Download or read book Theory of the Subject written by Alain Badiou and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2009-07-28 with total page 824 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Badiou is widely considered to be France's most important and exciting contemporary thinker. Much of Badiou's earlier work (including Being and Event) can only be fully understood with a clear grasp of Theory of the Subject, one of his most important works.
Download or read book Death and Mastery written by Benjamin Y. Fong and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2016-11-08 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first philosophers of the Frankfurt School famously turned to the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud to supplement their Marxist analyses of ideological subjectification. Since the collapse of their proposed "marriage of Marx and Freud," psychology and social theory have grown apart to the impoverishment of both. Returning to this union, Benjamin Y. Fong reconstructs the psychoanalytic "foundation stone" of critical theory in an effort to once again think together the possibility of psychic and social transformation. Drawing on the work of Hans Loewald and Jacques Lacan, Fong complicates the famous antagonism between Eros and the death drive in reference to a third term: the woefully undertheorized drive to mastery. Rejuvenating Freudian metapsychology through the lens of this pivotal concept, he then provides fresh perspective on Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse's critiques of psychic life under the influence of modern cultural and technological change. The result is a novel vision of critical theory that rearticulates the nature of subjection in late capitalism and renews an old project of resistance.
Download or read book Lacanian Theory of Discourse written by Mark Bracher and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 1997-03 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection introduces and develops Lacanian thought concerning the relations among language, subjectivity, and society. Lacanian Theory of Discourse provides an account of how language both interacts with and constitutes structures of subjectivity, producing specific attitudes and behaviors as well as significant social effects.
Download or read book Alain Badiou Live Theory written by Oliver Feltham and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2008-06-26 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou is undoubtedly the most exciting and influential voice in contemporary French philosophy and one of the most important theorists at work today. His impact on continental philosophy and the wider philosophy community, politics and the arts in the last twenty years has been immense. Alain Badiou: Live Theory offers a concise and accessible introduction to his work and thought, laying out the central themes of his major works, including his magnum opus, Being and Event, and its long-awaited sequel, Logics of Worlds. Oliver Feltham explores the fundamental questions through which Badiou's philosophy constantly evolves, identifies the key turning points in his ideas, and makes a clear case for the coherence and powerful singularity of his thought when employed in the analysis of political and artistic situations. Feltham examines the thinkers and theorists with whom Badiou has engaged and who have engaged with him, arguing that Badiou's work is compelling precisely because it opens up new genealogies and new polemics in the intellectual landscape. The book includes a brand new interview with Badiou, in which he discusses his current concerns and future plans. This is the ideal companion to study for students and readers encountering this fascinating thinker for the first time.
Download or read book From Anthropology to Social Theory written by Arpad Szakolczai and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2019-01-17 with total page 297 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Presenting a ground-breaking revitalization of contemporary social theory, this book revisits the rise of the modern world to reopen the dialogue between anthropology and sociology. Using concepts developed by a series of 'maverick' anthropologists who were systematically marginalised as their ideas fell outside the standard academic canon, such as Arnold van Gennep, Marcel Mauss, Paul Radin, Lucien Lévy-Bruhl and Gregory Bateson, the authors argue that such concepts are necessary for understanding better the rise and dynamics of the modern world, including the development of the social sciences, in particular sociology and anthropology. Concepts discussed include liminality, imitation, schismogenesis and trickster, which provide an anthropological 'toolkit' for readers to develop innovative understandings of the underlying power mechanisms of globalized modernity. Aimed at graduate students and researchers, the book is clearly structured. Part I introduces the 'maverick' anthropologists, while Part II applies the maverick tool-kit to revisit the history of sociological thought and the question of modernity.
Download or read book Signifiers and Acts written by Ed Pluth and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Signifiers and Acts, Ed Pluth examines Lacan's views on language and sexuality to argue that Lacan's theory of the subject is best read as a theory of freedom and agency—a theory that is especially compelling precisely because of its structuralist and seemingly antihumanist framework. Presenting new aspects of Lacan's work and commenting extensively on the important yet unpublished seminars that still make up the majority of his contribution to contemporary thought, the book aims to make a Lacanian intervention into contemporary theory. In addition to Saussure, Sartre, Derrida, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy, Pluth discusses works in political theory and identity theory by Alain Badiou, Judith Butler, and Slavoj Zðizûek.
