970 books match the query 'Movements' and 30 start with d

cover of Dance of the Dialectic: STEPS IN MARX'S METHOD

Dance of the Dialectic

STEPS IN MARX'S METHOD

Bertell Ollman

University of Illinois Press, 2003

Bertell Ollman has been hailed as "this country's leading authority on dialectics and Marx's method" by Paul Sweezy, the editor of Monthly Review and dean of America's Marx scholars. In this book Ollman offers a thorough analysis of Marx's use of dialectical method.
 
Marx made extremely creative use of dialectical method to analyze the origins, operation, and direction of capitalism. Unfortunately, his promised book on method was never written, so that readers wishing to understand and evaluate Marx's theories, or to revise or use them, have had to proceed without a clear grasp of the dialectic in which the theories are framed. The result has been more disagreement over "what Marx really meant" than over the writings of any other major thinker.
 
In putting Marx's philosophy of internal relations and his use of the process of abstraction--two little-studied aspects of dialectics--at the center of this account, Ollman provides a version of Marx's method that is at once systematic, scholarly, clear and eminently useful.
 
Ollman not only sheds important new light on what Marx really meant in his varied theoretical pronouncements, but in carefully laying out the steps in Marx's method makes it possible for a reader to put the dialectic to work in his or her own research. He also convincingly argues the case for why social scientists and humanists as well as philosophers should want to do so. 
 
[more]
cover of Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy

Dead Letters to Nietzsche, or the Necromantic Art of Reading Philosophy

Joanne Faulkner

Ohio University Press, 2010

Dead Letters to Nietzsche examines how writing shapes subjectivity through the example of Nietzsche’s reception by his readers, including Stanley Rosen, David Farrell Krell, Georges Bataille, Laurence Lampert, Pierre Klossowski, and Sarah Kofman. More precisely, Joanne Faulkner finds that the personal identification that these readers form with Nietzsche’s texts is an enactment of the kind of identity-formation described in Lacanian and Kleinian psychoanalysis. This investment of their subjectivity guides their understanding of Nietzsche’s project, the revaluation of values.

Not only does this work make a provocative contribution to Nietzsche scholarship, but it also opens in an original way broader philosophical questions about how readers come to be invested in a philosophical project and how such investment alters their subjectivity.

[more]
cover of Dear Incomprehension: On American Speculative Fiction

Dear Incomprehension

On American Speculative Fiction

Stéphane Vanderhaeghe

University of Alabama Press, 2024

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES

A philosophical and formally inventive inquiry into the experimental terrains of American speculative fiction, where meaning emerges through ambiguity, rupture, and critical refusal.

Dear Incomprehension: On American Speculative Fiction is a thought-provoking exploration of the fascinating field of contemporary speculative fiction, a genre that transcends boundaries and encompasses science fiction, fabulist tales, modern fairy tales, and experimental narratives that challenge the very essence of storytelling and reading.

Written as a philosophical essay that mirrors the unorthodox nature of the texts it analyzes, Dear Incomprehension examines American works that defy traditional narrative devices such as plot, character, logic, and even legibility. Drawing on a number of philosophical theories, among them object-oriented ontology and speculative realism, Vanderhaeghe argues that these unconventional works resist the standard tools of criticism, demanding instead a novel perspective and approach.

An in-depth resource for scholars and students of contemporary literature, philosophy, and digital literary studies, Dear Incomprehension offers a fresh framework for analyzing experimental fiction and alternative modes of meaning-making. It is a must-read for those seeking to grasp the complexities and nuances of American experimental and speculative fiction.

[more]
cover of Dearth: Deconstruction After Speculative Realism. Art and Dwelling

Dearth

Deconstruction After Speculative Realism. Art and Dwelling

Philippe Lynes

Northwestern University Press, 2026

Proposing new insight into the legacies of Derridean thought for contemporary philosophy

In Art and Dwelling, the second volume of his Dearth sequence, Philippe Lynes sheds new light on the most enduring offshoot of the speculative realist movement, object-oriented ontology. Through careful readings of Graham Harman and Timothy Morton, Lynes shows how Jacques Derrida’s seminars offer critical insights into the spacing and distancing that precede and exceed all human practices of art and dwelling, with a deep sensitivity to the ecological and ethico-political consequences that follow.

