Books in the Crosscurrents series

The re-examination of Saint Paul's letters in contemporary European philosophy is one of the most important developments at the crossroads of philosophy and theology today. In discussion with a range of authors contributing to this movement, including Heidegger, Badiou, Agamben, and Taubes, Gert-Jan van der Heiden offers a new and systematic account of the philosophical potential of these letters. He does so by uncovering a dialectic of exception, which revolves around the Pauline notions of the outcast and the spirit. Against a general tendency to understand the significance of Paul in politico-theological terms alone, van der Heiden focuses on the ontological potential of Saint Paul's letters by elucidating what they imply for our thinking about (non-)beings, world, event, time, exception and spirit. Ultimately, he shows how this dialectic implies a new understanding of being and thinking and gives rise to a new art of living, both ethically and politically. Gert-Jan van der Heiden is Professor of Metaphysics at Radboud University in Nijmegen, the Netherlands.

Using animals for scientific research is a highly contentious issue that Continental philosophers engaging with 'the animal question' have been rightly accused of shying away from. Now, Wahida Khandker asks whether Continental approaches to animality and organic life will make us reconsider our treatment of non-human animals. By following its historical and philosophical development, she argues that the concept of 'pathological life' as a means of understanding organic life as a whole plays a pivotal role in refiguring the human-animal distinction. She explores the significance of this across philosophy and the life sciences through the work of a number of key thinkers of life and process, from Henri Bergson to Donna Haraway.

Following a long tradition of objectification, 20th-century French feminism often sought to liberate the female body from the confines of patriarchal logos and to inscribe its rhythms in writing. Amaleena Damle addresses questions of bodies, boundaries and philosophical discourses by exploring the intersections between a range of contemporary philosophers and authors on the subject of contemporary female corporeality and transformation.

Hans-Georg Gadamer's poetics completely overturns the European aesthetic tradition. By concentrating on the experience of meaning, Unfinished Worlds shows how Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics transforms aesthetics into a mode of attentive practice. It has deep implications for all of the humanities, and how we can understand the meaning of poetry, art, literature, history and theology. His emphasis on participation promises an approach that will revolutionise aesthetic and hermeneutic practice, and gives us new ways to think about the cultural productivity and social legitimacy of the humanities.

Combining recent insights from animal studies, critical plant studies and the new materialisms, Danielle Sands reads fiction and philosophy alongside each other to propose a method of thinking of and with animals that draws on a bestiary of affects. She challenges the claim that empathy should be primary mode of engagement with nonhuman life. Instead, she looks at the stories that we tell, and are told, by insects - beings at the edges of animal life. The indifference, even disgust, that these creatures evoke in us forms the basis for a new ethics not limited by empathy. Along the way she encounters fiction writers Yann Martel, Karen Joy Fowler, Han Kang and Jim Crace beside the philosophy of Graham Harman, Donna Haraway, Jacques Derrida and Roger Caillois.

Providing a guide to fantasy writing from the classical period to the 20th century, this text focuses on different examples of how fantasy has acted as a political response to cultural opportunities and pressures. A wide variety of styles and genres are investigated.

The work of the Italian Continental philosopher Giorgio Agamben is usually read in terms of critical theory or traditional political philosophy. In this book, the author argues that Agamben's thought has been widely misunderstood. It radically reinterprets Agamben's political philosophy, including his concepts of 'bare life' and 'the exception'.

A volume that reflects a broadening area of English Studies that takes in non-western literatures and places more emphasis on the contexts and broader notions of "writing". It discusses writing from and about Africa and also touches on studies in black writing.

This text presents the current state in interdisciplinary racial studies, looking in detail at the construction, perception and representation of race in a variety of literature. The essays examine style, figures of speech, settings, narrative devices and historical social situations.

This study explores the relationship between writing and film, looking at box office successes such as "The Piano" and "The English Patient" as well as adaptations of 19th century "classic" novels, and science fiction films such as "Blade Runner" and "Starship Troopers".

This text surveys the writing genres that have contributed to the American notions of America. Essays from scholars from both sides of the Atlantic chart the range of responses to American nationhood, from colonial times to the present, and include dissenting responses from minority communities.

Addressing the concept of writing, this volume seeks to re-examine a range of issues and themes arising out of the Victorian period.

Difficult Atheism shows how contemporary French philosophy is rethinking the legacy of the death of God in ways that take the debate beyond the narrow confines of atheism into the much broader domain of post-theological thinking. Christopher Watkin argues that Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Quentin Meillassoux each elaborate a distinctive approach to the post-theological, but that each approach still struggles to do justice to the death of God.

Leemon McHenry argues that Whitehead's metaphysics provides a better basis for achieving a unification of physical theory than a traditional substance metaphysics. He investigates the influence of Maxwell's electromagnetic field, Einstein's theory of relativity and quantum mechanics on the development of the ontology of events and compares Whitehead's theory to his contemporaries, C. D. Broad and Bertrand Russell, as well as W. V. Quine. In this way, McHenry defends the naturalised and speculative approach to metaphysics as opposed to analytical and linguistic methods that arose in the 20th century.