In this highly insightful analysis of Western and Chinese concepts of efficacy, Francois Jullien subtly delves into the metaphysical preconceptions of the two civilizations to account for diverging patterns of action in warfare, politics, and diplomacy. He shows how Western and Chinese strategies work in several domains (the battlefield, for example) and analyzes two resulting acts of war. The Chinese strategist manipulates his own troops and the enemy to win a battle without waging war and to bring about victory effortlessly. Efficacity in China is thus conceived of in terms of...

In this highly insightful analysis of Western and Chinese concepts of efficacy, Francois Jullien subtly delves into the metaphysical preconceptions of the two civilizations to account for diverging patterns of action in warfare, politics, and diplomacy. He shows how Western and Chinese strategies work in several domains (the battlefield, for example) and analyzes two resulting acts of war. The Chinese strategist manipulates his own troops and the enemy to win a battle without waging war and to bring about victory effortlessly. Efficacity in China is thus conceived of in terms of...

In this groundbreaking study, Jean Pierre-Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece takes us far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon to reveal a fundamentally other culture: one of slavery, of masks and death, of scapegoats, of ritual hunting and ecstasies.

Vernant's provocative discussion of various institutions and practices including war, marriage, and sacrifice details the complex intersection of the religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. The book concludes with...

Jean Pierre-Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet are leaders in a contemporary French classical scholarship that has produced a a stunning reconfiguration of Greek thought and literature. In this work, published here as a single volume, the authors present a disturbing and decidedly non-classical reading of Greek tragedy that insists on its radical discontinuity with our own outlook and with our social, aesthetic, and psychological categories. Originally published in French in two volumes, this new single-volume edition includes revised essays from volume one and is the first English...

In this book, his first to appear in English, French sinologist Francois Jullien uses the Chinese concept of shi--meaning disposition or circumstance, power or potential--as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture and to uncover the intricate structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking. He follows the concept from one field to another--including military strategy, politics, the aesthetics of calligraphy, and literary theory--and from reflection on history to "first philosophy." At the point where these various domains intersect, a fundamental intuition assumed for centuries to be...

In the half-century since the appearance of Hannah Arendt s seminal work "The Origins of Totalitarianism," innumerable historians have detailed the history of the Nazi years. Now, in a brilliant synthesis of this work, Enzo Traverso situates the extermination camps as the final, terrible moment in European modernity s industrialization of killing and dehumanization of death. Traverso upends the conventional presentation of the Holocaust as an inexplicable anomaly, navigating an excess of antecedents both technical and cultural. Deftly tracing a complex lineage the guillotine and machine...

When Jean-Pierre Vernant first published Myth and Thought among the Greeks in 1965, it transformed the field of ancient Greek scholarship, calling forth a new way to think about Greek myth and thought. In eighteen essays--three of which, along with a new preface, are translated into English for the first time--Vernant freed the subject of ancient Greece from its philological chains and reread the questions of -muthos- and -logos- within multifaced and transdisciplinary contexts--of religion, ritual, and art, philosophy, science, social and economic institutions, and historical psychology....