The present collection of essays is devoted to the Christian philosophy of the most prolific and most speculatively ambitious of the Cambridge Origenists, Henry More. Not only did More revere Origen, whom he extolled as a "holy sage" and "that miracle of the Christian world", but he also developed a philosophical system which hinged upon the Origenian notions of universal divine goodness and libertarian human freedom. Throughout his life, More subscribed to the ancient theology of the pre-existence of (...) souls and took issue with the early modern philosophies of Thomas Hobbes, René Descartes and Baruch de Spinoza. His vision of God's goodness, experienced in his early school years at Eton, became the cornerstone of an Origenist rationalism which envisaged an extended world animated by divine thought and inhabited by self-moving rational agents. More's philosophy is the crowning attainment of the early modern rediscovery of Origen as well as a neglected major rationalist system in its own right which went on to exert decisive influence upon all subsequent western metaphysics. The essays collected in the first part provide a detailed introduction to More's voluminous writings. After a comprehensive general overview of his metaphysical and ethical system, the essays expound More's historical context and his philosophical development from his early poetry in the 1640s to his mature philosophical and theological prose works of the 50s, 60s and 70s. In addition, the reception of More and Origen in the later Cambridge Origenists and in Isaac Newton is outlined. The second part contains several excerpts from More's influential Latin works first translated into English by the editor. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 125-126 [Access article in PDF] Sextus Empiricus. Against the Grammarians (Adversos Mathematicos I). Introduction, Commentary, and Translation by D. L. Blank. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. lvi + 436. Cloth, $105.00. Sesto Empirico. Contro gli astrologi. Introduction, Commentary, and Translation by Emidio Spinelli. Naples: Bibliopolis, 2000. Pp. 230. Paper, L. 70.000. No historian of philosophy should be retailing the old canards (...) that the Hellenistic philosopher Sextus Empiricus was silly, wholly confused, or merely a compiler and not a philosopher in his own right. These translations and commentaries, along with the recent work of Richard Bett, James Hankinson, and others, should bury those notions forever.Against the Grammarians is the first and Against the Astrologers is the fifth volume of Sextus's six-volume Against the Teachers of the technai or professional arts and sciences (grammar, rhetoric, geometry, arithmetic, astrology, and music). Sextus is not against all forms of the study of these matters; in fact, one of the skeptic's "rules for living" is that he will engage in an art (techne) to make a living (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, I.24). But he is against the claims of each of them to special technical expertise. He prefers the unpretentious experience of everyday life—living by the phenomena; non-expert, practical forms of grammar, astronomy, music—to fancy theories about the nature of things.Against the Grammarians is Sextus's critique of the interpreters of poetry and prose—today's English professors and historians. Philosophers will be amused by his deconstruction of various sorts of lit crit arrogance and rashness that are still with us. Regrettably, some of us are not immune from the same critiques.Against the Astrologers is Sextus's critique of the Chaldean soothsayers. He is not against the observation of celestial phenomena for agricultural or navigational purposes. His critiques of the astrologers for lack of empirical evidence and promotion of superstition make him sound like a proto-scientist.One originality of Sextus's work was his combination of a dogmatic Epicurean critique of the grammatologists and astrologers with a skeptical aporetic critique. Precisely because he does not hesitate to make use of the arguments of others, some interpreters have decided that Sextus was unoriginal and derivative. But Blank and Spinelli both show that he recombines these arguments in ways that no one else had done. That is one of the ways of being original in philosophy. The upshot is that he is our earliest source of quite a number of critiques of grammarians and astrologers.The use of dogmatic arguments raises the problem of whether Sextus engages in so-called "negative dogmatism" in these volumes. Right at the beginning of Against the Astrologers, Sextus accuses them of violating "right reason." What right does a skeptic have to invoke such a standard? Some have felt that at this stage Sextus was a dogmatic skeptic, invoking one set of truths to tear down another. But that is not necessary. Blank and Spinelli explain this well with a combination of points. One, we can see the dogmatic and Epicurean attacks as clearing the ground for the following skeptical equipollence of arguments. Two, we can follow Jonathan Barnes in assuming that each claim that something has been demolished assumes the counterargument that it has been proven, so that the implied upshot is equipollence. Three, "right reason" can be the sort of unpretentious practical reasoning and living in accord with the appearances that the skeptics often claimed to live by.Spinelli and Blank provide many useful improvements over the previous English translations of these texts by Bury and the Italian translations by Russo. Blank rightly relies on Spinelli's 1995 translation and commentary on Sextus's Against the Ethicists and Spinelli rightly relies on Blank for a number of points. Spinelli supplies the Greek on facing pages of the translation; Blank does not. Spinelli also supplies five Greek zodiac charts and a beautiful print of a fifteenth-century zodiac.Neither Blank nor Spinelli unduly lionizes Sextus. They admit that... (shrink)

