"In 1966, Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at Johns Hopkins University that cast the entire history of Western Philosophy into doubt. The following year, Derrida published three brilliant but mystifying books that convinced the pollsters that he was the most important philosopher of the late 20th Century. Unfortunately, nobody was sure whether the intellectual movement that he spawned - Deconstruction - advanced philosophy or murdered it. The truth?...

Rejects Levinas's argument for the preeminence of ethics in philosophy. "Imagine listening at a keyhole to a conversation with the task of transcribing it, and the result may be a text similar to the present one." -from Part I: Stagework In a series of meditations responding to writings by Emmanuel Levinas, David Appelbaum suggests that a flawed grammar warrants Levinas to speak of language at the service of ethics. It is the nature of performance...

Raoul Moati intervenes in the critical debate that divided two prominent philosophers in the mid-twentieth century. In the 1950s, the British philosopher J. L. Austin advanced a theory of speech acts, or the "performative," that Jacques Derrida and John R. Searle interpreted in fundamentally different ways. Their disagreement centered on the issue of intentionality, which Derrida understood phenomenologically and Searle read pragmatically. The controversy...

The book offers a new introduction to Jacques Derrida and to Deconstruction as an important strand of Continental Philosophy. From his early writings on phenomenology and linguistics to his later meditations on war, terrorism, and justice, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) achieved prominence on an international scale by addressing as many different audiences as he did topics. Yet despite widespread acclamation, his work has never been considered easy....

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...

Despites China's effort to maintain peace with its neighbors, its military and economic growth poses an undeniable threat. Regional states must account for a more powerful potential adversary in China, and China has become more ambitious in its efforts to control its surroundings. Historical baggage has only aggravated the situation, as China believes it is reclaiming its rightful place after a time of weakness and mistreatment, while other Asia-Pacific...

In his best-selling book You Must Change Your Life!, Peter Sloterdijk argued exercise and practice were crucial to the human condition. In The Art of Philosophy, he extends this critique to academic science and scholarship, casting the training processes of academic study as key to the production of sophisticated thought. Infused with humor and provocative insight, The Art of Philosophy further integrates philosophy and human existence, richly detailing...

Published in 1973, L'Etourdit was one of the French philosopher Jacques Lacan's darkest and most important works. The book posed questions that traversed the entire body of Lacan's psychoanalytical explorations, including his famous idea that 'there is no such thing as a sexual relationship,' which seeks to undermine our certainties about intimacy and reality. In There's No Such Thing as a Sexual Relationship, Alain Badiou and Barbara Cassin take...

The Writing of Innocence explores the topic of innocence and the peculiar relationship to Christianity in the writing of Maurice Blanchot. Its starting point is that innocence is not a condition relegated to a mythical past but rather one resulting from the construction of the subject in and through language. Hence, we don't lose innocence; instead, we are lost by innocence. It is an excess, not a lack. This inverted notion of innocence raises new...

Throughout his career, shaped by a notable collaboration with Louis Althusser, Jacques Rancière has continually unsettled political discourse, particularly by examining its relationship to aesthetics. Like Michel Foucault, he broke with his many of his predecessors to upend dominant twentieth-century historical narratives and critical theories. Often overlooked in the canon of his works, Mute Speech contains the critical seeds of Rancière's most...