LITERATURE AND CULTURAL STUDIES 2019
HI G HL I G H TS IN L ITE R ATURE & CULTURAL STUDI ES Cathay
Deep Time, Dark Times
A Critical Edition EZRA POUND Edited by Timothy Billings, Introduction by Christopher Bush, Foreword by Haun Saussy
On Being Geologically Human DAVID WOOD
“A timely and transformative challenge to confront our responsibilities in the face of climate disaster and the Anthropocene, Deep Time, Dark Times draws insights from Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida to inform our emerging geological consciousness. Playful while serious, sophisticated yet disarmingly genuine, Wood leads us through the conceptual brambles of our planetary plight and raises the stakes for what it means to think philosophically in our time. His lessons on thinking and living geohistorically will be essential reading for environmental humanists, philosophers, and anyone interested in avoiding the worst of our possible futures.”—Ted Toadvine, University of Oregon
“A miracle of poetic reincarnation, Ezra Pound’s Cathay finally gets a comprehensive and thorough treatment in this critical edition. A marvel of scholarship that will be required reading for all students of poetry.”—Yunte Huang Ezra Pound’s Cathay is a masterpiece of modernism, but also of world literature. The muscular precision of images that mark Pound’s translations helped established a modern style for American literature, at the same time creating a thirst for classical Chinese poetry in English. Yet Pound wrote it without knowing any Chinese, relying instead on word-forword “cribs” from notebooks that reveal a remarkable story of sustained cultural exchange. By placing Pound’s final text alongside the Chinese originals and manuscript traces of Pound’s Japanese and American interlocutors, the fully annotated critical edition resituates Cathay as a classic of world literature.
176 PAGES 9780823281350, PAPERBACK, $19.95, £14.99 Thinking Out Loud DECEMBER 2018
Reoccupy Earth: Notes toward an Other Beginning DAVID WOOD
364 PAGES, 7 X 9 9780823281060, HARDBACK, $34.95, £26.99 DECEMBER 2018
Habit rules our lives. And yet climate change and the catastrophic future it portends, makes it clear that we cannot go on like this. Philosophy is about emancipation—from illusions, myths, and oppression. In Reoccupy Earth, the noted philosopher David Wood shows how an approach to philosophy attuned to our ecological existence can suspend the taken-for-granted and open up alternative forms of earthly dwelling. Sharing the earth, as we do, raises fundamental questions about space and time, place and history, territory and embodiment—questions that philosophy cannot directly answer but can help us to frame and to work out for ourselves. Bringing an uncommon lucidity, directness, and even practicality to sophisticated philosophical questions, Wood plots experiential pathways that disrupt our habitual existence and challenge our everyday complacency.
The Unconstructable Earth An Ecology of Separation FRÉDÉRIC NEYRAT Translated by Drew S. Burk
“A vitally important book that stakes out a new position in the environmental humanities.”—Steven Shaviro The Anthropocene announces a post-natural planet that can be remade at will through the prowess of geoengineering. With it, a new kind of power, geopower, takes the entire Earth, in its social, biological and geophysical dimensions, as an object of knowledge, intervention, and governmentality. This shift has been aided, wittingly or not, by theorists of the constructivist turn who have likewise called into question the divide between nature and culture. Against both camps, this book confronts the unconstructable Earth, proposing an “ecology of separation” that acknowledges the wild, subtractive capacity of nature. Neyrat shows what it means to appreciate Earth as an unsubstitutable becoming that always escapes the hubris of those who would remake and master it.
240 PAGES 9780823283538, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99 Groundworks: Ecological Issues in Philosophy and Theology APRIL 2019
Killing Times
The Temporal Technology of the Death Penalty DAVID WILLS
“Killing Times makes an enormous contribution to understanding the logic of capital punishment in its disparate practices, laws, and customs. For the first time we see that capital punishment is not only about retribution through state-imposed death, but it is also and above all about the absolute mastery of time through the creation of a kind of negative prosthesis—technology—that impossibly supplements and completes the human by subtracting and destroying it. This is scholarship and theoretical analysis at the highest level: thorough, wide-ranging, and convincing.”—Allan Stoekl, Pennsylvania State University
256 PAGES, 3 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823282579, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99 Meaning Systems
288 PAGES 9780823283491, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 MARCH 2019 www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m
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HI G HL I G H TS IN L ITE R ATURE & CULTURAL STUDI ES Queer as Camp
Decolonial Love
To camp means to occupy a place and/or time provisionally or under special circumstances. To camp can also mean to queer. And for many children and young adults, summer camp is a formative experience mixed with homosocial structure and homoerotic longing. In Queer as Camp, editors Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason curate a collection of essays and critical memoirs exploring the intersections of “queer” and “camp,” focusing especially on camp as an alternative and potentially nonnormative place and/or time. Highly interdisciplinary in scope, Queer as Camp reflects on camp and Camp with candor, insight, and often humor.