Cefalu offers the first sustained assessment of the ways in which recent contemporary philosophy and cultural theory -- including the work of Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Eric Santner, Slavoj Žižek, and Alenka Zupancic -- can illuminate Early Modern literature and culture. The book argues that when selected Early Modern devotional poets set out to represent subject-God relations, they often encounter some sublime aspect of God that, in Slovenian-Lacanian terms, seems "Other" to himself. This divine Other, while sometimes presented directly as (...) a void or empty place, is more often filled in and presented instead as some form of divine excess. While Donne, and to a lesser extent Traherne, disavow those numinous aspects of God that might subsist beneath such excesses, Crashaw, and especially Milton, attempt to represent the intimate relationship between any creature’s and God's intrinsic alterity. Cefalu introduces new ways of theorizing not only seventeenth-century religious ideologies, but also the nature of Early Modern subjectivity. (shrink)

This edition offers you the first Modern English version of Chaucer's only previously untranslated major work, Boece. Boece is Chaucer's Middle English translation of the 6th-century CE philosopher Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy. For over a thousand years,,The Consolation underpinned Christian understanding of Fate, Fortune, Free Will, and Divine Providence, and its ideas influenced Chaucer's major works. While many editions offer a Modern English translation from the original Latin, this edition gives you an approachable version of (...) Chaucer's translation and puts you face-to-face with his phrasings and emendations. Here, the father of English poetry's voice finally speaks up, so you can enjoy his poetic turns and even track where the language from Boece echoes in The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde. (shrink)

I want to argue…that to read Rossetti’s religious poetry with understanding requires a more or less conscious investment in the peculiarities of its Christian orientation, in the social and historical particulars which feed and shape the distinctive features of her work. Because John O. Waller’s relatively recent essay on Rossetti, “Christ’s Second Coming: Christina Rossetti and the Premillenarianist William Dodsworth,” focuses on some of the most important of these particulars, it seems to me one of the most useful pieces (...) of scholarship ever written on the poet. The essay locates the special ground of Rossetti’s religious poetry in that peculiar Adventist and premillenarian context which flourished for about fifty years in mid nineteenth-century culture. In point of historical fact—and it is a historical fact which has enormous significance for the aesthetic character of Rossetti’s poetry—her religious verse is intimately meshed with a number of particular, even peculiar, religious ideas.18 From the vantage of her strongest poetry, the most important of these ideas were allied to a once powerful religious movement which later—toward the end of the century—slipped to a marginal position in English culture.The whole question [of premillenarianism] was overshadowed first and last by the Tractarian Movement, Anglo-Catholicism, and the resulting Protestant reaction. And we can see in retrospect that all through the years [1820-1875] the theological future actually belonged to liberal, or Broad Church, principles. By the middle 1870s, apparently [the issues raised through the premillenarian movement] were no longer very alive.19­­In this context we may begin to understand the decline of Rossetti’s reputation after the late nineteenth century, when she was still regarded as one of the most powerful and important contemporary English poets. Her reputation was established in the 1860s and 1870s, when Adventism reached the apogee of its brief but influential career. Thereafter, the availability of religious poetry was mediated either through the Broad Church line or through the High Church and Anglo-Catholic line . The premillenarian and evangelist enthusiasm which supported Rossetti’s religious poetry had been moved to the periphery of English culture when the canon of such verse began to take shape in the modern period.To read Rossetti’s poetry, then, we have to willingly suspend not only our disbelief in her convictions and ideas but also our belief in those expectations and presuppositions about religious poetry which we have inherited from those two dominant ideological lines—Broad Church and High Church and Anglo-Catholic. Waller has drawn our attention to the general premillenarian content of her work, and I should like to follow his lead by emphasizing another crucial and even more particular doctrinal feature of her poetry. 19. Waller, “Christ’s Second Coming,” p. 477. For a general discussion of millenarianism in the early nineteenth century, see J. E. Harrison, The Second Coming, Popular Millenarianism, 1780-1850 . Jerome J. McGann is the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of Humanities at the California Institute of Technology. His two most recent books are The Romantic Ideology. A Critical Investigation and A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism . His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “Formalism, Savagery, and Care; or, The Function of Criticism Once Again” and “The Meaning of the Ancient Mariner”. (shrink)

