{"title":"Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"let-them-rot-book-alenka-zupani-9781531501044","title":"Let Them Rot","description":"A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49745021305105,"sku":"NGR9781531501044","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50380612927761,"sku":"CIN1531501044G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51034803699985,"sku":"NIN9781531501044","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1531501044.jpg?v=1750797714"},{"product_id":"philology-of-life-book-kevin-mclaughlin-9781531501693","title":"The Philology of Life","description":"The Philology of Life retraces the outlines of the philological project developed by Walter Benjamin in his early essays on Hölderlin, the Romantics, and Goethe. This philological program, McLaughlin shows, provides the methodological key to Benjamin's work as a whole.   According to Benjamin, German literary history in the period roughly following the first World War was part of a wider \"crisis of historical experience\"—a life crisis to which Lebensphilosophie (philosophy of life) had instructively but insufficiently responded. Benjamin's literary critical struggle during these years consisted in developing a philology of literary historical experience and of life that is rooted in an encounter with a written image.  The fundamental importance of this \"philological\" method in Benjamin's work seems not to have been recognized by his contemporary readers, including Theodor Adorno who considered the approach to be lacking in dialectical rigor. This facet of Benjamin's work was also elided in the postwar publications of his writings, both in German and English. In recent decades, the publication of a wider range of Benjamin's writings has made it possible to retrace the outlines of a distinctive philological project that starts to develop in his early literary criticism and that extends into the late studies of Baudelaire and Paris. By bringing this innovative method to light this study proposes \"the philology of life\" as the key to the critical program of one of the most influential intellectual figures in the humanities.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49746417549585,"sku":"NGR9781531501693","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52750526185745,"sku":"NIN9781531501693","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1531501699.jpg?v=1751180311"},{"product_id":"dissonance-book-sean-alexander-gurd-9780823269655","title":"Dissonance","description":"An overview and descriptions of the auditory commitments of ancient Greek song, drama, and acoustic theory from the time of Homer to the death of Euripides, this is the first complete study of the cultural system of sound in Greece.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49802113483025,"sku":"CIN0823269655G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363823423761,"sku":"CIN0823269655VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823269655.jpg?v=1750883582"},{"product_id":"literature-and-the-remains-of-the-death-penalty-book-peggy-kamuf-9780823282296","title":"Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty","description":"Why have generations of philosophers failed or refused to articulate a rigorous challenge to the death penalty, when literature has been rife with death penalty abolitionism for centuries? In this book, Peggy Kamuf explores why any properly philosophical critique of capital punishment in the West must confront the literary as that which exceeds the logical demands of philosophy.  Jacques Derrida has written that “the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.” How, Kamuf asks, does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind in a Western nation that professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty?  Following a lucid account of Derrida’s approach to the death penalty, Kamuf pursues this question across several literary texts. In reading Orwell’s story “A Hanging,” Kamuf explores the relation between literary narration and the role of the witness, concluding that such a witness needs the seal of literary language in order to account for the secret of the death penalty. The next chapter turns to the American scene with Robert Coover’s 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as an outlandish public spectacle in Times Square. Because this fictional device reverses the drive toward secrecy that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, put an end to public executions in the West, Kamuf reads the novel in a tension with the current tendency in the U.S. to shore up and protect remaining death penalty practices through increasingly pervasive secrecy measures. A reading of Norman Mailer’s 1979 novel The Executioner’s Song, shows the breakdown of any firm distinction between suicide and capital execution and explores the essential affinity between traditional narrative structure, which is plotted from the end, and the “plot” of a death penalty. Final readings of Kafka, Derrida, and Baudelaire consider the relation between literature and law, showing how performative literary language can “play the law. “A brief conclusion, titled “Postmortem,” reflects on the condition of literature as that which survives the death penalty.  A major contribution to the field of law and society, this book makes the case for literature as a space for contesting the death penalty, a case that scholars and activists working across a range of traditions will need to confront.