"Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?" In responding to this question, eight iconoclastic thinkers prove the rich potential of democracy, along with its critical weaknesses, and reconceive the practice to accommodate new political and cultural realities. Giorgio Agamben traces the tense history of constitutions and their coexistence with various governments. Alain Badiou contrasts current democratic practice with democratic communism. Daniel Bensaid ponders the institutionalization of democracy, while Wendy Brown discusses the democratization of society under neoliberalism. Jean-Luc Nancy measures the difference between democracy as a form of rule and as a human end, and Jacques Rancière highlights its egalitarian nature. Kristin Ross identifies hierarchical relationships within democratic practice, and Slavoj Zizek complicates the distinction between those who desire to own the state and those who wish to do without it. Concentrating on the classical roots of democracy and its changing meaning over time and within different contexts, these essays uniquely defend what is left of the left-wing tradition after the fall of Soviet communism. They confront disincentives to active democratic participation that have caused voter turnout to decline in western countries, and they address electoral indifference by invoking and reviving the tradition of citizen involvement. Passionately written and theoretically rich, this collection speaks to all facets of modern political and democratic debate.

Democracy in What State? (New Directions in Critical Theory, 11)

Politics & Social Sciences

Agamben, Giorgio

RANCIÈRE, JACQUES

Žižek, Slavoj

BADIOU, ALAIN

Ross, Kristin

Brown, Wendy

Nancy, Jean-Luc

Bensaïd, Daniel

Philosophy

Columbia University Press

Two eminent French philosophers discuss German philosophy―including the legacy of Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Adorno, Fichte, Marx, and Heidegger―from a French perspective.
In this book, Alain Badiou and Jean-Luc Nancy, the two most important living philosophers in France, discuss German philosophy from a French perspective. Written in the form of a dialogue, and revised and expanded from a 2016 conversation between the two philosophers at the Universität der Künste Berlin, the book offers not only Badiou's and Nancy's reinterpretations of German philosophers and philosophical concepts, but also an accessible introduction to the greatest thinkers of German philosophy. Badiou and Nancy discuss and debate such topics as the legacies of Kant, Hegel, and Marx, as well as Nietzsche, Adorno, Fichte, Schelling, and the unavoidable problem of Heidegger and Nazism. The dialogue is contentious, friendly, and often quotable, with strong―at times passionate―positions taken by both Badiou and Nancy, who find themselves disagreeing over Kant, for example, and in unexpected agreement on Marx, for another.
What does it mean, then, to conduct a dialogue on German philosophy from a French perspective? As volume editor Jan Völker observes, “German philosophy” and “French philosophy” describe complex constellations that, despite the reference to nation-states and languages, above all encompass shared concepts and problems―although these take a range of forms. Perhaps they can reveal their essential import only in translation.

German Philosophy: A Dialogue (Untimely Meditations)

Literature & Fiction

History & Criticism

MIT Press]

This collection of essays presents, for the first time in English, some of the key essays on the political by Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy. Including several unpublished essays, Retreating the Political offers some highly original perspectives on the relationship between philosophy and the political. Through contemporary readings of the political in Freud, Heidegger and Marx, the authors ask if we can talk of an a priori link between the philosophical and the political; they investigate the significance of the 'figure' - the human being as political subject - in the history of metaphysics; and they inquire how we can 're-treat' the political today in the face of those who argue that philosophy is at an 'end'.

Retreating the Political (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

Lacoue-Labarthe, Phillippe

Routledge

“These masterful photos blend the spontaneity of a great snapshot with the highly organized composition of a classical painting.”―Publishers Weekly Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004) was perhaps the finest and most influential image maker of the twentieth century, and his portraits are among his best-known work. Over a fifty-year period, he photographed some of the most eminent personalities of the era, as well as ordinary people, chosen as subjects because of their striking and unusual features. Originally published to coincide with an exhibition at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, this book features both well-known images and previously unpublished portraits: Ezra Pound, Andre´ Breton, Martin Luther King, Samuel Beckett, Truman Capote, Susan Sontag, Carl Jung, William Faulkner, Marilyn Monroe, Henri Matisse, and many more. Each photograph was chosen because it perfectly embodies Cartier-Bresson’s description of what he was attempting to communicate in his work: “Above all I look for an inner silence. I seek to translate the personality and not an expression.” The portraits reproduced here―discreet, without artifice―confirm once more the singular gift of Cartier-Bresson, who instinctively knew in which revealing fraction of a second to click the shutter. 97 tritone photographs

An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson

Arts & Photography

Sire, Agnès

Individual Artists

Thames&Hudson

The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan (Contemporary Contin Philosophy)

This book is a close reading of Jacques Lacan's seminal essay, "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud, " selected for the particular light it casts on Lacan's complex relation to linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. It clarifies the way Lacan renews or transforms the psychoanalytic field, through his diversion of Saussure's theory of the sign, his radicalization of Freud's fundamental concepts, and his subversion of dominant philosophical values. The authors argue, however, that Lacan's discourse is marked by a deep ambiguity: while he invents a new "language," he nonetheless maintains the traditional metaphysical motifs of systemacity, foundation, and truth.

