In this bold and provocative work, French philosopher Alain Badiou proposes a startling reinterpretation of St. Paul. For Badiou, Paul is neither the venerable saint embalmed by Christian tradition, nor the venomous priest execrated by philosophers like Nietzsche: he is instead a profoundly original and still revolutionary thinker whose invention ......
First published in 1935, this work represents Emmanuel Levinas' first attempt to break with the ontological obsession of the Western tradition. In it, Levinas not only affirms the necessity of an escape from being, but also gives a meaning and a direction to it. Beginning with an analysis of need not as lack or some external limit to a ......
Opening with the provocative query "what might an anthropology of the secular look like?" this work explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities in the modern West and Middle East. It proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions ......
It is commonly believed that Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), well known as the founder of phenomenology and as the teacher of Heidegger, was unable to free himself from the framework of a classical metaphysics of subjectivity. Supposedly, he never abandoned the view that the world and the Other are constituted by a pure transcendental subject, and his ......
For many years English-language scholarship on late medieval and early modern Italy was largely dominated by work on Florence-as a city, culture, and economic and political entity. During the past few decades, however, scholarship has moved well beyond the "Florentine model" to explore the diversity of Italian urban and provincial life-the "many ......
Gender, Language, and Culture in French Orientalism
Building on the critical foundations established by Edward Said in Orientalism, this text examines the relationship between the Orientalist tradition in French art and literature and France s colonial history. It focuses on a central dimension of this exchange: the prevalent figure of the oriental woman, and the interplay of race and gender in ......
The heart of this book is the remarkable Civil War diary of the author's great-grandfather, William Benjamin Gould, an escaped slave who served in the United States Navy from 1862 until the end of the war. The diary vividly records Gould's activity as part of the North Atlantic Blockading Squadron off the coast of North Carolina and Virginia; his ......
A part of the "return to religion" now evident in European philosophy, this text represents the culmination of the career of a phenomenological thinker whose earlier works trace a trajectory from Marx through a genealogy of psychoanalysis that interprets Descartes's "I think, I am", as "I feel myself thinking, I am". In this work, Michel Henry ......
This set of extended and intellectually nuanced interviews with a broad range of contemporary philosophers working in the fields of moral and political philosophy invites readers to participate in the dialogue. We observe philosophers think as they speak, trying to clarify their views, and we watch them argue with each other, in the process ......
