Books in the Cultural Memory in the Present series

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.

Explores the interweaving of several of Derrida's characteristic concerns with themes that Paul explores in Romans. This book argues that the central concern of Romans is with the question of justice. The many perplexities that arise from trying to think justice outside of law are clarified by reading Derrida on various themes.

This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author's basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud.

"The New Demons" combines an original investigation of twentieth century philosophical debates on evil and a critical engagement with the latest research on power and biopolitics in order to offer a unique vision of our contemporary human condition.

The Image of Law is the first book to examine law through the work of Gilles Deleuze, activating his thought within problems of jurisprudence and developing a concept of judgment that acknowledges its inherently creative capacity.

This book criticizes theories, dominant today, that reduce the self to a simple illusion, proposing a new theory of the ego that allows us to better understand our existence and our relations with others.

This remarkable posthumous work by one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century engages Augustine's Confessions, one of the major canonical works of world literature and the very paradigm of autobiography as a definable genre of writing. Lyotard approaches his subject by returning to his earliest phenomenological training.

"The Ends of Mourning" explores from an interdisciplinary perspective the crisis of contemporary culture with respect to the problem of mourning. The book charts the emergence and development of the problem of mourning in the writings of Freud, Proust and Freud's successor Lacan.

These essays provide important interpretations and analyze critical developments in the political philosophy of Gilles Deleuze.

The book situates the philosophical significance of Bataille's anthropological reflections within the fourfold made up by the names of Schelling, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Freud.

Occidental Eschatology is a study of apocalypticism and its effects on Western philosophy. One of the great Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century, Taubes published only this one book during his life, and here the English translation finally becomes available.

This is an interdisciplinary study of the major cultural and political scenes of a decade marked by dramatic -and sometimes traumatic-change.

In this book of brilliantly erudite and precise discussions, which also serves as an introduction to Pierre Hadot's more scholarly works, Hadot explains that for the Ancients, philosophy was not reducible to the building of a theoretical system: it was above all a choice about how to live one's life.

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

Combining approaches from literary studies and historical sociology, this book provides a groundbreaking cultural history of the strategies Freud employed in his writings and career to orchestrate public recognition of psychoanalysis and to shape its institutional identity.

This dialogue, proposed to Derrida by the historian Elisabeth Roudinesco, brings together two longtime friends who share a common history and an intellectual heritage. While their perspectives are often different, they have many common reference points: psychoanalysis, above all, but also the authors and works that have come to be known outside France as "post-structuralist."

This work explores the role of literature in the former Yugoslavia's attempts to create a multicultural nation. It focuses on the cultural processes by which the idea of a nation was developed and on the reasons that this idea failed to bind the South Slavs into a viable nation and state.

This book explores and reassesses the philosophical notion of relation. In contrast to the scholastic, ontological conception of relation as a thing of diminished being, it views relation as the minimal and elemental theme and structure of philosophy. The author argues that rethinking relation engages the very possibility and limits of philosophical discourse.

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.