Bringing together theologies of liberation and decolonial thought, Decolonial Love interrogates colonial frameworks that shape Christian thought and legitimize structures of oppression and violence within Western modernity. In response to the historical situation of colonial modernity, the book offers a decolonial mode of theological reflection and names a historical instance of salvation that stands in conflict with Western modernity. Decolonial Love offers to theologians a foothold within the modern/colonial context from which to commit to the sacred and, from a historical encounter with the divine mystery, face up to and take responsibility for the legacies of colonial domination and violence within a struggle to transform reality.
Essays on Summer, Style, and Sexuality Edited by Kenneth B. Kidd and Derritt Mason
Salvation in Colonial Modernity JOSEPH DREXLER-DREIS
256 PAGES, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823283606, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99 MAY 2019
224 PAGES 9780823281879, PAPERBACK, $25.00, £18.99 DECEMBER 2018
Messy Eating
Conversations on Animals as Food Samantha King, R. Scott Carey, Isabel Macquarie, Victoria Millious, and Elaine Power, Editors
The Supermarket of the Visible
Literature on the ethics and politics of food and that on animal-human relationships have infrequently converged. Representing an initial step towards bridging this divide, Messy Eating features interviews with thirteen prominent and emerging scholars about the connections between their academic work and their approach to consuming animals as food. The collection explores how authors working across a range of perspectives—postcolonial, Indigenous, Black, queer, trans, feminist, disability, poststructuralist, posthumanist, and multispecies—weave their theoretical and political orientations with daily, intimate, and visceral practices of food consumption, preparation, and ingestion.
Toward a General Economy of Images PETER SZENDY Translated by Jan Plug
“A gifted writer with real pedagogical talent, Szendy knows just the appropriate dosage of theoretical fine points (which he makes with surgical precision) and shifts register as needed to quite accessible discussions of popular films and television.”—Suzanne Guerlac Images saturate our world now more than ever, constituting the visibility in which we live. The Supermarket of the Visible analyzes this space and the icons that populate it as the culmination of a history of the circulation and general commodification of images and gazes. From the first elevators and escalators, to cinema, all the way down to contemporary eye-tracking techniques that monitor the slightest saccades of our eyes, Szendy offers an entirely novel theory of the intersection of the image and economics.
288 PAGES 9780823283651, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99 JUNE 2019
Reading Sideways
The Queer Politics of Art in Modern American Fiction DANA SEITLER
160 PAGES, 55 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823283576, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99 Thinking Out Loud APRIL 2019
Reading Sideways explores the pivotal role that various art forms played in American literary fiction in direct relation to the politics of gender and sexuality in works of modern American literature. It tracks the crosswise circulation of aesthetic ideas in fiction and argues that at stake in the aesthetic turn of these works was not only the theorization of aesthetic experience, but also an engagement with political arguments about available modes of sociability and sexual expression. To track these engagements, author Dana Seitler performs a method she calls “lateral reading,” a mode of interpretation that moves horizontally through various historical entanglements and across the fields of the arts to make sense of—and see in a new light—their connections, challenges, and productive frictions. 208 PAGES, 18, BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823282616, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 JULY 2019
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L I T E R AT U R E & C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 2 0 1 9
RACE & ETHNIC STUDIES Mapping Memory
Practicing Caste
Visuality, Affect, and Embodied Politics in the Americas KAITLIN M. MURPHY
On Touching and Not Touching ANIKET JAAWARE Foreword by Anupama Rao
In Mapping Memory, Kaitlin M. Murphy investigates the use of memory as a means of contemporary sociopolitical intervention. Mapping Memory focuses specifically on visual case studies, including documentary film, photography, performance, new media, and physical places of memory, from sites ranging from the Southern Cone to Central America and the US-Mexico borderlands. Murphy develops new frameworks for analyzing how visual culture performs as an embodied agent of memory and witnessing, arguing that visuality is inherently performative. By analyzing the performative elements, or strategies, of visual texts – such as embodiment, reenactment, haunting, and the performance of material objects and places, Murphy elucidates how memory is both anchored in and extracted from specific bodies, objects, and places.
