A new book:The Hermeneutic Nature of Analytic Philosophy: A Study of Ernst Tugendhat

An interview with the author

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Radical Alterity (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) by Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume
Translated by Ames Hodges

Where is the Other today? Can Otherness challenge our arrogant, insular cultural narcissism? From artificial intelligence to the streets of Venice, from early explorers to contemporary photographers, Jean Baudrillard and Marc Guillaume discuss the traces of radical alterity in our world. These provocative seminars, held in 1990 and 1991, follow the multiple, intertwined trajectories first projected in Baudrillard’s work and his reading of the “radical exoticism” posited by Victor Segalen–ideas Baudrillard extends into the realms of mass media, pseudonyms, technology, and that illusorily close yet radically foreign “primitive society of the future,” America.

In a world where no corner is unexplored, the Other remains a challenge to thought, a crack in the shell of universal understanding, impossible to communicate but potentially the linchpin of communication itself. Together, Baudrillard and Guillaume explore the threatened and fatal figures of radical alterity.

This collection is no longer available in French, and this English edition includes an additional essay by Baudrillard, “Because Illusion and Reality Are Not Opposed.”

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Pure War (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents) by Paul Virilio and Sylvere Lotringer, translated by Mark Polizzotti

featuring a new introduction by Sylvere Lotringer and Paul Virilio, and a postscript with two new interviews

In June 2007, Paul Virilio and Sylvère Lotringer met in La Rochelle, France to reconsider the premises they had developed twenty-five years before in their frighteningly prescient classic, Pure War. Pure War was the book that first introduced Paul Virlio to English readers in 1983. It described the invisible war waged by technology against humanity, and the lack of any real distinction since World War II between war and peace. In conversation with Lotringer in 1982, Virilio noted the “accidents” that inevitably arise with every technological development: from car crashes to nuclear spillage, to the extermination of space and the derealization of time wrought by instant communication.

In this new and updated edition, Virilio and Lotringer consider how the omnipresent threat of the “accident”–both military and economic–has escalated. With the fall of the Soviet bloc, the balance of power between East and West based on nuclear deterrence has given way to a more diffuse multi-polar nuclear threat. Moreover, as the speed of communication has increased exponentially, “local” accidents–like the collapse of the Asian markets in the late 1980s–escalate, with the speed of contagion, into global events instantaneously. “Globalization,” Virilio argues, is the planet’s ultimate accident.

Paul Virilio was born in Paris in 1932 to an immigrant Italian family. Trained as an urban planner, he became the director of the École Speciale d’Architecture in the wake of the 1968 rebellion. He has published twenty-five books, including Pure War (1988) (his first in English) and The Accident of Art (2005), both with Sylvère Lotringer and published by Semiotext(e). In 1998, he retired from teaching to devote himself to subh projects as working with homeless people in Paris and building the first Museum of the Accident. He now lives in La Rochelle, France and no longer travels.

Description of Rethinking Facticity, eds, Francois Raffoul and Eric Sean Nelson

The concept of facticity has undergone crucial transformations over the last century in hermeneutics and phenomenology, but it has not yet received the attention that it warrants. Following a suggestion by Merleau-Ponty that philosophy is not about essences but rather the facticity of existence, prominent philosophers examine the significance of facticity in its historical context and reflect on its contemporary relevance. Focusing on the works of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Lacan, and Fanon, among others, they trace its significance from life-philosophy to contemporary European thought and explore its philosophical implications. The following questions are addressed: What thoughts of experience, of subjectivity, of finitude, of nature, of the body, of racial and sexual difference does facticity provoke? What thinking of language, of history, of birth and death, of our ethical being-in-the-world does it mobilize? Exploring these questions, the contributors offer new interpretations of facticity.

See the publisher’s site for more details, such as the table of contents and the pdf of the introduction.

New edition from Semiotext(e): Fatal Strategies by Jean Baudrillard
translated by Philippe Beitchman and W. G. J. Niesluchowski / with a new introduction by Dominic Pettman

No work was more important to Baudrillard himself than Fatal Strategies, and it is indeed one of the best places to start for an overview of his thought. When Fatal Strategies was first published in French in 1983, it represented a turning point for Jean Baudrillard: an utterly original, and for many readers, utterly bizarre book that offered a theory as proliferative, ecstatic, and hallucinatory as the postmodern world it endeavored to describe. Arguing against the predetermined outcomes of dialectical thought with his renowned, wry, ambivalent passion, with this volume Jean Baudrillard mounted an attack against the “false problems” posed by Western philosophy. If his Marxist days were firmly behind him, Baudrillard here indicated that metaphysics had also gone the way of sociology and politics: the contemporary world demanded nothing less than Pataphysics, Alfred Jarry’s absurdist philosophy that described the laws of the universe supplementary to this one. In effect, with Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard became Baudrillard.

In his extrapolationist manner, Baudrillard sought to replace Western philosophy’s circular arguments with a ritualistic Theater of Cruelty. Using this line of thought developed in Fatal Strategies, Baudrillard went on, throughout the 1980s, to find new and shatteringly accurate ways of discussing American corporatocracy, arms build-up, and hostage taking. Fatal Strategies asserts a profound critique of American politics, and it is an important step towards his examination of evil.

This edition features a new introduction written by Dominic Pettman after Baudrillard’s death.
Read the rest of this entry »

Indiana University Press Spring Web Sale Starts Today!