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50028667863313,"sku":"GOR013840162","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823282295.jpg?v=1750746362"},{"product_id":"thinking-with-adorno-book-gerhard-richter-9780823284023","title":"Thinking with Adorno","description":"What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it. By the same token, what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. The central aim of Richter’s book is to examine how these basic yet far-reaching assumptions teach us to think with Adorno—both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations. These contexts and constellations range from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the difficulty of inheriting a tradition, from the primacy of the object to the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one.  Richter vividly shows how Adorno’s highly suggestive—yet often overlooked—concept of the “uncoercive gaze” designates a specific kind of comportment in relation to an object of critical analysis: It moves close to the object and tarries with it while struggling to decipher the singularities and non-identities that are lodged within it, whether the object is an idea, a thought, a concept, a text, a work of art, an experience, or a problem of political or sociological theory.  Thinking with Adorno’s uncoercive gaze not only means following the fascinating paths of his own work; it also means extending hospitality to the ghostly voices of others. As this book shows, Adorno is best understood as a thinker in dialogue, whether with long-deceased predecessors in the German tradition such as Kant and Hegel, with writers such as Kafka, with contemporaries such as Benjamin and Arendt, or with philosophical voices that succeeded him, such as those of Derrida and Agamben.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50028671598865,"sku":"GOR013840183","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008644907281,"sku":"NIN9780823284023","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823284026.jpg?v=1751170511"},{"product_id":"minima-philologica-book-werner-hamacher-9780823265350","title":"Minima Philologica","description":"Minima Philologica brings together two essays by Werner Hamacher that are meant to revitalize philology as a practice beyond its restriction to the restoration of linguistic data and their meanings. In these two texts, \"95 Theses on Philology\" and \"For—Philology,\" Hamacher propounds a notion of generalized philology that is equivalent to the real production of linguistic utterances, and indeed utterances not limited to predicative or even discursive statements. Philology, in speaking for language where no clear and distinct language is given, exhibits and exposes the structure of language in general. The first text, \"95 Theses on Philology,\" challenges academic philology as well as other disciplines across the humanities and sciences that \"use\" language, assuming it to be a given entity and not an event. The theses develop what Hamacher calls the \"idea of philology\" by describing the constitution of its objects, its relation to knowledge, its suspension of consciousness, and its freedom for what remains always still to be said.  In \"For—Philology,\" both speaking and writing, Hamacher argues, follow, discursively and non-discursively, the desire for language. Desire—philía—is the insatiable affect that drives the movement between utterances toward the next and the one after that. Desiring language—logos—means to respond to an alien utterance that precedes you, ignorant about where the path will lead, accepting loss and uncertainty, thinking in and through language and the lack of it, exceeding, returning, responding to others, cutting into and off what is to be said. In arguing this, Hamacher responds, directly or obliquely, to other philological thinkers such as Plato and Schlegel, Nietzsche, Benjamin, and Heidegger, as well as to poets such as Rene Char, Francis Ponge, Paul Celan, and Friedrich Holderlin. Taken together, the essays of Minima Philologica constitute a manifesto for a new understanding of linguistic existence that breaks new ways of attending to language and those who live by it.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50030063845649,"sku":"GOR011387468","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53059073933585,"sku":"NIN9780823265350","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823265358.jpg?v=1769508621"},{"product_id":"fact-of-resonance-book-julie-beth-napolin-9780823288168","title":"The Fact of Resonance","description":"Shortlisted, 2021 Memory Studies Association First Book Award  The Fact of Resonance returns to the colonial and technological contexts in which theories of the novel developed, seeking in sound an alternative premise for theorizing modernist narrative form. Arguing that narrative theory has been founded on an exclusion of sound, the book poses a missing counterpart to modernism’s question “who speaks?” in the hidden acoustical questions “who hears?” and “who listens?”  For Napolin, the experience of reading is undergirded by the sonic. The book captures and enhances literature’s ambient sounds, sounds that are clues to heterogeneous experiences secreted within the acoustical unconscious of texts. The book invents an oblique ear, a subtle and lyrical prose style attuned to picking up sounds no longer hearable. “Resonance” opens upon a new genealogy of modernism, tracking from Joseph Conrad to his interlocutors—Sigmund Freud, Frantz Fanon, W. E. B. Du Bois, William Faulkner, and Chantal Akerman—the racialized, gendered, and colonial implications of acoustical figures that “drift” through and are transformed by narrative worlds in writing, film, and music.  A major synthesis of resources gleaned from across the theoretical humanities, the book argues for “resonance” as the traversal of acoustical figures across the spaces of colonial and technological modernity, figures registering and transmitting transformations of “voice” and “sound” across languages, culture, and modalities of hearing. We have not yet sufficiently attended to relays between sound, narrative, and the unconscious that are crucial to the ideological entailments and figural strategies of transnational, transatlantic, and transpacific modernism. The breadth of the book’s engagements will make it of interest not only to students and scholars of modernist fiction and sound studies, but to anyone interested in contemporary critical theory.