This unique volume presents a debate between four of the top feminist theorists in the US today, discussing the key questions facing contemporary feminist theory, responding to each other, and distinguishing their views from others.

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.

Deconstruction both by its friends and enemies has come to be associated with a set of cliches that completely misunderstands its ethical aspiration. It is particularly within the field of law that we can see the ethical force of deconstruction, and also illuminate its concrete and practical importance. In The Philosophy of the Limit Drucilla Cornell examines the relationship of deconstruction to questions of ethics, justice and legal interpretation. She argues that renaming deconstruction "the philosophy of the limit" will allow (...) us to be more precise about what deconstruction actually is philosophically and hence to articulate more clearly its significance for law. Cornell explores the ethical and juridical significance of the so-called postmodern rebellion against metaphysics. A shared ethical rebellion links philosophers as different as Theodor Adorno, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas. Together they present a new ethical configuration, new in its difference from both the critical social theory of J$u$urgen Habermas and the analytic jurisprudence of Nagel and Rawls. A key aspect of this newness is the centrality given to the relationship between questions of ethics and sexual difference. Cornell argues that the appeal of Lacan's analysis to feminists is that it helps to explain the profound hold the gender hierarchy has over Western culture, including its theories of political transformation. Under a Lacanian analysis the law of gender identity will be replicated in the laws of an existing legal system. This means that we cannot hope to sustain legal reforms unless the gender hierarchy is challenged. Cornell examines Derrida's position on the significance of the gender hierarchy in philosophy and explores its ethical and political importance. Derrida's intervention against legal positivism has important implications for the legal reforms necessary to protect marginalized groups. His emphasis on the limit, she argues, is crucial to thosewhose well-being and very lives may depend on legal transformation, women and homosexuals, for example. In an important contribution to legal philosophy, Cornell explores the affinities of Derrida's writings with recent liberal analytic jurisprudence. She also explores the differences. Comparing Rawls's and Derrida's accounts of justice, she argues that Derrida gives greater attention to the necessary utopian moment in his insistence on maintaining the divide between law, established norms, and justice. Cornell's focus on the importance of the limit and the centrality of the gender hierarchy allows her to offer a view of jurisprudence different from both critical social theory and analytic jurisprudence. As we watch the long-fought-for civil rights of women systematically overturned, we have reason to think about how the connections she makes shed light on an underlying truth of our social, political, and legal reality. (shrink)

This new edition of Drucilla Cornell's highly acclaimed book includes a substantial new introduction by the author, which situates the book within current ...

The struggle against liberalism in the totalitarian view of the state.--The concept of essence.--The affirmative character of culture.--Philosophy and critical theory.--On hedonism.--Industrialization and capitalism in the work of Max Weber.--Love mystified; a critique of Norman O. Brown and a reply to Herbert Marcuse by Norman O. Brown.--Aggressiveness in advanced industrial society.

A major influence on civil rights, anti-colonial, and black consciousness movements around the world, Black Skin, White Masks is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Hailed for its scientific analysis and poetic grace when it was first published in 1952, the book remains a vital force today. “[Fanon] demonstrates how insidiously the problem of race, of color, connects with a whole range of words and images.” — Robert Coles, The New York Times Book Review.

Lewis Gordon presents the first detailed existential phenomenological investigation of antiblack racism as a form of Sartrean bad faith. Bad faith, the attitude in which human beings attempt to evade freedom and responsibility, is treated as a constant possibility of human existence. Antiblack racism, the attitude and practice that involve the construction of black people as fundamentally inferior and subhuman, is examined as an effort to evade the responsibilities of a human and humane world. Gordon argues that the concept of (...) bad faith militates against any human science that is built upon a theory of human nature and as such offers an analysis of antiblack racism that stands as a challenge to our ordinary assumptions of what it means to be human. (shrink)