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A new book by Dorothea Olkowski: The Universal (In the Realm of the Sensible): Beyond Continental Philosophy

From the publisher:

The Universal proposes a radically new philosophical system that moves from ontology to ethics. Drawing on the work of De Beauvoir, Sartre, and Le Doeuff, among others, and addressing a range of topics from the Asian sex trade to late capitalism, quantum gravity, and Merleau-Ponty’s views on cinema, Dorothea Olkowski stretches the mathematical, political, epistemological, and aesthetic limits of continental philosophy and introduces a new perspective on political structures.

Straddling a course between formalism and conventionalism, Olkowski develops the concept of an ontological unconscious that arises from our “sensible” relation to the world-the information we absorb and emit that affects our encounters with the environment and others. In this “realm of the senses,” or the field of vulnerability defined by our experience with pleasure and pain, Olkowski is able to rethink the space-time relations put forth by Irigaray’s notion of the “interval,” Bergson’s “recollection,” Merleau-Ponty’s idea of the “flesh,” and Deleuze’s “plane of immanence.”

This aesthetic sense is shared by all humankind and nonhuman entities in the organic and inorganic world. The sensible universal can be applied to categories of pure and practical reason; experiential binaries of male-female and subject-object; and issues of autonomy, moral laws, and the regulation of perception.

About the Author: Dorothea Olkowski is professor of philosophy at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her publications include Gilles Deleuze and the Ruin of Representation and, with Constantin Boundas, Gilles Deleuze and the Theater of Philosophy. She has also edited books on Merleau-Ponty and on French feminism.

Lexington Books has just published Marko Zlomislic’s Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics:

From the publisher’s site:

Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics offers a new approach to the study of Derrida’s philosophy. Challenging many scholarly articles and books, Marko Zlomislic argues against the popular conception of Derrida as a philosophical relativist. By evaluating objective evidence and through logical arguments, Zlomislic argues that Derrida has been concerned with ethics since his first published works. Indeed, Derrida’s arguments have presented a new understanding of ethics and the concept of decision. Zlomislic provides a substantive in-depth argument for reading Derrida’s ethics and, due to the central ethical concerns, Derrida’s entire philosophy.Jacques Derrida’s Aporetic Ethics is essential reading for anyone with an interest in this essential thinker of the twentieth century.

Foucault’s Security, Territory and Population (Lectures at the College de France) was just published.

The description from the publisher:

Marking a major development in Foucault’s thinking, this book derives from the lecture course which he gave at the College de France between January and April, 1978. Taking as his starting point the notion of ‘bio-power’, introduced in his 1976 course Society Must be Defended, Foucault sets out to study the foundations of this new technology of power over population. Distinct from punitive, disciplinary systems, the mechanisms of power are here finely entwined with the technologies of security, and it is to 18th century developments of these technologies with which the first chapters of the book are concerned. By the fourth lecture however Foucault’s attention turns, focusing newly on a history of ‘governmentality’ from the first centuries of the Christian era through to the emergence of the modern nation state. As Michel Sennelart explains in his afterword, the effect of this change of direction is to ’shift the center of gravity of the lectures from the question of biopower to that of government, to such an extent that the former almost entirely eclipses the former …’ Consequently, in light of Foucault’s later work, it is tempting to see these lectures as the moment of a radical turning point at which the transition to the problematic of the ‘government of self and others’ would begin.

And a very generous sample from the publisher (in pdf).

Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question
Anti-antisemitism and the Politics of the French Intellectual

By Jonathan Judaken

“All serious readers of Sartre's Anti-Semite and Jew should read Jonathan Judaken's Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question in order to understand its place in Sartre's oeuvre. Judaken has taken our understanding of this important text to a new level."—Robert Bernasconi, author of How to Read Sartre

“Jonathan Judaken's book takes commentary on Sartre to a new level and simultaneously provides a thought-provoking example of what the author terms ‘the cultural history of ideas,’ that is, a study of thought that both attends to its conceptual complexity and situates it within a larger sociocultural and political matrix. It also offers the first investigation of Sartre that systematically takes as its guide the pivotal importance of his influential reflections on the Jewish Question.”—Dominick LaCapra, Bowmar Professor of Humanistic Studies, Cornell University

"This book is crucial for a better understanding of Sartre's thought in general. It will also be of primary interest to all those who work in the field of twentieth-century cultural history, especially to those who are interested in the problematic of the so-called "culture wars" in contemporary France. Beyond that, it will also appeal to those who try to understand why the issue of antisemitism was still a major issue in Europe after the Second World War and is still one at the beginning of the twenty-first century."—Christian Delacampagne, Professor of French, Johns Hopkins University

Jean-Paul Sartre and the Jewish Question examines the image of “the Jew” in Sartre’s work to rethink not only his oeuvre but also the role of the intellectual in France and the politics and ethics of existentialism. It explores more broadly how French identity is defined through the abstraction and allegorization of “the Jew” and examines the role anti-antisemitic intellectuals play in this process.

Jonathan Judaken reconsiders the origins of the intellectual in France in the context of the Dreyfus affair and Sartre’s interventions in the parallel Franco-French conflicts in the 1930s and during the Vichy regime. He considers what it was possible to say on behalf of Jews and Judaism during the German occupation, Sartre’s contribution after the war to the Vichy syndrome, his positions on the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the ways Sartre’s reflections on the Jewish Question served as a template for his shift toward Marxism, his resistance to colonialism, and for the defining of debates about Jews and Judaism in postwar France by both Jewish and non-Jewish intellectuals. Judaken analyzes the texts that Sartre devoted to these issues and argues that “the Jew” constituted a foil Sartre consistently referenced in reflecting on politics in general and on the role of the intellectual in particular.

View the Table of Contents and read an excerpt

Jonathan Judaken is an associate professor of modern European cultural and intellectual history at the University of Memphis.