Book picks similar to
Foreign Bodies by Alphonso Lingis


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Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places


Edward W. Soja - 1996
    In what may eventually be seen as one of the most important intellectual and political developments in the late twentieth century, scholars have begun to interpret space and the embracing spatiality of human life with the same critical insight and emphasis that has traditionally been given to time and history on the one hand, and social relations and society on the other. Thirdspace is both an enquiry into the origins and impact of the spatial turn and an attempt to expand the scope and practical relevance of how we think about space and such related concepts as place, location, landscape, architecture, environment, home, city, region, territory, and geography. The book's central argument is that spatial thinking, or what has been called the geographical or spatial imagination, has tended to be bicameral, or confined to two approaches. Spatiality is either seen as concrete material forms to be mapped, analyzed, and explained; or as mental constructs, ideas about and representations of space and its social significance. Edward Soja critically re-evaluates this dualism to create an alternative approach, one that comprehends both the material and mental dimensions of spatiality but also extends beyond them to new and different modes of spatial thinking.Thirdspace is composed as a sequence of intellectual and empirical journeys, beginning with a spatial biography of Henri Lefebvre and his adventurous conceptualization of social space as simultaneously perceived, conceived, and lived. The author draws on Lefebvre to describe a trialectics of spatiality that threads though all subsequent journeys, reappearing in many new forms in bell hooks evocative exploration of the margins as a space of radical openness; in post-modern spatial feminist interpretations of the interplay of race, class, and gender; in the postcolonial critique and the new cultural politics of difference and identity; in Michel Foucault's heterotopologies and trialectics of space, knowledge, and power; and in interpretative tours of the Citadel of downtown Los Angeles, the Exopolis of Orange County, and the Centrum of Amsterdam.

Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France


Judith Butler - 1987
    Subjects of Desire provides a sophisticated account of the post-Hegelian tradition that has predominated in modern France and remains timely in thinking about contemporary debates concerning desire, the unconscious, subjection, and the subject.

Terror from the Air


Peter Sloterdijk - 2001
    That day, the German army used a chlorine gas meant to exterminate indiscriminately. Until then, war, as described by Clausewitz and practiced by Napoleon, involved attacking the adversary’s vital function first. Using poison gas signaled the passage from classical war to terrorism. This terror from the air inaugurated an era in which the main idea was no longer to target the enemy’s body, but their environment. From then on, what would be attacked in wartime as well as in peacetime would be the very conditions necessary for life.This kind of terrorism became the matrix of modern and postmodern war, from World War I’s toxic gas to the Nazi Zyklon B used in Auschwitz, from the bombing of Dresden to the attack on the World Trade Center. Sloterdijk goes on to describe the offensive of modern aesthetics, aesthetic terrorism from Surrealism to Malevich--an “atmo-terrorism” in the arts that parallels the assault on environment that had originated in warfare.

Writings on Cities


Henri Lefebvre - 1995
    This new collection brings together, for the first time in English, Lefebvre's reflections on the city and urban life written over a span of some twenty years. The selection of writings is contextualized by an introduction - itself a significant contribution to the interpretation of Henri Lefebvre's work - which places the material within the context of Lefebvre's intellectual and political life and times and raises pertinent issues as to their relevance for contemporary debates over such questions as the nature of urban reality, the production of space and modernity. Writings on Cities is of particular relevance to architects, planners, geographers, and those interested in the philosophical and political understanding of contemporary life.

The Body in Pieces: The Fragment as a Matephor of Modernity


Linda Nochlin - 1995
    The grandness of that history no longer fit into the framework of the present, and artists felt overwhelmed by the magnitude of past heroic accomplishment. This was soon reflected in artistic representation, from Fuseli on. The partial image, the "crop," fragmentation, ruin, and mutilationall expressed grief and nostalgia for the loss of a vanished totality, a utopian wholeness. Often such feelings were expressed in deliberate destructiveness, which became the new way of seeing: the notion of the modern. In The Body in Pieces, the noted critic and art historian Linda Nochlin traces these developments by looking at work produced by artists from Neoclassicism and Romanticism to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Surrealism, and beyond. 59 illustrations.

Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation


Paul Ricœur - 1965
    The second part, "A Reading of Freud," is required reading for anyone seriously interested in psychoanalysis. The third section interpretation of Ricoeur's own theory of symbol—particularly religious symbol—which places this study at the center of contemporary debate over the sense of myth.In this book are revealed Ricoeur the philosopher of language; Ricoeur the critic of Freud; and Ricoeur the theologian of religious symbol. The author is outstanding in all three roles, and the book that emerges is of rare profundity, enormous scope, and complete timeliness.Paul Ricoeur is professor of philosophy at the University of Paris. “Paul Ricouer…has done a study that is all too rare these days, in which one intellect comes to grips with another, in which a scholar devotes himself to a thoughtful, searching, and comprehensive study of a genius…The final result is a unique survey of the panorama of Freudian thought by an observer who, although starting from outside, succeeds in penetrating to its core.” –American Journal of Psychiatry“Primarily an inquiry into the foundations of language and hermeneutics…[Ricoeur uses] the Freudian ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’ as a corrective and counter-balance for phenomenology and create a ‘new phenomenology’…This important work…should have an impact upon serious thinking in philosophy, theology, psychology, and other areas which have been affected by Freud studies.”—International Philosophical Quarterly“A stimulating tour de force that allows us to envisage both the psychoanalytic body of knowledge and the psychoanalytic movement in a broad perspective within the framework of its links to culture, history and the evolution of Western intellectual thought.” – Psychoanalytic Quarterly Paul Ricoeur is a professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago and the University of Paris.