“A remarkable exercise in showing what is possible when we attend to caste as if we were confronting it for the first time. . . . In posing caste as a problem for ethics, Jaaware returns to that fundamental question of what it means to be-withothers in a startlingly new manner.”—Anupama Rao, from the Foreword Practicing Caste attempts a fundamental break from the historicist and sociological tradition of caste studies. Engaging with the resources phenomenology, structuralism, and poststructuralism offer to our thinking of the body, Jaaware helps to illuminate the ethical relations that caste entails, especially around its injunctions concerning touching. The resulting insights offer new ways of thinking about sociality that are pertinent not only to India but also to thinking the common on a planetary basis.
208 PAGES, 13 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823282531, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
256 PAGES 9780823282258, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 Commonalities DECEMBER 2018
Alegal
Biopolitics and the Unintelligibility of Okinawan Life ANNMARIA M. SHIMABUKU
“Through an analytic of ‘mixed race,’ Shimabuku offers an incisive indictment of Japan’s middle-class ideology of heteronormativity and racial purity. Provocatively illuminating the recalcitrant possibilities of Okinawan politics and lifeforms beyond law and the State, Alegal must be engaged by everyone concerned with post-1945 Okinawa and fascism in our time.”—Lisa Yoneyama, University of Toronto “Shimabuku examines the complex relationship between the United States and Japan as it played out through the racialized and gendered bodies of Okinawa. While Okinawa may seem at the periphery of two imperial powers, Shimabuku puts it dead center in a brilliant and sharp-eyed account of how zones of alegality are also zones of origin for the law itself.“—James Martel, San Francisco State University
Under Representation
The Racial Regime of Aesthetics DAVID LLOYD
“The rigorous care with which David Lloyd examines and challenges the entanglement of race, representation and the aesthetic is irresistible and indispensable. Under Representation is a major, and singular, achievement.”—Fred Moten, New York University Under Representation shows how the founding texts of aesthetic philosophy ground the racial order of the modern world in our concepts of universality, freedom, and humanity. Late Enlightenment discourse on aesthetic experience proposes a decisive account of the conditions of possibility for universal human subjecthood. The aesthetic forges a powerful “racial regime of representation” whose genealogy runs from Enlightenment thinkers like Kant and Schiller to late Modernist critics like Adorno and Benjamin. Both a genealogy and an account of our present, Under Representation ultimately helps show how a political reading of aesthetics can help us build a racial politics adequate for the problems we face today, one that stakes claims more radical than multicultural demands for representation.
224 PAGES 9780823282654, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99 DECEMBER 2018
The Tongue-Tied Imagination
Decolonizing Literary Modernity in Senegal TOBIAS WARNER
Should a writer work in a former colonial language or in a vernacular? The Tongue-Tied Imagination explores how the language question came to matter. Focusing on Senegal, Warner draws on extensive archival research and an understudied corpus of novels, poetry, and films in both French and Wolof, as well as educational projects and popular periodicals. In tracing the politics of language from colonization through independence to the era of neoliberal development, Warner reveals language debates as a site from which to rethink the terms of world literature and chart a renewed practice of literary comparison.
240 PAGES 9780823282371, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99
320 PAGES, 12 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823284290, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99 MARCH 2019
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POETRY & POETICS Critical Rhythm
Lives of the Dead Poets
“This volume, with incandescent and defamiliarizing rhythms of its own, takes up rhythm as the central, everfugitive term in debates over sound and sense, the visible and the audible, the history of prosodic discourses, and methodological approaches to reading and performance.”— Max Cavitch, University of Pennsylvania Rhythm constitutes an untapped resource for understanding poetry, making legible a range of ways poetry affects us. Considering rhythm’s rich but also problematic roots in nineteenth-century notions of primitive, oral, communal, and sometimes racialized poetics, this book expands the terms through which we understand poetry.
