Negation is a crucial statement on the Holocaust--and on Holocaust denial--from Alain Finkielkraut, one of the most acclaimed and influential intellectuals in contemporary Europe.

The book examines the Holocaust, its origins in modern European thought and politics, and recent "revisionist" attempts to deny its full dimensions and, in some cases, its very existence as historical fact. Finkielkraut's central topic is the impulse toward "negation" of the Nazi horrors: the arguments made by many people, of varying political orientations, that "the gas chambers...

Alliance and Conflict combines a richly descriptive study of intersocietal relations in early nineteenth-century Northwest Alaska with a bold theoretical treatise on the structure of the world system as it might have been in ancient times. Ernest S. Burch Jr. illuminates one aspect of the traditional lives of the Inupiaq Eskimos in unparalleled detail and depth. Basing his account on observations made by early Western explorers, interviews with Native historians, and archeological research, Burch describes the social boundaries and geographic borders formerly existing in Northwest Alaska and...

Mindy Thompson Fullilove offers a series of meditations on her remarkable family and the places where they have lived. She lovingly recalls her parents: her father, a black leader of the labor movement, and her mother, a white woman whose boundless generosity was always in conflict with the racial divisions of the world around her. "Place" is a major actor in her family story, and in the course of bringing the backgrounds of six generations into the foreground, Fullilove uncovers the many lives--her own included--that are rooted in those places. Mindy Thompson Fullilove is a professor of...

"A poignant, groundbreaking memoir that links the Holocaust and its aftermath to the safe haven that opened for camp survivors in Latin America at mid-century. The controversy surrounding the collaboration between Isacovici and Rodriguez remains an extraordinary opportunity to reflect on the thorny path of Jewish-Hispanic relations worldwide."-Ilan Stavans "Distinguished by geography as well as by its painful testimony. . . . Much of the memoir's early drama involves the creeping Nazi threat opposing Jews' wishful thinking-that the war might be ending and that 'it can't happen here.' . . ....

"Germany long ago became part of us German Turks," Zafer Senocak observes. "Are we also a part of Germany?" Gathered here for the first time in English translation, these essays chart a new orientation for German life, culture, and politics beyond the Cold War and at the dawn of an unprecedented era. The 1990s began with national unification between East and West and closed with a radical liberalization of German citizenship law; many questions about the largest minority in this multicultural Germany have yet to be asked. This decade also reeled with war in the Persian Gulf and "ethnic...

Not only do "modern" Jewish languages like Yiddish and Hebrew have their own Jewish writers, but every major Western tongue from German and Russian to English and Portuguese does as well. These writers are often at the crossroad between the two traditions: their Jewish one and their own national one. Is there such a thing as a modern Jewish literary tradition, one navigating across linguistic and national lines? If so, how should one define it?Ilan Stavans is uniquely qualified to answer these questions and to comment on the power and challenges of cultural margins and literary crossings. He...

Looking through the history of art, a reader might conclude that Jews could not create art-and such an assumption, historically incorrect, would be no accident. As we see with disturbing clarity in this book, the discipline of art history-even the first scholarly studies of Jewish works of art-encourages the idea of the nonartistic Jew. Covering the last two centuries, The Nation without Art illuminates the rise of the paradigm of the non-artistic Jew and expresses the ways in which theorists, critics, and artists have sought to subvert, overcome, or work within it. Case studies explore the...