In this essay, a translation into English of Martin Heidegger's paper Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, Paul de Man demonstrates his significant engagement with the work of Heidegger. He considers Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin's five key-passages on the subject of poetry, suggesting that the order in which these passages appear as well as the inner coherence that links them together will reveal the essence of poetry. He first comments on Hölderlin's claim that poetry is ‘the most innocent (...) of all crafts’ and goes on to discuss the four other key-passages: ‘Therefore, man was given language, the perilous of all blessings... that he bear witness to what he is... ’; ‘There is much that men have experienced. They have called the many of the heavenly by name, since we are an exchange of words, and one can hear from another’; ‘The poets found what will endure’; ‘With merit, and yet poetically, man dwells on this earth’. (shrink)

In this essay, a translation into English of Martin Heidegger's paper Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, Paul de Man demonstrates his significant engagement with the work of Heidegger. He considers Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin's five key-passages on the subject of poetry, suggesting that the order in which these passages appear as well as the inner coherence that links them together will reveal the essence of poetry. He first comments on Hölderlin's claim that poetry is ‘the most innocent (...) of all crafts’ and goes on to discuss the four other key-passages: ‘Therefore, man was given language, the perilous of all blessings... that he bear witness to what he is... ’; ‘There is much that men have experienced. They have called the many of the heavenly by name, since we are an exchange of words, and one can hear from another’; ‘The poets found what will endure’; ‘With merit, and yet poetically, man dwells on this earth’. (shrink)

The article is devoted to the four principle realization in the creative work of two poets, namely the English literature classic T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) and a representative of the Russian poetry Elena Swarz (1948-2010). Number four is a structural principle in their works composition and crucifix of Christ. On the example of the two poets the author shows that on the one hand, the symbol of four is a cosmic transversalism of being and the cross image, on the other. (...) Thus, two contradictory meanings are combined here: harmony and drama as truly Christian forms of dialectics. (shrink)

Steadman suggests that these poets, along with most other Renaissance poets, did not actually regard themselves as divinely inspired but, rather, resorted to a common fiction to create the appearance of having special insight into the truth.

An analysis of two major religiously inspired writers from a Kierkegaardian perspective. _Writing the Incommensurable_ studies how the threat posed by the absence of an immanent God is explored in the works of Søren Kierkegaard, Christina Rossetti, and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Mary Finn erects a theoretical framework in each chapter based on a pseudonymous work of Kierkegaard. In these pseudonymous works, Kierkegaard uses the discourses of philosophy, theology, and literature to plot the complicated path of a religious writer whose own (...) impulse to write complicates—if it does not compromise—the religious vision she or he wants to communicate. The book is organized according to four Kierkegaardian categories: anxiety, lyric voice, repetition, and radical choice. All four are responses to what Kierkegaard calls the incommensurable, the unnegotiable gap between subjectivity on the one hand and "actuality" on the other. This gap plagues the writer-believer while also enabling writing. In what dilemma, then, does a religious poet find herself or himself when out of the depths of personal doubt, lack of understanding, and religious inadequacy comes a literary success? Or is this dilemma avoided by paradoxically refiguring failure as a measure of success, and if so, can such a refiguring ever be fully trusted? As the notion of the subjective "self" acquires preeminence in the nineteenth century, the particularized "writing self" is the entity Kierkegaard, Hopkins, and Rossetti fight to get beyond as religious believers. The futility of such an attempt nonetheless results in a peculiar success: there is the writing itself, material evidence that the fight occurred, imbued with the pathos and beauty of all monuments erected to lost causes. (shrink)

We began with the observation that language is often held to enact the world. We have examined several instances of this notion, beginning with a discussion of the folk etymology of certain words, moving through an example of Freud, to Morgenstern, Lettvin, and Stevens. The method shared by these examples assumes that words are literally saturated with meaning; that what appears arbitrary or senseless in them can be made to render up its sense and its motivation through a kind of (...) inspired analysis. Our intent has been to show how this principle of folk etymology lies behind some sophisticated creative thinking. In Freud, it is hypothesized to be a psychological mechanism of some depth. In Morgenstern and Lettvin, it forms the basis for a resonant poetic joke, while in Stevens it appears to have the same major status as the mythic principle of creation-through-language illustrated in our first examples from Egyptian mythology and from Genesis. Stevens, of course, uses the principle to create poetry, not religion; for as he says in section 5 of "The Man with the Blue Guitar": Poetry Exceeding music must take the placeOf empty heaven and its hymns . . . Samuel Jay Keyser, head of the department of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and editor of Linguistic Inquiry, is the coauthor of English Stress: Its Form, Its Growth and Its Role in Verse and of Beginning English Grammar. Alan Prince, an assistant professor of linguistics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, has written on stress and linguistic rhythm and is currently working, with Keyser, on the poetry of Wallace Stevens. (shrink)

A study of the effect of mysticism & theology on the philosophy & the works of three noteworthy 17th century poets: Donne, Browne & Vaughan.

