stanford university press apr 1998 (10 Ergebnisse)

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - The work of Giorgio Agamben, one of Italy's most important and original philosophers, has been based on an uncommon erudition in classical traditions of philosophy and rhetoric, the grammarians of late antiquity, Christian theology, and modern philosophy. Recently, Agamben has begun to direct his thinking to the constitution of the social and to some concrete, ethico-political conclusions concerning the state of society today, and the place of the individual within it.In Homo Sacer, Agamben aims to connect the problem of pure possibility, potentiality, and power with the problem of political and social ethics in a context where the latter has lost its previous religious, metaphysical, and cultural grounding. Taking his cue from Foucault's fragmentary analysis of biopolitics, Agamben probes with great breadth, intensity, and acuteness the covert or implicit presence of an idea of biopolitics in the history of traditional political theory. He argues that from the earliest treatises of political theory, notably in Aristotle's notion of man as a political animal, and throughout the history of Western thinking about sovereignty (whether of the king or the state), a notion of sovereignty as power over 'life' is implicit.The reason it remains merely implicit has to do, according to Agamben, with the way the sacred, or the idea of sacrality, becomes indissociable from the idea of sovereignty. Drawing upon Carl Schmitt's idea of the sovereign's status as the exception to the rules he safeguards, and on anthropological research that reveals the close interlinking of the sacred and the taboo, Agamben defines the sacred person as one who can be killed and yet not sacrificed-a paradox he sees as operative in the status of the modern individual living in a system that exerts control over the collective 'naked life' of all individuals.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - This volume of twelve essays focuses on two interrelated issues. First, it addresses the historical and cultural determinants that have given rise to what frequently has been described as 'the French exception,' the unusually conflictual French political process inherited from the revolutionary past in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and its accompanying avant-gardism in artistic, literary, and philosophical practice, both of which distinguish France from other European countries.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - What is a technical object At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.

