The psychoanalytic description of the mind's connection to the body, particularly through the unconscious, has made it difficult for philosophy and psychoanalysis to combine. Freud and Lacan argued that this connection is marked by the passion of the knowing subject, and this text explores what such a characterization means and how it provides a key to many contemporary theoretical and philosophical concerns. This analysis of Freud's metapsychology and its development in Lacanian theory takes the theory of psychoanalysis as the means to understanding the psychanalytic project itself....

Blanchot provides a compelling insight into one of the key figures in the development of postmodern thought. Although Blanchot's work is characterised by a fragmentary and complex style, Leslie Hill introduces clearly and accessibly the key themes in his work. He shows how Blanchot questions the very existence of philosophy and literature and how we may distinguish between them, stresses the importance of his political writings and the relationship between writing and history that characterised Blanchot's later work; and considers the relationship between Blanchot and key figures...

Blanchot provides a compelling insight into one of the key figures in the development of postmodern thought. Although Blanchot's work is characterised by a fragmentary and complex style, Leslie Hill introduces clearly and accessibly the key themes in his work. He shows how Blanchot questions the very existence of philosophy and literature and how we may distinguish between them, stresses the importance of his political writings and the relationship between writing and history that characterised Blanchot's later work; and considers the relationship between Blanchot and key figures...

Georges Bataille's powerful writings have fascinated many readers, enmeshed as they are with the themes of sex and death. His emotive discourse of excess, transgression, sacrifice, and the sacred has had a profound and notable influence on thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Kristeva. Bataille: Writing the Sacred examines the continuing power and influence of his work.
The full extent of Bataille's subversive and influential writings has only been made available to an English-speaking audience in recent years. By bringing together international specialists on Bataille from...

This is a study of Levinas's work. Following his philosophical works in roughly chronological order, it shows how Levinas's argument - that metaphysics is anarchically ethical - departs from the tradition culminating with Hegel from the thinking of contemporaries like Husserl and Heidegger. He examines in detail the relationship between Nietzsche's scripture after the death of God - so central to post-structuralism and post-modernism - and looks at the significance of the interruption by Levinas's genealogy of ethics of Nietzsche's genealogy of morals.

The period 1985-1995 saw a new wave of interest, in philosophical and theoretical circles, in the writings of Walter Benjamin, associate of the early Frankfurt School and among the most innovative and uncategorizable of German modernist thinkers. It is against the horizon of the contemporary theoretical scene, combining impulses from post-structuralism, feminism, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis, that Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading Benjamin experts, undertakes her re-reading of his work. The subject of this sequence of eleven essays, assembled here for the first time in...

The period 1985-1995 saw a new wave of interest, in philosophical and theoretical circles, in the writings of Walter Benjamin, associate of the early Frankfurt School and among the most innovative and uncategorizable of German modernist thinkers. It is against the horizon of the contemporary theoretical scene, combining impulses from post-structuralism, feminism, cultural anthropology, and psychoanalysis, that Sigrid Weigel, one of Germany's leading Benjamin experts, undertakes her re-reading of his work. The subject of this sequence of eleven essays, assembled here for the first time in...

Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential, controversial and complex thinkers of our time, has come to be at the centre of many political debates. This is the first book to consider the political implications of Derrida's deconstruction. It is a timely response both to Derrida's own recent shift towards thinking about the political, and to the political focus of contemparary Continental philosophy.
Richard Beardsworth's study, Derrida and the Political, locates a way of thinking about deconstruction using the tools of political philosophy. Richard Beardsworth has provided...

To the outside world Deng Xiaoping represents a contradiction - he is both China's most successful moderniser, and the Butcher of Beijing, China's supreme leader who must take responsibility for the events surrounding Tiananmen Square in June 1989. However, Deng the politition has no such contradiction: only the Chinese Communist Party can bring modernization to China. For Deng any threat to the Communist Party is a threat to the project of China's modernization. This book attempts to understand Deng's own particular role and the sources of his political power. Deng Xiaoping was involved with...

This timely collection of essays is the first to be written on the work of Maurice Blanchot in English. One of the finest writers of our time, Blanchot is a contemporary of Bataille and Levinas; his writing has influenced the likes of Derrida and Foucault.
Eminent commentators featured here include: Simon Critchley, Paul Davies, Cristopher Fynsk, Rodolphe Gasche, Leslie Hill, Michael Holland, Jeffery Mehlman, Roger Laporte, Ian Maclachlan, Marie-Claire Ropars-Wuilleumier, Gillian Rose and Ann Smock.
The essays consider the political implications of Blanchot's questioning the...