Download or read book The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought written by Betty Rojtman and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-08-12 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book analyses a cultural phenomenon that goes to the very roots of Western civilization: the centrality of death in our sense of human existence. It does so through a close reading of seminal works by the most creative authors of modern French thought, such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. These works encode an entire ethics of postmodernism. Betty Rojtman offers the reader a prism through which to see anew the key issues of the twentieth century: tragedy, finitude, nothingness—but also contestation, liberty, and sovereignty. Little by little we understand that this fascination with death may be just the other side of humankind’s great protest, its thirst for the infinite and its desire to be. Finally, Rojtman tries to offer another view on these fundamental questions by shifting to a parallel cultural reference: Kabbalah.
Download or read book The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture written by Dina Khapaeva and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-03-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Popular culture has reimagined death as entertainment and monsters as heroes, reflecting a profound contempt for the human race
Download or read book How the French Think written by Sudhir Hazareesingh and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2015-09-22 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning historian presents an absorbing account of the French mind, shedding light on France's famous tradition of intellectual life Why are the French such an exceptional nation? Why do they think they are so exceptional? The French take pride in the fact that their history and culture have decisively shaped the values and ideals of the modern world. French ideas are no less distinct in their form: while French thought is abstract, stylish and often opaque, it has always been bold and creative, and driven by the relentless pursuit of innovation. In How the French Think, the internationally-renowned historian Sudhir Hazareesingh tells the epic and tumultuous story of French intellectual thought from Descartes, Rousseau, and Auguste Comte to Sartre, Claude Lé-Strauss, and Derrida. He shows how French thinking has shaped fundamental Westerns ideas about freedom, rationality, and justice, and how the French mind-set is intimately connected to their own way of life-in particular to the French tendency towards individualism, their passion for nature, their celebration of their historical heritage, and their fascination with death. Hazareesingh explores the French veneration of dissent and skepticism, from Voltaire to the Dreyfus Affair and beyond; the obsession with the protection of French language and culture; the rhetorical flair embodied by the philosophes, which today's intellectuals still try to recapture; the astonishing influence of French postmodern thinkers, including Foucault and Barthes, on postwar American education and life, and also the growing French anxiety about a globalized world order under American hegemony. How the French Think sweeps aside generalizations and easy stereotypes to offer an incisive and revealing exploration of the French intellectual tradition. Steeped in a colorful range of sources, and written with warmth and humor, this book will appeal to all lovers of France and of European culture.
Download or read book Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought written by Christopher John Murray and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-01-11 with total page 748 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this wide-ranging guide to twentieth-century French thought, leading scholars offer an authoritative multi-disciplinary analysis of one of the most distinctive and influential traditions in modern thought. Unlike any other existing work, this important work covers not only philosophy, but also all the other major disciplines, including literary theory, sociology, linguistics, political thought, theology, and more.
Download or read book Contemporary French Philosophy Routledge Revivals written by Colin Smith and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2010-10-18 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1964, this is not just a chronicle or encyclopaedia, but deals thoroughly in turn with meaning, view about reason, and views about values, particularly moral values. The author's knowledge of French literature is extensive and thorough, and a feature of the book is his analysis of the philosophical implications of literary works by Sartre, Paul Valery, Camus and others.
Download or read book The Columbia History of Twentieth century French Thought written by Lawrence D. Kritzman and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2006 with total page 828 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Unrivaled in its scope and depth, "The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought" assesses the intellectual figures, movements, and publications that helped shape and define fields as diverse as history and historiography, psychoanalysis, film, literary theory, cognitive and life sciences, literary criticism, philosophy, and economics. More than two hundred entries by leading intellectuals discuss developments in French thought on such subjects as pacifism, fashion, gastronomy, technology, and urbanism. Contributors include prominent French thinkers, many of whom have played an integral role in the development of French thought, and American, British, and Canadian scholars who have been vital in the dissemination of French ideas.
