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In the Flow
by Boris GroysThe leading art theorist takes on art in the age of the Internet In the early twentieth century, art and its institutions came under critique from a new democratic and egalitarian spirit. The notion of works of art as sacred objects was decried and subsequently they would be understood merely as things. This meant an attack on realism, as well as on the traditional preservative mission of the museum. Acclaimed art theorist Boris Groys argues this led to the development of "direct realism": an art that would not produce objects, but practices (from performance art to relational aesthetics) that would not survive. But for more than a century now, every advance in this direction has been quickly followed by new means of preserving art's distinction.In this major new work, Groys charts the paradoxes produced by this tension, and explores art in the age of the thingless medium, the Internet. Groys claims that if the techniques of mechanical reproduction gave us objects without aura, digital production generates aura without objects, transforming all its materials into vanishing markers of the transitory present.From the Hardcover edition.
In the Forest of the Blind: The Eurasian Journey of Faxian's Record of Buddhist Kingdoms
by Matthew W. KingThe Record of Buddhist Kingdoms is a classic travelogue that records the Chinese monk Faxian’s journey in the early fifth century CE to Buddhist sites in Central and South Asia in search of sacred texts. In the nineteenth century, it traveled west to France, becoming in translation the first scholarly book about “Buddhist Asia,” a recent invention of Europe. This text fascinated European academic Orientalists and was avidly studied by Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche. The book went on to make a return journey east: it was reintroduced to Inner Asia in an 1850s translation into Mongolian, after which it was rendered into Tibetan in 1917. Amid decades of upheaval, the text was read and reinterpreted by Siberian, Mongolian, and Tibetan scholars and Buddhist monks.Matthew W. King offers a groundbreaking account of the transnational literary, social, and political history of the circulation, translation, and interpretation of Faxian’s Record. He reads its many journeys at multiple levels, contrasting the textual and interpretative traditions of the European academy and the Inner Asian monastery. King shows how the text provided Inner Asian readers with new historical resources to make sense of their histories as well as their own times, in the process developing an Asian historiography independently of Western influence. Reconstructing this circulatory history and featuring annotated translations, In the Forest of the Blind models decolonizing methods and approaches for Buddhist studies and Asian humanities.
In the Grip of Freedom: Law and Modernity in Max Weber (The Royal Society of Canada Special Publications)
by Cary BoucockFaith in the utility and value of legal rights forms the political common sense of our age. With its profound breadth and insight into the modern condition, Max Weber's social and political thought is widely considered to be the most influential of the era. Legal phenomena play a centre-stage role in his account of the development of the West and the rationalism of modern social arrangements.Cary Boucock's "In the Grip of Freedom" examines the relationship between Max Weber's "Sociology of Law" and his interpretation of the structure and meaning of modern society. Weber's social and political thought is investigated in the context of developments in Canada which have followed the 1982 enactment of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms-namely, the movement toward a rights-oriented nation where broad social issues are routed through the courts, and the political self-understanding of the citizen becomes increasingly tied to a conception of the individual as a rights-bearing subject. Professor Boucock's text runs against the grain of conventional assessments of Weber's legal theory and its applicability to understanding contemporary legal developments. He explores the significance of Weber's sociology of law theories within the larger compass of his sociological thought and illustrates the significance of Weber's sociology for interpreting the social dimensions of present-day legal developments in Canada. Weber's work is a vehicle for understanding the social and legal practices of our own time, and thus, goes far beyond a simple interpretation of the great German thinker.
