Books in the Cultural Memory in the Present series

Combining phenomenology and psychoanalysis in innovative ways, this book seeks to undo the binary opposition between appearance and existence that has been in place since Plato's parable of the cave.

Talks about culture and comparison. This book inquires into the idea of comparison in a postcolonial world. It argues that inclusiveness is not a sufficient response to postcolonial and multiculturalist challenges because it leaves the basis of equivalence unquestioned.

Fundamentally concerned with the means by which translation ensures the afterlife of literary and cultural texts, this book examines multiple processes of translation, temporal and spatial, through acts of intercultural exchange and intergenerational transmission.

Drawing on Heidegger's corpus, the work of historians and biblical specialists, and contemporary philosophers like Levinas and Derrida, Zarader brings to light the evolution of an impense-or unthought thought-that bespeaks a complex debt at the core of Heidegger's hermeneutic ontology.

This book argues that in "Christian Europe," the question of the enemy has for millennia been structured by the historical relation of Europe to both Arab and Jew. It provides a philosophical understanding of the background of the current conflict in the Middle East.

This book suggests that modern cultural and critical institutions have persistently associated questions of aesthetics and politics with literature, theory, technics, and Romanticism.

First published in 1935, On Escape represents Emmanuel Levinas's first attempt to break with the ontological obsession of the Western tradition. In it, Levinas not only affirms the necessity of an escape from being, but also gives a meaning and a direction to it.

The book offers a vast panorama of Communism from the perspective of its collapse, and inspects the world beyond the fall in the distorting mirror of its imagined prehistory-providing in the process a perceptive analysis of a number of the fundamental issues of history writing.

This book shows how, from the late nineteenth to the late twentieth century, the philosophy of science was increasingly confronted with historical questions and how it became historicized accordingly.

This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror in relation to contemporary theories of trauma.

Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our involvement in historical violence and contemporary inequality, this book introduces a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject.

This new collection of previously untranslated essays by renowned German conceptual historian and theorist Reinhart Koselleck provides new insight into his theory of history, an ambitious attempt to unearth the conditions of all possible histories.

This book proposes a new and provocative reading of the clinical and political work of Frantz Fanon, the Martinican psychiatrist and revolutionary.

This volume brings together four of Jacques Derrida's essays on Maurice Blanchot's fictions: "Pace Not(s)," "Living on," "Title To Be Specified," and "The Law of Genre."

Focusing on intermediality, The Material Image situates film within questions of representation familiar from painting and theatrical practices.

Redefining art as a transformative "forcework," The Force of Art offers a new theory of the artwork, in which art's force is explained as a contestation of power in its modern technological manifestations.

Is academic writing, particularly in the disciplines of literary theory and cultural studies, needlessly obscure? "Just Being Difficult?" provides learned and thoughtful analyses of the entire question of how critical writing relates to its intended publics and to audiences beyond them.

This book offers a cultural history of modern China by looking at the tension between memory and history, examining how Chinese intellectuals and artists experienced trauma, social upheavals, and transformations.

The book is the English edition of a collection of essays by Jacob Taubes, one of the most creative and idiosyncratic philosophers of religion in Germany of the second half of the twentieth century.

This collection of philosophical essays interrogates key notions and preoccupations of the phenomenological tradition. While using Heidegger's "Being and Time" as its point of reference and dispute, the book also confronts other philosphers, such as Kant, Nietzche and Derrida.

"Originally published in German under the title Die Kreatur, das Heilige, die Bilder."

The end of the 20th century saw an explosion of new media that effected huge changes in human categories of communication. At the same time, a return to religion occurred on a global scale. This volume confronts the difficulties involved in addressing the relationship between religion and media.

Mimesis and Theory brings together twenty previously uncollected essays on literature and literary theory by one of the most important thinkers of the past thirty years.

A fascinating work, at once philosophical and autobiographical, by one of the most original thinkers in the United States today.

Piero della Francesca's "Madonna del Parto", a celebrated fifteenth-century Tuscan fresco in which the Virgin gestures to her partially open dress and her pregnant womb, is unusual in its iconography. This book uses Piero's enigmatic painting to narrate our archaic memories.

Structures of Memory turns to the landscape of contemporary Berlin, particularly places marked by the presence of the Nazi regime, in order to understand how some places of great cruelty or great heroism are forgotten by all but eyewitnesses, while others become the site of public ceremonies, museums, or commemorative monuments.

The Honor of Thinking evaluates the concepts and discourses of critique, theory, and philosophy in light of the exigencies of what Martin Heidegger and the French post-Heideggerian thinkers have established about the nature and the tasks of thinking.