Download or read book Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology written by M. Kaern and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 383 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Death and Tenses written by Neil Kenny and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-17 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In what tense should we refer to the dead? The question has long been asked, from Cicero to Julian Barnes. Answering it is partly a matter of grammar and stylistic convention. But the hesitation, annoyance, and even distress that can be caused by the "wrong" tense suggests that more may be at stake—our very relation to the dead. This book, the first to test that hypothesis, investigates how tenses were used in sixteenth and early seventeenth-century France (especially in French but also in Latin) to refer to dead friends, lovers, family members, enemies, colleagues, writers, officials, kings and queens of recent times, and also to those who had died long before, whether Christ, the saints, or the ancient Greeks and Romans who posthumously filled the minds of Renaissance humanists. Did tenses refer to the dead in ways that contributed to granting them differing degrees of presence (and absence)? Did tenses communicate dimensions of posthumous presence (and absence) that partly eluded more concept-based affirmations? The investigation ranges from funerary and devotional writing to Eucharistic theology, from poetry to humanist paratexts, from Rabelais's prose fiction to Montaigne's Essais. Primarily a work of literary and cultural history, it also draws on early modern grammatical thought and on modern linguistics (with its concept of aspect and its questioning of "tense"), while arguing that neither can fully explain the phenomena studied. The book briefly compares early modern usage with tendencies in modern French and English in the West, asking whether changes in belief about posthumous survival have been accompanied by changes in tense-use.
Download or read book Women Imagination and the Search for Truth in Early Modern France written by Rebecca M. Wilkin and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Grounded in medical, juridical, and philosophical texts of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century France, this innovative study tells the story of how the idea of woman contributed to the emergence of modern science. Rebecca Wilkin focuses on the contradictory representations of women from roughly the middle of the sixteenth century to the middle of the seventeenth, and depicts this period as one filled with epistemological anxiety and experimentation. She shows how skeptics, including Montaigne, Marie de Gournay, and Agrippa von Nettesheim, subverted gender hierarchies and/or blurred gender difference as a means of questioning the human capacity to find truth; while "positivists" who strove to establish new standards of truth, for example Johann Weyer, Jean Bodin, and Guillaume du Vair, excluded women from the search for truth. The book constitutes a reevaluation of the legacy of Cartesianism for women, as Wilkin argues that Descartes' opening of the search for truth "even to women" was part of his appropriation of skeptical arguments. This book challenges scholars to revise deeply held notions regarding the place of women in the early modern search for truth, their role in the development of rational thought, and the way in which intellectuals of the period dealt with the emergence of an influential female public.
Download or read book The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes written by Elliot R. Wolfson and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 612 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes offers a detailed analysis of an extraordinary figure in the twentieth-century history of Jewish thought, Western philosophy, and the study of religion. Drawing on close readings of Susan Taubes's writings, including her correspondence with Jacob Taubes, scholarly essays, literary compositions, and poems, Elliot R. Wolfson plumbs the depths of the tragic sensibility that shaped her worldview, hovering between the poles of nihilism and hope. By placing Susan Taubes in dialogue with a host of other seminal thinkers, Wolfson illumines how she presciently explored the hypernomian status of Jewish ritual and belief after the Holocaust; the theopolitical challenges of Zionism and the dangers of ethnonationalism; the antitheological theology and gnostic repercussions of Heideggerian thought; the mystical atheism and apophaticism of tragedy in Simone Weil; and the understanding of poetry as the means to face the faceless and to confront the silence of death in the temporal overcoming of time through time. Wolfson delves into the abyss that molded Susan Taubes's mytheological thinking, making a powerful case for the continued relevance of her work to the study of philosophy and religion today.
Download or read book Funerals Politics and Memory in Modern France 1789 1996 written by Avner Ben-Amos and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2000-10-12 with total page 438 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is an interdisciplinary study of the state funerals that were celebrated in France between the French Revolution and the death of François Mitterand. Its aim is to explain how the funerals of such prominent figures as Voltaire, Napoleon, Gambetta, Hugo, and de Gaulle became major public events that helped to mould the national memory. Combining the insights of anthropologists and sociologists with a historical analysis, it argues that the dual character of the ceremony, a political festival and final rite of passage, turned the state funeral into a gripping event to which few French people could remain indifferent. The book focuses on the republican tradition of state funerals, which emerged in the French Revolution and has continued through the Fifth Republic. Whether in power or in opposition, the republicans used the funerals of their leaders and militants to educate the masses and mobilize public support. This book, the first comprehensive analysis of French state funerals, is also a major contribution to the study of republican culture.
Download or read book Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy written by Aidan Tynan and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-18 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.
Download or read book The Conversion of Imagination written by Matthew W. Maguire and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2006-03-31 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maguire uncovers a history of French thought that casts the imagination as a dominant faculty in our experience of the world. Original and thought-provoking, this book will interest a range of readers across intellectual history, political theory, literary and cultural studies, and the history of religious thought.