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50369804861713,"sku":"CIN0823288161G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008613220625,"sku":"NIN9780823288168","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52111140225297,"sku":"NGR9780823288168","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823288161.jpg?v=1751139836"},{"product_id":"intoxication-book-jean-luc-nancy-9780823267736","title":"Intoxication","description":"From Plato’s Symposium to Hegel’s truth as a “Bacchanalian revel,” from the Bacchae of Euripedes to Nietzsche, philosophy holds a deeply ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication. At the same time, from Baudelaire to Lowry, from Proust to Dostoyevsky, literature and poetry are also haunted by scenes of intoxication, as if philosophy and literature share a theme that announces and navigates their proximities and differences.  For Nancy, intoxication constitutes an excess that both fascinates and questions philosophy’s sober ambitions for appropriate forms of philosophical behavior and conceptual lucidity. At the same time, intoxication displaces a number of established dualities—reason and passion, mind and body, rationality and desire, rigor and excess, clarity and confusion, logic and eros.  Taking its point of departure from Baudelaire’s categorical imperative to understand modernity—“be drunk always”—Nancy’s little book is composed in fragments, quotations, drunken asides, and inebriated repetitions. His contemporary “banquet” addresses a range of related themes, including the role of alcohol and intoxication in rituals, myths, divine sacrifice, and religious symbolism, all those toasts to the sacred “spirits” involving libations and different forms of speech and enunciation—to the gods, to modernity, to the Absolute. Affecting both mind and body, Nancy’s subject becomes intoxicated: Ego sum, ego existo ebrius—I am, I exist—drunk.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50496166822161,"sku":"CIN0823267733G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008581665041,"sku":"NIN9780823267736","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823267733.jpg?v=1751107312"},{"product_id":"rationalist-empiricism-book-nathan-brown-9780823290017","title":"Rationalist Empiricism","description":"Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association  Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant's transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and yet delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique.  Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51008688619793,"sku":"NIN9780823290017","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0823290018.jpg?v=1761387496"},{"product_id":"let-them-rot-book-alenka-zupani-9781531501037","title":"Let Them Rot","description":"A provocative, highly accessible journey to the heart of Sophocles' Antigone elucidating why it keeps resurfacing as a central text of Western thought and Western culture.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51034086572305,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51034089324817,"sku":"NIN9781531501037","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1531501036.jpg?v=1750797715"},{"product_id":"catastrophic-historicism-book-ronald-mendozade-jess-9781531505646","title":"Catastrophic Historicism","description":"Catastrophic Historicism unsettles the historicist constitution of Julia de Burgos (1914–53), Puerto Rico's most iconic writer—a critical task that necessitates redefining the concept of historicism. Through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Jacques Derrida, Werner Hamacher, and Frank Ankersmit, Mendoza-de Jesús shows that historicism grounds historical objectivity in the historian's capacity to compose totalizing narratives that domesticate the contingency of the past. While critiques of historicism as a realism leave untouched the sovereignty of the historian, the book insists that reading the text of history requires an attunement to danger—a modality that interrupts historicism by infusing the past with a contingency that evades total appropriation.  After desedimenting the monumental tradition that has reduced de Burgos to a totemic figure, Catastrophic Historicism reads the poet's first collection, Poema en 20 surcos (1938). Mendoza-de Jesús argues that the historicity of Poema crystallizes in the lyrical speaker's self-institution as an embodied ipseity, which requires producing racialized\/gendered allegorical figures—the bearers of an abject flesh—that lack any ontological resistance to modern alienation. Rather than treating de Burgos's poetics of selfhood as the ideal image of Puerto Rican sovereignty, Mendoza-de Jesús endangers this idealization by drawing attention to the abjection that sustains our attachments to ipseity as the form of a truly sovereign life. In this way, Catastrophic Historicism not only resets the terms of ongoing critiques of historicism in the humanities—it also intervenes in Puerto Rican historicity for the sake of its transformation.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51034375258385,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51034378010897,"sku":"NIN9781531505646","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1531505643.jpg?v=1751087261"},{"product_id":"defective-institutions-book-jacques-lezra-9781531506919","title":"Defective Institutions","description":"Defective Institutions overturns the basis of institutionalism. Faith in classic institutions—exposed as clamorously inadequate by the failure of governance under neoliberalism--does not result in greater democracy, greater horizontality, or more equitable living. Nor does trust in the standing of decisions, in the authority of antecedent cases, in the coherence, strength, continuity, or solidity of the institutions that frame and render legitimate these decisions and the rules they buttress. To the contrary: the classically-imagined institution and our faith in it lie at the heart of neoliberal unfreedom and racialized violence.  