Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, this intellectual biography of Colette--the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy "Female Genius"--will be considered a major breakthrough in understanding one of the great creative minds of the twentieth century. Colette (1873-1954) was a prolific novelist who celebrated sexual pleasure and invented a language for it at a time when women writers were inhibited about dealing with the topic. Female sexuality in a male-dominated world and the joys and pains of love served as her main themes, and her novels--Cheri, La Chatte, and...
Published on the fiftieth anniversary of her death, this intellectual biography of Colette--the final volume of Julia Kristeva's trilogy "Female Geniu...
A particularly vicious and bloody civil war has racked Algeria for a decade. Amnesty International notes that since 1992, in a population of 28 million, 80,000 people have been reported killed, and the actual total is almost certainly higher. This terrible war overshadows Algeria's long and complex history and its prominence on the world economic stage second in size among African nations, Algeria has the longest Mediterranean coastline and contains the world's fifth-largest natural gas reserves. Algeria, 1830-2000 is a comprehensive narrative history of the country. Benjamin Stora, widely...
A particularly vicious and bloody civil war has racked Algeria for a decade. Amnesty International notes that since 1992, in a population of 28 mil...
In the fourth century a new narrative genre captured the imagination of the faithful the moving accounts of the lives of Christian saints. Willing to die gruesome deaths or endure constant suffering, saints conveyed a powerful message: God was still present in the world. He continues to manifest His powers and communicate His messages through His special friends the saints. What kind of Christianity do we find in these stories? In this original and provocative work, Aviad Kleinberg argues that the saints stories of medieval Europe were more than edifying entertainment; they retain an...
In the fourth century a new narrative genre captured the imagination of the faithful the moving accounts of the lives of Christian saints. Willing...
Philosophers and theologians have long engaged in intense debate and introspection over the representation of the deity, its possibilities and its proscriptions. "The Forbidden Image" traces the dual strains of iconophilia and iconoclasm, the privileging and prohibition of religious images, over a span of two and a half millennia in the West.
Alain Besancon s work begins with a comprehensive examination of the status of the image in Greek, Judaic, Islamic, and Christian thought. The author then addresses arguments regarding the moral authority of the image in European Christianity from...
Philosophers and theologians have long engaged in intense debate and introspection over the representation of the deity, its possibilities and its ...
Nineteenth-century theories of race were meant to provide a comprehensive account of the history and evolution of civilizations. What they produced instead were the modern foundations for prejudice and its politics. In this enlightening book, with a new preface and postscript for the Anglophone audience, Maurice Olender investigates the unsuspected links between erudition and race, showing the affinities between the social sciences and the concept of "race."
Beginning with a brilliant study of the Protocols of Zion, the book turns to Indo-European origins of language, culture,...
Nineteenth-century theories of race were meant to provide a comprehensive account of the history and evolution of civilizations. What they produced...
Paradise haunts the Biblical West. At once the place of origin and exile, utopia and final destination, it has shaped our poetic and religious imagination and informed literary and theological accounts of man's relation with his creator, with language and history. For Kant, Paradise was the inaugural moment for the rise and progress of reason as the agency of human history, slowly but certainly driving humanity away from error and superstition. Nietzsche described it more somberly as the very embodiment of the conflict between humanity and its beliefs.
In Earthly Paradise, ...
Paradise haunts the Biblical West. At once the place of origin and exile, utopia and final destination, it has shaped our poetic and religious imag...
In premodern China, elite painters used imagery not to mirror the world around them, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering their art alongside the philosophical traditions that inform it, "The Great Image Has No Form" explores the "nonobject"-a notion exemplified by paintings that do not seek to represent observable surroundings.
Francois Jullien argues that this nonobjectifying approach stems from the painters' deeply held belief in a continuum of existence, in which art is not distinct from reality. Contrasting this perspective with the Western notion of art as separate...
In premodern China, elite painters used imagery not to mirror the world around them, but to evoke unfathomable experience. Considering their art al...
Over 5,000 years ago, the history of humanity radically changed direction when writing was invented in Sumer, the southern part of present-day Iraq. For the next three millennia, kings, aristocrats, and slaves all made intensive use of cuneiform script to document everything from royal archives to family records.
In engaging style, Dominique Charpin shows how hundreds of thousands of clay tablets testify to the history of an ancient society that communicated broadly through letters to gods, insightful commentary, and sales receipts. He includes a number of passages, offered in...
Over 5,000 years ago, the history of humanity radically changed direction when writing was invented in Sumer, the southern part of present-day Iraq...
Ancient Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now western Iraq and eastern Syria, is considered to be the cradle of civilization home of the Babylonian and Assyrian empires, as well as the great Code of Hammurabi. The Code was only part of a rich juridical culture from 2200 1600 BCE that saw the invention of writing and the development of its relationship to law, among other remarkable firsts.
Though ancient history offers inexhaustible riches, Dominique Charpin focuses here on the legal systems of Old Babylonian Mesopotamia and offers...
Ancient Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now western Iraq and eastern Syria, is considered to b...
Is it possible to apply a theoretical approach to ethics? The French philosopher Catherine Chalier addresses this question with an unusual combination of traditional ethics and continental philosophy. In a powerful argument for the necessity of moral...
Is it possible to apply a theoretical approach to ethics? The French philosopher Catherine Chalier addresses this question with an unusual combination...
