" "Positions brings together three interviews with Derrida, outlining his central concerns and ideas.

Praised for its rare combination of scholarly rigor and imaginative interpretation, _Nietzsche and Philosophy_ has long been recognized as one of the most important analyses of Nietzsche. It is also one of the best introductions to Deleuze's thought, establishing many of his central philosophical positions. In _Nietzsche and Philosophy_, Deleuze identifies and explores three crucial concepts in Nietzschean thought-multiplicity, becoming, and affirmation-and clarifies Nietzsche's views regarding the will to power, eternal return, nihilism, and difference. For Deleuze, Nietzsche challenged conventional philosophical (...) ideas and provided a means of escape from Hegel's dialectical thinking, which had come to dominate French philosophy. He also offered a path toward a politics of difference. In this new edition, Michael Hardt's foreword examines the profound influence of Deleuze's provocative interpretations on the study of Nietzsche, which opened a whole new avenue in postwar thought. (shrink)

The political writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the prophet of the postmodern, are presented here as both the missing dimension of his work and the key to understanding his position within contemporary debate.

Using a theoretical and historical investigation, this study presents a poststructuralist critique of subject-centred reason against the background of the modernity/postmodernity and "information society" debates.

More than any other figure, Friedrich Nietzsche is cited as the philosopher who anticipates and previews the philosophical themes that have dominated French theory since structuralism. Informed by the latest developments in both contemporary French philosophy and Nietzsche scholarship, Alan Schrift's Nietzsche's French Legacy provides a detailed examination and analysis of the way the French have appropriated Nietzsche in developing their own critical projects. Using Nietzsche's thought as a springboard, this study makes accessible the ideas of some of the most (...) important and difficult of contemporary French poststructuralist theorists including Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault and Helene Cixous. Through a careful analysis and close reading of the texts of Nietzsche and French poststructuralism, Schrift illuminates the ways in which Nietzsche's thought prefigures certain poststructuralist motifs. He demonstrates how several dominant themes in contemporary Frenchphilosophy emerge out of Nietzsche's own thinking. As one of the first books to critically examine the work of the new French anti-Nietzschean's, Schrift defends the value of poststructuralism and Nietzsche as critical resources for confronting the present. (shrink)

One of America's foremost philosophers challenges the lost generation of the American Left to understand the role it might play in the great tradition of democratic intellectual labor that started with writers such as Walt Whitman and John Dewey.

In these eloquent essays, articles and lectures, Rorty gives a stimulating summary of his central philosophical beliefs and how they relate to his political ...