Working at the point of contact and conflict between socialist and anarcho-philosophical traditions, Defective Institutions offers an alternative, which is also an alternative to the figures of governance associated with the liberal conception of the state: an aberrant republicanism comprised of defective institutions, run through with the necessity of their abolition. Lezra's book moves from the primitive scenes of Western political institution—the city; the family; the university; the first person; \"race\"—through recent work in the philosophy of translation, decolonial studies, abolitionism, Afropessimism and its critiques, psvchoanalysis, and musicology.  To offer an original wedding of abolition and institution, Lezra brings together genealogies of contemporary institutionalism (from Durkheim and Hauriou to Searle); post-Marxist accounts of the state (Balibar, Abensour); philosophical and anthropological anarchism (Wolff, Malabou, Graeber, Scott); critical legal theory (analyses of Marbury v. Madison as well as Dobbs v. Jackson); continental and analytic versions and critiques of foundationalism (Heidegger, Lyotard and Butler; Quine, Searle and Fine); and political and sociological abolitionism (Lewis, O'Brien).   At a time when some call for strengthening institutions and for defending liberties ostensibly protected by such institutions, and others long for the destruction of institutions that have long been oppressive, Lezra's book offers today's Left a new framework for confronting institutions' necessity and their necessary abolition.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51034401407249,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51034404323601,"sku":"NIN9781531506919","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1531506917.jpg?v=1766141959"},{"product_id":"rationalist-empiricism-book-nathan-brown-9780823290000","title":"Rationalist Empiricism","description":"Honorable Mention, Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies, Modern Language Association  Twenty-first-century philosophy has been drawn into a false opposition between speculation and critique. Nathan Brown shows that the key to overcoming this antinomy is a re-engagement with the relation between rationalism and empiricism. If Kant's transcendental philosophy attempted to displace the opposing priorities of those orientations, any speculative critique of Kant will have to re-open and consider anew the conflict and complementarity of reason and experience. Rationalist Empiricism shows that the capacity of reason and experience to extend and yet delimit each other has always been at the core of philosophy and science. Coordinating their discrepant powers, Brown argues, is what enables speculation to move forward in concert with critique.  Sweeping across ancient, modern, and contemporary philosophy, as well as political theory, science, and art, Brown engages with such major thinkers as Plato, Descartes, Hume, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Bachelard, Althusser, Badiou, and Meillassoux. He also shows how the concepts he develops illuminate recent projects in the science of measurement and experimental digital photography. With conceptual originality and argumentative precision, Rationalist Empiricism reconfigures the history and the future of philosophy, politics, and aesthetics.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51109471060241,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51109471551761,"sku":"NIN9780823290000","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/082329000X.jpg?v=1761390294"},{"product_id":"quest-for-liberation-book-chunjie-zhang-9781531510350","title":"The Quest for Liberation","description":"Contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism routinely refers to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual origin. A group of Chinese and German-speaking thinkers in the early twentieth century, however, used classical Chinese philosophy as an alternative intellectual genealogy to reimagine ethics, politics, society, and modernity for the entire world. Their engagement with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism broadens the scope of global intellectual history to include a non-European origin of concepts and ideas.  Due to the differences in their local crises, the Chinese and the European stories are often narrated in separate national and cultural contexts. Bridging the critical divide between China and the West, The Quest for Liberation examines the thinkers' shared interest in Chinese philosophy and their common effort to envision a world culture other than Western modernity.   Breaking with the common logic of either studying the reception and adaptation of Western ideas in the East or critiquing the misrepresentation of the East in the West, Zhang's book emphasizes entanglements between Chinese and European thinkers and highlights their quest for liberation in a globalizing world. Their visions of an ontological commons for everyone help us imagine a better world community in our time of global crises, beyond the clash of civilizations.  This book is available from the publisher on an open access basis.