Dearth: Deconstruction After Speculative Realism argues that Derrida’s seminars on Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot, La Chose (The Thing), anticipated many of the philosophical, literary, and aesthetic questions animating speculative realism today: an anti-anthropocentric critique of Kantian correlationism; an overcoming of the apocalyptic nihilism of extinction through a deeper, affirmative habituation to nothingness; and poignant reflections on the literary and poetic aspects of living and dying in impossible worlds. His is an anti-correlationist plea that resounds now more urgently than ever.

[more]
cover of Dearth: Deconstruction After Speculative Realism. The Nothing and Nothingness

Dearth

Deconstruction After Speculative Realism. The Nothing and Nothingness

Philippe Lynes

Northwestern University Press, 2026

Proposing a radical reconceptualization of deconstruction and nothingness
 
The first of two volumes exploring Jacques Derrida’s prefiguration of speculative realism, The Nothing and Nothingness examines the transcendental naturalism of Ray Brassier and Iain Hamilton Grant and the speculative materialism of Quentin Meillassoux. Philippe Lynes proposes nothing less than a radical reconceptualization of deconstruction as a call to bear witness to nothingness: let the earth be the earth, let nature be nature, and leave them to their reality, secrecy, and withdrawal without us.
 
Dearth: Deconstruction After Speculative Realism argues that Derrida’s seminars on Martin Heidegger and Maurice Blanchot, La Chose (The Thing), anticipated many of the philosophical, literary, and aesthetic questions animating speculative realism today: an anti-anthropocentric critique of Kantian correlationism; an overcoming of the apocalyptic nihilism of extinction through a deeper, affirmative habituation to nothingness; and poignant reflections on the literary and poetic aspects of living and dying in impossible worlds. His is an anti-correlationist plea that resounds now more urgently than ever.

[more]
cover of Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

Decolonizing Science in Latin American Art

Joanna Page

University College London, 2021

An assembly of a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists.

Projects that bring the sciences into art are increasingly being exhibited in galleries and museums across the world. In a surge of publications on the subject, few have focused on regions beyond the Global North. This book assembles a new corpus of art-science projects by Latin American artists, ranging from big-budget collaborations with NASA and MIT to homegrown experiments in artists’ kitchens. Page shows how these artworks also “decolonize” science by resisting the exploitation of the natural world that has attended the creation of knowledge in western contexts. Instead, the artists featured in this volume emphasize the subjectivity and intelligence of other species, staging new forms of collaboration and co-creativity beyond the human. Establishing critical dialogues between Western science and indigenous thought, this book interrogates how artistic practices may communicate, extend, supplement, and challenge scientific ideas.
 
[more]
cover of Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right-to-Die Debate

Deconstructing Dignity

A Critique of the Right-to-Die Debate

Scott Cutler Shershow

University of Chicago Press, 2013

The right-to-die debate has gone on for centuries, playing out most recently as a spectacle of protest surrounding figures such as Terry Schiavo. In Deconstructing Dignity, Scott Cutler Shershow offers a powerful new way of thinking about it philosophically. Focusing on the concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life, he employs Derridean deconstruction to uncover self-contradictory and damaging assumptions that underlie both sides of the debate.