“This is one of the most exquisitely-crafted books I have ever had the privilege of reading. Swann sets out to complicate the idea that biographical fascination is simply retrograde, sentimental, canonizing, or ideological. With the assurance of a deeply felt calling, this book addresses the largest questions that we face as readers of literature.”—Marc Redfield, Brown University “Swann is possessed of a prose style that is both clear and, at times, breath-takingly surprising. A beautifully conceived, organized, and written study.”—Adela Pinch, University of Michigan
The Poetics of a Literary Life Form Ben Glaser and Jonathan Culler, Editors
Keats, Shelley, Coleridge KAREN SWANN
192 PAGES 9780823284177, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99 Lit Z APRIL 2019
Contributors: Derek Attridge, Tom Cable, Jonathan Culler, Natalie Gerber, Ben Glaser, Virginia Jackson, Simon Jarvis, Ewan Jones, Erin Kappeler, Meredith Martin, David Nowell Smith, Yopie Prins, Haun Saussy
Forms of a World
312 PAGES, 9 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823282036, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 Verbal Arts: Studies in Poetics JANUARY 2019
Contemporary Poetry and the Making of Globalization WALT HUNTER
“In a field dominated by the novel, we need smart critics like Walt Hunter to reveal poetry’s very different engagements with politics and economics. From territorial dispossession to environmental devastation, Hunter shows the agonies of globalization prompting subtle and inventive poetic responses.”—Caroline Levine, Cornell University “This smart, engaging, and timely book sets rethinks periodization according to the rhythms of capitalism. Finely written, with many moments of startling beauty and poetic nuance, Forms of a World offers a crucial reassessment of poetry’s importance today.”—Christopher Nealon, Johns Hopkins University
Midden
JULIA BOUWSMA Foreword by Afaa M. Weaver
“Vividly reimagined and gorgeously rendered, Julia Bouwsma’s Midden gives voice to the citizens of Malaga Island, off the coast of Maine, who early in the twentieth century were removed from their homes, their lives destroyed. Bouwsma writes, ‘I tried to write the island / to life.’ In this devastating and beautiful collection, she does just that, as she expands the field of documentary poetics. These poems bear witness to the tragedy of Malaga Island and demand that we remember our country’s violence to people and land. Julia Bouwsma’s voice is eloquent and urgent.”—Nicole Cooley
192 PAGES 9780823282210, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99 JANUARY 2019
96 PAGES, 8 X 9, 4 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823280988, PAPERBACK, $22.00, £16.99 Poets Out Loud
Xamissa
HENK ROSSOUW
“Voices in the singular and plural compel Henk Rossouw’s Xamissa with such ‘ecstatic stride’ as to match the intensity of human spectacle advancing the procession of Cape Town’s history. The collective effect of alternating scenes and incantations reflect an ethical imperative of uncertainty— destabilizing shifts of mood and matter; of the external and internal viewpoint. With formal ambition and acoustic scales of mind, Rossouw confronts a past haunted by racial brutality, even as it imagines an eventual social unity and the durational ‘anyway’ that poetry’s historical imagination is able to contain.”—Roberto Tejada 136 PAGES, 8 X 9, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823281107, PAPERBACK, $24.00, £17.99 Poets Out Loud
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L I T E R AT U R E & C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 2 0 1 9
LITERARY CRITICISM The Two Cultures of English
Literature and the Remains of the Death Penalty
Literature, Composition, and the Moment of Rhetoric JASON MAXWELL
PEGGY KAMUF
“A capstone book. Kamuf ’s scholarship is careful and honest, and the book is a delight to read.”—Diane Rubenstein, Cornell University “This is a superb book, with rich readings of essential texts that offer a fresh start to an urgent but often ignored question of justice. Without moralizing, Kamuf takes a strong position against the death penalty, directly confronting the actual legal, political, ethical, social, and philosophical questions it raises. In one blow, she overhauls the debate and makes us look at what really matters in it. The book will find a wide, hungry, and receptive audience across a range of fields and disciplines.”—Thomas Keenan, Bard College
“The Two Cultures of English takes a new look at the rise of theory in literary studies. Despite myriad claims about breaking down boundaries, theory also enforced some, generally taking the mantle of pure thought in contrast to the practical work of composition. Maxwell focuses on how both met on the terrain of rhetoric. It is one of the first studies that puts the two together in a sustained way, versed in both literary and composition scholarship. Reassessing the recent past, The Two Cultures is an excellent addition to new histories of criticism and theory.”—Jeffrey J. Williams, author of How to Be an Intellectual: Essays on Criticism, Culture, and the University 256 PAGES 9780823282456, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99 JANUARY 2019
176 PAGES 9780823282296, PAPERBACK, $25.00, £18.99 Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory
Maurice Blanchot
Death Now
A Critical Biography CHRISTOPHE BIDENT Translated by John McKeane
Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1944 MAURICE BLANCHOT Translated by Michael Holland
“An essential addition to the library of anyone seriously interested in Maurice Blanchot and the evolutions of literary and philosophical thinking in twentieth-century France.” —Lydia Davis “An event of the first magnitude, illuminating the life and writing of perhaps the most compelling, unsettling, and wondrously enigmatic author of the last century.”—Tom Conley, Harvard University Maurice Blanchot has long inspired writers, artists, and philosophers with some of the most incisive statements of what it meant to experience the traumas and turmoils of the twentieth century. Bident’s magisterial biography provides the first full-length account of Blanchot’s itinerary, drawing on unpublished letters and interviews with the writer’s close friends, while also providing a sophisticated genealogy of his thought.
