SUNY in Contemporary French Thought

Argues that we need to reinvent sovereignty as a motive for democratic political action while remaining alert to its dangers, specifically its relationship to violence. Sovereignty is usually seen as either the assertion of national rights in the face of external challenge or the cruel license of unaccountable power. In philosophy, sovereignty has been presented as the earthly manifestation of a potentially limitless, preexisting power, usually belonging to God. This divine sovereignty provides a model and the authority for worldly sovereignty. Yet, divine sovereignty also threatens the human by imagining power as transcendent, unquestionable, and potentially infinite. This infinity makes sovereignty endlessly disruptive and thus potentially infinitely violent. Engaging the complexities of sovereignty through the canon of political philosophy from Hobbes to Foucault and Agamben, Bastard Politics argues that there is no escaping this ambiguity. Nick Mansfield draws on Bataille and Derrida to argue that politics is sovereignty in action. In order to deal with the political challenges of the climate change era-including the enactment of global justice, the future of democracy, and unpredictable surges in population movement-we must embrace the possibilities of human sovereignty while remaining mindful of its dangers. Nick Mansfield is Honorary Professor of Critical and Cultural Studies at Macquarie University in Sydney. He is the author of several books, including The God Who Deconstructs Himself: Subjectivity and Sovereignty between Freud, Bataille and Derrida and Theorizing War: From Hobbes to Badiou.

Comprehensive overview of the entire spectrum of works by one of twentieth-century France's most original thinkers. Gaston Bachelard, one of twentieth-century France's most original thinkers, is known by English-language readers primarily as the author of The Poetics of Space and several other books on the imagination, but he made significant contributions to the philosophy and history of science. In this book, Roch C. Smith provides a comprehensive introduction to Bachelard's work, demonstrating how his writings on the literary imagination can be better understood in the context of his exploration of how knowledge works in science. After an overview of Bachelard's writings on the scientific mind as it was transformed by relativity, quantum physics, and modern chemistry, Smith examines Bachelard's works on the imagination in light of particular intellectual values Bachelard derived from science. His trajectory from science to a specifically literary imagination is traced by recognizing his concern with what science teaches about how we know, and his increasing preoccupation with questions of being when dealing with poetic imagery. Smith also explores the material and dynamic imagination associated with the four elements-fire, water, air, and earth-and the phenomenology of creative imagination in Bachelard's Poetics of Space, his Poetics of Reverie, and in the fragments of Poetics of Fire. Roch C. Smith is Professor Emeritus of French at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of Understanding Alain Robbe-Grillet.

A poetic and philosophical negotiation of the alternatives of atheism and religious faith. In A Man of Little Faith the French poet and philosopher, Michel Deguy, reflects on the loss of religious faith both personally and culturally. Disenchanted not only with the oversimplifications of radical atheism but also with what he sees as an insipid sacralization of art as the influence of religion has waned, Deguy refuses to focus on loss or impossibility. Instead, he actively suspends belief, producing a poetic deconstruction that, though resolutely a-theistic, makes a plea for an earthly piety and for the preservation of the relics of religion for the world to come. Two essays by Jean-Luc Nancy and a recent interview with Deguy are included, which reveal the impact and implications of Deguy's ongoing reflection and its significance within his generation of French thought.

Explores the philosophy of history of Henri Bergson and shows its relevance to contemporary historical thought. Henri Bergson is famous for his explorations of time as duration, yet he rarely referred to history in his writings. Simultaneously, historians and philosophers of history have generally disregarded Bergson's ideas about the nature of time. Modernity has brought change at an ever-accelerating rate, and one of the results of this has been a tendency toward presentism. Only the here and now matters, as past and future have been absorbed by the "omnipresent present" of the digital age. In highlighting the role of history in the work of Bergson, Bergson and History shows how his philosophy of life allows us to revise the modern conception of history. Bergson's philosophy situates history within a broader framework of life as a creative becoming, allowing us to rethink important topics in the study of history, such as historical time, the survival of the past, and historical progress. Leon ter Schure is an independent scholar who received his PhD in philosophy from the University of Groningen, the Netherlands.