Shershow examines texts from Cicero’s De Officiis to Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals to court decisions and religious declarations. Through them he reveals how arguments both supporting and denying the right to die undermine their own unconditional concepts of human dignity and the sanctity of life with a hidden conditional logic, one often tied to practical economic concerns and the scarcity or unequal distribution of medical resources. He goes on to examine the exceptional case of self-sacrifice, closing with a vision of a society—one whose conditions we are far from meeting—in which the debate can finally be resolved. A sophisticated analysis of a heated topic, Deconstructing Dignity is also a masterful example of deconstructionist methods at work. 
[more]
cover of Deconstruction: An American Institution

Deconstruction

An American Institution

Gregory Jones-Katz

University of Chicago Press, 2021

The basic story of the rise, reign, and fall of deconstruction as a literary and philosophical groundswell is well known among scholars. In this intellectual history, Gregory Jones-Katz aims to transform the broader understanding of a movement that has been frequently misunderstood, mischaracterized, and left for dead—even as its principles and influence transformed literary studies and a host of other fields in the humanities.
​
Deconstruction begins well before Jacques Derrida’s initial American presentation of his deconstructive work in a famed lecture at Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and continues through several decades of theoretic growth and tumult. While much of the subsequent story remains focused, inevitably, on Yale University and the personalities and curriculum that came to be lumped under the “Yale school” umbrella, Deconstruction makes clear how crucial feminism, queer theory, and gender studies also were to the lifeblood of this mode of thought. Ultimately, Jones-Katz shows that deconstruction in the United States—so often caricatured as a French infection—was truly an American phenomenon, rooted in our preexisting political and intellectual tensions, that eventually came to influence unexpected corners of scholarship, politics, and culture.
 
[more]
cover of DeepAesthetics: Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning

DeepAesthetics

Computational Experience in a Time of Machine Learning

Anna Munster

Duke University Press, 2025

Computation has now been reconfigured by machine learning: those technical processes and operations that yoke together statistics and computer science to create artificial intelligence (AI) by furnishing vast datasets to learn tasks and predict outcomes. In DeepAesthetics, Anna Munster examines the range of more-than-human experiences this transformation has engendered and considers how those experiences can be qualitative as well as quantitative. Drawing on process philosophy, Munster approaches computational experience through its relations and operations. She combines deep learning—the subfield of machine learning that uses neural network architectures—and aesthetics to offer a way to understand the insensible and frequently imperceptible forms of nonlinear and continuously modulating statistical function. Attending to the domains and operations of image production, statistical racialization, AI conversational agents, and critical AI art, Munster analyzes how machine learning is operationally entangled with racialized, neurotypical, and cognitivist modes of producing knowledge and experience. She approaches machine learning as events through which a different sensibility registers, one in which AI is populated by oddness, disjunctions, and surprises, and where artful engagement with machine learning fosters indeterminate futures.
[more]
cover of Deja Vu: Aberrations Of Cultural Memory

Deja Vu

Aberrations Of Cultural Memory

Peter Krapp

University of Minnesota Press, 2004

The pitfalls of cultural memory and forgetting, understood through the genealogy of the phenomenon called déjà vu

Referring to a past that never was, déjà vu shares a structure not only with fiction, but also with the ever more sophisticated effects of media technology. Tracing the term from the end of the nineteenth century, when it was first popularized in the pages of the Revue philosophique, Peter Krapp examines the genealogy and history of the singular and unrepeatable experience of déjà vu. This provocative book offers a refreshing counterpoint to the clichéd celebrations of cultural memory and forces us do a double take on the sanctimonious warnings against forgetting so common in our time.

Disturbances of cultural memory—screen memories, false recognitions, premonitions—disrupt the comfort zone of memorial culture: strictly speaking, déjà vu is neither a failure of memory nor a form of forgetting. Krapp’s analysis of such disturbances in literature, art, and mass media introduces, historicizes, and theorizes what it means to speak of an economy of attention or distraction. Reaching from the early psychoanalytic texts of Sigmund Freud to the plays of Heiner Müller, this exploration of the effects of déjà vu pivots around the work of Walter Benjamin and includes readings of kitsch and aura in Andy Warhol’s work, of cinematic violence and certain exaggerated claims about shooting and cutting, of the memorial character of architecture, and of the high expectations raised by the Internet.
[more]
cover of Democratic Art: The New Deal's Influence on American Culture

Democratic Art

The New Deal's Influence on American Culture

Sharon Ann Musher

University of Chicago Press, 2015

Throughout the Great Recession American artists and public art endowments have had to fight for government support to keep themselves afloat. It wasn’t always this way. At its height in 1935, the New Deal devoted $27 million—roughly $461 million today—to supporting tens of thousands of needy artists, who used that support to create more than 100,000 works. Why did the government become so involved with these artists, and why weren’t these projects considered a frivolous waste of funds, as surely many would be today?