A new edition of the highly acclaimed book Multiculturalism and "The Politics of Recognition," this paperback brings together an even wider range of leading philosophers and social scientists to probe the political controversy surrounding multiculturalism. Charles Taylor's initial inquiry, which considers whether the institutions of liberal democratic government make room--or should make room--for recognizing the worth of distinctive cultural traditions, remains the centerpiece of this discussion. It is now joined by Jürgen Habermas's extensive essay on the issues of recognition and (...) the democratic constitutional state and by K. Anthony Appiah's commentary on the tensions between personal and collective identities, such as those shaped by religion, gender, ethnicity, race, and sexuality, and on the dangerous tendency of multicultural politics to gloss over such tensions. These contributions are joined by those of other well-known thinkers, who further relate the demand for recognition to issues of multicultural education, feminism, and cultural separatism.Praise for the previous edition. (shrink)

In this classic work, Herbert Marcuse takes as his starting point Freud's statement that civilization is based on the permanent subjugation of the human instincts, his reconstruction of the prehistory of mankind - to an interpretation of the basic trends of western civilization, stressing the philosophical and sociological implications.

The wide range of disciplines represented here enables the volume to stand as a contextualizing work in Fanon studies. It contains new original essays on Africana philosophy, the human sciences, dialectical humanism, women of color studies, neocolonial and postcolonial studies, violence, and tragedy.

In ____Bodies That Matter,__ Judith Butler further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most "material" dimensions of sex and sexuality. Deepening the inquiries she began in _Gender_ _Trouble,_ Butler offers an original reformulation of the materiality of bodies, examining how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the "matter" of bodies, sex, and gender. Butler argues that power operates to constrain "sex" from the start, delimiting what counts as a viable sex. She offers (...) a clarification of the notion of "performativity" introduced in _Gender Trouble_ and explores the meaning of a citational politics. The text includes readings of Plato, Irigaray, Lacan, and Freud on the formation of materiality and bodily boundaries; "Paris is Burning," Nella Larsen's "Passing," and short stories by Willa Cather; along with a reconsideration of "performativity" and politics in feminist, queer, and radical democratic theory. (shrink)

A new collection of critical essays from bell hooks takes as its theme the deep longing for a critical voice. I explore some motifs that operate across the divergent topics of her essays. She writes of the dangers of commodification, of "reassuring" images, of individualism. I also explore the paths of hooks's uniquely black postmodernism: her critique of various essentialisms, her philosophically important conception of subjectivity, and her beautiful and powerful transformations of multiple discourses.

The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Husserl's last great work, is important both for its content and for the influence it has had on other philosophers. In this book, which remained unfinished at his death, Husserl attempts to forge a union between phenomenology and existentialism. Husserl provides not only a history of philosophy but a philosophy of history. As he says in Part I, "The genuine spiritual struggles of European humanity as such take the form of struggles between (...) the philosophies, that is, between the skeptical philosophies--or nonphilosophies, which retain the word but not the task--and the actual and still vital philosophies. But the vitality of the latter consists in the fact that they are struggling for their true and genuine meaning and thus for the meaning of a genuine humanity.". (shrink)

There is an increasing division between Existentialism and Marxism, despite Jean-Paul Sartre's attempts to bridge these two influential philosophies of the twentieth century. The chief difference lies in the rational and irrational conceptions of the nature of the universe and of society. The expression of this condition has become vehement and widespread, as is indicated in Existentialism versus Marxism. Included in this original and rich anthology are such classical figures as Nietzsche, Marx, and Engels, and such modern thinkers as Sartre, (...) Camus, Marcuse, Lukacs, Schaff, et al. The editors illuminating introduction sets up the battle lines clearly, enabling the reader to understand the meaning and engage in the excitement of the confrontation. (shrink)