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51627484315921,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51627484971281,"sku":"NGR9781531510350","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52778305782033,"sku":"NIN9781531510350","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1531510353.jpg?v=1751022207"},{"product_id":"quest-for-liberation-book-chunjie-zhang-9781531510367","title":"The Quest for Liberation","description":"Contemporary debate on cosmopolitanism routinely refers to Immanuel Kant as its intellectual origin. A group of Chinese and German-speaking thinkers in the early twentieth century, however, used classical Chinese philosophy as an alternative intellectual genealogy to reimagine ethics, politics, society, and modernity for the entire world. Their engagement with Confucianism, Taoism, and Buddhism broadens the scope of global intellectual history to include a non-European origin of concepts and ideas.  Due to the differences in their local crises, the Chinese and the European stories are often narrated in separate national and cultural contexts. Bridging the critical divide between China and the West, The Quest for Liberation examines the thinkers' shared interest in Chinese philosophy and their common effort to envision a world culture other than Western modernity.   Breaking with the common logic of either studying the reception and adaptation of Western ideas in the East or critiquing the misrepresentation of the East in the West, Zhang's book emphasizes entanglements between Chinese and European thinkers and highlights their quest for liberation in a globalizing world. Their visions of an ontological commons for everyone help us imagine a better world community in our time of global crises, beyond the clash of civilizations.  This book is available from the publisher on an open access basis.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51632582820113,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51632583213329,"sku":"NGR9781531510367","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51787372200209,"sku":"NIN9781531510367","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1531510361.jpg?v=1752144144"},{"product_id":"thinking-with-balibar-book-ann-laura-stoler-9780823288489","title":"Thinking with Balibar","description":"This volume, the first sustained critical work on the French political philosopher Etienne Balibar, collects essays by sixteen prominent philosophers, psychoanalysts, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics who each identify, define, and explore a central concept in Balibar's thought.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52101856330001,"sku":"NGR9780823288489","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53081793003793,"sku":"NIN9780823288489","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780823288489.jpg?v=1757094810"},{"product_id":"baudelaire-s-shadow-book-nathan-brown-9781531514235","title":"Baudelaire's Shadow","description":"Baudelaire’s fame and notoriety have been established by the reduction of his complex work to simplified profiles: the poet of the modern city, of erotic obsession, of Satanic revolt, of colonial fantasies, of mystical correspondences, of corporeal decay . . . But what is it that holds these facets of the work together? Is there a logic underpinning the proliferation of themes, styles, and personae in The Flowers of Evil, while suturing content and form?  Baudelaire’s Shadow argues that what is most fundamentally at stake across the manifold layers of Baudelaire’s poetic project is the problem of determination: a contradiction between determining and being determined, a dialectic of agency bound up with its negation. This approach enables a new understanding of conceptual, formal, and figural cruxes traversing The Flowers of Evil, including the relationship between writing and reading, the anticipation of death, the negativity of the void, the representation of race, the poetics of ekphrasis, the singularity of the aesthetic, the actuality of the social, the indeterminacy of sense, and the materiality of the signifier.  With philosophical precision and poetic élan, one of Baudelaire’s finest translators reconstructs what we thought we knew about The Flowers of Evil from the ground up, revealing the dialectical logic at the heart of this major work of modern literature.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52709821907217,"sku":"NGR9781531514235","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53187106603281,"sku":"NIN9781531514235","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781531514235.jpg?v=1762818143"},{"product_id":"baudelaire-s-shadow-book-nathan-brown-9781531514242","title":"Baudelaire's Shadow","description":"Baudelaire’s fame and notoriety have been established by the reduction of his complex work to simplified profiles: the poet of the modern city, of erotic obsession, of Satanic revolt, of colonial fantasies, of mystical correspondences, of corporeal decay . . . But what is it that holds these facets of the work together? Is there a logic underpinning the proliferation of themes, styles, and personae in The Flowers of Evil, while suturing content and form?  Baudelaire’s Shadow argues that what is most fundamentally at stake across the manifold layers of Baudelaire’s poetic project is the problem of determination: a contradiction between determining and being determined, a dialectic of agency bound up with its negation. This approach enables a new understanding of conceptual, formal, and figural cruxes traversing The Flowers of Evil, including the relationship between writing and reading, the anticipation of death, the negativity of the void, the representation of race, the poetics of ekphrasis, the singularity of the aesthetic, the actuality of the social, the indeterminacy of sense, and the materiality of the signifier.  With philosophical precision and poetic élan, one of Baudelaire’s finest translators reconstructs what we thought we knew about The Flowers of Evil from the ground up, revealing the dialectical logic at the heart of this major work of modern literature.