Is poetry a topic for philosophical reflection? This paper seeks to argue that it is by exhibiting poetry as a form of knowledge. What the claim that poetry is a form of knowledge amounts to is that something can be knowledge in virtue of being poetical and poetical in virtue of being the (kind of) knowledge it is. Various kinds of skeptical doubt about this claim are considered. It is argued that such doubts are based on distorting pictures of poetry. (...) Two strategies to justify the claim that poetry is a form of knowledge shall be explored. The first strategy is a broadly Wittgensteinian one, relying on grammatical reminders. The second strategy is a broadly Hegelian one, exhibiting poetry as a form of knowledge by showing that the concepts of two other forms of knowledge – practical and second-person knowledge – due to internal incoherences, point beyond themselves towards the concept of poetry. (shrink)

From 1968 to 1991 the acclaimed film theorist Christian Metz wrote several remarkable books on film theory. These books set the agenda of academic film studies during its formative period. Metz's ideas were taken up, digested, refined, reinterpreted, criticized and sometimes dismissed, but rarely ignored. This volume collects and translates into English a series of interviews with Metz, who offers readable summaries, elaborations, and explanations of his sometimes complex and demanding theories of film. We also discover the contents (...) of his unpublished manuscript on jokes, his relation to Roland Barthes, and the social networks operative in the French intellectual community during the 1970s and 1980s."--Back cover. (shrink)

From philosophy to theology -- Structure -- Mystery -- Power.

Between 1934 and 1937 Maurice Blondel, the French Roman Catholic philosopher best known for his 1893 work, Action, published a trilogy of writings. Out of these writings came a theological ontology of tremendous force, creativity, and coherence. The purpose of the present dissertation is to reassess the viability of Blondel's ontology for contemporary theology. The retrieval begins with John Milbank's 1990 investigation of Blondel's early philosophy. While Milbank focuses on the strengths of Blondel, he also highlights some critical weaknesses. The (...) dissertation argues that Blondel later came to recognize and correct these weaknesses in his trilogy. ;La pensee, the first volume of the trilogy, discusses the nature and development of thought. Recognizing the ontological structure of thought leads Blondel to present his doctrine of the transnatural elan for assimilation to God. The transnatural desire for God is compared with Henri de Lubac's notion of naturae desiderium and then applied to the modern problem of the relationship between nature and supernature. ;The second installment of the trilogy, L'etre et les etres , explores the mysterious relation of Being and beings. Blondel situates the discussion within the language of creation, identifying Being as Creator and beings as creatures. The analogy of creation allows him to forge the proper relationship between Being and beings. After Blondel's death, two different schools of thought emerged on the mystery of being: Karl Rahner's Thomism and Jean-Luc Marion's new phenomenology. Each school is reviewed and critiqued from a Blondelian perspective. ;The trilogy concludes with a long-awaited revision of L'action . It begins by distinguishing the idea of action from action itself and establishing the ontological difference of action. Action is presented ontologically as enacted power, which is investigated in its individual, social, and metaphysical forms. Individual action is identified as making, practicing, and contemplating. Social action is studied next, with the conclusion that the social being of enacted power is determined by either a philosophy of peace or violence. Finally, divine action is evaluated with regards to the language of causality and absolute power. Blondel proposes instead to describe God's activity in terms of pure action. (shrink)

Natural scientific psychology grew out of an effort to objectify language. The ultimate effect of its methodological innovations was to distance the reader from a primordial poetic experience of the world and from a cultural heritage whose primary task it was to cultivate that experience. We make use of the poetics and the phenomenological thought of Gaston Bachelard in order to place poetry and literature in a more fruitful relationship to psychology.

Ancient Poetry in general makes the claim of divine inspiration, thus deriving authority from a supernatural source. Accordingly, it bases the validity of its message on a foundation beyond argument, which has consequences both for the relationship between poets and their poems, as well as between poems and their readers. In Christian Late Antiquity the divine foundation of poetry had to be renegotiated, and as a consequence authorities and arguments had to be given a new role in the (...) class='Hi'>Christian poetic discourse. This paper will analyse the various possibilities and their consequences, also looking at the issue in terms of how far pagan poetry already foreshadowed such a development. The poets taken into consideration include Commodianus, Prudentius, the Carmen adversus Marcionitas, Prosper of Aquitaine, and Venantius Fortunatus. (shrink)

