Books in the Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory series

Philosophy holds an ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication, this excess that both fascinates and questions philosophy's sober ambitions for conceptual clarity and appropriate behavior. Displacing established dualities-mind and body, reason and desire, logic and eros-Nancy's subject becomes intoxicated: Ego sum, ego existo ebrius-I am, I exist-drunk.

The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. The book shows how the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic.

This book argues that the work of Theodor W. Adorno is best understood through the lens of his highly suggestive-yet often overlooked-concept of the "uncoercive gaze," an innovative way of relating to the object of one's analysis that interweaves critical intimacy and analytic vigilance.

How does literature contest capital punishment? The central question of this book, taken over from Derrida's seminar The Death Penalty, is pursued in the analyses of four fictional texts. The context of the remains of the death penalty in the contemporary U.S. frames these engagements and extends their pertinence today.

This book theorizes the extraordinary regimes of humanmental experience by putting the emphasis on poetry. Poetry grants us the ability to move beyond the very limitsof thought. This essay is at the interface of literary theory, cognitivescience and philosophy and is uniquely comparative, encompassing dozens ofdifferent traditions, from all continents, from Ancient times to now.

The book Chronicle of Separation is an attempt to write on Derrida, to Derrida and from Derrida on the basis of a pathetic experience, which, in various ways, describes and enacts the pathetic experience of deconstruction itself. The book tackles the weight of emotions that is at the heart of deconstructive reading.

Flirtations: Rhetoric and Aesthetics This Side of Seduction, opens by asking a fundamental first question: What is flirtation, and how does it differ from seduction? The essays thereby address the under-theorized terrain of flirtation not as a subgenre of seduction but rather as a phenomenon in its own right.

This book elucidates the ways in which German Idealist authors such as Kant, Fichte, Friedrich Schlegel and Hegel envisioned the conjunction of spontaneous activity and receptivity towards culturally transmitted models in the context of aesthetic experience, philosophical thought, textual communication and literary criticism.

An overview and descriptions of the auditory commitments of ancient Greek song, drama, and acoustic theory from the time of Homer to the death of Euripides, this is the first complete study of the cultural system of sound in Greece.

The Limits of Fabrication engages anew with traditional understandings of poetry as a practice of making or building, putting this approach to the test and radicalizing its implications by studying models of form and structure in twentieth and twenty-first century materialist poetics alongside recent innovations in materials science and engineering.

Essays by major contemporary figures in political philosophy, anthropology, and cultural studies presenting an original reflection on the question what is a particular concept (classic concepts in politics as well as newly politicized concepts) and asking what sort of work a rethinking of that concept can do for us now.

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar's thought.

This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar's thought.

A phenomenological account of the forms of life characteristic of late capitalism--including television, celebrity culture, and personal electronics--culminating in an ontology of the gadget-commodity that brings together Marxist theories of commodity fetishism and ideology with Heidegger's attempt to think truth as unconcealment.

Technologies of Critique elaborates a critical practice that eludes critique's capture by institutional and market logics. Building on Chile's history of dissident art and its entangling of politics and aesthetics, Thayer engages continental philosophical traditions, to help pinpoint the technologies and media through which art intervenes critically in socio-political life.