In Democratic Art, Sharon Musher explores these questions and uses them as a springboard for an examination of the role art can and should play in contemporary society. Drawing on close readings of government-funded architecture, murals, plays, writing, and photographs, Democratic Art examines the New Deal’s diverse cultural initiatives and outlines five perspectives on art that were prominent at the time: art as grandeur, enrichment, weapon, experience, and subversion. Musher argues that those engaged in New Deal art were part of an explicitly cultural agenda that sought not just to create art but to democratize and Americanize it as well. By tracing a range of aesthetic visions that flourished during the 1930s, this highly original book outlines the successes, shortcomings, and lessons of the golden age of government funding for the arts.
[more]
cover of Derrida and Differance

Derrida and Differance

David Wood and Robert Bernasconi

Northwestern University Press, 1988

A collection of six essays by British and American philosophers, Derrida and Différance represents recent appropriations of Derrida's thought at the Warwick Workshops on Continental Philosophy. With an introductory letter by and interview with Derrida, Derrida and Différance focuses on the celebrated term "différance," a neologism devised by Derrida to denote the influence of differentiation in the structuring of all signification.
[more]
cover of Derrida's Gift, Volume 16

Derrida's Gift, Volume 16

Elizabeth Weed and Ellen Rooney, eds.

Duke University Press, 0

In this special issue of differences, leading feminist theorists acknowledge Derrida’s contribution to feminist theory, discuss the crucial place of difference in both Derridian deconstruction and feminist theory, and reflect on the ethical, professional, and epistemological implications of Derrida’s thought for the discipline of women’s studies.

In bringing together major feminist critics whose work has been touched by the writings of Derrida, this issue both pays tribute to and reflects upon Derrida’s ideas. Among the essayists included, Jane Gallop considers Derrida’s writings on Levinas; Judith Butler reads Derrida’s final interview in Le Monde in 2004; Elizabeth Grosz signals Derrida as a rare philosopher for whom sexual difference was crucial; Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak explores the figure of the mother’s child in Derrida, focusing on the critique of reproductive heteronormativity and the question of agency in feminism; and Joan Wallach Scott argues for the importance of critique in the academy. The issue also includes an edited transcription of a vibrant discussion between feminist theorists and Derrida called “Women in the Beehive: A Seminar with Jacques Derrida,” which took place at Brown University’s Pembroke Center for Teaching and Research on Women in 1984.

Contributors. Fran Bartkowski, Anne-Emmanuelle Berger, Susan Bernstein, Judith Butler, Pheng Cheah, Drucilla Cornell, Jane Gallop, Elizabeth Grosz, Peggy Kamuf, Christie McDonald, Joan Wallach Scott, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

[more]
cover of Destined for Liberty: The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II

Destined for Liberty

The Human Person in the Philosophy of Karol Wojtyla/John Paul II

Jaroslaw Kupczak, O.P.