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52709825675537,"sku":"NGR9781531514242","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53223527285009,"sku":"NIN9781531514242","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781531514242.jpg?v=1769686778"},{"product_id":"limits-of-fabrication-book-nathan-brown-9780823272990","title":"The Limits of Fabrication","description":"The Limits of Fabrication engages anew with traditional understandings of poetry as a practice of making or building, putting this approach to the test and radicalizing its implications by studying models of form and structure in twentieth and twenty-first century materialist poetics alongside recent innovations in materials science and engineering.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740348313873,"sku":"NIN9780823272990","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780823272990.jpg?v=1770286208"},{"product_id":"celebricities-book-anthony-curtis-adler-9780823270798","title":"Celebricities","description":"What becomes of life, experience, and truth in the hyperconsumeristic culture of the twenty-first century? What happens to the phenomenological call to go back to the things themselves when these things, to an ever greater degree, involve a televised life that is not ours to live, celebrities who are utterly like us yet infinitely untouchable, and uncannily pluripotent electronic gadgets? Combining sustained philosophical inquiry with fragmentary and experimental theoretical interventions, Anthony Curtis Adler rethinks Marxist materialism and the Heideggerian project in terms of the singular experiences of late capitalism. In doing so, he reveals how the disarticulation of life via the commodity fetish demands at once a new notion of phenomenological method and an ontology oriented toward the radical contingency of being itself as transcendental ground.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52740349133073,"sku":"NIN9780823270798","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780823270798.jpg?v=1763482657"},{"product_id":"revolution-and-restoration-book-massimiliano-tomba-9781531512491","title":"Revolution and Restoration","description":"At a time when terms like restoration, religion, authority, obligations, and natural law - once the rallying cries of the most emancipatory movements - are increasingly coopted by conservative forces, Revolution and Restoration offers a thought-provoking account of how \"outdated\" concepts can ignite radical energy and collective action. Through both historical and contemporary examples, the book elaborates the concrete possibilities for reimagining politics and society that emerge out of the clash between incompatible legal and economic structures.  At its core, Tomba’s book confronts the very foundations of the modern state and its three pillars: property, democracy, and citizenship. These pillars, long celebrated in the Western canon, are nevertheless mechanisms of exclusion: property is the denial of communal access, representative democracy the marginalization of the demos from decision-making, and citizenship the exclusion of the foreigner. Revolution and Restoration critiques these pillars to show how new concepts and political possibilities that emerge from political and social conflicts hold the potential to transcend and remake democracies in crisis.  Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism  is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52750525432081,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52750526152977,"sku":"NIN9781531512491","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781531512491.jpg?v=1763553583"},{"product_id":"revolution-and-restoration-book-massimiliano-tomba-9781531512484","title":"Revolution and Restoration","description":"At a time when terms like restoration, religion, authority, obligations, and natural law—once the rallying cries of the most emancipatory movements - are increasingly coopted by conservative forces, Revolution and Restoration offers a thought-provoking account of how \"outdated\" concepts can ignite radical energy and collective action. Through both historical and contemporary examples, the book elaborates the concrete possibilities for reimagining politics and society that emerge out of the clash between incompatible legal and economic structures.  At its core, Tomba’s book confronts the very foundations of the modern state and its three pillars: property, democracy, and citizenship. These pillars, long celebrated in the Western canon, are nevertheless mechanisms of exclusion: property is the denial of communal access, representative democracy the marginalization of the demos from decision-making, and citizenship the exclusion of the foreigner. Revolution and Restoration critiques these pillars to show how new concepts and political possibilities that emerge from political and social conflicts hold the potential to transcend and remake democracies in crisis.  Revolution and Restoration: The Politics of Anachronism is available from the Knowledge Unlatched on an open-access basis.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52750526054673,"sku":"NIN9781531512484","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":53477080465681,"sku":"NGR9781531512484","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9781531512484.jpg?v=1763553583"},{"product_id":"literature-and-the-remains-of-the-death-penalty-book-peggy-kamuf-9780823282302","title":"Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty","description":"Why have generations of philosophers failed or refused to articulate a rigorous challenge to the death penalty, when literature has been rife with death penalty abolitionism for centuries? In this book, Peggy Kamuf explores why any properly philosophical critique of capital punishment in the West must confront the literary as that which exceeds the logical demands of philosophy.  Jacques Derrida has written that \"the modern history of the institution named literature in Europe over the last three or four centuries is contemporary with and indissociable from a contestation of the death penalty.