Download or read book Death and Afterlife in Modern France written by Thomas A. Kselman and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2014-07-14 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although today in France church attendance is minimal, when death occurs many families still cling to religious rites. In exploring this common reaction to one of the most painful aspects of existence, Thomas Kselman turns to nineteenth-century French beliefs about death and the afterlife not only to show how deeply rooted the cult of the dead is in one Western society, but how death and the behavior of mourners have been politicized in the modern world. Drawing on sermons preached in rural and urban parishes, folktales, and accounts of seances, the author vividly re-creates the social and cultural context in which most French people responded to death and dealt with anxieties about the self and its survival. Inspired mainly by Catholicism, beliefs about death provided a social basis for moral order throughout the nineteenth century and were vulnerable to manipulation by public officials and clergy. Kselman shows, however, that by mid-century the increase in urbanization, capitalism, family privacy, and expressed religious differences generated diverse attitudes toward death, causing funerals to evolve from Catholic neighborhood rituals into personalized symbolic events for Catholics and dissenters alike--the civil burial of Victor Hugo being perhaps the greatest symbol of rebellion. Kselman's discussion of the growth of commercial funerals and innovations in cemetery administration illuminates a new struggle for control over funeral arrangements, this time involving businessmen, politicians, families, and clergy. This struggle in turn demonstrates the importance of these events for defining social identity. Originally published in 1993. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Download or read book The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture written by Dina Khapaeva and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2017-03-06 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture investigates the emergence and meaning of the cult of death. Over the last three decades, Halloween has grown to rival Christmas in its popularity. Dark tourism has emerged as a rapidly expanding industry. “Corpse chic” and “skull style” have entered mainstream fashion, while elements of gothic, horror, torture porn, and slasher movies have streamed into more conventional genres. Monsters have become pop culture heroes: vampires, zombies, and serial killers now appeal broadly to audiences of all ages. This book breaks new ground by viewing these phenomena as aspects of a single movement and documenting its development in contemporary Western culture. This book links the mounting demand for images of violent death with dramatic changes in death-related social rituals. It offers a conceptual framework that connects observations of fictional worlds—including The Twilight Saga, The Vampire Diaries, and the Harry Potter series—with real-world sociocultural practices, analyzing the aesthetic, intellectual, and historical underpinnings of the cult of death. It also places the celebration of death in the context of a longstanding critique of humanism and investigates the role played by 20th-century French theory, posthumanism, transhumanism, and the animal rights movement in shaping the current antihumanist atmosphere. This timely, thought-provoking book will appeal to scholars of culture, film, literature, anthropology, and American and Russian studies, as well as general readers seeking to understand a defining phenomenon of our age.
Download or read book Radical French Thought and the Return of the Jewish Question written by Eric Marty and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2015-05-22 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five seminal essays on contemporary antisemitism and its connections to radical thought. For English-speaking readers, this book serves as an introduction to an important French intellectual whose work, especially on the issues of antisemitism and anti-Zionism, runs counter to the hostility shown toward Jews by some representatives of contemporary critical theory. It presents for the first time in English five essays by Éric Marty, previously published in France, with a new preface by the author addressed to his American readers. The focus of these essays is the debate in France and elsewhere in Europe concerning the “Jew.” The first essay on Jean Genet, one of postwar France’s most important literary figures, investigates the nature of Genet’s virulent antisemitism and hatred of Israel and its significance for an understanding of contemporary phenomena. The curious reappearance of St. Paul in theological and political discourse is discussed in another essay, which describes and analyses the interest that secular writers of the far left have shown in Paul’s “universalism” placed over and against Jewish or Israeli particularism. The remaining essays are more polemical in nature and confront the anti-Israeli attacks by Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze. “Both important and timely, it will be a notable contribution to the ongoing public and intellectual discussion . . . of contemporary antisemitism and [the animus of intellectuals] toward the state of Israel.” —Elhanan Yakira, author of Post-Zionism, Post-Holocaust “Represents a significant contribution to our understanding of both the phenomenon of the “new antisemitism” and a certain strain of French critical theory over the last several decades.” —Maurice Samuels, Yale University
Download or read book Modern French Jewish Thought written by Sarah Hammerschlag and published by Brandeis University Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Modern Jewish thought" is often defined as a German affair, with interventions from Eastern European, American, and Israeli philosophers. The story of France's development of its own schools of thought has not been substantially treated outside the French milieu. This anthology of modern French Jewish writing offers the first look at how this significant and diverse body of work developed within the historical and intellectual contexts of France and Europe. Translated into English, these documents speak to two critical axes--the first between Jewish universalism and particularism, and the second between the identification and disidentification of French Jews with France as a nation. Offering key works from Simone Weil, Vladimir Janklvitch, Emmanuel Levinas, Albert Memmi, Hlne Cixous, Jacques Derrida, and many others, this volume is organized in roughly chronological order, to highlight the connections linking religion, politics, and history, as they coalesce around a Judaism that is unique to France.