Explores why Derrida, Hegel, and Heidegger conceive their thought as a "movement" rather than as a presentation of results or conclusions, and of the consequences of such an indirect method for critique and responsibility. This book explores the idea shared by Derrida, Hegel, and Heidegger that the value of their thought is not found in its results or conclusions, but in its "movement." All three describe the heart of their work in terms of a pathway, development, or movement that seems to deprive their thought of a solid ground. Johan de Jong argues that this is a structural vulnerability that is the source of its value, tracing Derrida's indirect method from his early to later works, and critically considering his engagements with Hegel and Heidegger. De Jong's analysis locates an affinity among Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida in a shared distrust of externality and, against the grain of some Levinasian commentaries, argues that Derrida's indirectness results in an ethics of complicity. The Movement of Showing answers a central question that many polemics about continental philosophy and postmodernism revolve around, namely: with which methods does one philosophize responsibly? It shows the difference between critique and polemics, and why simply taking up a position for or against is insufficient in order to think responsibly. Johan de Jong is Assistant Professor of Continental Philosophy at Leiden University in the Netherlands.

A major new interpretation of the philosophical significance of the oeuvre of Denis Diderot. Dramatic Experiments offers a comprehensive study of Denis Diderot, one of the key figures of European modernity. Diderot was a French Enlightenment philosopher, dramatist, art critic, and editor of the first major modern encyclopedia. He is known for having made lasting contributions to a number of fields, but his body of work is considered too dispersed and multiform to be unified. Eyal Peretz locates the unity of Diderot's thinking in his complication of two concepts in modern philosophy: drama and the image. Diderot's philosophical theater challenged the work of Plato and Aristotle, inaugurating a line of drama theorists that culminated in the twentieth century with Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud. His interest in the artistic image turned him into the first great modern theorist of painting and perhaps the most influential art critic of modernity. With these innovations, Diderot provokes a rethinking of major philosophical problems relating to life, the senses, history, and appearance and reality, and more broadly a rethinking of the relation between philosophy and the arts. Peretz shows Diderot to be a radical thinker well ahead of his time, whose philosophical effort bears comparison to projects such as Gilles Deleuze's transcendental empiricism, Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology, Jacques Derrida's deconstruction, and Jacques Lacan's psychoanalysis.

Wide-ranging essays on Jean-Luc Nancy's thought. Jean-Luc Nancy is one of the leading voices in European philosophy of the last thirty years, and he has influenced a range of fields, including theology, aesthetics, and political theory. This volume offers the widest and most up-to-date responses to his work, oriented by the themes of world, finitude, and sense, with attention also given to his recent project on the "deconstruction of Christianity." Focusing on Nancy's writings on globalization, Christianity, the plurality of art forms, his materialist ontology, as well as a range of contemporary issues, an international group of scholars provides not just inventive interpretations of Nancy's work but also essays taking on the most pressing issues of today. The collection brings to the fore the originality of his thinking and points to the future of continental philosophy. A previously unpublished interview with Nancy concludes the volume. Peter Gratton is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is the author of The State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity, also published by SUNY Press, and the coeditor (with John Panteleimon Manoussakis) of Traversing the Imaginary: Richard Kearney and the Postmodern Challenge. Marie-Eve Morin is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Alberta.

An analysis of Derrida's early work engaging Plato, Hegel, and the life sciences. Germs of Death explores the idea of genesis, or dissemination, in the early work of Jacques Derrida. Looking at Derrida's published and unpublished work from "Force and Signification" in 1963 to Glas in 1974, Mauro Senatore traces the development of Derrida's understanding of genesis both linguistically and biologically, and argues that this topic is an overlooked thread that draws together Derrida's readings of Plato and Hegel. Demonstrating how Derrida's analysis liberates the understanding of genesis from Platonic and Hegelian presupposition, Senatore also highlights Derrida's engagement with the biological thought of his day. Senatore also shows that the implications of Derrida's insights extend into contemporary ethical and political questions relating to postgenomic conceptions of life.

