"In this densely imbricated volume Derrida pursues his devoted, relentless dismantling of the philosophical tradition, the tradition of Plato, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger--each dealt with in one or more of the essays. There are essays too on linguistics (Saussure, Benveniste, Austin) and on the nature of metaphor ("White Mythology"), the latter with important implications for literary theory. Derrida is fully in control of a dazzling stylistic register in this book--a source of true illumination for those prepared to follow his (...) arduous path. Bass is a superb translator and annotator. His notes on the multilingual allusions and puns are a great service."--Alexander Gelley, Library Journal. (shrink)

In _Complexity and Postmodernism_, Paul Cilliers explores the idea of complexity in the light of contemporary perspectives from philosophy and science. Cilliers offers us a unique approach to understanding complexity and computational theory by integrating postmodern theory into his discussion. _Complexity and Postmodernism_ is an exciting and an original book that should be read by anyone interested in gaining a fresh understanding of complexity, postmodernism and connectionism.

This collection brings together ten essays on literary and philosophical topics, each of which provides occasion for advancing the critical approach now signified by the twin terms of the title.

Peter Hallward is lecturer in the French Department at King's College, London. His previous publications include Absolutely Postcolonial: Writing between the Singular and the Specific (2002) and a translation of Alain Badiou's Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding of Evil (2001).

Psyche: Inventions of the Other is the first publication in English of the twenty-eight essay collection Jacques Derrida published in two volumes in 1998 and 2003. Advancing his reflection on many issues, such as sexual difference, architecture, negative theology, politics, war, nationalism, and religion, Volume II also carries on Derrida's engagement with a number of key thinkers and writers: De Certeau, Heidegger, Kant, Lacoue-Labarthe, Mandela, Rosenszweig, and Shakespeare, among others. Included in this volume are new or revised translations of seminal (...) essays (for example, "Geschlecht I: Sexual Difference, Ontological Difference," "Geschlecht II: Heidegger's Hand," "How to Avoid Speaking: Denials," and " Interpretations at War : Kant, the Jew, the German"). (shrink)

One subject which captured the imagination of sociologists, philosophers, political scientists and writers on culture in the 1980s was postmodernism. This text considers the meaning and importance of postmodernity.

The book's two essays, 'Limited Inc.' and 'Signature Event Context, ' constitute key statements of the Derridean theory of deconstruction. They are perhaps the clearest exposition to be found of Derrida's most controversial idea.

In this article we explore the possibility of viewing complex systems, as well as the models we create of such systems, as operating within a particular type of economy. The type of economy we aim to establish here is inspired by Jacques Derrida’s reading of George Bataille’s notion of a general economy. We restrict our discussion to the philosophical use of the word ‘economy’. This reading tries to overcome the idea of an economy as restricted to a single logos or (...) master narrative. At the same time, however, Derrida illustrates that we always operate from a restricted framework and as such something will always escape and interrupt our understanding of the world. In this paper we will propose that one could use Derrida’s reading of Bataille, along with notions such as différance, in order to move towards an understanding of complex systems as existing within certain sets of possibilities and constraints. We argue that this view of an economy agrees with the work of Edgar Morin on complexity and his conceptualization of general complexity. (shrink)

The acknowledgement that something is complex, it is argued, implies that our knowledge of it will always be limited. We cannot make complete, absolute or final claims about complex systems. Post-structuralism, and specifically deconstruction, make similar claims about knowledge in general. Arguments against deconstruction can, therefore, also be held against a critical form of complexity thinking and a defence of the view from complexity (as presented here) should take account of them. Three of these arguments are investigated: that deconstruction and (...) complexity-thinking lead to relativism, that they are subject to the performative contradiction and that their claims are vague. It is shown that these critiques are not really effective and it is suggested that a responsible approach to complexity has to be provisional, i.e. modest, without being vague or relativistic. (shrink)

As the price of oil climbs toward $100 a barrel, our impending post-fossil fuel future appears to offer two alternatives: a bleak existence defined by scarcity and sacrifice or one in which humanity places its faith in technological solutions with unforeseen consequences. Are there other ways to imagine life in an era that will be characterized by resource depletion? The French intellectual Georges Bataille saw energy as the basis of all human activity--the essence of the human--and he envisioned a society (...) that, instead of renouncing profligate spending, would embrace a more radical type of energy expenditure: la depense , or "spending without return." In Bataille's Peak , Allan Stoekl demonstrates how a close reading of Bataille--in the wake of Giordano Bruno and the Marquis de Sade-- can help us rethink not only energy and consumption, but also such related topics as the city, the body, eroticism, and religion. Through these cases, Stoekl identifies the differences between waste, which Bataille condemned, and expenditure, which he celebrated. The challenge of living in the twenty-first century, Stoekl argues, will be to comprehend--without recourse to austerity and self-denial--the inevitable and necessary shift from a civilization founded on waste to one based on Bataillean expenditure. Allan Stoekl is professor of French and comparative literature at Penn State University. He is the author of Agonies of the Intellectual: Commitment, Subjectivity, and the Performative in the Twentieth-Century French Tradition and translator of Bataille's Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939 (Minnesota, 1985). (shrink)

Alain Badiou, one of the most powerful voices in contemporary French philosophy, shows how our prevailing ethical principles serve ultimately to reinforce an ...

An anticipatory system is a system with the capacity to anticipate its own evolution. This paper generalizes the idea of anticipatory systems from its original biological setting to the fields of cognitive and social sciences, and it shows that anticipatory systems are a generalization of autopoietic systems. Anticipatory systems, almost by definition, escape the possibilities of rote iteration. This argument shows that the complexity of an anticipatory system extends well beyond mainstream complexity theory. For this reason, the idea of systems (...) of higher-order complexity has been introduced. These types of systems come in at least two forms: impredicative or self-referential systems, and living systems. It follows that anticipation does not necessarily require life. (shrink)

DIVUses C.L.R. James’sThe Black Jacobins as a jumping-off point for a reconsideration of colonial and postcolonial concepts of history, politics, and agency./div.

Bloch's The Spirit of Utopia, here presented for the first time in English translation, is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the twentieth-century. A peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, drawing on both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music, but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, The Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process (...) of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting. The first part concerns a mode of 'self-encounter' which presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. The second part is entitled 'Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse'. (shrink)

This is a review article of Paul Cillier's 1999 book _Complexity and Postmodernism_. The review article is generally encouraging and constructive, although isolates a number of areas in need of clarification or development in Cillier's work. The volume of the _South African Journal of Philosophy_ in which the review article appeared also printed a response by Cilliers.

This article undertakes a dual task. The first is to argue that the various positions of major Marxist thinkers on revolution may be gathered under the common framework of kairós, understood as a resolutely temporal term relating to the critical time, the opportune moment that appears unexpectedly and must be seized. The second task is to question the nature of kairós in terms of its biblical, class and economic residues. An investigation of the use of the term in classical Greece (...) reveals that it refers to both time and place, designating primarily what is in the right time and correct place. Given the class identifications of the Greek writers who deal with kairós and their subtle defences of their propertied, ruling class status, the term becomes problematic in light of these associations that trail behind it. In response, I seek to develop the political implications of the true opposite of kairós, namely ákairos, what is ill-timed and in the wrong place. (shrink)