Books published by Fordham University Press

Bruno Latour is one of the major figures of contemporary thought. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, spanning from his early work in the sociology and anthropology of science to his recent philosophy of multiple "modes of existence."

How can one experience the apocalypse in the present? Lyric Apocalypse argues that John Milton's and Andrew Marvell's lyrics depict revelation as an immediately perceptible event. In so doing, their lyrics explore the nature of events, the modern question of what it means for something to happen in the present.

Our contemporary challenge, according to the authors, is that a new world has quietly cropped up on us and is, in fact, already here. In this book, the authors invite us on an uncharted walk into barely known worlds when an everyday French idiom, "What's this world coming to?," is used to question our conventional thinking about the world.

A Derrida scholar traces the evolution of the philosopher's final seminar in Paris as he contemplates the state of the world and his own mortality. For decades, philosopher Jacques Derrida held weekly seminars in Paris, spending years at a time on a single, complex theme. From 2001 to 2003, he delivered the final work in this series, entitled ';The Beast and the Sovereign.' As this final seminar progressed, its central theme was diverted by questions of death, mourning, memory, and, especially, the end of the world. Now philosopher and Derrida scholar Michael Naas takes readers through the remarkable itinerary of Derrida's final seminar in The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments. The book begins with Derrida's analyses of the question of the animal in the context of his other published works on that subject. It then follows Derrida as a very different tone begins to emerge, one that wavers between melancholy and extraordinary lucidity with regard to the end of life. Focusing the entire second year on Daniel Defoe's novel Robinson Crusoe and Martin Heidegger's seminar ';The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics,' Derrida explores questions of the end of the world and of an originary violence that is both creative and destructive. The End of the World and Other Teachable Moments follows Derrida from week to week as he responds to these emerging questions, as well as to important events unfolding around him, both world eventsthe aftermath of 9/11, the American invasion of Iraqand more personal ones, from the death of Maurice Blanchot to intimations of his own death less than two years away.

Responding to Loss: Heideggerian Reflections on Literature, Architecture, and Film provides detailed explications of The Crossing by Cormack McCarthy, the Jewish Museum Berlin by Daniel Libeskind, and Wim Wenders' Wings of Desire. The interpretations-thinking via Heidegger, Marion, Arendt, and Levinas-call for an adequate response to loss, violence, witnessing.

Nietzsche advocates the affirmation of earthly life as a way to counteract nihilism and asceticism. This volume takes stock of the complexities and wide-ranging perspectives that Nietzsche brings to bear on the problem of life's becoming on earth by engaging various interpretative paradigms reaching from existentialist to Darwinist readings of Nietzsche.