I argue from a hermeneutic point of view that formal elements of poetry can only be identified because poetry is based on both the phenomenon and the conception of poetry, both of which precede the attempt to identify formal elements as the defining moment of poetry. Furthermore, I argue with Gadamer that poetry is based on a rupture with and an epoche of our non-poetic use of language in such a way that it liberates “fixed” universal aspects of everyday language, (...) and that through establishing itself in a new, self-referential and monologue unity, it individualizes speech . From the hermeneutic position, poetry is a form of speaking rather than a “fixed” object. As such, I will try to make sense of what Paul Celan said in his famous “Meridian” speech: namely, that the poem is “actualized language, set free under the sign of a radical individuation, which at the same time stays mindful of the limits drawn by language, the possibilities opened by language.”. (shrink)

Biblical Exegesis and Mystical Theology in the Venerable Bede brings together seventeen essays by Arthur Holder exploring the theology and spirituality found in Bede's biblical commentaries and homilies. The volume shows that Bede was both a masterful student of received tradition and a creative thinker concerned to address the needs and concerns of his audience of Christian pastors and teachers in the eighth-century Northumbrian church. Although Bede is best known as the author of The Ecclesiastical History of the (...) class='Hi'>English People, the last half-century of scholarship has demonstrated the sophistication and vast influence of his work in the fields of grammar, biblical interpretation, hagiography, poetry, computus, natural science, and theology. The chapters in this volume show how Bede's exegesis was integrally connected with his work in all those genres and with the monumental artistic productions of his monastery such as the illuminated bible manuscript known as the Codex Amiatinus. The five parts of the book deal with Bede as teacher and biblical scholar, his interpretations of the tabernacle and the temple, his commentary on the Song of Songs, his attitudes toward philosophy and heresy, and his mystical theology. This book will be of interest to students of Christian theology, mysticism, the development of biblical interpretation, and the history of early medieval England. (shrink)

_Political Poetry across the Centuries_ aims to give a concise yet wide ranging overview of political poetry from antiquity to the immediate past spanning from Europe to East Asia.

The Israelite Samaritan Version of the Torah: First English Translation Compared with the Masoretic Version. Edited by Benyamim Tsedaka and Sharon Sullivan. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2013. Pp. xxxvii + 522, illus. $26.

English summary: During his time inWurzburg from 1803 to 1806 Schelling read his lectures on the System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere several times. They are the only complete exposition of Schellings identity philosophy, which comprises the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of mind. The articles discuss the Wurzburger System in the context of problem history and in light of the history of Schellings works and of the history of debates concerning them. With contributions by Christopher (...) Arnold, Ulrich Barth, Christoph Binkelmann, Christian Danz, Georg Essen, Michael Hackl, Patrick Leistner, Jan Rohls, Alexander Schuhbach, Sebastian Schwenzfeuer, Clemens Tangerding and Paul Ziche. German description: In seiner Wurzburger Zeit von 1803 bis 1806 hat Schelling mehrfach sein System der gesammten Philosophie und der Naturphilosophie insbesondere vorgetragen. Hierbei handelt es sich um die einzige Gesamtdarstellung der identitatsphilosophischen Konzeption, welche sowohl Natur- als auch Geistphilosophie umfasst. Die Beitrage des Bandes thematisieren das Wurzburger System vor seinem werk- und problemgeschichtlichen Hintergrund sowie in seinem debattengeschichtlichen Kontext. Mit Beitragen von Christopher Arnold, Ulrich Barth, Christoph Binkelmann, Christian Danz, Georg Essen, Michael Hackl, Patrick Leistner, Jan Rohls, Alexander Schubach, Sebastian Schwenzfeuer, Clemens Tangerding und Paul Ziche.Mit Beitragen von Christopher Arnold, Ulrich Barth, Christoph Binkelmann, Christian Danz, Georg Essen, Michael Hackl, Patrick Leistner, Jan Rohls, Alexander Schuhbach, Sebastian Schwenzfeuer, Clemens Tangerding und Paul Ziche. (shrink)

