Books published by re.press

This volume brings together essays by different generations of Italian thinkers which address, whether in affirmative, problematizing or genealogical registers, the entanglement of philosophical speculation and political proposition within recent Italian thought.

"Incognitum hactenus by Kristen Alvanson."

In advancing the political project of autonomy, Castoriadis raises the fundamental question: what ought we to think? Following an interpretation of his elucidation of the connections between time, history, and the groundlessness of the world and society, this study argues for a broadening of Castoriadis's question, something which enables attention, not just to the subject matter of thinking, but also its form and the thinker's situatedness. While Castoriadis's insights may be usefully deployed both to expose the limits of inherited thought, which privileges the power of receiving meaning and value over creation and creativity, and to explore the interaction between politics and philosophy, his own approach may well represent the other equally problematic side of the Platonic tradition he criticizes. Consequently, Castoriadis's notions of radical democratic subjectivity and autonomous thinking, both of which respond to the 'ought' question, may inadvertently conform to a mode of being that can do no more than protest the dominant formalism characterising the modern Western world. At the core of this limitation lies a decisive issue for philosophy: whether the enactment of thinking is informed by the historical irruption and retreat of the visionary collective.

The Reflections on Presence is a philosophical notebook which explores the complexities and concerns of contemporary conscience. They construct a program of 'spiritual exercises', in the tradition of Marcus Aurelius, Ignatius Loyola and Nikos Kazantzakis, starting with the recognition of contemporary disillusion followed by the gradual investigation of the interconnected nature of reality and imagination, the affirmation of the individual presence and the ethics born out of such presence. They culminate in a vision of existential transparency that links poetry, philosophy and religion through the impure materiality of the everyday being.

Out of Bounds is a sequence of poems in three parts. It is a double story of dislocation that explores autobiographical fragments drawing on the protagonist's experience of migration and motherhood. It draws together the two strands to reveal a subject at pains to re-define herself through language in a space circumscribed by sexuality, culture, and post-colonial politics. Succinct and astonishingly vivid, these pieces stretch the boundaries of language and literary form.

Politics, Ethics and Performance: Helene Cixous and the Theatre du Soleil is a collection of essays by French feminist poet, playwright and philosopher Helene Cixous. Cixous' performative and poetic mode of writing explores the relationship between theatrical performance and contemporary politics."

In this important new work on the philosophy of German Idealism, Valkanov investigates the Kantian notion of the limits of human cognition and its implication for our understanding and practice of freedom. He then turns to the question of the connection between knowledge and freedom in the philosophy of Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. Valkanov moves beyond the more traditional and formalized treatments of Kant, by applying the critical analysis of limitation, confusion and conflict to our own ways of thinking. This approach tests the stability of our conceptions and sense of certainty through a voluntary exposure to the destructive force of Kant's transcendental critique. The result is a text which presents the essence of the arguments and exposes the passion that underpins the complex terminology and architectonics of transcendental philosophy. This ground-breaking work restores a sense of wonder at the depths of Kant's transcendental discoveries, the immensity of the challenge that he posed and the intense, living connection between his work and the work of those who succeeded him.

Explores the meaning and politics of place (Roebuck Plains) through Aboriginal narratives, songs, conversations, photographs and paintings, together with European historical, geographic and geological knowledge; linked by a series of explanatory, exploratory and analytical essays on history, anthropology, critical theory and painting; interview with Peter Yu, NAC representative.

