Download or read book Mythology Madness and Laughter written by Markus Gabriel and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-10-02 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mythology, Madness and Laughter: Subjectivity in German Idealism explores some long neglected but crucial themes in German idealism. Markus Gabriel, one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary philosophy, and Slavoj Žižek, the celebrated contemporary philosopher and cultural critic, show how these themes impact on the problematic relations between being and appearance, reflection and the absolute, insight and ideology, contingency and necessity, subjectivity, truth, habit and freedom. Engaging with three central figures of the German idealist movement, Hegel, Schelling, and Fichte, Gabriel, and Žižek, who here shows himself to be one of the most erudite and important scholars of German idealism, ask how is it possible for Being to appear in reflection without falling back into traditional metaphysics. By applying idealistic theories of reflection and concrete subjectivity, including the problem of madness and everydayness in Hegel, this hugely important book aims to reinvigorate a philosophy of finitude and contingency, topics at the forefront of contemporary European philosophy. MARKUS GABRIEL is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research, NY. He has published a number of books and journal articles in German, including Der Mensch im Mythos (De Gruyter, 2006), and Das Absolute und die Welt in Schellings Freiheitsschrift (Bonn University Press, 2006).
Download or read book Myth Society and Profanation written by William Pawlett and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-10-31 with total page 178 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work challenges the dominant pejorative view of myth by showing how myth is implicated in the deepest layers of society, politics, individuality and temporality. This work draws upon European cultural theorists, particularly Schelling, Nietzsche, Freud, Bataille and Baudrillard, to challenge the dominant pejorative view of myth. It argues that myth has been subjected to an intensive process of profanation yet nevertheless is always implicated in society, politics and temporality. The work examines sacred dimensions of myth, the modern myth of desire and some cultural effects of the profanation process. The intended audience is undergraduate and postgraduate students in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences.
Download or read book The Transformation of Reason Studies on System Myth and History in German Idealism written by Diogo Ferrer and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2024-07-25 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critique, skepticism, conflict, incompleteness, nothingness, irrational abyss, evil, and even genocide... That is what German idealism is also about. Trying to chart human reason as an architectural system, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling uncovered that the most significant problems lie beneath the ground, in the foundations. Can reason survive the discovery of what lies at its depths? And should it? This book ventures into these foundations, addressing the keen philosophical innovations of German idealists. Through comparative and development studies, it presents fresh interpretations of how these leading thinkers reconstructed reason on unexplored territories. The greatest hazard was triggering an enduring inversion of values.
Download or read book Laughter at the Foot of the Cross written by Michael A. Screech and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2015-04-15 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: M. A. Screech, best known for his translations of Montaigne and Rabelais, has collected a series of brilliant essays on the question of when laughter was acceptable to the Western Church. During a time of reform and concerns about heresy, laugher becomes a subtle measure of when and how one can risk rule-breaking. While it could be cruel to mock those who fell into error, it wasas Screech points out so much better than burning them. Professor Screech explores what inspired laughter in the Renaissance, and whether it could be innocent."
Download or read book Thinking Catherine Malabou written by Thomas Wormald and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-03-28 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume contributes to the growing body of literature exploring the work of contemporary French philosopher Catherine Malabou. Through its fifteen contributions, including two previously untranslated essays by Malabou, the volume explores the various ways in which Malabou's thought both performs and furnishes resources for the negotiation of philosophy's attachment and detachment from itself and other disciplines. What kind of interaction can philosophy have with either science or politics without conquering them? How does one carry out philosophy while subverting it, changing it, directing it on or opening it up to different pathways? The chapters explore the detachment of Malabou from her own philosophical training in deconstruction, the theme of habit and the question of new attachments, detachments through the relation of Malabou's thought and science, and the detachments that transpire through philosophy's confrontation with politics. In order to have a future, philosophy must detach from its own tradition and passionately confront questions of race, gender, and colonialism.
Download or read book Figures of Natality written by Joseph D. O’Neil and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2017-01-26 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Figures of Natality reads metaphors and narratives of birth in the age of Goethe (1770-1832) as indicators of the new, the unexpected, and the revolutionary. Using Hannah Arendt's concept of natality, Joseph O'Neil argues that Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist see birth as challenging paradigms of Romanticism as well as of Enlightenment, resisting the assimilation of the political to economics, science, or morality. They choose instead to preserve the conflicts and tensions at the heart of social, political, and poetic revolutions. In a historical reading, these tensions evolve from the idea of revolution as Arendt reads it in British North America to the social and economic questions that shape the French Revolution, culminating in a consideration of the culture of the modern republic as such. Alongside this geopolitical evolution, the ways of representing the political change, too, moving from the new as revolutionary eruption to economic metaphors of birth. More pressing still is the question of revolutionary subjectivity and political agency, and Lessing, Goethe, and Kleist have an answer that is remarkably close to that of Walter Benjamin, as that “secret index” through which each past age is “pointed toward redemption.” Figures of Natality uncovers this index at the heart of scenes and products of birth in the age of Goethe.