An updated edition of a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis from a postfordist perspective. The 2010 English-language edition of Christian Marazzi's The Violence of Financial Capitalism made a groundbreaking work on the global financial crisis available to an expanded readership. This new edition has been updated to reflect recent events, up to and including the G20 summit in July 2010 and the broad consensus to reduce government spending that emerged from it. Marazzi, a leading figure in (...) the European postfordist movement, argues that the processes of financialization are not simply irregularities between the traditional categories of wages, rent, and profit, but rather a new type of accumulation adapted to the processes of social and cognitive production today. The financial crisis, he contends, is a fundamental component of contemporary accumulation and not a classic lack of economic growth. Marazzi shows that individual debt and the management of financial markets are actually techniques for governing the transformations of immaterial labor, general intellect, and social cooperation. The financial crisis has radically undermined the very concept of unilateral and multilateral economico-political hegemony, and Marazzi discusses efforts toward a new geomonetary order that have emerged around the globe in response. Offering a radically new understanding of the current stage of international economics as well as crucial post-Marxist guidance for confronting capitalism in its newest form, The Violence of Financial Capitalism is a valuable addition to the contemporary arsenal of postfordist thought. This edition includes the glossary of the esoteric neolanguage of financial capitalism—”Words in Crisis,” from “AAA” to “toxic asset”—written for the first English-language edition, and offers a new afterword by Marazzi. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis is the first English translation of Pierre Bayle’s political pamphlet, Réponse d’un nouveau converti à la Lettre d’un refugié of 1689. It may be one of the most critical attacks on a writer’s own side in the history of political ideas. It is a stinging rebuke of Bayle’s own party, the Protestants, for their incoherence, hypocrisy, and violence. It came three years after his similarly savage refutation of the Catholics in The Condition of Wholly Catholic France, also recently (...) published in its first English translation in this journal. A substantial introduction explains some of the context, explores the political theology of this pamphlet, and reviews scholarly interpretations. (shrink)

Christian Marazzi's first book: a post-Fordist classic on the roots to economic crises in the contemporary age. Communication as work: we have recently experienced a profound transformation in the processes of production. While the assembly line excluded any form of linguistic productivity, today, there is no production without communication. The new technologies are linguistic machines. This revolution has produced a new kind of worker who is not a specialist but is versatile and infinitely adaptable. If standardized mass production was (...) dominant in the past, today we produce an array of different goods corresponding to specific consumer niches. This is the post-Fordist model described by Christian Marazzi in Capital and Affects. Tracing the development of this new model of labor from Toyota plants in Japan to the most recent innovations, Marazzi's critique goes beyond political economy to encompass issues related to social life, political engagement, democratic institutions, interpersonal relations, and the role of language in liberal democracies. This translation at long last makes Marazzi's first book available to English readers. Capital and Affects stands not only as the foundation to Marazzi's subsequent work, but as foundational work in post-Fordist literature, with an analysis startlingly relevant to today's troubled economic times. This Semiotext edition includes the afterword Marazzi wrote for the 1999 Italian edition. (shrink)

In _An Introduction to Kant’s Aesthetics_, Christian Wenzel discusses and demystifies Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment, guiding the reader each step of the way and placing key points of discussion in the context of Kant’s other work. Explains difficult concepts in plain language, using numerous examples and a helpful glossary. Proceeds in the same order as Kant’s text for ease of reference and comprehension. Includes an illuminating foreword by Henry E. Allison. Offers twenty-six further-reading sections, commenting briefly (...) on books and articles from the English, German, and French, that are relevant for each topic Provides an extensive bibliography and a chapter summarizing Kant's main points. (shrink)

This study represents a comparison between two radical gestures of literary self-reflexivity: romantic irony and postmodernist metafiction. It examines the impact of early German romantic theory and its central concept of irony on German and English romantic narrative fiction and relates the same to postmodernist self-reflexive novels, including its British and American variants. A primary objective of this comparison is to account for the radical skepticism that postmodernist metafiction voices with respect to the paramount philosophical question of truth and (...) reality. The immanent tension between an absolute idealistic and a radically skeptic position which romantic irony articulates and enacts is conceived of as an important and instructive link to the understanding of postmodernism. (shrink)

This article presents two cases of women doing development work for civil society organizations in the Global South. The author uses the cases to explicate the relationship of global civil society, development work, feminism, and Christianity. The case studies were collected through life history interviews with the participants. The cases, interpreted in light of the ‘third space’ cultural theory of Homi Bhabha, destabilize the fixed identity of these women as ‘development workers’, ‘feminists’, ‘Western’, and ‘Christian’.

Asked to define poetry, one is likely to reply with a sigh, a shrug, a look of exasperation or even one of contempt, indicating not only that the question is oppressive but that anyone who asks it must be something of a fool, a pest, or a vulgarian. Though these uncongenial reactions may be interpreted as the signs of intellectual embarrassment, they are, I think, quite justified. For the nature of definition and the particular historical fortunes of the term poetry (...) conjoin to this effect: that a definition of the term will either be a total chronicle of those fortunes or will constitute merely one more episode in them. In other words, a definition of poetry is bound to be either inadequate to the job or, if adequate, then both unmanageable and uninteresting for any other purpose. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, professor of English and communications at the University of Pennsylvania, is the author of Poetic Closure: A Study of How Poems End, for which she received the Christian Gauss and Explicator awards, and the editor of Shakespeare's Sonnets. This article will be part of a book, Fictive Discourse. She has also contributed "Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

The detailed interpretation and translation of Nietzsche’s early Latin odes clearly show that Horace’s lyric poetry has an exemplary function for the development of Nietzsche’s own poetic language. Even in his later works, such as Twilight of the Idols and the Dionysos-Dithyrambs, Nietzsche’s poetic style and rhetorical strategies remain indebted to his early attempts to emulate classical Latin poetry when he was a pupil at the Pforta boarding school.