A provocative examination of the consequences of Levinas's and Adorno's thought for contemporary ethics and political philosophy. This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the "non-identity thinking" of Adorno and the "ethics of the Other" of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and "inhuman" material others such as environments and animals; the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life. Eric S. Nelson is Professor of Philosophy at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is the coeditor (with John E. Drabinski) of Between Levinas and Heidegger, also published by SUNY Press, and the author of Chinese and Buddhist Philosophy in Early Twentieth-Century German Thought.

Highlights the extent to which the two thinkers share a common philosophical framework, while also demonstrating how Levinas shifts the orientation of philosophical thinking from truth to justice. Tracing the relationship between truth and justice as articulated by Heidegger and Levinas, Rozemund Uljée presents the relation between the two thinkers as a subtle, profound, and complex rapport, which includes both their proximity and radical difference. This rapport is conceived not as a confrontation, but rather as a transformation, as Levinas's notion of justice does not renounce Heidegger's account of truth and its deployment. Thinking Difference with Heidegger and Levinas shows how the ethical relation transforms the essence and task of philosophy in its entirety, since it shifts the orientation of philosophy and the task of thinking from its concern with truth as ground or foundation to a question of justice. As a result, philosophy is no longer riveted to Being and its truth, but answers to the call for justice and must be conceived of as infinite commencement, where its impossibility to totalize meaning ensures that it remains open to the alterity of transcendence.

Building on Jean-Luc Marion's phenomenology of love this book takes up the "question of the Other" and argues that through the interpretive activities of the amorous imagination lovers come to experience one another as the Beloved.

An original interpretation of Merleau-Ponty on subjectivity, drawing from and challenging both the continental and analytic traditions. Challenging a prevalent Western idea of the self as a discrete, interior consciousness, Scott L. Marratto argues instead that subjectivity is a characteristic of the living, expressive movement establishing a dynamic intertwining between a sentient body and its environment. He draws on the work of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty, contemporary European philosophy, and research in cognitive science and development to offer a compelling investigation into what it means to be a self. Scott L. Marratto is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Michigan Technological University and the coauthor (with Lawrence E. Schmidt) of The End of Ethics in a Technological Society.

Elaborates the author's conception of plasticity by proposing a new way of thinking through Heidegger's writings on change. Behind Martin Heidegger's question of Being lies another one not yet sufficiently addressed in continental philosophy: change. Catherine Malabou, one of France's most inventive contemporary philosophers, explores this topic in the writings of Heidegger through the themes of metamorphosis, migration, exchange, and modification, finding and articulating a radical theory of ontico-ontological transformability. The Heidegger Change sketches the implications of this theory for a wide range of issues of central concern to the humanities-capitalism, the gift, ethics, suffering, the biological, technology, imagination, and time. Not since the writings of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas has the work of Heidegger been the subject of such inventive interpretation and original theory in its own right.

Considers the problems of sovereignty through the work of Rousseau, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, and Derrida. Following up on the fables and stories surrounding political sovereignty-once theological, now often nationalist-Peter Gratton's The State of Sovereignty takes aim at the central concepts surrounding the post-9/11 political environment. Against those content to conceptualize what has been called the "sovereign exception," Gratton argues that sovereignty underwent profound changes during modernity, changes tracked by Rousseau, Arendt, Foucault, Agamben, and Derrida. Each of these thinkers investigated the "fictions" and "illusions" of claims to sovereign omnipotence, while outlining what would become the preeminent problems of racism, nationalism, and biopower. Gratton illustrates the principal claims that tie these philosophers together and, more importantly, what lessons they offer, perhaps in spite of themselves, for those thinking about the future of politics. His innovative readings will open new ground for new and longtime readers of these philosophers alike, while confronting how their critiques of sovereignty reshape our conceptions of identity, freedom, and selfhood. The result not only fills a long-standing need for an up-to-date analysis of the concept of sovereignty but is also a tour de force engaging readers in the most important political and philosophical questions today.