“The time has come to attend to Blanchot’s early literary and political journalism (his missteps included) which, surprisingly, the first generation of his postwar admirers barely noteds. It reminds us that this major theoretician of literary modernity has never been associated with academia: the newspaper was the site of his first critical exercise. Death Now provides a rich overview of the French literary atmosphere during the fateful final period of the Occupation. It is also unmistakably haunted by the ghost of a Blanchot to come.”—Denis Hollier, New York University 176 PAGES 9780823281794, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99
Ecstasy in the Classroom
Trance, Self, and the Academic Profession in Medieval Paris AYELET EVEN-EZRA
632 PAGES 9780823281756, PAPERBACK, $40.00, £32.00
Can ecstatic experiences be studied with the academic instruments of rational investigation? What kinds of religious illumination are experienced by academically minded people? And what is the specific nature of the knowledge of God that university theologians of the Middle Ages enjoyed compared with other modes of knowing God, such as rapture, prophecy, the beatific vision, or simple faith? Ecstasy in the Classroom explores the interface between academic theology and ecstatic experience in the first half of the thirteenth century, formative years in the history of the University of Paris, medieval Europe’s “fountain of knowledge.” 312 PAGES 9780823281916, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 Fordham Series in Medieval Studies DECEMBER 2018
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LITERARY CRITICISM Systems of Life: Biopolitics, Economics, and
Exterranean
Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political economy, and the still emergent sciences of life in that historical moment, the essays collected here reopen the question of how concepts of animal, vegetable, and human life, among other biological registers, had an impact on the Enlightenment project of thinking politics and economics as a joint enterprise. The volume’s contributors consider politics, economics, and the biological as distinct, semi-autonomous spheres whose various combinations required inventive, sometimes incomplete, acts of conceptual mediation, philosophical negotiation, disciplinary intervention, or aesthetic representation.
“For anyone who might be suffering from Anthropocene fatigue, this is a book to jolt you from your slumbers. What happens to the globe when we shift attention from the outward projection of emissions to extraction? The Earth we thought we knew, and were already mourning, takes on a stunning new critical light.”—Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University Exterranean concerns the extraction of stuff from the Earth. Through a rich archive of nonmodern texts and images from across Europe, Usher offers a bracing riposte to several critical trends in ecological thought. Shifting emphasis from emission to extraction, the book reorients our perspective away from Earthrise-like globes and shows what is gained by opening the planet to depths within.
Literature on the Cusp of Modernity Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag, Editors
Extraction in the Humanist Anthropocene PHILLIP JOHN USHER
280 PAGES, 22 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823281718, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 Forms of Living
240 PAGES, 34 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823284214, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 Meaning Systems MARCH 2019
Poetics of History
Rousseau and the Theater of Originary Mimesis PHILIPPE LACOUE-LABARTHE Translated by Jeff Fort
Novel Shocks
“Now available in Jeff Fort’s impeccable translation, The Poetics of History is the culmination of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s lifetime work on the question of mimesis in Rousseau—a question of crucial importance that had never before been posed or answered in this form. Identifying in Rousseau an onto-technology so radical that it challenges his supposed antitheatricality, The Poetics of History redefines both poetics and history even as it offers a new way of understanding the French reception of Heidegger.”—Andrew Parker, Rutgers University
Throughout the 1950s, a coalition of developers, politicians, and planners bulldozed vast areas of land deemed “slums” or “blighted” to make way for freeways, public and private housing projects, cultural centers, and skyscrapers. While the program was national, New York was ground zero, and the demolition and monumental reconstruction of the city created a distinctive urban sensorium, rooted in the new segregated landscapes of prosperous white private space and poor black public space. Novel Shocks situates these landscapes at the center of the mid-century novel, arguing that James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Patricia Highsmith, Ayn Rand, William Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, and Warren Miller all registered these new urban spaces as traumatic “shocks” that required new aesthetic forms.