In the Name of God: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Ethics and Violence (Blackwell Public Philosophy Series #34)
by John TeehanReligion is one of the most powerful forces running through human history, and although often presented as a force for good, its impact is frequently violent and divisive. This provocative work brings together cutting-edge research from both evolutionary and cognitive psychology to help readers understand the psychological structure of religious morality and the origins of religious violence. Introduces a fundamentally new approach to the analysis of religion in a style accessible to the general reader Applies insights from evolutionary and cognitive psychology to both Judaism and Christianity, and their texts, to help understand the origins of religious violence Argues that religious violence is grounded in the moral psychology of religion Illustrates its controversial argument with reference to the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the response to the attacks from both the terrorists and the President. Suggests strategies for beginning to counter the divisive aspects of religion Discusses the role of religion and religious criticism in the contemporary world. Argues for a position sceptical of the moral authority of religion, while also critiquing the excesses of the “new atheists” for failing to appreciate the moral contributions of religion Awarded Honourable Mention, 2010 Prose Awards
In the Name of Phenomenology
by Simon GlendinningThe attempt to pursue philosophy in the name of phenomenology is one of the most significant and important developments in twentieth century thought. In this bold and innovative book, Simon Glendinning introduces some of its major figures, and demonstrates that its ongoing strength and coherence is to be explained less by what Maurice Merleau-Ponty called the 'unity' of its 'manner of thinking' and more by what he called its 'unfinished nature'. Beginning with a discussion of the nature of phenomenology, Glendinning explores the changing landscape of phenomenology in key texts by Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas and Derrida. Focusing on the different ways in which each philosopher has responded to and transformed the legacy of phenomenology, Glendinning shows that the richness of this legacy lies not in the formation of a distinctive movement or school but in a remarkable capacity to make fertile philosophical breakthroughs. Important topics such as the nature of phenomenological arguments, the critique of realism and idealism, ontology, existentialism, perception, ethics and the other are also closely examined. Through a re-evaluation of the development of phenomenology Glendinning traces the ruptures and dislocations of philosophy that, in an age dominated by science, strive constantly to renew our understanding of ourselves and our place in the world. Clearly and engagingly written, In the Name of Phenomenology is essential reading for students of phenomenology and contemporary philosophy.
In the Name of the Nation: India and Its Northeast (South Asia in Motion)
by Sanjib BaruahIn India, the eight states that border Myanmar, Bangladesh, Bhutan and the Tibetan areas of China are often referred to as just "the Northeast." In the Name of the Nation offers a critical and historical account of the country's troubled relations with this borderland region. Its modern history is shaped by the dynamics of a "frontier" in its multiple references: migration and settlement, resource extraction, and regional geopolitics. Partly as a result of this, the political trajectory of the region has been different from the rest of the country. Ethnic militias and armed groups have flourished for decades, but they coexist comfortably with functioning electoral institutions. The region has some of India's highest voter turnout rates, but special security laws produce significant democracy deficits that are now almost as old as the Republic. That these policies have been enforced to foment national unity while multiple alternative conceptions of the "nation" animate politics in the region forces us to reflect on the very foundations of the nation form. Sanjib Baruah offers a nuanced account of this impossibly complicated story, asking how democracy can be sustained, and deepened, in these conditions.
In the Realm of the Senses
by Johannah Fahey Howard Prosser Matthew ShawThis book charts new territory both theoretically and methodologically. Drawing on MacDougall's notion of social aesthetics, it explores the sensory dimensions of privilege through a global ethnography of elite schools. The various contributors to the volume draw on a range of theoretical perspectives from Lefebvre, Benjamin, Bourdieu, Appadurai, Kress and van Leeuwen to both broaden and critique MacDougall's original concept. They argue that within these elite schools there is a relationship between their 'complex sensory and aesthetic environments' and the construction of privilege within and beyond the school gates. Understanding the importance of the visual to ethnography, the social aesthetics of these elite schools are captured through the inclusion of a series of visual essays that complement the written accounts of the aesthetics of privilege. The collection also includes a series of vignettes that further explore the sensory dimension of these aesthetics: touch, taste--though metaphorically understood-- sight and sound. These varying formats illustrate the aesthetic nature of social relations and the various ways in which class permeates the senses. The images from across the different schools and their surroundings immerse the reader in these worlds and provide poignant ethnographic data of the forces of globalisation within the context of elite schooling.
In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West (The Wellek Library Lectures)
by Wendy BrownAcross the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring?In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism’s multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones.Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism’s intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears.
In the Self's Place: The Approach of Saint Augustine (Cultural Memory in the Present)
by Jean-Luc MarionIn the Self's Place is an original phenomenological reading of Augustine that considers his engagement with notions of identity in Confessions. Using the Augustinian experience of confessio, Jean-Luc Marion develops a model of selfhood that examines this experience in light of the whole of the Augustinian corpus. Towards this end, Marion engages with noteworthy modern and postmodern analyses of Augustine's most "experiential" work, including the critical commentaries of Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. Marion ultimately concludes that Augustine has preceded postmodernity in exploring an excess of the self over and beyond itself, and in using this alterity of the self to itself, as a driving force for creative relations with God, the world, and others. This reading establishes striking connections between accounts of selfhood across the fields of contemporary philosophy, literary studies, and Augustine's early Christianity.
