For the sake of salt, Rome created a system of remuneration (from which we get the word "salary"), nomads domesticated the camel, the Low Countries revolted against their Spanish oppressors, and Gandhi marched against the tyranny of the British. Through the ages, salt has conferred status, preserved foods, and mingled in the blood, sweat, and tears of humanity. Today, chefs of haute cuisine covet it in its most exotic forms--underground salt deposits, Hawaiian black lava salt, glittery African crystals, and pink Peruvian salt from the sea carried in bricks on the backs of llamas.

From...

French philosopher Luce Irigaray has become one of the twentieth century's most influential feminist thinkers. Among her many writings are three books (with a projected fourth) in which she challenges the Western tradition's construals of human beings' relations to the four elements--earth, air, fire, and water--and to nature. In answer to Heidegger's undoing of Western metaphysics as a "forgetting of Being," Irigaray seeks in this work to begin to think out the Being of sexedness and the sexedness of Being.

This volume is the first English translation of L'oubli de l'air chez...

A brilliant and original reimagining of sexuality, this book examines how concepts lend themselves to power/knowledge formations, and offers a robust synthesis of insights from Foucault and Deleuze to extend those into a proposal for a conceptual next step for imagining the structures of sexuality as eros. Many contemporary French philosophers make incidental use of the notion of a ruse. Its names are legion: 'duplicity, ' 'concealment, ' 'forgetting, ' and 'subterfuge, ' among others. This book employs Gilles Deleuze's philosophy of the concept to describe three specifically conceptual...