Books in the Cultural Memory in the Present series

This book examines the early development of the fantastic tale through the works of of the German romantics Ludwig Tieck, Achim von Arnim, and E. T. A. Hoffmann; the subsequent French rediscovery of the genre in works by Theophile Gautier and Prosper Merimee; and Edgar Allan Poe's contributions to the literary form.

This collection of essays and interviews, some previously unpublished and almost all of which appear in English for the first time, encompasses the political and ethical thinking of Jacques Derrida over 30 years.

This work aims to reintroduce history into political theory. Contemporary political philosophy - liberalism, communitarianism, and republicanism - disregards history as irrelevant to the nature of politics and to what constitutes a political problem.

This book is an introduction to the nature of modernity as envisioned by Germany's leading social theorist of the late 20th century, Niklas Luhmann. For Luhmann, modernity is neither an Enlightenment project nor a ludic rejection of that project, but rather the precondition of all our deliberations, the structure within which our semantics makes sense.

This work explores Gilles Deleuze's contribution to film theory. According to Deleuze, we have come to live in a new universe that could be described as metacinematic. His conception of images implies a new kind of camera consciousness, one that determines our perceptions and sense of selves.

This book argues that the extraordinary force of the image in contemporary life-the contemporary imaginary-can be traced back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries.

This book collects published and unpublished work over the last dozen years by one of today's most distinguished and provocative anthopologists. Johannes Fabian is widely known outside of his discipline because his work so often overcomes traditional scholarly boundaries to bring fresh insight to central topics in philosophy, history, and cultural studies.

This volume presents the meditations of seven well-known French thinkers on the special relations of their own intellectual pursuit to Judaism.

This book investigates "cultural instruments," meaning normative forms of analysis and practice that are central to Western culture. It explores their history from antiquity to the early Enlightenment and their use and reworking by different cultures, moving from Europe to Africa and the Americas, especially the Caribbean, in the process giving close readings of a wide range of authors.

Taking on the Tradition focuses on how the work of Jacques Derrida has helped us rethink and rework the themes of tradition, legacy, and inheritance in the Western philosophical tradition.

This work offers a sustained examination of Dutch 17th-century genre painting from a theoretically informed feminist perspective.

This work engages on a theoretical level with issues in semiotics generally, taking Peirce's writings as a case study through which to investigate the adequacy of a theory of signs to account for the way "talk" works.

This book analyzes contemporary visual art produced in the context of conflict and trauma from a range of countries, including Colombia, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and Australia. It focuses on what makes visual language unique, arguing that the "affective'"quality of art contributes to a new understanding of the experience of trauma and loss.

Naming the Witch explores the recent series of witchcraft accusations and killings in East Java, which spread as the Suharto regime slipped into crisis and then fell.

Samira Haj conceptualizes Islam through a close reading of two Muslim reformers-Muhammad ibn 'Abdul Wahhab (1703-1787) and Muhammad 'Abduh (1849-1905)-each representative of a distinct trend, chronological as well as philosophical, in modern Islam. Their works are examined primarily through the prism of two conceptual questions: the idea of the modern and the formation of a Muslim subject. Approaching Islam through the works of these two Muslims, she illuminates aspects of Islamic modernity that have been obscured and problematizes assumptions founded on the oppositional dichotomies of modern/traditional, secular/sacred, and liberal/fundamentalist. The book explores the notions of the community-society and the subject's location within it to demonstrate how Muslims in different historical contexts responded differently to theological and practical questions. This knowledge will help us better understand the conflicts currently unfolding in parts of the Arab world.

This book investigates the ideological and political conditions that allow, and sanction, the undisguised political violence of our times. It is concerned with the regnant demands of nationalism and of history writing, and the unity and uniformity upon which these insist.

This book presents a set of critical engagements by writers from a variety of disciplines with the work of noted anthropologist Talal Asad.

From Conrad to Rushdie, from Du Bois, to Nggi, Worlds Within explores the changing form of novels, nations, and national identities, by attending to the ways in which political circumstances meet narratives of the psyche.

This study looks at how the philosophies of Jacques Derrida (1930-2004) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929) employ the figures of "exemplarity" and "chosenness" in order to address the tension between the universality of philosophical thinking and the particularity of nations, languages, and individual human experience.

This book seeks to explain the critiques of humanism and the "negative" philosophical anthropologies that dominated mid-century philosophy and traces the appearance of a new, non-humanist atheism in twentieth-century French thought.

Through three different versions of phenomenological discourse (Derrida, Henry, and Levinas), this book explores the notions of excess and the excess of excess relative to conceptions of the self.

An impassioned plea for democratic societies to take the future seriously at a time when all our energies seem focused on the present.

This book chronicles the demise of the so-called leftist Italian cultural establishment during the long 1980s.

Many people these days regard religion as outdated and are unable to understand how believers can intellectually justify their faith. Nonbelievers have long assumed that progress in technology and the sciences renders religion irrelevant. Believers, in contrast, see religion as vital to society's spiritual and moral well-being. But does modernization lead to secularization? Does secularization lead to moral decay? Sociologist Hans Joas argues that these two supposed certainties have kept scholars from serious contemporary debate and that people must put these old arguments aside in order for debate to move forward. The emergence of a "e;secular option"e; does not mean that religion must decline, but that even believers must now define their faith as one option among many.In this book, Joas spells out some of the consequences of the abandonment of conventional assumptions for contemporary religion and develops an alternative to the clich of an inevitable conflict between Christianity and modernity. Arguing that secularization comes in waves and stressing the increasing contingency of our worlds, he calls upon faith to articulate contemporary experiences. Churches and religious communities must take into account religious diversity, but the modern world is not a threat to Christianity or to faith in general. On the contrary, Joas says, modernity and faith can be mutually enriching.

This book explores the stakes of the uses and abuses of money, language, and technical objects.

This book, itself by a major Italian philosopher, explores the distinctive traits of Italian theory and philosophy, reflecting on why it has been growing in popularity and why people have turned to it for answers to real-world issues and problems.

The Belated Witness examines major works by Art Spiegelman, Cynthia Ozick, Christa Wolf, and Paul Celan, focusing specifically on the unsettling configuration of birth-as-death trauma around which these texts are organized.

This ambitious work engages several major philosophical genres. It responds to current discussions of the "gift," which lie on the frontier of literature, anthropology, and economics, notably in the work of Jacques Derrida, and offers a detailed critique of the basis on which those discussions have proceeded.

The twenty-five contributors to this volume who include such influential thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Talal Asad, and James Siegel confront the conceptual, analytical, and empirical difficulties involved in addressing the complex relationship between religion and media.