Download or read book Transitional Subjects written by Amy Allen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical social theory has long been marked by a deep, creative, and productive relationship with psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud and Fromm were important cornerstones for the early Frankfurt School, recent thinkers have drawn on the object-relations school of psychoanalysis. Transitional Subjects is the first book-length collection devoted to the engagement of critical theory with the work of Melanie Klein, Donald Winnicott, and other members of this school. Featuring contributions from some of the leading figures working in both of these fields, including Axel Honneth, Joel Whitebook, Noëlle McAfee, Sara Beardsworth, and C. Fred Alford, it provides a synoptic overview of current research at the intersection of these two theoretical traditions while also opening up space for further innovations. Transitional Subjects offers a range of perspectives on the critical potential of object-relations psychoanalysis, including feminist and Marxist views, to offer valuable insight into such fraught social issues as aggression, narcissism, “progress,” and torture. The productive dialogue that emerges augments our understanding of the self as intersubjectively and socially constituted and of contemporary “social pathologies.” Transitional Subjects shows how critical theory and object-relations psychoanalysis, considered together, have not only enriched critical theory but also invigorated psychoanalysis.
Download or read book Feeling in Theory written by Rei Terada and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Because emotion is assumed to depend on subjectivity, the "death of the subject" described in recent years by theorists such as Derrida, de Man, and Deleuze would also seem to mean the death of feeling. This revolutionary work transforms the burgeoning interdisciplinary debate on emotion by suggesting, instead, a positive relation between the "death of the subject" and the very existence of emotion. Reading the writings of Derrida and de Man--theorists often seen as emotionally contradictory and cold--Terada finds grounds for construing emotion as nonsubjective. This project offers fresh interpretations of deconstruction's most important texts, and of Continental and Anglo-American philosophers from Descartes to Deleuze and Dennett. At the same time, it revitalizes poststructuralist theory by deploying its methodologies in a new field, the philosophy of emotion, to reach a startling conclusion: if we really were subjects, we would have no emotions at all. Engaging debates in philosophy, literary criticism, psychology, and cognitive science from a poststructuralist and deconstructive perspective, Terada's work is essential for the renewal of critical thought in our day.
Download or read book The Subject of Modernity written by Anthony J. Cascardi and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1992-03-19 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The question of modernity has provoked a vigorous debate in the work of thinkers from Hegel to Habermas. Anthony J. Cascardi offers an historical account of the origins and transformations of the rational subject of self as it is represented in Descartes, Cervantes, Pascal, Hobbes and the Don Juan myth.
Download or read book Badiou s Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory written by Burhanuddin Baki and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-11-20 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Alain Badiou's Being and Event continues to impact philosophical investigations into the question of Being. By exploring the central role set theory plays in this influential work, Burhanuddin Baki presents the first extended study of Badiou's use of mathematics in Being and Event. Adopting a clear, straightforward approach, Baki gathers together and explains the technical details of the relevant high-level mathematics in Being and Event. He examines Badiou's philosophical framework in close detail, showing exactly how it is 'conditioned' by the technical mathematics. Clarifying the relevant details of Badiou's mathematics, Baki looks at the four core topics Badiou employs from set theory: the formal axiomatic system of ZFC; cardinal and ordinal numbers; Kurt Gödel's concept of constructability; and Cohen's technique of forcing. Baki then rebuilds Badiou's philosophical meditations in relation to their conditioning by the mathematics, paying particular attention to Cohen's forcing, which informs Badiou's analysis of the event. Providing valuable insights into Badiou's philosophy of mathematics, Badiou's Being and Event and the Mathematics of Set Theory offers an excellent commentary and a new reading of Badiou's most complex and important work.
Download or read book Changing the Subject written by Lisa Blankenship and published by University Press of Colorado. This book was released on 2019-11-08 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Changing the Subject explores ways of engaging across difference. In this first book-length study of the concept of empathy from a rhetorical perspective, Lisa Blankenship frames the classical concept of pathos in new ways and makes a case for rhetorical empathy as a means of ethical rhetorical engagement. The book considers how empathy can be a deliberate, conscious choice to try to understand others through deep listening and how language and other symbol systems play a role in this process that is both cognitive and affective. Departing from agonistic win-or-lose rhetoric in the classical Greek tradition that has so strongly influenced Western thinking, Blankenship proposes that we ourselves are changed (“changing the subject” or the self) when we focus on trying to understand rather than simply changing an Other. This work is informed by her experiences growing up in the conservative South and now working as a professor in New York City, as well as the stories and examples of three people working across profound social, political, class, and gender differences: Jane Addams’s activist work on behalf of immigrants and domestic workers in Gilded Age Chicago; the social media advocacy of Brazilian rap star and former maid Joyce Fernandes for domestic worker labor reform; and the online activist work of Justin Lee, a queer Christian who advocates for greater understanding and inclusion of LGBTQ+ people in conservative Christian churches. A much-needed book in the current political climate, Changing the Subject charts new theoretical ground and proposes ways of integrating principles of rhetorical empathy in our everyday lives to help fight the temptations of despair and disengagement. The book will appeal to students, scholars, and teachers of rhetoric and composition as well as people outside the academy in search of new ways of engaging across differences.