In the Shadow of Catastrophe: German Intellectuals Between Apocalypse and Enlightenment (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism #14)
by Anson RabinbachThese essays by eminent European intellectual and cultural historian Anson Rabinbach address the writings of key figures in twentieth-century German philosophy. Rabinbach explores their ideas in relation to the two world wars and the horrors facing Europe at that time.Analyzing the work of Benjamin and Bloch, he suggests their indebtedness to the traditions of Jewish messianism. In a discussion of Hugo Ball's little-known Critique of the German Intelligentsia, Rabinbach reveals the curious intellectual career of the Dadaist and antiwar activist turned-nationalist and anti-Semite. His examination of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Jaspers's The Question of German Guilt illuminates the complex and often obscure political referents of these texts. Turning to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Rabinbach offers an arresting new interpretation of this central text of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Subtly and persuasively argued, his book will become an indispensable reference point for all concerned with twentieth-century German history and thought.
In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America
by Robert Gooding-WilliamsThe Souls of Black Folk is Du Bois’s outstanding contribution to modern political theory. It is his still influential answer to the question, “What kind of politics should African Americans conduct to counter white supremacy?” Here, in a major addition to American studies and the first book-length philosophical treatment of Du Bois’s thought, Robert Gooding-Williams examines the conceptual foundations of Du Bois’s interpretation of black politics. For Du Bois, writing in a segregated America, a politics capable of countering Jim Crow had to uplift the black masses while heeding the ethos of the black folk: it had to be a politics of modernizing “self-realization” that expressed a collective spiritual identity. Highlighting Du Bois’s adaptations of Gustav Schmoller’s social thought, the German debate over the Geisteswissenschaften, and William Wordsworth’s poetry, Gooding-Williams reconstructs Souls’ defense of this “politics of expressive self-realization,” and then examines it critically, bringing it into dialogue with the picture of African American politics that Frederick Douglass sketches in My Bondage and My Freedom. Through a novel reading of Douglass, Gooding-Williams characterizes the limitations of Du Bois’s thought and questions the authority it still exerts in ongoing debates about black leadership, black identity, and the black underclass. Coming to Bondage and then to these debates by looking backward and then forward from Souls, Gooding-Williams lets Souls serve him as a productive hermeneutical lens for exploring Afro-Modern political thought in America.
In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Barack Obama
by William E. LeuchtenburgA ghost has inhabited the Oval Office since 1945--the ghost of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR's formidable presence has cast a large shadow on the occupants of that office in the years since his death, and an appreciation of his continuing influence remains essential to understanding the contemporary presidency. This new edition of In the Shadow of FDR has been updated to examine the presidency of George W. Bush and the first 100 days of the presidency of Barack Obama. The Obama presidency is evidence not just of the continuing relevance of FDR for assessing executive power but also of the salience of FDR's name in party politics and policy formulation.
In the Shadow of Justice: Postwar Liberalism and the Remaking of Political Philosophy
by Katrina ForresterA history of how political philosophy was recast by the rise of postwar liberalism and irrevocably changed by John Rawls’s A Theory of JusticeIn the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Katrina Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism—a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state—became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain.In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Rawls’s A Theory of Justice made a particular kind of liberalism essential to political philosophy. Using archival sources, Forrester explores the ascent and legacy of this form of liberalism by examining its origins in midcentury debates among American antistatists and British egalitarians. She traces the roots of contemporary theories of justice and inequality, civil disobedience, just war, global and intergenerational justice, and population ethics in the 1960s and ’70s and beyond. In these years, political philosophers extended, developed, and reshaped this liberalism as they responded to challenges and alternatives on the left and right—from the New International Economic Order to the rise of the New Right. These thinkers remade political philosophy in ways that influenced not only their own trajectory but also that of their critics.Recasting the history of late twentieth-century political thought and providing novel interpretations and fresh perspectives on major political philosophers, In the Shadow of Justice offers a rigorous look at liberalism’s ambitions and limits.