Urban Renewal and the Origins of Neoliberalism MYKA TUCKER-ABRAMSON
176 PAGES, 5 X 7 ½ 9780823282333, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99 JANUARY 2019
Ecological Form
System and Aesthetics in the Age of Empire Nathan K. Hensley and Philip Steer, Editors Afterword by Karen Pinkus
208 PAGES 9780823282692, PAPERBACK, $25.00, £18.99 DECEMBER 2018
Ecological Form brings together leading voices in nineteenth century ecocriticism to suture the lingering divide between postcolonial and ecocritical approaches. Together, these essays show how Victorian thinkers used aesthetic form to engage problems of system, interconnection, and dispossession that remain our own. The authors reconsider Victorian literary structures in light of environmental catastrophe; coordinate “natural” questions with sociopolitical ones; and underscore the category of form as a means for generating environmental—and therefore political—knowledge. Ecological Form demonstrates how nineteenth-century thinkers conceptualized the circuits of extraction and violence linking Britain to its global network. Yet the book’s most pressing argument is that this past thought can be a resource for reimagining the present. 256 PAGES, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823282111, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 DECEMBER 2018
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L I T E R AT U R E & C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 2 0 1 9
PHILOSOPHY & THEORY Levels of Organic Life and the Human
The Reproduction of Life Death
An Introduction to Philosophical Anthropology HELMUTH PLESSNER Translated by Millay Hyatt Introduction by J. M. Bernstein
Derrida’s La vie la mort DAWNE MCCANCE
“This is a superbly researched, written, and argued book on two of the most important though neglected aspects of Derrida’s work: his reading of biology and his closely related work on academic institutions. It is a work that anyone who is serious about Derrida will want to read and will have to take into account.”—Michael Naas, DePaul University Based on archival translations of a soon-to-be-published seminar by Jacques Derrida, The Reproduction of Life Death offers an unprecedented study of Derrida’s engagement with molecular biology and genetics. McCance shows how Derrida ties biological accounts of reproduction to the reproductive program of teaching, challenging an auto-reproductive notion of pedagogy, while also reinterpreting the work of psychoanalysis.
“This twentieth-century work was a pioneering effort to articulate an alternative to mechanistic-reductive accounts of life. Neglected for too long, it is now available to a wider audience in a new climate, where it will have its full impact.” —Charles Taylor, Author of A Secular Age This key work by a titan of modern thought draws on phenomenological, biological, and social scientific sources in a systematic account of nature, life, and human existence, including social existence. Initially obscured by the ascent of Heidegger and by the author’s persecution by the Nazis, Plessner’s vision has once again become appreciated by scholars concerned with animality, human dignity, materialism, and the philosophy of cognition, technology, and nature. A powerful and sophisticated account of embodiment, the Levels helps us approach philosophy and social theory together with science, without reducing the former to the latter.
224 PAGES, 4 BLACK AND WHITE, ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823283903, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99 JULY 2019
For the Love of Psychoanalysis
The Play of Chance in Freud and Derrida ELIZABETH ROTTENBERG
448 PAGES, 4 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823283989, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 Forms of Living JULY 2019
“This brilliant, pathbreaking, witty, and lucidly argued book will undoubtedly become a major point of reference—if not the major point of reference—for anyone interested in psychoanalysis and deconstruction for years to come”—Elissa Marder, Emory University “A tour de force of critical writing. Rottenberg has a unique, lively, and witty philosophical voice. She stands out as one of the most interesting scholars working at the intersection of deconstruction and psychoanalysis”—Rebecca Comay, University of Toronto For the Love of Psychoanalysis is a book about what exceeds or resists calculation—in life and in death. Rottenberg examines what emerges from the difference between psychoanalysis and philosophy.
Thinking with Adorno:The Uncoercive Gaze GERHARD RICHTER
“The chapters of this book are among the finest I have ever read on Adorno.”—Daniel Purdy, Pennsylvania State University What Theodor W. Adorno says cannot be separated from how he says it, and what he thinks cannot be isolated from how he thinks it. Richter’s book teaches us to think with Adorno—both alongside him and in relation to his diverse contexts and constellations, from aesthetic theory to political critique, from the problem of judgment to the question of how to lead a right life within a wrong one.