\" How, Kamuf asks, does literature contest the death penalty today, particularly in the United States where it remains the last of its kind in a Western nation that professes to be a democracy? What resources do fiction, narrative, and poetic language supply in the age of the remains of the death penalty?  Following a lucid account of Derrida's approach to the death penalty, Kamuf pursues this question across several literary texts. In reading Orwell's story \"A Hanging,\" Kamuf explores the relation between literary narration and the role of the witness, concluding that such a witness needs the seal of literary language in order to account for the secret of the death penalty. The next chapter turns to the American scene with Robert Coover's 1977 novel The Public Burning, which restages the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as an outlandish public spectacle in Times Square. Because this fictional device reverses the drive toward secrecy that, beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, put an end to public executions in the West, Kamuf reads the novel in a tension with the current tendency in the U.S. to shore up and protect remaining death penalty practices through increasingly pervasive secrecy measures. A reading of Norman Mailer's 1979 novel The Executioner's Song, shows the breakdown of any firm distinction between suicide and capital execution and explores the essential affinity between traditional narrative structure, which is plotted from the end, and the \"plot\" of a death penalty. Final readings of Kafka, Derrida, and Baudelaire consider the relation between literature and law, showing how performative literary language can \"play the law. \"A brief conclusion, titled \"Postmortem,\" reflects on the condition of literature as that which survives the death penalty.  A major contribution to the field of law and society, this book makes the case for literature as a space for contesting the death penalty, a case that scholars and activists working across a range of traditions will need to confront.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":52935304413457,"sku":"NGR9780823282302","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53014083633425,"sku":"NIN9780823282302","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780823282302.jpg?v=1779530332"},{"product_id":"receptive-spirit-book-mrton-dornbach-9780823268290","title":"Receptive Spirit","description":"Premised on the assumption that the mind is fundamentally active and self-determining, the German Idealist project gave rise to new ways of thinking about our dependence upon culturally transmitted models of thought, feeling, and creativity. Receptive Spirit elucidates the ways in which Kant, Fichte, Schlegel, and Hegel envisioned and enacted the conjunction of receptivity and spontaneous activity in the transmission of human-made models of mindedness. Their innovations have defined the very terms in which we think about the historical character of aesthetic experience, the development of philosophical thinking, the dynamics of textual communication, and the task of literary criticism.  Combining a reconstructive approach to this key juncture of modern thought with close attention paid to subsequent developments, Marton Dornbach argues that we must continue to think within the framework established by the Idealists if we are to keep our bearings in the contemporary intellectual landscape.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53014083436817,"sku":"NIN9780823268290","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780823268290.jpg?v=1768143193"},{"product_id":"technologies-of-critique-book-willy-thayer-9780823286737","title":"Technologies of Critique","description":"Technologies of Critique elaborates a critical practice that eludes critique's capture by institutional and market logics. Building on Chile's history of dissident art and its entangling of politics and aesthetics, Thayer engages continental philosophical traditions, to help pinpoint the technologies and media through which art intervenes critically in socio-political life.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53035356979473,"sku":"NIN9780823286737","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780823286737.jpg?v=1768747309"},{"product_id":"thinking-with-adorno-book-gerhard-richter-9780823284030","title":"Thinking with Adorno","description":"This book argues that the work of Theodor W. Adorno is best understood through the lens of his highly suggestive-yet often overlooked-concept of the uncoercive gaze, an innovative way of relating to the object of one's analysis that interweaves critical intimacy and analytic vigilance.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53108557644049,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53108557709585,"sku":"NIN9780823284030","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780823284030.jpg?v=1770562176"},{"product_id":"intoxication-book-jean-luc-nancy-9780823267729","title":"Intoxication","description":"Philosophy holds an ambivalent relation to the pleasures of intoxication, this excess that both fascinates and questions philosophy's sober ambitions for conceptual clarity and appropriate behavior. Displacing established dualities-mind and body, reason and desire, logic and eros-Nancy's subject becomes intoxicated: Ego sum, ego existo ebrius-I am, I exist-drunk.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53403477770513,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53403477803281,"sku":"NIN9780823267729","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780823267729.jpg?v=1776143713"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/collections\/idiom-inventing-writing-theory-book-series.oembed?page=2","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}