The primary aim of this collection is to show that the topicality of Lacan's legacy to contemporary philosophy is particularly evident with regard to current debates which, in attempting to overcome the spurious divide between continental and analytic traditions, as well as between the human, social and natural sciences, have been thoroughly rethinking the notions of realism and materialism, along with their implications for aesthetics, ethics, politics, and theology. More or less explicitly, all the essays included in the present volume tackle such a complex speculative articulation by focusing on the way in which a Lacanian approach can shed new light on traditional concepts of Western philosophy, if not rehabilitate them. The 'new' in the 'new generation' that gives the title to the present collection of articles is far from rhetorical. All the authors included are under fifty years of age, most are under forty, and some are even under thirty. Without exception, they have, however, already secured a prominent position in debates concerning the relation between philosophy and psychoanalysis, or are in the process of doing so. The other contiguous novelty of this volume that marks a major shift from previous attempts at presenting Lacan in dialogue avec les philosophes is its markedly international dimension. Contributors reside and work in seven different countries, which are, moreover, not always their countries of origin. As the reader will be able to confirm by taking into consideration the respectful intensity of the many cross-references present in these essays - which should be taken as a very partial sedimentation of exchanges of ideas and collaborative projects that, in some cases, have been ongoing for almost a decade - geographical distance appears to have been beneficial to the overcoming of Lacan's confinement to the supposed orthodoxy of specific - provincial - schools and their pathetic fratricidal wars, whilst in parallel enhancing intellectual rigour. These pieces rethink philosophically through Lacan, with as little jargon as possible, in this order, realism, god, history, genesis and structure, writing, logic, freedom, the master and slave dialectic, and the act.

The enterprise of philosophy has been under sustained attack throughout the 20th century, not just by the sciences and allied cultural forces but within the traditions of analytic and Continental thought themselves. This work attempts to diagnose the roots of these assaults on the enterprise of philosophy and responds to them by developing a new constructive and systematic 'image of philosophy.' This novel conception of philosophy aims to re-establish philosophy's 'field' as a humanly indispensable enterprise autonomous from, but related to, other such areas as religion, science, and art. Beginning with Kant's suppressed notion of 'analytic a posteriori judgments, ' and drawing widely upon both the ancient and modern traditions as well as such contemporary thinkers as Deleuze, Badiou, and Meillassoux, it proposes a new 'mapping' of the field of philosophy in terms of three conditions necessary for the very existence of philosophy as an activity, body of texts, and thought-complexes expressed in them: embodiment, signification, and ideality. In so doing, it offers a view that is realist, finitist, constructivist, and pluralistic, but that also accords a central role to logical reasoning and truth claims. In the end, it seeks to discover the common roots of the analytic and Continental traditions, to move beyond the impasses and exhaustion of 'postmodernisms, ' and to provide a framework for addressing the newly emergent philosophical issues of the 21st century.

Umbr(a) was one of the most important US theory journals of the 1990s and early 2000s, publishing work by some of the greatest philosophers, psychoanalysts and theorists of our era. In every regard, it was ahead of the curve - in content, design, and style - often introducing thinkers who have subsequently become globally influential. This anthology presents a selection of the very best of Umbr(a), including contributions from Joan Copjec, Sam Gillespie, Charles Shepherdson, Russell Grigg, Alenka Zupan?i?, Slavoj ¿i¿ek,Mladen Dolar, Catherine Malabou, Tim Dean, Steven Miller, Dominiek Hoens, Petar Ramadanovic, Sigi Jöttkandt, Colette Soler, Jelica Sumi? and A. Kiarina Kordela.

The passing of seasons, days, hours, years, via my growth, perplexed me. Staring at my parents' formal living room, the couches looked different to how I had previously remembered them. My home was forever misleading. This was not my furniture, my room, my kitchen; I had simply been dropped in here, without notice, by an indiscriminate stork. The History of My Body is a meditation on childhood, adolescence and young adulthood by an emerging Australian female writer. This is a history of the merciless, well-worn path of encounters and accomplices: of family and friends, of education and confusion, of solids, liquids and gas. History traditionally pertains to fact, but the story of the body of Larissa Bird descries no such truth. In fostering a sense of objective revelation, Larissa disintegrates the formula for life granted to her from birth. The twisted deeds of her father, the ignorance of her mother, the depraved rationale of her early school education, their history remains as it was in their original encounter-a bewildering muddle of wild assimilation and the impossibility of rejection. Larissa makes no claim to know anything, and her story will probably be as elusive for you as it is for her. Your only escape from the History of her Body will be in her encounters with the fantastic secrets of Knowledge. She admits no regret for stumbles into pretense, confusion and disarray. What is a history, but a series of forgotten events, illogical conclusions and muddled incentives? This book should be filed under fictitious memoir.

