Böcker i Commonalities-serien

Failures to listen or mishearings can be a matter of life and death. Shattering Biopolitics elaborates the intimate and complex relation between life and sound in philosophy, political theory, and sound-art.

Many on the Left have looked upon "universal" as a dirty word, one that signals liberalism's failure to recognize the masculinist and Eurocentric assumptions from which it proceeds. Balibar builds on these critiques, yet works to rescue and reinvent what universal claims can offer for a revolutionary politics answerable to the common.

Diano's Form and Event has long been known in Europe as a major work not only for classical studies but even more for contemporary philosophy, anticipating the work of Deleuze, Badiou, Esposito, and Agamben. It now appears in English for the first time, with a substantial Introduction that situates the book in the genealogy of modern political philosophy.

Practicing Caste attempts a break from the tradition of caste studies, using versions of phenomenology, structuralism and post-structuralism; and gives a description of touchability and untouchability in terms of a rhetoric and semantics of touch.

Traces Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's engagement with deconstructive thought from his early work in the 1960s to the present, examining his key concepts - infancy, Voice, potentiality, sovereignty, bare life, messianism - in relation to key texts and concepts in Jacques Derrida's work.

Claims advertising is nothing but a metaphysical hypothesis about the moral nature of things: objects aren't purely physical or economical entities. Any object, regardless of its nature, can become a complex of possible happiness--not just an object of value, but a moral source of perfection for any one of us.

This book brings together secular liberal democratic thought-as found within the work of late neo-pragmatic philosopher Richard Rorty-with religious liberal thinkers-such as Martin Buber and Ernst Bloch-for the purpose of exploring the contested intellectual history of redemptive hope narratives.

This book describes the historical underpinnings of political theology that continue to exert their influence. The confluence of Roman and Christian notions on the person fuels an exclusionary mechanism that unites by dividing people. Restoring thought to an impersonal place of universal access can help to end this oppressive conceptual regime.

This book is comprised of two essays on the biblical commandment against homicide. The first is authored by a Roman Catholic cardinal; the second by a leading Italian feminist philosopher. Together the two essays explore the religious, philosophical, political, historical, and moral significance of "Thou Shalt Not Kill" today.

This book proposes a conversation between Immanuel Kant's first two Critiques and Emmanuel Levinas's Otherwise than Being to reflect on the ideas of freedom, obligation, subjectivity, ethics, autonomy and thinking.

From prehistoric stone tools to machines to computers, things have traveled a long road along with human beings. Changing with the times, places, and methods of production, coming from diverse histories, enveloped in multiple layers of meaning, things embody ideas, emotions, and symbols of which we are often unaware.

Communities in Fiction reads in detail six novels or stories (one each by Trollope, Hardy, Conrad, Woolf, Pynchon, and Cervantes) in the light of theories of community worked out (contradictorily) by Raymond Williams, Martin Heidegger, and Jean-Luc Nancy for communities or non-communities in the real world.

This book proposes the reject as the figure of thought for our contemporaneous times. It shows how the reject can open us to radical forms of relations, democratic horizons, and "post-secular" and "posthuman" futures not only beyond anthropocentric limits, but also in ways by which others and their differences are affirmed respectfully.

Looks at gender and queer theories through lenses that are simultaneously retrospective and anticipatory, "American" and "French".

Seeks to understand the prevailing conception of government in the light of an important transformation in the idea of politics brought about by Christianity.

How is political change possible when even the most radical revolutions only reproduce sovereign power? Via the analysis of the contradictory meanings of stasis, Vardoulakis argues that the opportunity for political change is located in the agonistic relation between sovereignty and democracy and thus demands a radical rethinking.

This book is a rehabilitation sensibility. It defines what we call sensibility or sensible life by defining the ontological status of images. It shows that images have an intermediate ontological status and exist in an autonomous sphere. It also explores our interactions with images in dream, fashion and language.

Assesses the current situation of Europe ten years after the adoption of the single currency. Examines the genealogy of the idea of Europe from the Greek confrontation with the Asia to the conflict between the Roman Empire and Christianity. Discusses the role of secularization in the shaping of modern Europe.

An impressive collection bringing together contributions of renowned scholars on the topic of a "New Poetics of Community" that goes beyond both a romantic nostalgia for homogeneity and the myths of social engineering and rational choice.

"A cultural analysis of representation and representational discourse that advances black feminist practice as a modality through which black social life is both theorized and made material."

Over thirty years after Maurice Blanchot writes The Unavowable Community-a book outlining a critical response to Jean-Luc Nancy's early proposal for thinking an "inoperative community"-The Disavowed Community offers a close reading of Blanchot's text.

In The Techne of Giving, Timothy Campbell elaborates a notion of generosity as way of responding to contemporary biopower. Reading films from Visconti, Rossellini, and Antonioni, he both updates their political lexicon while adopting them as models able to push back against neoliberal forms of gift-giving.

A powerful essay on identity and its fate in our contemporary world. Against various attempts to cling to established identities, Nancy shows that an identity is always open: to alterity and its transformations. Ultimately, one does not have an identity but has to become what one is, without ever returning to a same but solely to difference and singularity.

An analysis of the history and social role of mobile phones today (with an enhancement of their primary writing function) is followed by a proposal of a philosophical theory of objects, which is meant to be complementary to Searle's 'collective intentionality', that places writing at the basis of social reality.

Takes up Foucault's hypothesis that liberal "civil society," far from being a sphere of natural freedoms, designates the social spaces where our biological lives come under new forms of control, and are invested with new forms of biopower.