In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience (Ideas in Context #127)
by Jeffrey R. CollinsThomas Hobbes and John Locke sit together in the canon of political thought but are rarely treated in common historical accounts. This book narrates their intertwined careers during the Restoration period, when the two men found themselves in close proximity and entangled in many of the same political conflicts. Bringing new source material to bear, In the Shadow of Leviathan establishes the influence of Hobbesian thought over Locke, particularly in relation to the preeminent question of religious toleration. Excavating Hobbes's now forgotten case for a prudent, politique toleration gifted by sovereign power, Jeffrey R. Collins argues that modern, liberal thinking about toleration was transformed by Locke's gradual emancipation from this Hobbesian mode of thought. This book investigates those landmark events - the civil war, Restoration, the popish plot, the Revolution of 1688 - which eventually forced Locke to confront the limits of politique toleration, and to devise an account of religious freedom as an inalienable right.
In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of US Global Power (Dispatch Books)
by Alfred W. McCoyThe award-winning historian delivers a &“brilliant and deeply informed&” analysis of American power from the Spanish-American War to the Trump Administration (New York Journal of Books).In this sweeping and incisive history of US foreign relations, historian Alfred McCoy explores America&’s rise as a world power from the 1890s through the Cold War, and its bid to extend its hegemony deep into the twenty-first century. Since American dominance reached its apex at the close of the Cold War, the nation has met new challenges that it is increasingly unequipped to handle.From the disastrous invasion of Iraq to the failure of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, fracturing military alliances, and the blundering nationalism of Donald Trump, McCoy traces US decline in the face of rising powers such as China. He also offers a critique of America&’s attempt to maintain its position through cyberwar, covert intervention, client elites, psychological torture, and worldwide surveillance.
In the Space of Reasons: Selected Essays of Wilfrid Sellars
by Wilfrid SellarsThis collection, co-edited by Sellar's chief interpreter and intellectual heir, should do much to elucidate and clearly establish the significance of this difficult thinker's vision for contemporary philosophy. Edited and introduced by Robert B. Brandom and Kevin Scharp
In the Spirit of Critique: Thinking Politically in the Dialectical Tradition (SUNY series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)
by Andrew J. DouglasFocusing on the critical postures of Hegel, Marx, and a series of twentieth-century intellectuals, including Sartre, Adorno, and C. L. R. James, this book explores what dialectical thinking entails and how such thinking might speak to the lived realities of the contemporary political moment. What is revealed is not a formal method or a grand philosophical system, but rather a reflective energy or disposition—a dialectical spirit of critique—that draws normative sustenance from an emancipatory moral vision but that remains attuned principally to conflict and tension, and to the tragic uncertainties of political life. In light of the unique challenges of the late-modern age, as theorists and citizens struggle to sustain an active and coherent critical agenda, In the Spirit of Critique invites serious reconsideration of a rich and elusive intellectual tradition.
In the Spirit of Hegel: A Study of G.W.F. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit
by Robert C. SolomonIn this book, the author captures the bold and exhilarating spirit, presenting the Phenomenology as a thoroughly personal as well as philosophical work. He begins with a historical introduction, which lays the groundwork for a section-by-section analysis of the Phenomenology. Both the initiated and readers unacquainted with the intricacies of German idealism will find this to be an accessible and exciting introduction to this philosopher's monumental work.
In the Swarm: Digital Prospects (Untimely Meditations #3)
by Byung-Chul HanA prominent German thinker argues that—contrary to “Twitter Revolution” cheerleading—digital communication is destroying political discourse and political action. The shitstorm represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication.—from In the SwarmDigital communication and social media have taken over our lives. In this contrarian reflection on digitized life, Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. In the predigital, analog era, by the time an angry letter to the editor had been composed, mailed, and received, the immediate agitation had passed. Today, digital communication enables instantaneous, impulsive reaction, meant to express and stir up outrage on the spot. “The shitstorm,” writes Han, ”represents an authentic phenomenon of digital communication. ”Meanwhile, the public, the senders and receivers of these communications have become a digital swarm—not a mass, or a crowd, or Negri and Hardt's antiquated notion of a “multitude,” but a set of isolated individuals incapable of forming a “we,” incapable of calling dominant power relations into question, incapable of formulating a future because of an obsession with the present. The digital swarm is a fragmented entity that can focus on individual persons only in order to make them an object of scandal. Han, one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today, describes a society in which information has overrun thought, in which the same algorithms are employed by Facebook, the stock market, and the intelligence services. Democracy is under threat because digital communication has made freedom and control indistinguishable. Big Brother has been succeeded by Big Data.