Gabriel Tarde's Monadology and Sociology, originally published in 1893, is a remarkable and unclassifiable book. It sets out a theory of 'universal sociology', which aims to explicate the essentially social nature of all phenomena, including the behaviour of atoms, stars, chemical substances and living beings. He argues that all of nature consists of elements animated by belief and desire, which form social aggregates analogous to those of human societies and institutions. In developing this central insight, Tarde outlines a metaphysical system which builds on both classical rationalist philosophy and the latest scientific theories of the time, in a speculative synthesis of extraordinary range and power. Tarde's work has only recently returned to prominence after a long eclipse. His work was an important influence on later theorists including Deleuze and Latour, and has been widely discussed in the social sciences, but has rarely been a focus of philosophical interest. The translator's afterword provides an explication of the key ideas in the text and situates Tarde's theory within the context of the philosophical tradition, arguing for the importance of the text as a highly original work of systematic ontology, and for its importance for contemporary theoretical debates.

There is today a cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural recognition of the need to reconceptualize the complexities of the global reality. In this study the authors present the view that a rethinking of Hegel's concept of Civil Society has the potential to meet this need. They argue that the standard interpretations of Hegel are largely misplaced and that a properly systemic reading of the concepts of Civil Society, the State and their relationship, has the potential to shed new light on our understandings of the normative implications of global processes ranging from the effects of economic globalization to the global activism of NGOs and social movements, to international relations and the question of global governance. The authors also engage with discussions of (global) civil society from a range of disciplines and cultural and intellectual traditions to illustrate the benefits of rethinking the Hegelian concept of Civil Society.

Without exception, everyone is called upon today to construct his/her patriotic identity as a response to the supreme imperative of our shared whiteness: 'act as if the land were initially without owners'. For white Australia, this imperative is more primordial than the usual formulation of the call to patriotism: 'be prepared to sacrifice yourself for your country', since patriotic sacrifice presupposes that one already has a country to which one is devoted. The imperative of whiteness touches the depth of our ontology since it is from this that the white collective springs as the creator of the white Australian nation-state. White Australians perpetually enter the world in so far as we faithfully obey the imperative to act as if the land were initially without owners and it is through this imperative that we cover over the question, 'where do you come from?', posed to us by the defiant resistance of Indigenous sovereign being. White Australia is therefore unavoidably implicated in the perpetuation of the nation that must act 'as if ...' or what we call the 'hypothetical nation'.

At one and the same time the poet in me sinks and the rebel in me flies. The rebel encounters himself in the poet in whom the vision is drowned. The poet encounters himself in the rebel and becomes philosopher, the bearer of the vision of vision. Being this tension the ego falls in love with both. Fragments are the forgotten whispers of such falling.

The Rational Kernel of the Hegelian Dialectic is the last in a trilogy of political-philosophical essays, preceded by Theory of Contradiction and On Ideology, written during the dark days at the end of the decade after May '68. With the late 1970's "triumphant restoration" in Europe, China and the United States, Badiou and his collaborators return to Hegel with a Chinese twist. By translating, annotating and providing commentary to a contemporaneous text by Chinese Hegelian Zhang Shi Ying, Badiou and his collaborators attempt to diagnose the status of the dialectic in their common political and philosophical horizon. Readers of Badiou's more recent work will find a crucial developmental step in his work in ontology and find echoes of his current project of a 'communist hypothesis'. This translation is accompanied by a recent interview that questions Badiou on the discrepancies between this text and his current thought, on the nature of dialectics, negativity, modality and his understanding of the historical, political and geographical distance that his text introduces into the present.

This study presents an original interpretation of the meaning and complex inter-relationship of the concepts of love, sexuality, family and the law. It argues that they should be understood as forms of interplay between the subjective and the objective, necessity and contingency and unity and difference. A comprehensive elaboration of these forms is to be found in Hegel's Science of Logic-the conclusions of which he used to organise his ethical and political thought. The argument is introduced with a discussion of the relevance of Hegel's speculative philosophy to modernity. The authors then explore the relationship between thought, being and recognition in Hegel's philosophical system and offer an interpretation of the Science of Logic. This interpretation forms the basis of a re-assessment of Hegel's treatment of love, sexual relationships, the family and law. A Hegelian account of familial love is employed to review recent debates within a range of discourses, including feminism, family law and gay and lesbian studies. As well as addressing current concerns about sexual difference and the ontology of homosexuality, the study provides a guide to reading Hegel in an original and productive way. It will be of interest to philosophers, feminists, theorists of sexualities, ethical and legal theorists.