272 PAGES 9780823284108, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 JUNE 2019
240 PAGES 9780823284023, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 Idiom: Inventing Writing Theory JULY 2019
Murderous Consent
On the Accommodation of Violent Death MARC CRÉPON Translated by Michael Loriaux, and Jacob Levi Foreword by James Martel
The Mathematical Imagination
On the Origins and Promise of Critical Theory MATTHEW HANDELMAN
“Against the familiar lament that the inappropriate application of mathematical reasoning abets social reification and instrumental rationality, Matthew Handelman rescues forgotten attempts to argue otherwise. This search for a ‘negative mathematics’ that has critical potential has foreshadowed ways in which the yawning gap between the humanities and STEM fields may be overcome in our digital age.”—Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
“Murderous Consent is a bold and principled argument against the strategic rationality that governs violence in our times. Crépon asks us to consider the myriad ways that consent and complicity sustain murderous acts and policies, arguing that we cannot understand violence without taking into account the consent to violence. This book provocatively helps us to rethink settled forms of ethical reasoning that directly or indirectly license violence and lets us imagine a world in which complicit realism gives way to much needed affirmation of non-violence. An all too timely meeting of ethics and politics.”—Judith Butler
256 PAGES, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823283828, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99 MARCH 2019
224 PAGES 9780823283743, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 Perspectives in Continental Philosophy MAY 2019 www.fo rd h am p re ss .co m
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L I T E R AT U R E & C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 2 0 1 9
L AW
MEDIA STUDIES
Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places
Figuring Violence
Justice Beyond and Between Marianne Constable, Leti Volpp, and Bryan Wagner, Editors
Affective Investments in Perpetual War REBECCA A. ADELMAN
“Figuring Violence is a challenging, highly original contribution to critical research on affect and the visual culture of militarization. Adelman vividly analyses the people and nonhuman animals around whom militarized affect gets assembled in contemporary US culture, scaling the fine granularities of militarized feeling and the larger imaginaries of war-time mediation, and their devastating consequences. This book calls us in and challenges us to take on the struggle against militarized violence and its powerful structures of feeling. It is a critical read for anyone willing to ‘stay with the trouble’ of doing the emotional and political work that de-militarization requires of us.”—Carrie Rentschler, McGill University
“This extraordinary collection is a veritable lost and found of law’s traces. Moving across disciplines, it offers rich and surprising refractions of law’s ephemera: What do we learn about the opacity of governance when we look for justice beyond its expected ‘place’ in the confines of textual or rhetorical jurisprudence? What is revealed when the legal inhabits the sacred, informs the literary, performs geography, polices time, seeps through the agora, regenerates itself within bodies? This indispensable book excavates how seemingly robust juridical processes may teeter in concert with more fragile norms for mobility, status, and human affinity.”—Patricia J. Williams, Columbia Law School For many, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the “wrong places”—sites and spaces where no formal law appears.
352 PAGES, 19 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823281688, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99
The Blind Man
A Phantasmography ROBERT DESJARLAIS
Contributors: Kathryn Abrams, Daniel Boyarin, Wendy Brown, Marianne Constable, Samera Esmeir, Daniel Fisher, Sara Ludin, Saba Mahmood, Rebecca McLennan, Ramona Naddaff, Beth Piatote, Sarah Song, Christopher Tomlins, Leti Volpp, Bryan Wagner
The Blind Man: A Phantasmography examines the complicated forces of perception, imagination, and phantasms of encounter in the contemporary world. In considering photographs he took while he was traveling in France, Desjarlais reflects on a few pictures that show the features of a man, apparently blind, who begs for money at a religious site in Paris. Composed of an intricate weave of text and image, The Blind Man attends to pressing issues in contemporary life: the fraught dimensions of photographic capture; encounters with others and alterity; the politics of looking; media images of violence and abjection; and the nature of fantasy and imaginative construal.
272 PAGES, 28 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823283705, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99 Berkeley Forum in the Humanities MARCH 2019
Administering Interpretation
Derrida, Agamben, and the Political Theology of Law Peter Goodrich and Michel Rosenfeld, Editors
“Peter Goodrich and Michel Rosenfeld underline to important effect the woeful marginality of critical jurisprudence and critical legal interpretation in the contemporary U.S. legal academy, in contrast to transoceanic points of comparison. The collection itself is an effective advertisement for the absurdity of that marginality.”—Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, School of Law
232 PAGES, 64 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS, 9780823281114, PAPERBACK, $29.95, £22.99 Thinking from Elsewhere
Allied Encounters
Contributors: Giovanna Borradori, Marinos Diamantides, Allen Feldman, Stanley Fish, Pierre Legrand, Bernadette Meyler, Michel Rosenfeld, Bernhard Schlink, Jeanne Schroeder, Laurent de Sutter, Katrin Trüstedt, Marco Wan
The Gendered Redemption of World War II Italy MARISA ESCOLAR
Allied Encounters uniquely explores Anglo-American and Italian literary, cinematic and military representations of World War II Italy in order to trace, critique and move beyond the gendered paradigm of redemption that has conditioned understandings of the Allied-Italian encounter. The arrival of the Allies’ global forces in an Italy torn by civil war brought together populations that had long mythologized one another, yet “liberation” did not prove to be the happy ending touted by official rhetoric. Instead of a ‘honeymoon,’ the Allied-Italian encounter in Naples and Rome appeared to be a lurid affair, where the black market reigned and prostitution was the norm. Informed by the historical context as well as their respective traditions, these texts become more than mirrors of the encounter or generic allegories.