In the Tracks of Historical Materialism
by Perry AndersonWhat have been the major changes in the intellectual landscape of the left since the mid seventies? Have they on balance represented an emancipation or a retreat for socialist culture as a whole? In the Tracks of Historical Materialism looks at some of the paradoxes in the evolution of Marxist thought in this period. It starts by considering the remarkable and variegated growth of historical materialism in the Anglo-American world, spreading across a broad field from history to economics, politics to literature, sociology to philosophy. By contrast, the same years have seen a drastic recession of Marxist influences in the Latin cultures where it was traditionally strong—France or Italy. Its main theoretical challengers there proved to be successive forms of structuralism and post-structuralism. The common coordinates of these—tracing the outer bounds of the work of Levi-Strauss or Lacan, Foucault or Derrida—are surveyed and criticized, in the light of the inherent limitations of the language model from which they derived. In Germany, on the other hand, the theoretical scene has been largely dominated by the accumulating work of Habermas, with its roots in the Frankfurt School. Yet Habermas's philosophy also reveals unexpected affinities with the trend of prevalent Parisian concerns, in its unifying emphasis on communication—while at the same time diverging from them in the constancy of its political commitments. The historical background of international class struggles against which these variant fates of Marxism in the west were played out is then explored, with special attention to the interconnection between the destinies of Maoism and Eurocommunism. What, finally, is the nature of the relationship between Marxism as a theory and socialism as a goal? A conclusion reviews the wider issues posed for the labour movement by the rise of the peace movement and the women's movement, and suggests a range of priorities for the further development of Marxist thought in the eighties.
In the Twilight of Revolution: The Political Theory of Amilcar Cabral (Routledge Library Editions: Political Thought and Political Philosophy #39)
by Jock McCullochFirst published in 1983. Amilcar Cabral was one of Africa’s leading revolutionary figures. Universally recognised as the founding father at the independent state of Guiné-Bissau, he was also the first truly important political thinker to have emerged from Africa’s two decades of revolution. This book was the first publication to present a critical analysis of his standing as a political theorist. Born in 1925 in the then Portuguese colony of Guiné, Cabral devoted his life to the liberation of his people from colonialism and was instrumental in founding the PAIGC, the African Party for the Independence of Guiné and Cape Verde. He was assassinated early in 1973, but the PAIGC continued his task and Guiné-Bissau gained independence in September 1973. Guiné’s revolution came late, but it was a genuine revolution and, like all revolutions, was accompanied by a theory of its own. That theory is found in the writings of Cabral. In this study Jack McCulloch explains that, because of the conjunction of a number of historical factors, the revolution in Guiné assumed an importance for out of proportion to the size or economic significance of the country, and shows that consequently Cabral’s theory has come to have an historical significance of its own. This account of Cabral’s political theory demonstrates clearly that the effect of Cabral’s career was to help bring down the last of the great colonial empires in Africa and, in the realm of theory, to dismantle the central shibboleths of African socialism.
In(-)Kongruenz leben: Eine qualitative Untersuchung zu vegetarisch und vegan lebenden Menschen aus bildungstheoretischer Perspektive
by Marvin GiehlMarvin Giehl zeigt den im erziehungswissenschaftlichen Diskurs bislang unterrepräsentierten Konnex zwischen den ethisch motivierten Ernährungs- und Lebensformen des Vegetarismus und des Veganismus sowie deren biographischer Genese und bildungstheoretischen Überlegungen auf. Durch die Erhebung qualitativer Interviews und die Auswertung im Stile der dokumentarischen Methode entwirft der Autor mehrere datenbegründete Typiken, welche die Komplexität von ‚vegetarischen‘ und ‚veganen‘ Biographien rekonstruieren. Virulent wird dabei ein spannungsreiches Wechselspiel von erlebter Inkongruenz und Kongruenz. Mit dem Forschungsergebnis legt er eine neue Betrachtung von post-anthropozentrisch gedachten biographischen Bildungsprozessen vor, woraus auch praktische pädagogische Implikationen abzuleiten sind. Schließlich erweitert die Arbeit die Perspektiven im methodologischen Diskurs, indem sie bislang vorherrschende und reproduzierte Fokussierung auf konjunktive Wissensbestände und die damit korrespondieren Wissensformen durch die analytische Berücksichtigung von kommunikativem Wissen ergänzt.
