Books in the Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series

Technics and Time 2: Disorientation continues Stiegler's interrogation of prosthetic and ortho-thetic memory in light of the crisis that arises when speed and delay are irreconcilable, the crisis of "human being" itself.

In this philosophical detective story, Giorgio Agamben reads the mysterious 1938 disappearance of atomic physicist Ettore Majorana as an intentional and decisive objection to how quantum physics had reduced the real to probability.

Originally published in Italian in 2016 under the title Che cos'ae la filosofia?

This is the author's most influential work of literary theory and criticism in which she explores the relations between literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

This volume presents a new proposal for the link between philosophy and art. Badiou identifies and rejects the three schemes of didacticism, romanticism, and classicism that he sees as having governed traditional "aesthetics," and seeks a fourth mode of accounting for the educative value of works of art.

Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature with man-made objects, which did not have the source of production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.

Technics and Time, 3 furthers Stiegler's critique of technics, working (back) through Kant in order to examine the nature of "cinematic time" relative to phenomenology and hypertechnology.

The three essays collected in this book offer a succinct introduction to Agamben's recent work through an investigation of Foucault's notion of apparatus, a meditation on the intimate link of philosophy to friendship, and a reflection on the singular relation with one's own time that we call contemporariness.

This book, written out of Derrida's long-standing friendship with Jean-Luc Nancy, examines the central place accorded to the sense of touch in the Western philosophical tradition.

The influential French philosopher, Derrida, discusses the analytic of death in Heidegger's Being and Time. This new book will not fail to set new standards for the discussion of Heidegger and for dealing with philosophical texts.

In this book, one of Italy's most important and original contemporary philosophers considers the status of art in the modern era. He probes the meaning and historical consequences of the indefinite continuation of art in what Hegel called a "self-annulling" mode, in the process offering an imaginative reinterpretation of the history of aesthetics from Kant to Heidegger.

Acting Out brings together two short books (the autobiographical I>How I Became a Philosopher and To Love, To Love Me, To Love Us) by Bernard Stiegler, the fruit of the discipline he developed in prison and of the passion he brings to his political, philosophical, and technical diagnoses of contemporary life.

Levinas discusses his encounters with those philosophers and literary authors whose writings have contributed to his own philosophy: Agnon, Buber, Celan, Delhomme, Derrida, Jabes, Kierkegaard, Lacroix, Laporte, Picard, Proust, Van Breda, Wahl, and, most notably, Blanchot.

"Originally published in Italian in 2017 under the title Creazione e anarchia: l'opera nell'etaa della religione capitalistica."

In this book, literary critic and political theorist Werner Hamacher shows how Hoelderlin's late poetry develops and enacts a radical theory of meaning that culminates in a unique, unprecedented, and still revolutionary concept of revolution that begins with a groundbreaking understanding of language.

This analysis of art and its modes of existence by a contemporary French philosopher begins with an essay that introduces the principal concern sustained in the four succeeding ones.

Advances the author's reflections on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative theology, politics, war, nationalism, and religion.

"Originally published in Italian in 2017 under the title Karman: breve trattato sull'azione, la colpa e il gesto."

This book argues that the theory of force elaborated in Immanuel Kant's aesthetics (and in particular, his theorization of the dynamic sublime) is of decisive importance to poetry in the nineteenth century and to the connection between poetry and philosophy over the last two centuries. Inspired by his deep engagement with the critical theory of Walter Benjamin, who especially developed this Kantian strain of thinking, Kevin McLaughlin uses this theory of force to illuminate the work of three of the most influential nineteenth-century writers in their respective national traditions: Friedrich Holderlin, Charles Baudelaire, and Matthew Arnold. The result is a fine elucidation of Kantian theory and a fresh account of poetic language and its aesthetic, ethical, and political possibilities.

In 1980, deconstructive and psychoanalytic literary theorist Barbara Johnson wrote an essay on Mary Shelley for a colloquium on the writings of Jacques Derrida. The essay marked the beginning of Johnson's lifelong interest in Shelley as well as her first foray into the field of "e;women's studies,"e; one of whose commitments was the rediscovery and analysis of works by women writers previously excluded from the academic canon. Indeed, the last book Johnson completed before her death was Mary Shelley and Her Circle, published here for the first time. Shelley was thus the subject for Johnson's beginning in feminist criticism and also for her end. It is surprising to recall that when Johnson wrote her essay, only two of Shelley's novels were in print, critics and scholars having mostly dismissed her writing as inferior and her career as a side effect of her famous husband's. Inspired by groundbreaking feminist scholarship of the seventies, Johnson came to pen yet more essays on Shelley over the course of a brilliant but tragically foreshortened career. So much of what we know and think about Mary Shelley today is due to her and a handful of scholars working just decades ago. In this volume, Judith Butler and Shoshana Felman have united all of Johnson's published and unpublished work on Shelley alongside their own new, insightful pieces of criticism and those of two other peers and fellow pioneers in feminist theory, Mary Wilson Carpenter and Cathy Caruth. The book thus evolves as a conversation amongst key scholars of shared intellectual inclinations while closing the circle on Johnson's life and her own fascination with the life and circle of another woman writer, who, of course, also happened to be the daughter of a founder of modern feminism.

H. C. for Life, That Is to Say . . . is Jacques Derrida's tribute to Helene Cixous-the author, her works, and their lifelong mutual reading and intellectual friendship.

A probing investigation of the trial of Jesus by noted Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben.

This book argues for a deconstructive approach to the past by looking at deconstruction's impact on American historians and then presenting an alternative hauntological theory and method of history influenced by, but not beholden to, the work of Jacques Derrida.

By focusing on what is outside the frame, this book offers a comprehensive theory of film, a concise history of American cinema, and a reflection on the place and significance of film within the arts of modernity in general.

This latest collection of texts, which focus on the "mystery" of literature, as well as on language as a laboratory for conceiving an ethical-political perspective that places us beyond sovereign power, offer a window onto Giorgio Agamben's most current research.

The book offers the first systematic analysis of Kafka's only work of nonfiction, the so-called Zurau fragments, and develops his proposals there for a controversial solution to human suffering and the drive toward moral betterment.

The final volume in Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben's wide-ranging investigation of the foundations of Western politics and culture.

The Messianic Reduction is the first study of Benjamin's early philosophy that takes into consideration the full range of his work, with particular emphasis on its complex relation to phenomenology, Kant and neo-Kantianism, and certain developments in mathematics.

In this book, Agamben investigates the roots of the modern moral concept of duty in the theory and practice of Christian liturgy.

This volume collects twenty-three interviews given over the course of the last two decades by Jacques Derrida. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of his concerns, touching upon such subjects as the teaching of philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, AIDS, language and translation, nationalism, politics, and Derrida's early life and the history of his writings.