352 PAGES, 15 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823283781, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 Just Ideas MAY 2019
248 PAGES, 16 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823284498, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 World War II: The Global, Human, and Ethical Dimension JULY 2019
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JEWISH STUDIES
RENAISSANCE STUDIES
Jewish Studies as Counterlife
Last Acts
“Jewish Studies needs Adam Zachary Newton’s book. Newton enacts interdisciplinarity as a powerful form of critique for and in Jewish Studies, rather than the conservative mode of appropriation-as-retrenchment that it has so frequently become in the post-Theory academy.”—Benjamin Schreier, Pennsylvania State University Jewish Studies offers a unique perspective on the academic humanities because it has spanned disciplinary locations and configurations, from nineteenth-century philology to the emancipatory politics of the Enlightenment, from postwar ethnic pluralism to interdisciplinary cultural studies. Newton harnesses the possibilities offered this evolving collection of forces in order to open, refashion, and exemplify possibilities for a humanities to come.
Last Acts argues that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theater offered important opportunities to practice arts of dying. While theater is often understood as a form of mourning, early modern plays also engage with devotional traditions that understand death less as an occasion for suffering or grief than as an action to be performed, well or badly. Active deaths belie mortality narratives of helplessness and loss and instead suggest how marginalized and constrained subjects might participate in the political, social, and economic management of life. Analyzing death scenes in Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Jonson alongside devotional texts and contemporary biopolitical theory, Last Acts shows how theater reflects, enables, and contests the politicization of life and death.
A Report to the Academy ADAM ZACHARY NEWTON
The Art of Dying on the Early Modern Stage MAGGIE VINTER
224 PAGES, 6 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATION 9780823284252, PAPERBACK, $28.00, £20.99 MAY 2019
256 PAGES, 1 BLACK AND WHITE ILLUSTRATION 9780823283941, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 JUNE 2019
Saint Marks: Words, Images, and What Persists
Jews and the Ends of Theory
JONATHAN GOLDBERG
Shai Ginsburg, Martin Land, and Jonathan Boyarin, Editors
“Saint Marks finds and forges material connections among things, images, and words. In these connections, Goldberg persuades us, the biographical subject exceeds his or her own life, living through matter. The book concerns Venice and its patron saint—what it means to construct the identity of each and then identify the one with the other, as well as the natural, historical, pictorial, and literary forces that undo such constructions. With chapters titled ‘atmospherics,” “gravity,” “stones,” and “secrets,” the book is a magisterial shift of the biographical and historical into the geographical that will appeal to a broad readership across art history and literary studies.”—Amy Knight Powell, University of California, Irvine
“A powerful collection that opens new vistas in our approach to social, cultural, and literary critical theories.”—Seyla Benhabib, Yale University Theory has often been coded as “Jewish”—not merely because Jewish intellectuals have been central participants, but also because certain problematics of modern Jewishness enrich theoretical questions across the humanities. In the range of violence and agency that can attend the appellation “Jew,” Jewishness is revealed as a rhetorical and not just social fact, one tied to profound questions of power, subjectivity, identity, figuration, language, and relation that are also central to modern theory and modern politics.
212 PAGES, 24 COLOR AND 4 B/W ILLUSTRATIONS 9780823282074, PAPERBACK, $32.00, £24.99 DECEMBER 2018
Contributors: Svetlana Boym, Andrew Bush, Sergey Dolgopolski, Jay Geller, Sarah Hammerschlag, Hannan Hever, Martin Land, Martin Jay, James I. Porter, Yehouda Shenhav, Elliot R. Wolfson
Unknowing Fanaticism
Reformation Literatures of Self-Annihilation ROSS LERNER
336 PAGES 9780823281992, PAPERBACK, $35.00, £26.99 DECEMBER 2018
“Lerner presents a thoughtful and penetrating study of how England’s major seventeenth-century writers came to terms with a tradition of prophecy, messianism, and divine grace that can be utopian and critical, but also militant and destructive. In gesturing toward twenty-first century politics Lerner never chains his analyses to the contemporary situation but instead gives us tools to think about jihadism, right wing terror, fundamentalism, and liberation theology.”—Julia Reinhard Lupton, University of California, Irvine The term fanatic, from the European Reformation to today, has never been a stable one. Unknowing Fanaticism rejects the simplified binary of fanatical religion and rational politics, turning to Renaissance literature to demonstrate that fanaticism was integral to how both modern politics and poetics developed. 224 PAGES 9780823283866, PAPERBACK, $30.00, £22.99 APRIL 2019
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L I T E R AT U R E & C U LT U R A L S T U D I E S 2 0 1 9
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