Books published by Stanford University Press

This text examines the undeclared war on the Mongolian plains that took place from May to September 1939 and ended with a decisive Soviet victory with two important results: Japan reoriented its strategic emphasis toward the south; and Russia freed itself from the fear of fighting on two fronts.

In this book, Agamben investigates monasticism from its beginnings up through the Franciscan movement in an attempt to find a new form-of-life that escapes from the logic of Western politics as put forth in his Homo Sacer series.

In this reflection on the relation between nature and culture, Michel Serres relates the present environmental catastrophe to pollution generated by humanity's efforts to appropriate.

In this book, Tang addresses how public opinion is shaped in China's political, economic, and social environment and how it affects decision making and political change.

Using American schools as a reference point, this book provides a comprehensive, comparative description of schooling as a global institution.

This book offers a new perspective on the extensive rabbinic discussions of menstrual impurity, female physiology, and anatomy, and on the social and religious institutions those discussions engendered. It analyzes the functions of these discussions within the larger textual world of rabbinic literature and in the context of Jewish and Christian culture in late antiquity.

The author, Saiokuken Socho (1448-1532)-the preeminent linked-verse (renga) poet of his time-provides in his journal a vivid portrayal of cultural life in the capital and the provinces, together with descriptions of battles and great warrior families, the dangers of travel through war-torn countryside, and the plight of the poor.

The author shows how museum culture offers a unique vantage point on the 19th and 20th centuries' preoccupation with history and subjectivity, and demonstrates how the constitution of the aesthetic provides insight into the realms of technology, industrial culture, architecture, and ethics.

This edition of Dawn, the second installment in Nietzsche's free spirit trilogy, is a translation of the celebrated Colli-Montinari edition, which is acclaimed as one of the most important works of scholarship in the humanities in the last half century.

In this extended meditation on the language of the self within contemporary social politics, the author ponders the question: What does it matter what you say about yourself? She studies why the requirement to be a something-or-other should be so hard to satisfy in a manner that rings true in the ears of its own subject.

A history of the efforts of community leaders and intellectuals in Venice, Trieste, and Dalmatia to create a multi-national region along the shores of the Adriatic Sea, based on a nationalism that valued diversity, not homogeneity.

Consuming Desires examines new forms of marriage emerging in Egypt and the United Arab Emirates in reaction, in part, to the governments' increasing attempts to control sexuality with shari'a law.

The Honor of Thinking evaluates the concepts and discourses of critique, theory, and philosophy in light of the exigencies of what Martin Heidegger and the French post-Heideggerian thinkers have established about the nature and the tasks of thinking.

This book explores Hegel's response to the French Revolutionary Terror in relation to contemporary theories of trauma.

Haunted by its unburied past, late Soviet and post-Soviet culture has produced unique mourning and memorial practices - this book details these practices and provides new interpretations of the cultural artifacts produced in Russia from the 1930s through the 2010s.

This posthumous and crucial contribution by one of the latter twentieth-century's most important sociologists, overturns a half-century of assumptions about the sociology of religion.

In this book, Rotman argues that mathematics is a vast and unique man-made imagination machine controlled by writing. It addresses both aspects-mental and linguistic-of this machine. The essays in this volume offer an insight into Rotman's project, one that has been called "one of the most original and important recent contributions to the philosophy of mathematics."

The powerful thesis of this book is that in order to achieve full selfhood we must all repeatedly and endlessly kill the phantasmatic image of ourselves instilled in us by our parents-the projection of the child our parents wanted.

Drawing on medieval Chinese poetry, fiction, and religious scriptures, this book illuminates the greatest goddess of Taoism and her place in Chinese society.

Without stigmatizing commercial activity, this book takes a philosophical and anthropological look at the universe of the gift, debt, and money in the West from ancient Greece to the present in order to examine how and why knowledge has long been assumed to be priceless.

This is the definitive edition (including drafts, notes, and ancillary materials) of Paul Celan's Meridian, the most important poetological manifesto of the second half of the twentieth century.

Drawing on hitherto unexamined manuscripts, this book challenges the standard narrative that English presbyterianism was successfully extinguished from the late sixteenth century until its prominent public resurgence during the English Civil War.

In his new collection of essays, Giorgio Agamben addresses the most urgent themes of his recent research.

Genealogical Fictions examines how the state, church, Inquisition, and other institutions in colonial Mexico used the Spanish notion of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) over time and how the concept's enduring religious, genealogical, and gendered meanings came to shape the region's patriotic and racial ideologies.

Through an examination of the pharmaceutical industry and access to medicine in Central America, this book considers whether health is a human right or a commodity, and whether human rights advocacy is an antidote to the advance of neoliberal social policy or the very vehicle through which it now advances.

Explores the dialectic of cynicism and hope and the role of human rights in the production of rule in the occupied Palestinian territories.

Roberto Esposito, a leading Italian philosopher, deconstructs the notion of community by examining its etymological roots in the Latin munus, or gift, and then reads against classical political interpretations of community.

This book makes use of vivid primary documents to provide a fascinating portrait of Paris in the year 1200: a key moment in its history, when the modern French capital was being born.

What made some 700 men and women in the Yorkshire town of Kingston-upon-Hull in the years 1837 to 1900 take their lives? This book attempts to answer this question and also to study how suicide was understood by victims, families, and friends; how the causes of suicide changed over time; and what coroners' inquests can tell us about Victorian life, beliefs, and values in general.