Continental philosophy has entered a new period of ferment. The long deconstructionist era was followed with a period dominated by Deleuze, which has in turn evolved into a new situation still difficult to define. However, one common thread running through the new brand of continental positions is a renewed attention to materialist and realist options in philosophy. Among the leaders of the established generation, this new focus takes numerous forms. It might be hard to find many shared positions in the writings of Badiou, DeLanda, Laruelle, Latour, Stengers, and Zizek, but what is missing from their positions is an obsession with the critique of written texts. All of them elaborate a positive ontology, despite the incompatibility of their results. Meanwhile, the new generation of continental thinkers is pushing these trends still further, as seen in currents ranging from transcendental materialism to the London-based speculative realism movement to new revivals of Derrida. As indicated by the title The Speculative Turn, the new currents of continental philosophy depart from the text-centered hermeneutic models of the past and engage in daring speculations about the nature of reality itself. This anthology assembles authors, of several generations and numerous nationalities, who will be at the centre of debate in continental philosophy for decades to come.

In his new book, the eminent philosopher Andrew Benjamin turns his attention to architecture, design, sculpture, painting and writing. Drawing predominantly on a European tradition of modern philosophical criticism running from the German Romantics through Walter Benjamin and beyond, he offers a sequence of strong meditations on a diverse ensemble of works and themes: on the library and the house, on architectural theory, on Rachel Whiteread, Peter Eisenman, Anselm Kiefer, Peter Nielson, David Hawley, Terri Bird, Elizabeth Presa and others. In Benjamin's hands, criticism is bound up with judgment. Objects of criticism always become more than mere documents. These essays dissolve the prejudices that have determined our relation to aesthetic objects and to thought, releasing in their very care and attentiveness to the 'objects themselves' the unexpected potentialities such objects harbour. In his sensitivity to what he calls 'the particularity of material events', Benjamin's writing comes to exemplify new possibilities for the contemporary practice of criticism itself. These essays are a major contribution to critical thought about art and architecture today, and a genuine work of what Benjamin himself identifies as a 'materialist aesthetics'.

Wittgenstein said that philosophers should greet each other, not by saying "hello," but rather "take your time." But what is time? Time is money, but this points to an even better answer to this basic question for our modern epoch: time is acceleration. In a cultural system which stresses economic efficiency, the quicker route is always the more prized, if not always the better one. Wittgenstein's dictum thus constitutes an act of rebellion against the dominant vector of our culture, but as such it threatens to become (quickly) anti-modern. We need an approach to "reading" our information-rich culture which is not reactionary but rather meets its accelerated condition. In this book, O. Bradley Bassler develops a toolkit for acute reading of our modern pace, not through withdrawal but rather through active engagement with a broad range of disciplines. The main characters in this drama comprise a cast of master readers: Hannah Arendt, Jean Starobinski, Harold Bloom, Angus Fletcher, Hans Blumenberg and John Ashbery, with secondary figures drawn from the readers and critics whom this central group suggests. We must develop a vocabulary of pacing, reflecting our modern distance from classical sources and the concomitant acceleration of our contemporary condition. Only in this way can we begin to situate the phenomenon of modernity within the larger scales of human culture and history.

Stretchmarks of Sun is informed by the crossing of borders-geographical, historical, formal and subjective. It explores autobiographical fragments drawing on the protagonist's experience of dislocation and reconnection. It is poetry that draws together strands plucked from different disciplines, ways of knowing and art forms to reveal how home is made out of love and language.

