The Doppelganger or Double presents literature as the "double" of philosophy. There are historical reasons for this. The genesis of the Doppelganger is literature's response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity. The Doppelganger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism's assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality and human agency. This critique prefigures post-War extrapolations of the subject as decentred. From this perspective, the Doppelganger has a "family resemblance" to current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It becomes the emblematic...

The Doppelgnger or Double presents literature as the doubleof philosophy. There are historical reasons for this. The genesis of the Doppelgnger is literature's response to the philosophical focus on subjectivity. The Doppelgnger was coined by the German author Jean Paul in 1796 as a critique of Idealism's assertion of subjective autonomy, individuality and human agency. This critique prefigures post-War extrapolations of the subject as decentred. From this perspective, the Doppelgnger has a family resemblanceto current conceptualizations of subjectivity. It becomes the emblematic subject of...

What does it mean to think about, and with, Spinoza today? This collection, the first broadly interdisciplinary volume dealing with Spinozan thought, asserts the importance of Spinoza's philosophy of immanence for contemporary cultural and philosophical debates.
Engaging with Spinoza's insistence on the centrality of the passions as the site of the creative and productive forces shaping society, this collection critiques the impulse to transcendence and regimes of mastery, exposing universal values as illusory. Spinoza Now pursues Spinoza's challenge to abandon the temptation to...

What does it mean to think about, and with, Spinoza today? This collection, the first broadly interdisciplinary volume dealing with Spinozan thought, asserts the importance of Spinoza's philosophy of immanence for contemporary cultural and philosophical debates.
Engaging with Spinoza's insistence on the centrality of the passions as the site of the creative and productive forces shaping society, this collection critiques the impulse to transcendence and regimes of mastery, exposing universal values as illusory. Spinoza Now pursues Spinoza's challenge to abandon the temptation to...

Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead.

Drawing on critical thinkers in political theology such as Schmitt, Agamben, Nancy, Blanchot, and Paulhan, 'The Politics of Nothing' asks what happens to the political when considered in the frame of the productive potential of the nothing?This book was originally published as a special issue of Culture, Theory and Critique.

Many of Kafka's narratives place their heroes in situations of confinement. Gregor Samsa is locked in his room in the Metamorphosis, and the land surveyor in The Castle is stuck in the village unable either to leave or to gain access to the castle. Dimitris Vardoulakis argues that Kafka constructs these plots of confinement in order to laugh at his heroes' futile attempts to express their will. In this way, Kafka emerges as a critic of the free will and as a proponent of a different kind of freedom: one focused within the confines of one's experience and mediated by one's...

Despite being contemporaries, Walter Benjamin and Martin Heidegger never directly engaged with one another. Yet, Hannah Arendt, who knew both men, pointed out common ground between the two. Both were concerned with the destruction of metaphysics, the development of a new way of reading and understanding literature and art, and the formulation of radical theories about time and history. On the other hand, their life trajectories and political commitments were radically different. In a 1930 letter, Benjamin told a friend that he had been reading Heidegger and that if the two were to engage with...

Kafka's literary universe is organized around constellations of imprisonment. Freedom and Confinement in Modernity proposes that imprisonment does not signify a tortured state of the individual in modernity. Rather, it provides a new reading of imprisonment suggesting it allows Kafka to perform a critique of a modernity instead.