A User's Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari


Brian Massumi - 1992
    When read along with its rigorous textual notes, the book also becomes the richest scholarly treatment of Deleuze's entire philosophical oeuvre available in any language. Finally, the dozens of explicit examples that Brian Massumi furnishes from contemporary artistic, scientific, and popular urban culture make the book an important, perhaps even central text within current debates on postmodern culture and politics.Capitalism and Schizophrenia is the general title for two books published a decade apart. The first, Anti-Oedipus, was a reaction to the events of May/June 1968; it is a critique of state-happy Marxism and school-building strains of psychoanalysis. The second, A Thousand Plateaus, is an attempt at a positive statement of the sort of nomad philosophy Deleuze and Guattari propose as an alternative to state philosophy.

On Deconstruction: Theory and Criticism after Structuralism


Jonathan D. Culler - 1982
    Jonathan Culler's On Deconstruction is a typically patient, thoughtful, illuminating exposition of the ideas of Jacques Derrida and their application to literary studies."--David Lodge, Commonweal "Culler is lucid and thorough, can move into and out of other people's arguments without losing the sense of his own voice and argument, and can manage to seem equally at home with Freudianism, feminism, and traditional literary criticism."--Times Literary Supplement "As a practicing critic Culler has always been a deconstructor, and he approaches this topic with special immediacy and force. In On Deconstruction he offers generous summaries of numerous representative articles and a fine annotated bibliography. . . . His magisterial way of tracing particular topics and techniques through our diaspora of critical texts, and his provocative analyses, cannot fail to focus any critic's thinking about deconstruction."--Modern Language Quarterly "Gifted with grace and clarity, Culler provides us with a stimulating survey of contemporary literary criticism."--Antioch Review With an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considered deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader-response criticism. On Deconstruction is both an authoritative synthesis of Derrida's thought and an analysis of the often-problematic relation between his philosophical writings and the work of literary critics. Culler's book is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in understanding modern critical thought. This edition marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the first publication of this landmark work and includes a new preface by the author that surveys deconstruction's history since the 1980s and assesses its place within cultural theory today.

The Tourist Gaze: Leisure And Travel In Contemporary Societies


John Urry - 1990
    Urry develops this analysis through various levels - historical, economic, social, cultural and visual.Mass tourism is charted from its origins in the English seaside resorts to its development as a global industry. The economic impact and complex social relations involved in international tourism are explored. Changing patterns of tourism are shown to be connected to the broader cultural changes of postmodernism and related to the role of the service and middle classes. The author argues that we

Fatal Strategies


Jean Baudrillard - 1983
    Posing such anti-questions as "Must we put information on a diet?" Baudrillard cuts across historical and contemporary space with profound observations on American corporations, arms build-up, hostage-taking, transgression, truth, and the fate of theory itself. Not only an important map of Baudrillard's continuing examination of evil, this essay is also a profound critique of 1980s American politics at the time when the author was beginning to have his incalculable effect on a generation of this country's artists and theorists.

Hoping Against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim


John D. Caputo - 2015
    Caputo has a long career as one of the preeminent postmodern philosophers in America. The author of such books as Radical Hermeneutics, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida, and The Weakness of God, Caputo now reflects on his spiritual journey from a Catholic altar boy in 1950s Philadelphia to a philosopher after the death of God. Part spiritual autobiography, part homily on what he calls the nihilism of grace, Hoping Against Hope calls believers and nonbelievers alike to participate in the praxis of the kingdom of God, which Caputo says we must pursue without why.Caputos conversation partners in this volume include Lyotard, Derrida, and Hegel, but also earlier versions of himself: Jackie, a young altar boy, and Brother Paul, a novice in a religious order. Caputo traces his own journey from faith through skepticism to hope after the death of God. In the end, Caputo doesnt want to do away with religion; he wants to redeem religion and to reinvent religion for a postmodern time.

Downcast Eyes: The Denigration of Vision in Twentieth-Century French Thought


Martin Jay - 1993
    These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance.Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty.His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.

Introduction to Critical Theory: Horkheimer to Habermas


David Held - 1980
    They became a key element in the formation and self-understanding of the New Left, and have been the subject of continuing controversy. Partly because of their rise to prominence during the political turmoil of the sixties, and partly because they draw on traditions rarely studied in the Anglo-American world, the works of these authors are often misunderstood.In this book David Held provides a much-needed introduction to, and evaluation of, critical theory. He is concerned mainly with the thought of the Frankfurt school—Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, in particular—and with Habermas, one of Europe's leading contemporary thinkers. Several of the major themes considered are critical theory's relation to Marx's critique of the political economy, Freudian psychoanalysis, aesthetics, and the philosophy of history. There is also a discussion of critical theory's substantive contribution to the analysis of capitalism, culture, the family, and the individual, as well as its contribution to epistemology and methodology.Held's book will be necessary reading for all concerned with understanding and evaluating one of the most influential intellectual movements of our time.

A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds


Jacques Derrida - 1991
    Twenty-two essays and excerpts from Derrida's writings over the last twenty-five years are gathered in this accessible introduction, A Derrida Reader. The book's five sections are carefully introduced by the editor, and each selection of Derrida's work is presented succinctly in context. A general introduction to the volume by Peggy Kamuf provides an original interpretation and overview of Derrida's work and philosophy.

The Expectant Father: The Ultimate Guide for Dads-to-Be


Armin A. Brott - 2013