The Discourse Of The Syncope

Nancy’s classic study of the role of language in Kant demonstrates why the question of how to write philosophy, of philosophical style, is not just ancillary to critical philosophy but goes to the heart of the project of establishing human reason in its autonomy and freedom.

The concept of community is one of the most frequently used and abused of recent philosophical or socio-political concepts. In the 1980s, faced with the imminent collapse of communism and the unchecked supremacy of free-market capitalism, the philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy (in The Inoperative Community) and the writer Maurice Blanchot (in The Unavowable Community) both thought it essential to rethink the fundamental basis of “community” as such. More recently, Nancy has renewed the debate by unexpectedly attacking Blanchot’s account of community, claiming that it embodies a dangerously nostalgic desire for mythic and religious communion. This book examines the history and implications of this controversy. It analyses in forensic detail Nancy’s and Blanchot’s contrasting interpretations of German Romanticism, and the work of Heidegger, Bataille, and Marguerite Duras, and examines closely their divergent approaches to the contradictory legacy of Christianity. At a time when politics are increasingly inseparable from a deep-seated sense of crisis, it provides an incisive account of what, in the concept of community, is thought yet crucially still remains unthought.

The first dictionary dedicated to the work of Jean-Luc Nanc, a key figure in the contemporary intellectual landscape. This dictionary considers the full scope of his writing and will provide insights into the philosophical and theoretical background to hi

The first book to provide a detailed account of fragmentary writing in the work of the French novelist, critic, and thinker Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003).

This book—the culmination of forty years of friendship between J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida, during which Miller also closely followed all Derrida’s writings and seminars—is “for Derrida” in two senses. It is “for him,” dedicated to his memory. The chapters also speak, in acts of reading, as advocates for Derrida’s work. They focus especially on Derrida’s late work, including passages from the last, as yet unpublished, seminars. The chapters are “partial to Derrida,” on his side, taking his part, gratefully submitting themselves to the demand made by Derrida’s writings to be read—slowly, carefully, faithfully, with close attention to semantic detail. The chapters do not progress forward to tell a sequential story. They are, rather, a series of perspectives on the heterogeneity of Derrida’s work, or forays into that heterogeneity. The chief goal has been, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, “plainly to propound” what Derrida says. The book aims, above all, to render Derrida’s writings justice. It should be remembered, however, that, according to Derrida himself, every rendering of justice is also a transformative interpretation. A book like this one is not a substitute for reading Derrida for oneself. It is to be hoped that it will encourage readers to do just that.

Breathing and its rhythms—liminal, syncopal, and usually inconspicuous—have become a core poetic compositional principle in modern literature. Examining moments when breath's punctuations, cessations, inhalations, or exhalations operate at the limits of meaningful speech, Stefanie Heine explores how literary texts reflect their own mediality, production, and reception in alluding to and incorporating pneumatic rhythms, respiratory sound, and silent pauses. Through close readings of works by a series of pairs—Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg; Robert Musil and Virginia Woolf; Samuel Beckett and Sylvia Plath; and Paul Celan and Herta Müller—Poetics of Breathing suggests that each offers a different conception of literary or poetic breath as a precondition of writing. Presenting a challenge to historical and contemporary discourses that tie breath to the transcendent and the natural, Heine traces a decoupling of breath from its traditional association with life, and asks what literature might lie beyond.

Over the past three decades, Jean-Luc Nancy has become one of the most celebrated contemporary philosophers. His remarkably diverse body of work, which deals with such topics as post-Heideggerian ontology, Christian painting, the experience of drunkenness, heart transplants, contemporary cinema and the problem of freedom, is entirely "immersed" in modernity, as he puts it. Within this plural framework, art – which he explicitly defines as a modern construct – plays a singular role in that it is the very prism through which he explores the problems of sense and feeling in general, particularly as they relate to “our” experience of modernity. The contributors to Understanding Nancy, Understanding Modernism fully delve into the heretofore under-acknowledged and under-explored modernism of Nancy's writings on philosophy and the arts through close readings of his key works as well as broader essays on the relationship between his thought and aesthetic modernity. In addition to an interview with Nancy himself, a final section consists of an extended glossary of Nancy's signature terms, which will be a valuable resource for students and experts alike.

Although Auden has often been hailed as the twentieth century’s master of metre and most outstanding practitioner of traditional poetic forms, his metrical art still remains a mystery, as far as its real significance is concerned. This book sheds new light on the enticing appeal of formal poetry which induced Auden into composing in almost every possible stanza form. In order to work out a ‘new’ appreciative assessment of Auden’s formal art, the book uses Amittai Aviram’s theory of poetic rhythm, which transcends the common literary critical process, based on the rhetorical assessment of rhythm in poetry. Aviram’s theory clearly revolutionises our common methods of interpretation regarding rhythm rather than meaning as the starting point in reading poetry; it is the poem’s ideas and theme which express and strengthen rhythm, not the other way round. Such conception of rhythm, as allegorized by meaning (images and metaphors), breathes new life into the outworn Russian formalist tradition. Turning to Auden’s poetry today may be said to be urged by both literary and political contexts; in an age marked by uncertainties and an upsurge of violence, poetry’s voice, regrettably, reverberates less forcefully, sinking into a state of formal loosening. As such, this book may be said to be prompted by a ‘necessity’ to revive the interest in Auden’s poetry, especially given its recent neglect. A reconsideration of Auden’s conception of the nature of poetry and its status enables us to encrypt his verbal art, assess its multiple effects, and appreciate the metrical range that has helped the poet handle so subtly his twofold inquiry: What is poetry? What is its use?