Download or read book Discerning the Subject written by Paul Smith and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1988 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Agent Person Subject Self written by Paul Kockelman and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers both a naturalistic and critical theory of signs, minds, and meaning-in-the-world. It provides a reconstructive rather than deconstructive theory of the individual, one which both analytically separates and theoretically synthesizes a range of faculties that are often confused and conflated: agency (understood as a causal capacity), subjectivity (understood as a representational capacity), selfhood (understood as a reflexive capacity), and personhood (understood as a sociopolitical capacity attendant on being an agent, subject, or self). It argues that these facilities are best understood from a semiotic stance that supersedes the usual intentional stance. And, in so doing, it offers a pragmatism-grounded approach to meaning and mediation that is general enough to account for processes that are as embodied and embedded as they are articulated and enminded. In particular, while this theory is focused on human-specific modes of meaning, it also offers a general theory of meaning, such that the agents, subjects and selves in question need not always, or even usually, map onto persons. And while this theory foregrounds agents, persons, subjects and selves, it does this by theorizing processes that often remain in the background of such (often erroneously) individuated figures: ontologies (akin to culture, but generalized across agentive collectivities), interaction (not only between people, but also between people and things, and anything outside or in-between), and infrastructure (akin to context, but generalized to include mediation at any degree of remove).
Download or read book Theory of the Political Subject written by Sergei Prozorov and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-11-07 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Together these two companion volumes develop an innovative theory of world politics, grounded in the reinterpretation of the concepts of ‘world’ and ‘politics’ from an ontological perspective. Theory of the Political Subject continues the project of reconstruction of political universalism begun in Ontology of World Politics. Having redefined world politics in terms of the affirmation of the universal ontological axioms of freedom, equality and community in an infinite multiplicity of particular situations or ‘worlds’, in this book Prozorov focuses on the way this affirmation is actually practiced, analysing the conditions for the emergence within a world of the subject of its radical transformation. Drawing on the contemporary reassessment of the notion of the subject in continental political thought, particularly the work of Alain Badiou, Prozorov defines the political subject in terms of one’s subtraction from the positive order of one’s world, the weakening of one’s particular identity that makes possible one’s participation in the affirmation of the universal. The book proceeds with outlining the path of the political subject within its world, from the point of its inception to its confrontation with ethical, epistemic and other limits to its activity. This account of the subjective aspect of world politics also offers new and stimulating perspectives on such key issues of political theory as the relation of politics to human nature, the role of violence in politics and the conditioning of politics by philosophical or scientific knowledge. Systematic and accessible, these works will be key reading for all students and scholars of political science and international relations.
Download or read book The Subject of Anthropology written by Henrietta L. Moore and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-04-23 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this ambitious new book, Henrietta Moore draws on anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis to develop an original and provocative theory of gender and of how we become sexed beings. Arguing that the Oedipus complex is no longer the fulcrum of debate between anthropology and psychoanalysis, she demonstrates how recent theorizing on subjectivity, agency and culture has opened up new possibilities for rethinking the relationship between gender, sexuality and symbolism. Using detailed ethnographic material from Africa and Melanesia to explore the strengths and weaknesses of a range of theories in anthropology, feminism and psychoanalysis, Moore advocates an ethics of engagement based on a detailed understanding of the differences and similarities in the ways in which local communities and western scholars have imaginatively deployed the power of sexual difference. She demonstrates the importance of ethnographic listening, of focused attention to people’s imaginations, and of how this illuminates different facets of complex theoretical issues and human conundrums. Written not just for professional scholars and for students but for anyone with a serious interest in how gender and sexuality are conceptualized and experienced, this book is the most powerful and persuasive assessment to date of what anthropology has to contribute to these debates now and in the future.
Download or read book The Psychic Life of Power written by Judith Butler and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Judith Butler's new book considers the way in which psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. It combines social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in novel ways, and offers a more sustained analysis of the theory of subject formation implicit in her previous books.
Download or read book Quine s Naturalism written by Paul A. Gregory and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-11-03 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: W. V. Quine was the most important naturalistic philosopher of the twentieth century and a major impetus for the recent resurgence of the view that empirical science is our best avenue to knowledge. His views, however, have not been well understood. Critics charge that Quine's naturalized epistemology is circular and that it cannot be normative. Yet, such criticisms stem from a cluster of fundamental traditional assumptions regarding language, theory, and the knowing subject - the very presuppositions that Quine is at pains to reject. Through investigation of Quine's views regarding language, knowledge, and reality, the author offers a new interpretation of Quine's naturalism. The naturalism/anti-naturalism debate can be advanced only by acknowledging and critiquing the substantial theoretical commitments implicit in the traditional view. Gregory argues that the responses to the circularity and non-normativity objections do just that. His analysis further reveals that Quine's departure from the tradition penetrates the conception of the knowing subject, and he thus offers a new and engaging defence of Quine's naturalism.