The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe

Biographies & Memoirs

State Univ of New York Pr

This book is a close reading of Jacques Lacan’s seminal essay, “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious or Reason Since Freud, ” selected for the particular light it casts on Lacan’s complex relation to linguistics, psychoanalysis, and philosophy. It clarifies the way Lacan renews or transforms the psychoanalytic field, through his diversion of Saussure’s theory of the sign, his radicalization of Freud’s fundamental concepts, and his subversion of dominant philosophical values. The authors argue, however, that Lacan’s discourse is marked by a deep ambiguity: while he invents a new “language,” he nonetheless maintains the traditional metaphysical motifs of systemacity, foundation, and truth.

State University of New York Press

Philosophical reflections on the phenomenon of globalization.Appearing in English for the first time, Jean-Luc Nancy’s 2002 book reflects on globalization and its impact on our being-in-the-world. Developing a contrast in the French language between two terms that are usually synonymous, or that are used interchangeably, namely globalisation (globalization) and mondialisation (world-forming), Nancy undertakes a rethinking of what “world-forming” might mean. At stake in this distinction is for him nothing less than two possible destinies of our humanity, and of our time. On the one hand, with globalization, there is the uniformity produced by a global economical and technological logic leading to the contrary of an inhabitable world, “the un-world” (l’im-monde)―as Nancy refers to it―an un-world that entails social disintegration, misery, and injustice. And, on the other hand, there is the possibility of an authentic world-forming, that is, of a making of the world and of a making sense that Nancy calls a “creation” of the world. Nancy understands such world-forming in terms of an inexhaustible struggle for justice. This book is an important contribution by Nancy to a philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of globalization and a further development on his earlier works on our being-in-common, justice, and a-theological existence.

The Creation of the World or Globalization (SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought)

Philosophical reflections on the phenomenon of globalization. Appearing in English for the first time, Jean-Luc Nancy’s 2002 book reflects on globalization and its impact on our being-in-the-world. Developing a contrast in the French language between two terms that are usually synonymous, or that are used interchangeably, namely globalisation (globalization) and mondialisation (world-forming), Nancy undertakes a rethinking of what “world-forming” might mean. At stake in this distinction is for him nothing less than two possible destinies of our humanity, and of our time. On the one hand, with globalization, there is the uniformity produced by a global economical and technological logic leading to the contrary of an inhabitable world, “the un-world” (l’im-monde)—as Nancy refers to it—an un-world that entails social disintegration, misery, and injustice. And, on the other hand, there is the possibility of an authentic world-forming, that is, of a making of the world and of a making sense that Nancy calls a “creation” of the world. Nancy understands such world-forming in terms of an inexhaustible struggle for justice. This book is an important contribution by Nancy to a philosophical reflection on the phenomenon of globalization and a further development on his earlier works on our being-in-common, justice, and a-theological existence. “…the writer has developed a unique interpretation of subjectivity and experience as a critical basis for rethinking community … It is impossible not to be impressed by a book in which nothing, from the poetics of the writing to the final proposition, is overemphasized or strained.” — Social &amp; Legal Studies “…recently translated into English … the book reframes a question from earlier days; what does it mean to exist with others in a world whose disparate global parts are increasingly being brought together and unified?” — The Kelvingrove Review “Graced by a lucid introduction from his superb translators, Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Creation of the World or Globalization plots the creative world-forming possibilities by which, in the name of a certain justice, the nihilism of globalization may be resisted. The future of the world hangs in the balance; Nancy makes a brilliant contribution to thinking new beginnings.” — David Wood, author of The Step Back: Ethics and Politics after Deconstruction

The epoch of representation is as old as the West. Indeed, representation is the West, understood as what at once designates and expands its own limits. But what comes after the West? What comes after representation's disclosure of its own limit? The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade of work, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, the birth that characterizes being. We are now at the limit of representation, where objects as we experience them have been show to be merely objects of representation—or rather, of presentation, since there is nothing to (re)present. The first part of this book, "Existence," asks how, today, one can give sense of meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it comes nude into the world, must now be our "sense." In examining what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what presence "is"; rather we should conceive presence as presence to someone, including to presence itself. This birth is not the constitution of an identity, but the endless departure of an identity from, and from within, its other, or others. Its coming is not desire but jouissance, the joy of averring oneself to be continually in the state of being born—a rejoicing of birth, a birth of rejoicing. The second section, "Poetry," asks: What art exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe (or rather, "exscribe," in a term the book develops) the coming existence as such? The author's trajectory in this book crosses those of Hegel, Schlegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, in their comments on art and politics, existence and corporeality, everyday life and its modes of existence and ecstasy. An analysis that dares this crossing involves all the varied accounts of existence, political as well as philosophical, and all the realms of poverty.

The Birth to Presence (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)

Stanford University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nancy, Jean-Luc. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Nancy, Jean-Luc

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Nancy, Jean-Luc. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Democracy in What State? (New Directions in Critical Theory, 11)

Democracy in What State? (New Directions in Critical Theory, 11)

German Philosophy: A Dialogue (Untimely Meditations)

Retreating the Political (Warwick Studies in European Philosophy)

An Inner Silence: The Portraits of Henri Cartier-Bresson

The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan (Suny Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy)

The Title of the Letter: A Reading of Lacan (Contemporary Contin Philosophy)

The Creation of the World or Globalization (SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought)

The Creation of the World or Globalization (SUNY Series in Contemporary French Thought)

The Birth to Presence (Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics)