Books in the Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series

Ludwig Tieck's 1797 rewriting of Charles Perrault's famous Bluebeard tale (1697) explicitly claims to be an "arabesque" book "without any sense and coherence." The author's close reading of this capricious narrative, based on Kant's theory of what it means to produce nonsense, reveals a specifically Romantic type of nonsense.

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

Concentrating on both widely known and seldom-read texts from a variety of philosophers, writers, and critics-from Leibniz and Mendelssohn, through Kleist and Hebel, to Benjamin and Irigaray-the book analyzes the genesis and structure of interruption, a topic of growing interest to contemporary literary studies, continental philosophy, legal studies, and theological reflection.

Matchbook consists of nine essays written around, or in response to, work published by Jacques Derrida since 1980. The focal point of the essays is the "Envois," which forms part of The Post Card (1980 in French). Particular attention is paid to how that text articulates with the ethical and political emphases of Derrida's more recent work, but also to its autobiographical conceit.

Agamben seeks to separate the Pauline texts from the history of the Church that canonized them, thus revealing them to be "the fundamental messianic texts of the West." He argues that Paul's Letters are concerned not with the foundation of a new religion but rather with the "messianic" abolition of Jewish law.

This book synthesizes Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida on interpretation and difference in order to provide a new theory of how interpretation functions in psychoanalysis.

Skirting the Ethical presents highly original readings of six pivotal works that, disrupting our conventional concept of morality, point us towards a non-prescriptive mode of ethics, as an ever-to-be-renewed rethinking that has much to do with the act of interpretation.

Gasche's latest book explores the concept or idea of Europe in the philosophies of Husserl, Heidegger, Patoka, and Derrida, and how it is linked to the notions of rationality, universality, world, the relation the other, and responsibility.

An analysis of the historical position of Paul Celan's poetry, this book addresses the question of a lyric language that would not be the expression of subjectivity. Lacoue-Labarthe defines the subject as the principle that founds, organizes, and secures both cognition and action, a figure not only of domination but of the extermination of everything other than itself.

The book presents a powerful reminder of adults' responsibility for the development of long-term attention (and thus of maturity) in children, particularly in the face of the techniques of attention-destruction practiced by the programming industries.

Ambiguities of Witnessing explores the complex relationship between law and literature in testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the body that investigated crimes of the apartheid era in South Africa.

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.

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.

"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself", wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general.

This is an analysis of the ways a linked set of ethico-political concepts responsibility, rights, freedom, equality, and justice might be re-thought, not simply jettisoned or reactively defended, in view of the linguistic deconstruction of their underlying principle, the individual human subject.

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

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

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.