This book foregrounds the centrality of political conflicts in the radical philosophy of Alain Badiou. It is divided into two halves. The first undertakes a reading of Badiou''s wider oeuvre (beyond Being and Event) and demonstrates that his political theory derives from analyses of key revolutionary sequences such as the Paris Commune, October ''17, May ''68 and the Chinese Cultural Revolution. From his evolving meditations on these sequences, and from his theoretical borrowings from Marxism, psychoanalysis and set-theory, Badiou has established a complex schema of the possible outcomes of conflict which constitutes a subtle and flexible theory of change. In the second half, the book applies this schema to a concrete ''situation'': colonial and post-colonial Jamaica. Against the backdrop of the history of conflict in Jamaica, the Morant Bay Revolt of 1865 is interpreted as an ''event'' in Badiou''s very precise sense. The Rastafari movement is then posited as a ''subject body'' faithful to this event, while roots reggae is explored as the ''subject language'' of this Rastafarian subject body. Through this example, it is suggested that the starkness of the account of the event in Being and Event, in its incompatibility with history or culture, must be qualified if Badiou''s contribution to a renewed philosophy of conflict is to be realized. To this end, the book builds on Badiou''s own Logics of Worlds in order to speculatively propose two new concepts: ''evental historiography'' and ''evental culture''. It is argued that conceptual elaborations like these might enable a productive rapprochement between Badiou and Cultural Studies and Postcolonial theory - disciplines of which Badiou himself has been extremely critical, but which are certain to shape his reception in the English-speaking world. Conversely, both Cultural Studies and Postcolonial theory, precisely in their increasingly enfeebled conceptions of social, cultural and political conflict, stand to gain a great deal from dialogue with the persistently Maoist dimensions of Badiou''s work.

This work takes seriously literature's repeated attestations of a One in its stories, poems and plays entitled 'First Love'. The author suspends the contemporary philosophical stricture against every idea of a whole to unmask the figure concealed behind the psychoanalytic myth of first love.

This text looks at Bruno Latour specifically as a philosopher. Part one covers four key works in Latour's career in metaphysics, while part two identifies Latour's key contributions to ontology, while criticizing his focus on the relational character of actors at the expense of their autonomous reality.

Walter Benjamin is universally recognised as one of the key thinkers of modernity: his writings on politics, language, literature, media, theology and law have had an incalculable influence on contemporary thought. Yet the problem of architecture in and for Benjamin's work remains relatively underexamined. Does Benjamin's project have an architecture and, if so, how does this architecture affect the explicit propositions that he offers us? In what ways are Benjamin's writings centrally caught up with architectural concerns, from the redevelopment of major urban centres to the movements that individuals can make within the new spaces of modern cities? How can Benjamin's theses help us to understand the secret architectures of the present? This volume takes up the architectural challenge in a number of innovative ways, collecting essays by both well-known and emerging scholars on time in cinema, the problem of kitsch, the design of graves and tombs, the orders of road-signs, childhood experience in modern cities, and much more. Engaged, interdisciplinary, bristling with insights, the essays in this collection will constitute an indispensable supplement to the work of Walter Benjamin, as well as providing a guide to some of the obscurities of our own present.

Bringing together for the first time all of G.W.F. Hegel's major Introductions in one place, this book ambitiously attempts to present readers with Hegel's systematic thought through his Introductions alone. The Editors articulate to what extent, precisely, Hegel's Introductions truly reflect his philosophic thought as a whole. Certainly each of Hegel's Introductions can stand alone, capturing a facet of his overarching idea of truth. But compiled all together, they serve to lay out the intricate tapestry of Hegel's thought, woven with a dialectic that progresses from one book to another, one philosophical moment to another. Hegel's reflections on philosophy, religion, aesthetics, history, and law-all included here-have profoundly influenced many subsequent thinkers, from post-Hegelian idealists or materialists like Karl Marx, to the existentialism of Kierkegaard and Jean-Paul Sartre; from the phenomenological tradition of Edmund Husserl to Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and other post-moderns, to thinkers farther afield, like Japan's famous Kyoto School or India's Aurobindo. This book provides the opportunity to discern how the ideas of these later thinkers may have originally germinated in Hegel's writings, as well as to penetrate Hegel's worldview in his own words, his grand architecture of the journey of the Spirit.