Download or read book Problem of Nature in Hegel s Final System written by Wes Furlotte and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2018-07-02 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wes Furlotte critically evaluates Hegel's philosophy of human freedom in terms of his often-disregarded conception of nature. In doing so, he gives us a new portrait of Hegel's final system that is surprisingly relevant for our contemporary world, connecting it with recent work in speculative realism and new materialism.
Download or read book Hegel and Resistance written by Bart Zantvoort and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-12-28 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept of resistance has always been central to the reception of Hegel's philosophy. The prevalent image of Hegel's system, which continues to influence the scholarship to this day, is that of an absolutist, monist metaphysics which overcomes all resistance, sublating or assimilating all differences into a single organic 'Whole'. For that reason, the reception of Hegel has always been marked by the question of how to resist Hegel: how to think that which remains outside of or other to the totalizing system of dialectics. In recent years the work of scholars such as Catherine Malabou, Slavoj Žižek, Rebecca Comay and Frank Ruda has brought considerable nuance to this debate. A new reading of Hegel has emerged which challenges the idea that there is no place for difference, otherness or resistance in Hegel, both by refusing to reduce Hegel's complex philosophy to a straightforward systematic narrative and by highlighting particular moments within Hegel's philosophy which seem to counteract the traditional understanding of dialectics. This book brings together established and new voices in this field in order to show that the notion of resistance is central to this revaluation of Hegel.
Download or read book The New Materialism written by Geoff Pfeifer and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-02-11 with total page 153 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou and Slavoj Žižek have become two of the dominant voices in contemporary philosophy and critical theory. In this book, Geoff Pfeifer offers an in-depth look at their respective views. Using Louis Althusser’s materialism as a starting point—which, as Pfeifer shows, was built partially as a response to the Marxism of the Parti Communiste Français and partially in dialogue with other philosophical movements and intellectual currents of its times—the book looks at the differing ways in which both Badiou’s and Žižek’s work attempt to respond to issues that arise within the Althusserian edifice. Pfeifer argues here that, ultimately, Žižek’s materialism succeeds in responding to these issues in ways that Badiou’s does not. In building this argument, Pfeifer engages not only with the work of Althusser, Badiou, and Žižek and their intellectual backgrounds, but also with much of the contemporary scholarship surrounding these thinkers. As such, Pfeifer’s book is an important addition to the ongoing debates within contemporary critical theory.
Download or read book Repeating i ek written by Agon Hamza and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-17 with total page 447 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Repeating Žižek offers a serious engagement with the ideas and propositions of philosopher Slavoj Žižek. Often subjecting Žižek's work to a Žižekian analysis, this volume's contributors consider the possibility (or impossibility) of formalizing Žižek's ideas into an identifiable philosophical system. They examine his interpretations of Hegel, Plato, and Lacan, outline his debates with Badiou, and evaluate the implications of his analysis of politics and capitalism upon Marxist thought. Other essays focus on Žižek's approach to Christianity and Islam, his "sloppy" method of reading texts, his relation to current developments in neurobiology, and his theorization of animals. The book ends with an afterword by Žižek in which he analyzes Shakespeare's and Beckett's plays in relation to the subject. The contributors do not reach a consensus on defining a Žižekian school of philosophy—perhaps his idiosyncratic and often heterogeneous ideas simply resist synthesis—but even in their repetition of Žižek, they create something new and vital. Contributors. Henrik Jøker Bjerre, Bruno Bosteels, Agon Hamza, Brian Benjamin Hansen, Adrian Johnston, Katja Kolšek, Adam Kotsko, Catherine Malabou, Benjamin Noys, Geoff Pfeifer, Frank Ruda, Oxana Timofeeva, Samo Tomšic, Gabriel Tupinambá, Fabio Vighi, Gavin Walker, Sead Zimeri, Slavoj Žižek
Download or read book Hegel s Rabble written by Frank Ruda and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2011-10-06 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Hegel's Rabble, Frank Ruda identifies and explores a crucial problem in the Hegelian philosophy of right that strikes at the heart of Hegel's conception of the state. This singular problem, which Ruda argues is the problem of Hegelian political thought, appears in Hegel's text only in a seemingly marginal form under the name of the "rabble": a particular side-effect of the dialectical deduction of the necessity of the existence of state from the contradictory constitution of civil society. Working out from a thorough analysis of this problem and drawing on contemporary discussions in the work of such thinkers as Alain Badiou, Jean-Luc Nancy and Slavoj Zizek, the book proceeds to re-examine and reconstruct Hegel's entire political project. Ruda goes on to argue that only by re-thinking this problem of 'the rabble' in Hegel's thought - the only problem Hegel is able neither to resolve nor to sublate - can the early Marxian conception of 'the proletariat' be properly understood. The book closes with an Afterword from Slavoj Zizek.
