The search to create a science of signatures that exceeds the attempts of semiology and hermeneutics to determine pure and unmarked signs.

The philosophical genealogy of a remarkable antagonist: the pirate, the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe.

An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into the sense of being sentient--what it means to feel that one is alive--that draws on philosophical, literary, psychological, and medical accounts from ancient, medieval, and modern cultures.

This work looks closely at the literature of the survivors of Auschwitz, probing the philosophical and ethical questions raised by their testimony.

Whether the subject is Ovid, Dante, or modern fiction, classical Arabic literature or the birth of the French language, structuralist linguistics or Freud's writings on aphasia, Heller-Roazen considers with clarity, precision, and insight the forms, the effects, and the ultimate consequences of the forgetting of language.

Examines Tony Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art.

The aim of this work is to explore the power of the informe . The authors introduce a new set of concepts into our understanding of avante-garde and modernist art practices. A new map of 20th-century art emerges from this reconceptualization and from analyses of the work of relevant artists.

Explores the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be useless. In these volumes, Bataille examines this paradox from an anthropological and ethical perspective.

A collection of essays on photography, the novel, and film pondering on a series of literary and philosophical problems: the relation among genius and theories of subjectivity; the problem of messianic time as explicated in both images and lived experience; parody as a literary paradigm; and the potential of magic to provide an ethical canon.

Since its publication amid the social upheavels of the 1960s, the theses of this book have influenced debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism and life in the late 20th century. This text explores contemporary effects of power.

The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, what in his last writing he called simply a life. They capture a problem that runs throughout his work - his long search for a new and superior empiricism. Announced in his first book, on David Hume, then taking off with his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of an empiricist ...

This volume is both a pivotal reading of Spinoza's work and also a crucial text within the development of Deleuze's own thought. It was the culmination of a series of monographic studies by Deleuze and in it he reflects on one of the thinkers who influenced his own work.

Traces the early modern European history of identification practices and identity papers. Using research, this title presents the prehistory of modern passport and identification technologies: the documents, seals, and stamps, that could document and transform their owner's identity.

Presents a radically interdisciplinary inquiry into the origins of human consciousness, community, and potential. This title collects essays and lectures on research in anthropology, comparative religion, aesthetics, and philosophy. It provides a universal imagination and thought for our own potential community.

A collection of essays examining nine intriguing objects made eloquent when matter and meaning converge. This work seeks to understand how objects become charged with significance without losing their gritty materiality.

Focuses on the logic, language, and imagery of Rwanda's violence. This book presents perpetrator testimony, with photographs of Rwandans, both perpetrators and survivors. It challenges our assumptions about the genocide and about those who perpetrated it. It also prods us to consider how to represent and imagine violence on the scale of Rwanda's.

What remains of moral judgement when truth itself is mistrusted, when the validity of every belief system depends on its context, when power and knowledge are inextricably entangled? Is a viable moral theory still possible in the wake of the postmodern criticism of modern philosophy? The Order of Evil responds directly to these questions and dilemmas with one simple and brilliant change of focus.

Provides a consideration of blandness as the harmonious union of potential values - an infinite opening into human experience. This book makes readers think and experience what may at first seem impossible: the richness of a bland sound, a bland meaning, a bland painting, a bland poem.