Taschenbuch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - In the early 1890's, an armed rebellion fueled by religious fervor erupted over a wide area of northwestern Mexico. At the center of the outburst were a few hundred farmers from the village of Tomochic and a teenage folk saint named Teresa, who was ministering to thousands of people throughout the area. When the villagers proclaimed, 'We will obey no one but God!,' the Mexican government exiled 'Santa Teresa' to the United States and trained its guns and bayonets on the farmers. A bloody confrontation ensued-God against government-that is still remembered in song, literature, films, and civic celebrations.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'The inertia of language,' declares Geoffrey Hill, is also 'the coercive force of language.' Good poets write against coercion, and Against Coercion is essentially about the power of words. Looking at our most highly organized form of words, poems, and how they work, it observes how that work speaks--always indirectly--to historical, ethical, and aesthetic questions, including matters of culture, identity, and feminism. It also demonstrates how to read poetry--how to go beyond an elementary (and usually boring) approach, thereby recovering the sheer pleasure of good poems and resisting the coercion of language, that power of words to do ill.A study in advanced poetics, Against Coercion pays close attention to the intricate workings of poems, building larger claims on specific evidence and enjoying the praxis of master writers. The focus is on modern poets, from the early moderns (Stevens, Eliot) through to mid-century (Bishop) and recent (Merrill, Hill). Some chapters reach back to Milton, Wordsworth, and Aristophanes, however, while two even widen to encompass prose fiction.The opening section centers on matters of empire, war, and nation. It includes chapters on Eliot, Keynes, and empire, and on Geoffrey Hill and Elizabeth Bishop (with reflections on language and war). The second section moves to questions of culture and the uses of memory, notably in allusion to earlier writers. It examines what our collective memory chooses to retain and to forget. The range of reference here extends from the King James Bible through Milton and Wordsworth to A. R. Ammons.In the third section, poetry is seen at play, offering those happy occasions when work and play become one. Chapters treat the concept of play in Milton (including some feminist questions), the poetics of punning in Stevens and Bishop, riddles both large and small, in Stevens, a proposed typology of riddles, and a newly recovered Graeco-Latin pun in Alice in Wonderland. The final section moves to practical criticism and offers a new theory of ghost rhymes, a new suggestion of a formula in dream literature, a model for reading a poem, using John Hollander's 'Owl' as an illustration, and, taking Stevens as an example, a pedagogical argument that emphasizes the importance of logic and thought in poetry.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Agamben's intuition, chronicle and meditation are fascinating.'--The Review of Politics'The story of homo sacer is certainly worth reading because of its suggestiveness and provocations.'--Modernism/Modernity.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - Pastoral Process draws a basic distinction between two aspects of the pastoral ideal: the Arcadian pastoral, which locates the unspoiled paradise in space, apart from the complexities of city and court, and finds it accessible for limited periods of recuperation and reorientation; and the Golden Age mode, which locates the ideal pastoral life in time gone by, always already lost as soon as it is apprehended as paradise.The author's central aim is an archaeology of the nostalgia-based pastoral of the vanished Golden Age. On the surface level, her close readings of certain Renaissance poems and sequences--Spenser's Shepheardes Calender, Marvell's Mower poems, and Milton's Lycidas--clarify 'pastoral process' the dislocating transition from innocence to experience, from secure centeredness in a comfortable, self-mirroring world to a new condition of division, displacement, and alienation. The advent of individuation and sexual desire, and the internalization of undirectional time and universal death, transform the pastoral paradise into a wasteland or leave the newly self-conscious protagonist outside his former idyll, looking in.Excavation beneath these initial readings uncovers the master myth of Eden that informs them, as well as parallel narratives of loss such as the various accounts of the Golden Age or the tale in Plato's Symposium of beings fallen from original wholeness into fragmentation and lack. Ramifications of the master myth include Christian and Jewish commentaries that helped shape traditional understandings of the story, and especially the subversive tradition that persisted, against the strong tide of orthodox interpretation, in reading the Fall of Man in terms of childhood wholeness breaking down in the wake of sexual knowledge and the burden of full, separated consciousness.Below the poetic utterances and the shaping myths lies the deeper archaeological stratum of the unconscious and the mechanisms that construct, always retrospectively and often counterfactually, a blissful childhood. Beyond Freud's own theories, later offshoots and reworkings of his psychology are invoked to explore psychological experiences and needs that inform both myths and poems: Jung, the developmental psychologists, and especially Lacan. The study concludes by returning to the surface to consider the pastoral impulse in historical terms, as a defining moment in the careers of Spenser, Marvell, and Milton and as a special urgency in the early modern times they inhabited.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - What is a technical object At the beginning of Western philosophy, Aristotle contrasted beings formed by nature, which had within themselves a beginning of movement and rest, and man-made objects, which did not have the source of their own production within themselves. This book, the first of three volumes, revises the Aristotelian argument and develops an innovative assessment whereby the technical object can be seen as having an essential, distinct temporality and dynamics of its own.The Aristotelian concept persisted, in one form or another, until Marx, who conceived of the possibility of an evolution of technics. Lodged between mechanics and biology, a technical entity became a complex of heterogeneous forces. In a parallel development, while industrialization was in the process of overthrowing the contemporary order of knowledge as well as contemporary social organization, technology was acquiring a new place in philosophical questioning. Philosophy was for the first time faced with a world in which technical expansion was so widespread that science was becoming more and more subject to the field of instrumentality, with its ends determined by the imperatives of economic struggle or war, and with its epistemic status changing accordingly. The power that emerged from this new relation was unleashed in the course of the two world wars.Working his way through the history of the Aristotelian assessment of technics, the author engages the ideas of a wide range of thinkers--Rousseau, Husserl, and Heidegger, the paleo-ontologist Leroi-Gourhan, the anthropologists Vernant and Detienne, the sociologists Weber and Habermas, and the systems analysts Maturana and Varela.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'For almost fifty years, Wrong may well have been the single most consistent voice for good sense and moderation in both the fevered circles of the New York intelligentsia and the discipline of sociology. He brings to his analyses a unique combination of historical perspective and a temperamental inclination to cut through the hype. As a result, whether he is reconsidering past events or arguments (McCarthyism, Hannah Arendt's characterization of totalitarianism, David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd) or assessing current events and fads (rational choice theory, postmodernism, Allan Bloom's lament about the state of the 'American Mind'), Wrong invariably ends up providing a new, balanced perspective where none existed before.' --Axel van den Berg, McGill University.

Buch. Zustand: Neu. Neuware - 'Vanderwood employs outstanding scholarship to offer a sophisticated and utterly fascinating analysis not only of the events at Tomochic but also of their broader historical context.'--Cheryl English Martin, University of Texas at El Paso'Vanderwood weaves a well-researched story of Temochic village from its indigenous and colonial past to the siege of 1892 and beyond . . . a logical, fascinating narrative that the experienced scholar, as well as the new reader to the field, will find rewarding.' --The Journal of Interdisciplinary History.