Books in the Commonalities series

This book is comprised of two essays on the biblical commandment against homicide. The first is authored by a Roman Catholic cardinal; the second by a leading Italian feminist philosopher. Together the two essays explore the religious, philosophical, political, historical, and moral significance of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" today.

Communities in Fiction reads in detail six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) in the light of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by Raymond Williams, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Nancy for communities or non-communities in the real world.

Looks at gender and queer theories through lenses that are simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory, "American" and "French".

A novel critique of sovereignty and an original philosophical theory of democratic practice

Takes up Foucault's hypothesis that liberal "civil society," far from being a sphere of natural freedoms, designates the social spaces where our biological lives come under new forms of control, and are invested with new forms of biopower.

A powerful essay on identity and its fate in our contemporary world. Against various attempts to cling to established identities, Nancy shows that an identity is always open: to alterity and its transformations. Ultimately, one does not have an identity but has to become what one is, without ever returning to a same but solely to difference and singularity.