Contradictory interpretations have been applied to history-making events that led to the end of the cold war: Václav Havel, using Kierkegaardian terms, called the demise of totalitarianism in east-central Europe an "existential revolution"'' (i.e. an awakening of human responsibility, spirit, and reason), while others hailed it as a victory for the "New World Order." Regardless of one''s point of view, however, it is clear that the global landscape has been dramatically altered. Where once the competition between capitalism and communism provided (...) a basis for establishing political- and self-identity, today, the destructive forces of nationalist identity and religious and secular fundamentalism are filling the void. In his timely and significant new work, Martin J. Matutík synthesizes the critical social theory of J rgen Habermas with the existentialism of Havel and Søren Kierkegaard to present an alternative to the conceptualization of identity based on nationalism that is stoking the flames of civil wars in Europe and racial and ethnic tensions in eastern Europe, the former Soviet Union, and the United States. In so doing, he reinvigorates critical social theory, and points the way toward a multicultural, post-national identity and a democracy capable of resisting both imperial consensus and xenophobic backlash. Offering the most extensive examination of Habermas''s and Kierkegaard''s critiques of nationalist identity available, Postnational Identity dramatically confronts the traditional view of existential philosophy as antisocial and uncritical. This volume shows how Kierkegaardian theory and practice of radically honest communication allows us to rethink the existential in terms of Habermas''s communicative action, and vice versa. As the author explains the foundations of his work in the Preface: Critical theory and existential philosophy, brought together in this book, engender two forms of suspicion of the present age. The critical theorist, such as J rgen Habermas, unmasks the forms in which social and cultural life become systematically distorted by the imperatives of political power and economic gain. The existential critic, like Søren Kierkegaard and Václav Havel, is suspicious of the various ways in which individuals deceive themselves or other people. This study aims to integrate Kierkegaard''s and Havel''s existential critique of motives informing human identity formation with Habermas''s critique of the colonialization of fragmented, anomic modern life by systems of power and money....My argument is that existential critique and social critique complement each other and overcome their respective limitations. Organized into three distinct sections, the book begins with a study of individual and group identity in Habermas''s work on communicative ethics. This section draws on Habermas''s readings of Kant, Hegel, Marx, Kierkegaard, Mead, and Durkheim. Part Two uses Kierkegaard''s existential ethics to broaden Habermas''s notion of identity. The argument proceeds from the performative character of existential individuality to Kierkegaard''s theory and practice of communication, and, finally, to the regulative community ideal projected in his critique of the present age. In the book''s final section, the author addresses the question of identity to the nationalist strife of the present age. Overall, the book sets forth the argument that a move from fundamentalist constructions of identity to postnational, open, and multicultural identity is a critical ideal on which both the existential and socio-political suspicion of the present age converge. Postnational Identity is addressed to the three multicultural audiences that gave it shape: western Europe, eastern Europe, and the United States. One of the first works to treat seriously the existential thought of Václav Havel, the book will hold enormous appeal for students and professionals involved in existential philosophy, critical theory, philosophy, and, more generally, political science, literary theory, communications, and cultural studies. (shrink)

Kristeva points to Montesquieu's esprit général--his notion of the social body as a guaranteed hierarchy of private rights--in this humanistic plea for tolerance and commonality.

. This work will be useful to all who wonder what to do about the largely negative results of postmodern thought.Ó ÑJoseph C. Flay The Resources of Rationality addresses the postmodernist assault on the claim of reason and develops a ...

In his most seminal book, Herbert Marcuse sharply objects to what he saw as pervasive one-dimensional thinking-the uncritical and conformist acceptance of existing structures, norms and behaviours. Originally published in 1964, One Dimensional Man quickly became one of the most important texts in the politically radical sixties. Marcuse's searing indictment of Western society remains as chillingly relevant today as it was at its first writing.