English summary: This volume looks at the so far little studied connections between the philosophy of Schelling and the historiographic waves in theological, philosophical and historical discourse during the first half of the 19th century. The reception of Schelling in theology, philosophy and history relates primarily to his writings around 1800. The essays in this volume firstly analyze the considerable impact that these texts had on the structure of contemporary debate. Secondly, they analyze the interdependence of the historical theology (...) that was beginning to take root and Schelling's emerging later philosophy. Thirdly, they examine the reception of Schelling's philosophy of history from the perspective of Friedrich Schleiermacher and historical academic discourse, as well as David Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur and the Landhut Romantics. German description: Der vorliegende Band thematisiert die bislang nur wenig erforschten Zusammenhange zwischen der Philosophie Schellings und den Historisierungsschuben in den theologischen, philosophischen und geschichtswissenschaftlichen Diskursen der ersten Halfte des 19. Jahrhunderts. Die Rezeption Schellings in Theologie, Philosophie und Geschichtswissenschaft bezieht sich vor allem auf dessen Schriften um 1800. Die Beitrage des Bandes untersuchen sowohl die breite Wirkung dieser Texte in den zeitgenossischen Debattenkonstellationen sowie die Wechselwirkungen zwischen der sich etablierenden historischen Theologie und der Herausbildung von Schellings Spatphilosophie als auch die Rezeption der Geschichtsphilosophie Schellings bei Friedrich Schleiermacher sowie in den geschichtswissenschaftlichen Diskursen, bei David Friedrich Strauss, Ferdinand Christian Baur sowie in der Landshuter Romantik. Mit Beitragen von: Christopher Arnold, Ulrich Barth, Christian Danz, Georg Essen, Malte Dominik Kruger, Christof Landmesser, Michael Murrmann-Kahl, Georg Neugebauer, Jan Rohls, Oliver Wintzek, Johannes Zachhuber. (shrink)

Originally published as a French edition in 1991, and first translated into English for this Cambridge edition in 2004, in this exhaustive study Christian Bidard develops a theory of prices of production. This theory breaks down the symmetry between producers and consumers and gives more importance to reproduction rather than scarcity. In his analysis of multiple-product systems, Bidard focuses on the notion of an all-engaging system which elucidates the link with von Neumann's theory; examines the notions of sector (...) and vertical integration which make possible an elegant treatment of fixed capital; clarifies the status of the internal rate of return; proposes a general theory of rent. In the discussion of capital theory and marginal equalities or, more specifically, the treatment of exhaustible resources, Bidard compares different readings of Sraffa's work and revisits the question of relationships between classical theory and the general equilibrium theory. (shrink)

This paper aims at discussing the relations between religion and revolution according to Edmund Burke’s and Alexis de Tocqueville’s considerations on the unleashment of the French Revolution. There is a rare dialog between both authors made by the French thinker, mainly in his book The Old Regime and the Revolution. Nonetheless, I intend to deepen this dialog. This procedure will make it possible to review the comparisons – between the English and the French Revolutions – made by both authors (...) and the distinct role played by religion in each process. Finally, I try to identify the main proximities and distances in the analysis of both authors on the theme. (shrink)

Purpose of the article: Knowledge is increasingly importance for the economic well-being of businesses. Core competencies of management are the generation and processing of information, used to develop a competitive advantage. Information has become established as a commodity in its own right which can be bought and sold. Four out of five goods traded on the market now consist of services or relate to information in the broadest sense. Knowledge is created when different pieces of information are linked on the (...) basis of a particular intellectual background and meaningfully interpreted. Accordingly, knowledge incorporates not just information but also experience, - judgements, rules of thumb and worldviews. Knowledge is always associated with human beings. Methodology/methods: This article is based on literature research. The original article was written in German and translated into English, supported by a translation agency. Scientific aim: A questionnaire is being drawn up on the basis of the research results. This will allow the appraisal of these influencing factors and framework conditions by small and medium sized enterprises to be surveyed and evaluated. Findings: Social systems arise through and are sustained by communication. Actions of managers primarily consist of communication. For cognitive simplification, all humans repeat actions that have previously proved successful. Previously accumulated knowledge thus becomes a significant barrier to learning. An organisation’s ability to learn depends not only the general willingness of its workforce to learn but also on the newness and/or compatibility of knowledge acquired from a partner. Conclusions : Developing or acquiring competition-relevant knowledge is generally time-consuming and costly. As a complementary function to knowledge acquisition, the retention of knowledge carriers in the form of people and materials forms another component of knowledge management. It is important to recognise early on those knowledge carriers who promise high potential in the future. (shrink)