Download or read book Meaning and Embodiment written by Nicholas Mowad and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2019-08-01 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Examines Hegel’s insights regarding the complexity and significance of embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. Meaning and Embodiment provides a detailed study of Hegel’s anthropology to examine the place of corporeity or embodiment in human life, identity, and experience. In Hegel’s view, to be human means in part to produce one’s own spiritual embodiment in culture and habits. Whereas for animals nature only has meaning relative to biological drives, humans experience meaning in a way that transcends these limits, and which allows for aesthetic appreciation of beauty and sublimity, nihilistic feelings of meaninglessness, and the complex and different systems of symbolic speech and action characterizing language and culture. By elucidating the different forms of embodiment, Nicholas Mowad shows how for Hegel we are embodied in several different ways at once: as extended, subject to physical-chemical forces, living, and human. Many difficult problems in philosophy and everyday experience come down to using the right concept of embodiment. Mowad traces Hegel’s account through the growth and development of the body, gender and racial difference, cycles of sleep and waking, and sensibility and mental illness. “This book offers a lucid explanation of very difficult Hegelian concepts in clear language, along with a passionate, searing, provocative, and intelligent foray into questions of race and gender.” — Lydia Moland, Colby College
Download or read book Inheritance in Psychoanalysis written by Joel Goldbach and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2018-02-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthology of recent, cutting-edge work in psychoanalysis and philosophy on the concept of inheritance. In contrast to the way inheritance is understood in scientific discourse and culture more broadly, inheritance in psychoanalysis is a paradox. Although its impossible, strictly speaking, for the unconscious to be inherited, this volume demonstrates how the concept of inheritance can occasion a rich reassessment and reinvention of psychoanalytic theory and practice. The collection enacts a critical traversal of inheritance for psychoanalysis: from the most basic assumptions of natural or biological inheritance, such as innateness, heredity, evolution, and ontogenesis, to analysis of the ways cultural traditions can be challenged and transformed, and finally to the reinvention of psychoanalytic practice, in which the ethics of inheritance is fully realized as the individuals responsibility to transform the social bond. Featuring strong interdisciplinary analysis rooted in both psychoanalysis and philosophy, this volume further engages science, politics, and cultural studies, and addresses contemporary political challenges such as autism and transgenderism.
Download or read book Samuel Beckett written by Laura Salisbury and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2012-04-04 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ranging widely over Beckett's fiction, drama and critical writings, the book demonstrates that it is through Beckett's comic timing that we can understand the double gesture of his art: the ethical obligation to represent the world how it is while, at the
Download or read book Fields of Sense written by Markus Gabriel and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2015-01-14 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is still a widespread assumption that metaphysics and ontology deal with roughly the same questions. They are supposed to be concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and to give an account of the meaning of 'existence' or 'being' in line with the broadest possible metaphysical assumptions. Against this, Markus Gabriel proposes a radical form of ontological pluralism that divorces ontology from metaphysics, understood as the most fundamental theory of absolutely everything (the world). He argues that the concept of existence is incompatible with the existence of the world and therefore proposes his innovative no-world-view. In the context of recent debates surrounding new realism and speculative realism, Gabriel also develops the outlines of a realist epistemological pluralism. His idea here is that there are different forms of knowledge that correspond to the plurality of fields of sense that must be acknowledged in order to avoid the trap of metaphysics.
Download or read book Negative Dialectics and Event written by Vangelis Giannakakis and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2021-11-04 with total page 187 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History is replete with false and unfulfilled promises, as well as singular acts of courage, resilience, and ingenuity. These episodes have led to significant changes in the way people think and act in the world or have set the stage for such transformations in the form of rational expectations in theory and the hopeful anticipations of dialectical imagination. Negative Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness revisits some of Theodor W. Adorno’s most influential writings and theoretical interventions to argue not only that his philosophy is uniquely suited to bring such events into sharp relief and reflect on their entailments but also that an effective historical consciousness today would be a consciousness awake to the events that interpellate and shape it into existence. More broadly, Vangelis Giannakakis presents a compelling argument in support of the view that the critical theory developed by the first generation of the Frankfurt School still has much to offer in terms of both cultivating insights into contemporary human experience and building resistance against states of affairs that impede human flourishing and happiness.
Download or read book Masters of the Grotesque written by Schuy R. Weishaar and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2012-10-26 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts and theories surrounding the aesthetic category of the grotesque are explored in this book by pursuing their employment in the films of American auteurs Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam, the Coen Brothers and David Lynch. The author argues that interpreting these directors' films through the lens of the grotesque allows us1to situate both the auteurs and the films within a long history of the grotesque in art and aesthetics. This cultural tradition effectively subsumes the contribution of any artist or1genre that intersects it but also affords the artist or genre--the auteur and the genre filmmaker--a pantheon and an abundance of images, themes, and motifs through which he1or she can subversively represent the world and our place in it.