As the first book to analyze the work of Fanon as an existential-phenomenological of human sciences and liberation philosopher, Gordon deploys Fanon's work to illuminate how the "bad faith" of European science and civilization have philosophically stymied the project of liberation. Fanon's body of work serves as a critique of European science and society, and shows the ways in which the project of "truth" is compromised by Eurocentric artificially narrowed scope of humanity--a circumstance to which he refers as the crisis (...) of European Man. In his examination of the roots of this crisis, Gordon explores the problems of historical salvation and the dynamics of oppression, the motivation behind contemporary European obstruction of the advancement of a racially just world, the forms of anonymity that pervade racist theorizing and contribute to "seen invisibility," and the reasons behind the impossibility of a nonviolent transition from colonialism and neocolonialism to post colonialism. (shrink)

Julia Kristeva. alteration has been identified, one is able to detect a similar ferment in the essential writings of other historical periods. A few definitions or clarifications are in order. That there has been a conceptual "revolution" is, 1 believe, ...

While some lament the slide of Western culture into relativism and nihilism and others celebrate the trend as a liberating sort of progress, Charles Taylor calls on us to face the moral and political crises of our time, and to make the most ...

Construction of the Aesthetic intends to recuperate the sphere of the aesthetic from the dialectic of existence: 'not to forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image.'.

In this classic introduction to existentialist thought, French philosopher Simone de Beauvoir’s The Ethics of Ambiguity simultaneously pays homage to and grapples with her French contemporaries, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, by arguing that the freedoms in existentialism carry with them certain ethical responsibilities. De Beauvoir outlines a series of ways of being (the adventurer, the passionate person, the lover, the artist, and the intellectual), each of which overcomes the former’s deficiencies, and therefore can live up to the responsibilities (...) of freedom. Ultimately, de Beauvoir argues that in order to achieve true freedom, one must battle against the choices and activities of those who suppress it. The Ethics of Ambiguity is the book that launched Simone de Beauvoir’s feminist and existential philosophy. It remains a concise yet thorough examination of existence and what it means to be human.--Description from an alternate version. (shrink)

'Search for a Method' is a separate and introductory essay published together with 'Critique of Dialectical Reason'.

Contends that Freud's theory of civilization is substantially sociological, and examines the philosophical and sociological implications of key Freudian ...

An Essay on Liberation outlines the new possibilities for contemporary human liberation.

The result was the Critique of Dialectical Reason, an intellectual masterpiece of the twentieth century, now republished in two volumes with major original ...

The purpose of this volume is to rethink the questions posed by Derrida's writings and his unique philosophical positioning, without reference to the catch phrases that have supposedly summed up deconstruction.

Multiculturalism and “The Politics of Recognition.” An Essay by Charles Taylor with commentary by Amy Gutmann, editor, Steven C. Rockefeller, Michael Walzer, and Susan Wolf.

This new edition of Drucilla Cornell's highly acclaimed book includes a substantial new introduction by the author, which situates the book within current feminist debates. In Beyond Accommodation, Drucilla Cornell offers a highly original vision of what feminist theory can give contemporary women. She challenges essentialist and naturalist accounts of feminine sexuality, arguing that any attempt to affirm woman's value and difference by either emphasizing her maternal role or repudiating the feminine only entraps women, once again, in a container that (...) curtails feminine sexual difference, legitimates the masculine fantasy of woman, and reinstates, rather than dismantles, the gender hierarchy. (shrink)

This anthology is a significant contribution to the debate over the relevance of Martin Heidegger's Nazi ties to the interpretation and evaluation of his philosophical work. Included are a selection of basic documents by Heidegger, essays and letters by Heidegger's colleagues that offer contemporary context and testimony, and interpretive evaluations by Heidegger's heirs and critics in France and Germany.In his new introduction, "Note on a Missing Text," Richard Wolin uses the absence from this edition of an interview with Jacques Derrida (...) as a springboard for examining questions about the nature of authorship and personal responsibility that are at the heart of the book.Richard Wolin is Professor of Modern European Intellectual History and Humanities at Rice University. He is the author of Walter Benjamin, The Politics of Being: The Political Thought of Martin Heidegger, and The Terms of Cultural Criticism: The Frankfurt School, Existentialism and Poststructuralism. (shrink)