ExcerptCarl Schmitt's recently translated Constitutional Theory (Verfassungslehre), first published in 1928 at the end of a period of relative stability in Weimar Germany, is a strangely timely work—both with regard to the continued relevance of the themes and problems it discusses and with regard to the current state of scholarship about Weimar constitutionalism. But, first things first, as befits what was originally intended as a short review article: The translation is accurate, even though it was occasionally necessary to break down (...) Schmitt's legal Germanicisms into more manageable English syntax. The long introduction, jointly written by Jeffrey Seitzer and Christopher Thornhill,…. (shrink)

English summary: While he was a student in Tubingen, the young Schelling wrote his own commentaries on the biblical scriptures and developed a historical hermeneutics which drew on contemporary concepts and took these concepts further. In this volume, the contributors provide the first study of these new sources in the context of the complex hermeneutical and exegetical debates in late Enlightenment theology. In doing so, they use an interdisciplinary approach to show the connections between theological problems at the end (...) of the 18th century and the development of German idealism, connections on which previously little research had been done. German description: Der junge Schelling hat wahrend seiner Tubinger Studienzeit eigene Kommentare zu biblischen Schriften verfasst und eine historische Hermeneutik ausgearbeitet, welche an die zeitgenossischen Konzeptionen anknupft und diese weiterfuhrt. Die Beitrage in diesem Band thematisieren erstmals diese neuen Quellen im Kontext der komplexen hermeneutischen und exegetischen Debattenlagen der spaten Aufklarungstheologie. Dadurch werden die bislang nur wenig erforschten Zusammenhange von theologischen Fragestellungen am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts und der Herausbildung des Deutschen Idealismus auf eine interdisziplinare Weise erschlossen. (shrink)

This article examines the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud in terms of the intersection between corporeality, temporality, and the political. The first part analyzes the deconstruction of lyrical subjectivity in Rimbaud’s verse in relation to the breakdown of the “sensory-motor link” described in the first volume of Deleuze’s Cinema; it discusses these homologous movements as a release of free-floating bodily potentiality. The second part shows how the shift from the first to the second volume of (...) Deleuze’s Cinema and the shift from verse to prose poetry in Rimbaud constitute the formal dimensions of a shared political project based on the transformation of bodily life, or a biopolitical transformation. This project can be understood as communist insofar as it attempts to liberate time from capital for the body and to produce a social form based on sharing the common. (shrink)

Trucage then exists when there is deceit. We may agree to use this term when the spectator ascribes to the diegesis the totality of the visual elements furnished him. In films of the fantastic, the impression of unreality is convincing only if the public has the feeling of partaking, not of some plausible illustration of a process obeying a nonhuman logic, but of a series of disquieting or "impossible" events which nevertheless unfold before him in the guise of eventlike appearances. (...) In the opposite case, the spectator undertakes a type of spontaneous sorting out of the visible material of which the filmic text is composed and ascribes only a portion of it to the diegesis. The services of the department of agriculture have worked more quickly because they were approached in an appropriate manner: this amounts to the diegesis. The film makes light of this sudden rapidity; ironically, it exaggerates it: here is the intention, which amounts to the enunciation. In the exact degree to which this perceptible bifurcation is maintained, the connotated will be unable to pass for denotated, and there is no trucage. The optical effect has not merged with the usual game of the photograms, the entire visual material has not been mistaken for the photographic, the diegetization has not been total. Christian Metz, one of the foremost French theorists of the cinema, is the author of Essais sur le signification au cinéma, Propositions méthodologiques pour l'analyse du film, and Langage et cinéma. He is Sous-Directeur d'Etudes Suppléant à l'Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris. This is the first English translation of "Trucage et cinéma," which appeared in Essais sur la signification au cinéma . Francoise Meltzer [the translator of this essay] is a professor of French literature and of comparative literature at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Trial of Psychoanalysis, Salome and the Dance of Writing, and Hot Property: The Stakes and Claims of Literary Originality. Her essay, "Color as Cognition in Symbolist Verse," is published in Critical Inquiry in the Winter 1978 issue. (shrink)