In recent decades the humanities and social sciences have undergone an 'animal turn', an efflorescence of interdisciplinary scholarship which is fresh and challenging because its practitioners consider humans as animals amongst other animals, while refusing to do so from an exclusively or necessarily biological point of view. Knowing Animals showcases original explorations of the 'animal turn' by new and eminent scholars in philosophy, literary criticism, art history and cultural studies. The essays collected here describe a lively bestiary of cultural organisms, whose flesh is (at...

Significantly advancing our notion of what constitutes a network, Philip Armstrong proposes a rethinking of political public space that specifically separates networks from the current popular discussion of globalization and information technology.

Significantly advancing our notion of what constitutes a network, Philip Armstrong proposes a rethinking of political public space that specifically separates networks from the current popular discussion of globalization and information technology.

The ancient Egyptians worshipped them, the Romans dressed them in fitted coats, and the Christians associated them with their divine savior. In Sheep, Philip Armstrong traces the natural and cultural history of both wild and domestic species of ovis, from the Old World mouflon to the corkscrew-horned flocks of the Egyptians, from the Trojan sheep of Homer s Odyssey to the cannibal sheep of Thomas More s Utopia, from the vast migratory mobs of Spanish merinos all the way to Dolly the first animal we have ever cloned and Haruki Murakami s sheep-human hybrids.
As...

Originally written for an exhibition Jean-Luc Nancy curated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007, this book addresses the medium of drawing in light of the question of form--of form in its formation, as a formative force, as a birth to form. In this sense, drawing opens less toward its achievement, intention, and accomplishment than toward a finality without end and the infinite renewal of ends, toward lines of sense marked by tracings, suspensions, and permanent interruptions. Recalling that drawing and design were once used interchangeably, Nancy notes that drawing designates a design...

Originally written for an exhibition Jean-Luc Nancy curated at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon in 2007, this book addresses the medium of drawing in light of the question of form--of form in its formation, as a formative force, as a birth to form. In this sense, drawing opens less toward its achievement, intention, and accomplishment than toward a finality without end and the infinite renewal of ends, toward lines of sense marked by tracings, suspensions, and permanent interruptions.

Recalling that drawing and design were once used interchangeably, Nancy notes that "drawing" designates a...

Theseus and the Minotaur is a tragic drama in one act (about 45 minutes in duration) suitable for high school students or young adult theater. Theseus is a brave hero. He carries a great sword. He aspires to be King of Athens. Yet he is judged poorly for being the illegitimate son of the sovereign, and is labelled as unfit for kingship. He knows he can only achieve his dreams by undermining the legitimacy of the monarch and the political stability of the entire region, and by turning to treachery. He says he has joined the Athenian youths on their way to the Minotaur to rescue them from their...

From Plato's Symposium to Hegel's truth as a "Bacchanalian revel," from the Bacchae of Euripedes to Nietzsche, philosophy holds a deeply ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication. At the same time, from Baudelaire to Lowry, from Proust to Dostoyevsky, literature and poetry are also haunted by scenes of intoxication, as if philosophy and literature share a theme that announces and navigates their proximities and differences. For Nancy, intoxication constitutes an excess that both fascinates and questions philosophy's sober ambitions for appropriate forms of philosophical behavior...

From Plato's Symposium to Hegel's truth as a "Bacchanalian revel," from the Bacchae of Euripedes to Nietzsche, philosophy holds a deeply ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication. At the same time, from Baudelaire to Lowry, from Proust to Dostoyevsky, literature and poetry are also haunted by scenes of intoxication, as if philosophy and literature share a theme that announces and navigates their proximities and differences. For Nancy, intoxication constitutes an excess that both fascinates and questions philosophy's sober ambitions for appropriate forms of philosophical behavior...

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community (1983)--a book that offered a critical response to an early essay by Jean-Luc Nancy on "the inoperative community"--Nancy responds in turn with The Disavowed Community. Stemming from Jean-Christophe Bailly's initial proposal to think community in terms of "number" or the "numerous," and unfolding as a close reading of Blanchot's text, Nancy's new book addresses a range of themes and motifs that mark both his proximity to and distance from Blanchot's thinking, from Bataille's "community of lovers" to the relation between...