An English translation of Bachelard's sixth book, in which he seeks to develop a metaphysical context for modern atomistic science. French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884–1962) is best known in the English-speaking world for his work on poetics and the literary imagination, but much of his oeuvre is devoted to epistemology and the philosophy of science. Like Thomas Kuhn, whose work he anticipates by three decades, Bachelard examines the revolution taking place in scientific thought, but with particular attention to the philosophical implications of scientific practice. Atomistic Intuitions, published in 1933, considers past atomistic doctrines as a context for proposing a metaphysics for the scientific revolutions of the twentieth century. As his subtitle indicates, in this book Bachelard proposes a classification of atomistic intuitions as they are transformed over the course of history. More than a mere taxonomy, this exploration of atomistic doctrines since antiquity proves to be keenly pedagogical, leading to an enriched philosophical appreciation of modern subatomic physics and chemistry as sciences of axioms. Though focused on philosophy of science, the perspectives and intuitions Bachelard garnered through this work provide a unique and even essential key to understanding his extensive writings on the imagination. Roch C. Smith's translation and explanatory notes will help to make this aspect of Bachelard's thought accessible to a wider readership, particularly in such fields as aesthetics, literature, and history. Roch C. Smith is Professor Emeritus of French Studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of Gaston Bachelard, Revised and Updated: Philosopher of Science and Imagination, also published by SUNY Press, as well as books on Alain Robbe-Grillet and André Malraux.

Repositions Bachelard as a critical and integral part of contemporary continental philosophy. Like Schelling before him and Deleuze and Guattari after him, Gaston Bachelard made major philosophical contributions to the advancement of science and the arts. In addition to being a mathematician and epistemologist whose influential work in the philosophy of science is still being absorbed, Bachelard was also one of the most innovative thinkers on poetic creativity and its ethical implications. His approaches to literature and the arts by way of elemental reverie awakened long-buried modes of thinking that have inspired literary critics, depth psychologists, poets, and artists alike. Bachelard's extraordinary body of work, unduly neglected by the English-language reception of continental philosophy in recent decades, exhibits a capacity to speak to the full complexity and wider reaches of human thinking. The essays in this volume analyze Bachelard as a phenomenological thinker and situate his thought within the Western tradition. Considering his work alongside that of Schelling, Husserl, Bergson, Buber, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Gadamer, Deleuze, and Nancy, this collection highlights some of Bachelard's most provocative proposals on questions of ontology, hermeneutics, ethics, environmental politics, spirituality, and the possibilities they offer for productive transformations of self and world.

All of Derrida's texts on Joyce together under one cover in fresh, new translations, along with key essays covering the range of Derrida's engagement with Joyce's works. Bringing together all of Jacques Derrida's writings on James Joyce, this volume includes the first complete translation of his book Ulysses Gramophone: Two Words for Joyce as well as the first translation of the essay "The Night Watch." In Ulysses Gramophone, Derrida provides some of his most thorough reflections on affirmation and the "yes," the signature, and the role of technological mediation in all of these areas. In "The Night Watch," Derrida pursues his ruminations on writing in an explicitly feminist direction, offering profound observations on the connection between writing and matricide. Accompanying these texts are nine essays by leading scholars from across the humanities addressing Derrida's treatments of Joyce throughout his work, and two remembrances of lectures devoted to Joyce that Derrida gave in 1982 and 1984. The volume concludes with photographs of Derrida from these two events. Andrew J. Mitchell is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emory University. He is the author of Heidegger Among the Sculptors: Body, Space, and the Art of Dwelling. Sam Slote is Assistant Professor of English at Trinity College Dublin. He is the author of The Silence in Progress of Dante, Mallarmé and Joyce and coeditor (with Luca Crispi) of How Joyce Wrote Finnegans Wake: A Chapter-by-Chapter Genetic Guide.

