In What Is a World? Pheng Cheah, a leading theorist of cosmopolitanism, offers the first critical consideration of world literature s cosmopolitan vocation. Addressing the failure of recent theories of world literature to inquire about the meaning of world, Cheah articulates a normative theory of literature s world-making power by creatively synthesizing four philosophical accounts of the world as a temporal process: idealism, Marxist materialism, phenomenology, and deconstruction. Literature opens worlds, he provocatively suggests, because it is a force of receptivity. Cheah...

The body of the law is an ambiguous phrase. Conventionally, it designates the law as a determinate corpus; legal codes, statutes, and the rulings of common law. But it can also refer to the subjected body that is produced by and is part of the law. This subjected body is necessary for the law's existence.

Thinking Through the Body of the Law reconceives the role of the body in the founding, maintaining, and regulation of our legal systems and social order and elaborates on its implications for issues of legal responsibility and justice. Taking into account and sometimes...