Böcker i Cultural Memory in the Present-serien

The Honor of Thinking evaluates the concepts and discourses of critique, theory, and philosophy in light of the exigencies of what Martin Heidegger and the French post-Heideggerian thinkers have established about the nature and the tasks of thinking.

Opening with the provocative query "e;what might an anthropology of the secular look like?"e; this book explores the concepts, practices, and political formations of secularism, with emphasis on the major historical shifts that have shaped secular sensibilities and attitudes in the modern West and the Middle East. Talal Asad proceeds to dismantle commonly held assumptions about the secular and the terrain it allegedly covers. He argues that while anthropologists have oriented themselves to the study of the "e;strangeness of the non-European world"e; and to what are seen as non-rational dimensions of social life (things like myth, taboo, and religion),the modern and the secular have not been adequately examined. The conclusion is that the secular cannot be viewed as a successor to religion, or be seen as on the side of the rational. It is a category with a multi-layered history, related to major premises of modernity, democracy, and the concept of human rights. This book will appeal to anthropologists, historians, religious studies scholars, as well as scholars working on modernity.

" I have but one language-yet that language is not mine." This book intertwines theoretical reflection with historical and cultural particularity to enunciate, then analyze this conundrum in terms of the distinguished author's own relationship to the French language. Its argument touches on several issues relevant to the current debates on multiculturalism.

In the Self's Place is a phenomenological reading of Augustine that engages with modern and postmodern analyses of Augustinian philosophy.

Roberto Esposito, a leading Italian philosopher, deconstructs the notion of community by examining its etymological roots in the Latin munus, or gift, and then reads against classical political interpretations of community.

This posthumous and crucial contribution by one of the latter twentieth-century's most important sociologists, overturns a half-century of assumptions about the sociology of religion.

Consisting of two texts on facing pages, the form of this presentation of two 1996 lectures on hospitality by Jacques Derrida is a self-conscious enactment of its content. Invitation by Anne Dufourmantelle appears on the left (an invitation that of course originates a response), clarifying and inflecting Derrida's "response" on the right.

Multidirectional Memory brings together Holocaust studies and postcolonial studies for the first time to put forward a new theory of cultural memory and uncover an unacknowledged tradition of exchange between the legacies of genocide and colonialism.