Event of Signature formulates a new philosophical problem which focuses on the handwritten signature as sign of legal identification. Author Michaela Fišerová works with three metaphysical expectations, which are shared in discourses of graphology and forensic analysis. The first expectation tends to reveal the signer's soul: a handwritten signature "naturally" mirrors the unique psychological qualities of the signer. The second expectation tends to guarantee the originality of the signer's trace: a handwritten signature proves physical contact between the signed document and the writing tool "authentically" moved by the signer's hand. The third expectation tends to recognize the signer's legal identity: a handwritten signature is expected to reproduce the signer's personal style, which enables identification by legal authorities. In a methodologically inventive and semiotically-based dialogue with Derrida's deconstruction, Fišerová situates this triple expectation in the interval between life and law. Challenging coverage of this topic finally shows that none of the metaphysical expectations will ever be fulfilled in the event of manual signing. Legal uses of handwritten signature are characterized by the complex aporia of repeating the unrepeatable.

Virality Vitality explores the history and present of the life sciences and virology, focusing on moments of disruption that reveal the instability of the most basic concepts guiding scientific knowledge and their practical or political consequences. From their "discovery" to present-day experiments in synthetic virology, viruses have given rise to upheavals in our models of life because of the difficulty of rigorously distinguishing life from virus, self from other. The virus has been compared to a gene, to an agent of life's heredity and immunity, and we humans depend on the fossils of ancient viral infections in our genome in order to bear children. Can a parasite give birth to its host? To interpret the nonoppositional relationship of virality and vitality, this book draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and the growing field of biodeconstruction that has emerged from his posthumously published work on genetics. In turn, Virality Vitality suggests a novel approach to questions of the agency of "matter" or the "nonhuman," often raised in Anthropocene studies, the material turn, and ecocriticism. Nothing is more natural than the artificiality of the borders drawn, maintained, and displaced by the living and their viruses, by virality-vitality. The inscription of these borders remains to be read, and thus deconstructive textuality is anything but opposed to the sciences and what they call life.

Michel Foucault's thought, Maddalena Cerrato writes, may be understood as practical philosophy. In this perspective, political analysis, philosophy of history, epistemology, and ethics appear as necessarily cast together in a philosophical project that aims to rethink freedom and emancipation from domination of all kinds. The idea of practical philosophy accounts for Foucault's specific approach to the object, as well as to the task of philosophy, and it identifies the perspective that led him to consider the question of subjectivity as the guiding thread of his work. Overall, Cerrato shows the deep consistency underlying Foucault's reflection and the substantial coherence of his philosophical itinerary, setting aside all the conventional interpretations that pivot on the idea that his thought underwent a radical "turn" from the political engagement of the question of power toward an ethical retrieval of the question of subjectivity.

Despite his influence in utopian studies and democratic theory, French philosopher Miguel Abensour (1939–2017) has yet to be fully discovered in the English-speaking world as only a fraction of his work has been translated. A Politics of Emancipation fills this void by translating a selection of his seminal essays into English for the first time. The Reader provides a systematic overview of Abensour's work and the two inseparable projects that govern his approach to political theory: on the one hand, a radical critique of all forms of domination and, on the other, a desire to conceptualize the political as the realm of freedom and emancipation. For Abensour, both projects are to be undertaken together in order to avoid the double trap of an evacuation of conflict from politics and the reduction of politics to a form of domination. In other words, a politics of emancipation requires a "ruthless" critique of domination coupled with an analysis of politics as the domain within which human beings experience freedom and equality.

Reimagining Europe comprises a series of contributions which address, in various ways, the relationship between Europe and continental philosophy/phenomenology. Europe is in crisis: a crisis that no longer designates a moment of decision, a critical point between a before and an after, but a state, a permanent mode of being, a constant emergency. At this juncture of Europe, the aporia of language confronts the aporia of history. We cannot speak, we must speak, we shall speak. As such, the contributions all engage with the idea that the question "what is Europe?" must measure up a series of questions, namely: what was it to be? What does it mean to initiate and sustain a project, such as Europe, if only at times, after the fact? The questions of internal and external borders, of homogeneity and coherence, identity and equality, legitimacy and rights, democracy and representation can only be raised insofar as the question of Europe, its destiny, and destination, is raised as a whole.