Books in the Commonalities series

This book brings together secular liberal democratic thought-as found within the work of late neo-pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty-with religious liberal thinkers-such as Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch-for the purpose of exploring the contested intellectual history of redemptive hope narratives.

In The Techne of Giving, Timothy Campbell elaborates a notion of generosity as way of responding to contemporary biopower. Reading films from Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni, he both updates their political lexicon while adopting them as models able to push back against neoliberal forms of gift-giving.

An impressive collection bringing together contributions of renowned scholars on the topic of a "New Poetics of Community" that goes beyond both a romantic nostalgia for homogeneity and the myths of social engineering and rational choice.

How is political change possible when even the most radical revolutions only reproduce sovereign power? Via the analysis of the contradictory meanings of stasis, Vardoulakis argues that the opportunity for political change is located in the agonistic relation between sovereignty and democracy and thus demands a radical rethinking.

Seeks to understand the prevailing conception of government in the light of an important transformation in the idea of politics brought about by Christianity.

Focusing on the work of Horace Walpole, Thomas Jefferson, Henry Mackenzie, Washington Irving, Charles Brockden Brown, and Edgar Allan Poe, examines how the aesthetics of the romance novel influenced--and was influenced by--emerging modern systems of racial, national, sentimental, and political community.

This book proposes the reject as the figure of thought for our contemporaneous times. It shows how the reject can open us to radical forms of relations, democratic horizons, and "post-secular" and "posthuman" futures not only beyond anthropocentric limits, but also in ways by which others and their differences are affirmed respectfully.

This book proposes a conversation between Immanuel Kant's first two Critiques and Emmanuel Levinas's Otherwise than Being to reflect on the ideas of freedom, obligation, subjectivity, ethics, autonomy and thinking.

This book describes the historical underpinnings of political theology that continue to exert their influence. The confluence of Roman and Christian notions on the person fuels an exclusionary mechanism that unites by dividing people. Restoring thought to an impersonal place of universal access can help to end this oppressive conceptual regime.

"A cultural analysis of representation and representational discourse that advances black feminist practice as a modality through which black social life is both theorized and made material."

Practicing Caste attempts a break from the tradition of caste studies, using versions of phenomenology, structuralism and post-structuralism; and gives a description of touchability and untouchability in terms of a rhetoric and semantics of touch.

Laura Harris is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Art and Public Policy at New York University.

Laura Harris is Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Art and Public Policy at New York University.

Many on the Left have looked upon "universal" as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. Balibar builds on these critiques, yet works to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common.

Diano's Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy, anticipating the work of Deleuze, Badiou, Esposito, and Agamben. It now appears in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy.

An analysis of the history and social role of mobile phones today (with an enhancement of their primary writing function) is followed by a proposal of a philosophical theory of objects, which is meant to be complementary to Searle's 'collective intentionality', that places writing at the basis of social reality.

Traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work in the 1960s to the present, examining his key concepts - infancy, Voice, potentiality, sovereignty, bare life, messianism - in relation to key texts and concepts in Jacques Derrida's work.

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community-a book outlining a critical response to Jean-Luc Nancy's early proposal for thinking an "inoperative community"-The Disavowed Community offers a close reading of Blanchot's text.

Assesses the current situation of Europe ten years after the adoption of the single currency. Examines the genealogy of the idea of Europe from the Greek confrontation with the Asia to the conflict between the Roman Empire and Christianity. Discusses the role of secularization in the shaping of modern Europe.

A collection of Essays over the last 20 years, exploring different dimensions (historical, political, philosophical, literary) of the philosophical debate on "subjecthood" and "subjectivity" in Modernity, as it was framed by the "Controversy on the subject" from the 1960's, and showing how it is now continued in a "controversy on the Universal".

Claims advertising is nothing but a metaphysical hypothesis about the moral nature of things: objects aren't purely physical or economical entities. Any object, regardless of its nature, can become a complex of possible happiness--not just an object of value, but a moral source of perfection for any one of us.

A study of Machiavelli's theory of politics and history which takes as its basis a radical theory of freedom as non-domination and a philosophy that gives priority to events over forms.

Terms of Politics: Community, Immunity, and Biopolitics presents a decade of Esposito's thought on the origins and possibilities of political theory.

This book is a rehabilitation sensibility. It defines what we call sensibility or sensible life by defining the ontological status of images. It shows that images have an intermediate ontological status and exist in an autonomous sphere. It also explores our interactions with images in dream, fashion and language.

From prehistoric stone tools to machines to computers, things have traveled a long road along with human beings. Changing with the times, places, and methods of production, coming from diverse histories, enveloped in multiple layers of meaning, things embody ideas, emotions, and symbols of which we are often unaware.

Written in an easy, often witty, style Documentality revises Foucault's late concept of the "ontology of actuality" into the project of an "ontological laboratory," thereby reinventing philosophy as a pragmatic activity that is directly applicable to our everyday life.