Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 08/02/2015
In a 1917 letter to Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin writes, “Theory is like a surging sea.” This small book takes more than its title from that line—it takes that line as a point of departure in Erich Auerbach’s sense, an Ansatzpunkt, as a compositional principle so that what follows can be read in its entirety[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 02/08/2015
[Given, If, Then] attempts to conceive a possibility of reading, through a set of readings: reading being understood as the relation to an Other that occurs prior to any semantic or formal identification, and, therefore, prior to any attempt at assimilating, or appropriating, what is being read to the one who reads. As such, it[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 01/26/2015
Read a review of Escargotesque in Digital America HERE. “Experience” is a concept paradoxically deployed to accentuate the aconceptual. Although thinking, knowing, reflecting, and analyzing are kinds of experiences, invocations of “experience” typically direct our attention to what is immediate, embodied, unrepresented, unthought, even unthinkable. And yet, whether by learning experience, traumatic experience, life experience,[…]
Published: 06/04/2014
Journal of Badiou Studies (General Editors: Michael J. Kelly and Arthur James Rose) is a multilingual, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to the philosophy and thought of, and surrounding, the philosopher, playwright, novelist, and poet Alain Badiou. Badiou Studies is dedicated to original, critical and challenging arguments that directly engage with the conditions and circumstances of Badiou’s[…]
Imprint: Speculations
Published: 05/15/2014
Ever since the turn of the century aesthetics has steadily gained momentum as a central field of study across the disciplines. No longer sidelined, aesthetics has grown in confidence. While this recent development brings with it a return to the work of the canonical authors (most notably Baumgarten and Kant), some contemporary scholars reject the[…]
Imprint: Dead Letter Office
Published: 04/01/2014
The Communism of Thought takes as its point of departure a passage in a letter from Dionys Mascolo to Gilles Deleuze: “I have called this communism of thought in the past. And I placed it under the auspices of Hölderlin, who may have only fled thought because he was unable to live it: ‘The life[…]
Imprint: Anarchist Developments in Cultural Studies
Published: 01/24/2014
Radical theory has always been beset by the question of ontology, albeit to varying degrees and under differing conditions. In recent years, in particular, political metaphysics has returned with force: the rise of Deleuze-influenced “new materialisms,” along with post-/non-Deleuzian Speculative Realism (SR) and Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), all bear testament to this. In this same period,[…]
Published: 08/04/2014
Alphonso Lingis is the author of fourteen books and many essays. He is emeritus professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. While many know him only as an eccentric ex-professor or as the translator of Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Pierre Klossowski, he is arguably the most distinctive voice in American continental philosophy. This is[…]