In-Between: Latina Feminist Phenomenology, Multiplicity, and the Self (SUNY series, Philosophy and Race)
by Mariana OrtegaThis original study intertwining Latina feminism, existential phenomenology, and race theory offers a new philosophical approach to understanding selfhood and identity. Focusing on writings by Gloría Anzaldúa, María Lugones, and Linda Martín Alcoff, Mariana Ortega articulates a phenomenology that introduces a conception of selfhood as both multiple and singular. Her Latina feminist phenomenological approach can account for identities belonging simultaneously to different worlds, including immigrants, exiles, and inhabitants of borderlands. Ortega's project forges new directions not only in Latina feminist thinking on such issues as borders, mestizaje, marginality, resistance, and identity politics, but also connects this analysis to the existential phenomenology of Martin Heidegger and to such concepts as being-in-the-world, authenticity, and intersubjectivity. The pairing of the personal and the political in Ortega's work is illustrative of the primacy of lived experience in the development of theoretical understandings of who we are. In addition to bringing to light central metaphysical issues regarding the temporality and continuity of the self, Ortega models a practice of philosophy that draws from work in other disciplines and that recognizes the important contributions of Latina feminists and other theorists of color to philosophical pursuits.
Inanimation: Theories of Inorganic Life (Posthumanities #35)
by David WillsInanimation is the third book by author David Wills to analyze the technology of the human. In Prosthesis, Wills traced our human attachment to external objects back to a necessity within the body itself. In Dorsality, he explored how technology is understood to function behind or before the human. Inanimation proceeds by taking literally the idea of inanimate or inorganic forms of life. Starting from a seemingly naïve question about what it means to say texts &“live on&” or have a &“life of their own,&” Inanimation develops a new theory of the inanimate.Inanimation offers a fresh account of what life is and the ethical and political consequences that follow from this conception. Inspired by Walter Benjamin&’s observation that &“the idea of life and afterlife in works of art should be regarded with an entirely unmetaphorical objectivity,&” the book challenges the coherence and limitations of &“what lives,&” arguing that there is no clear opposition between a live animate and dead inanimate. Wills identifies three major forms of inorganic life: autobiography, translation, and resonance. Informed by Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze, he explores these forms through wide-ranging case studies. He brings his panoptic vision to bear on thinkers (Descartes, Freud, Derrida, Benjamin, Carl Schmitt, Jean-Luc Nancy, Roland Barthes), writers and poets (Hélène Cixous, Paul Celan, William Carlos Williams, Ernst Jünger, James Joyce, Georges Bataille), and visual artists (Jean-François Millet, Jean-Luc Godard, Paul Klee). With panache and gusto, Wills discovers life-forms well beyond textual remainders and translations, in such disparate &“places&” as the act of thinking, the death drive, poetic blank space, recorded bird songs, the technology of warfare, and the heart stopped by love.
Inborn Knowledge: The Mystery Within
by Colin McGinnAn argument that nativism is true and important but mysterious, examining the particular case of ideas of sensible qualities. In this book, Colin McGinn presents a concise, clear, and compelling argument that the origins of knowledge are innate—that nativism, not empiricism, is correct in its theory of how concepts are acquired. McGinn considers the particular case of sensible qualities—ideas of color, shape, taste, and so on. He argues that these, which he once regarded as the strongest case for the empiricist position, are in fact not well explained by the empiricist account that they derive from interactions with external objects. Rather, he contends, ideas of sensible qualities offer the strongest case for the nativist position—that a large range of our knowledge is inborn, not acquired through the senses. Yet, McGinn cautions, how this can be is deeply problematic; we have no good theories about how innate knowledge is possible. Innate knowledge is a mystery, though a fact.McGinn describes the traditional debate between empiricism and nativism; offers an array of arguments against empiricism; constructs an argument in favor of nativism; and considers the philosophical consequences of adopting the nativist position, discussing perception, the mind–body problem, the unconscious, metaphysics, and epistemology.