Catholic University of America Press, 2000

In this compelling new work, Jaroslaw Kupczak, O.P., presents a complete introduction to John Paul II's theory of the human person
[more]
cover of Diagramming Devotion: Berthold of Nuremberg’s Transformation of Hrabanus Maurus’s Poems in Praise of the Cross

Diagramming Devotion

Berthold of Nuremberg’s Transformation of Hrabanus Maurus’s Poems in Praise of the Cross

Jeffrey F. Hamburger

University of Chicago Press, 2020

During the European Middle Ages, diagrams provided a critical tool of analysis in cosmological and theological debates. In addition to drawing relationships among diverse areas of human knowledge and experience, diagrams themselves generated such knowledge in the first place. In Diagramming Devotion, Jeffrey F. Hamburger examines two monumental works that are diagrammatic to their core: a famous set of picture poems of unrivaled complexity by the Carolingian monk Hrabanus Maurus, devoted to the praise of the cross, and a virtually unknown commentary on Hrabanus’s work composed almost five hundred years later by the Dominican friar Berthold of Nuremberg. Berthold’s profusely illustrated elaboration of Hrabnus translated his predecessor’s poems into a series of almost one hundred diagrams. By examining Berthold of Nuremberg’s transformation of a Carolingian classic, Hamburger brings modern and medieval visual culture into dialogue, traces important changes in medieval visual culture, and introduces new ways of thinking about diagrams as an enduring visual and conceptual model.
[more]
cover of Dialectic and Dialogue: Plato's Practice of Philosophical Inquiry

Dialectic and Dialogue

Plato's Practice of Philosophical Inquiry

Francisco J. Gonzalez

Northwestern University Press, 1998

Dialectic and Dialogue seeks to define the method and the aims of Plato's dialectic in both the "inconclusive" dialogues and the dialogues that describe and practice a method of hypothesis. Departing from most treatments of Plato, Gonzalez argues that the philosophical knowledge at which dialectic aims is nonpropositional, practical, and reflexive. The result is a reassessment of how Plato understood the nature of philosophy.
[more]
cover of Dialogue on the Infinity of Love

Dialogue on the Infinity of Love

Tullia d'Aragona

University of Chicago Press, 1997

Celebrated as a courtesan and poet, and as a woman of great intelligence and wit, Tullia d'Aragona (1510–56) entered the debate about the morality of love that engaged the best and most famous male intellects of sixteenth-century Italy. First published in Venice in 1547, but never before published in English, Dialogue on the Infinity of Love casts a woman rather than a man as the main disputant on the ethics of love.

Sexually liberated and financially independent, Tullia d'Aragona dared to argue that the only moral form of love between woman and man is one that recognizes both the sensual and the spiritual needs of humankind. Declaring sexual drives to be fundamentally irrepressible and blameless, she challenged the Platonic and religious orthodoxy of her time, which condemned all forms of sensual experience, denied the rationality of women, and relegated femininity to the realm of physicality and sin. Human beings, she argued, consist of body and soul, sense and intellect, and honorable love must be based on this real nature.

By exposing the intrinsic misogyny of prevailing theories of love, Aragona vindicates all women, proposing a morality of love that restores them to intellectual and sexual parity with men. Through Aragona's sharp reasoning, her sense of irony and humor, and her renowned linguistic skill, a rare picture unfolds of an intelligent and thoughtful woman fighting sixteenth-century stereotypes of women and sexuality.
[more]
cover of Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 2, 1928-29

Diary of a Philosophy Student

Volume 2, 1928-29

Simone de Beauvoir; Translation by Barbara Klaw; Edited by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, Margaret A. Simons, and Marybeth Timmermann

University of Illinois Press, 2021

Simone de Beauvoir, still a teen, began a diary while a philosophy student at the Sorbonne. Written in 1926-27—before Beauvoir met Jean-Paul Sartre—the diaries reveal previously unknown details about her life and times and offer critical insights into her early intellectual interests, philosophy, and literary works.

Presented for the first time in translation, this fully annotated first volume of the Diary includes essays from Barbara Klaw and Margaret A. Simons that address its philosophical, historical, and literary significance. It remains an invaluable resource for tracing the development of Beauvoir’s independent thinking and her influence on philosophy, feminism, and the world.

[more]
cover of Diary of a Philosophy Student: Volume 3, 1926-30

Diary of a Philosophy Student

Volume 3, 1926-30

Simone de Beauvoir. Translation by Barbara Klaw. Edited by Barbara Klaw, Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir, and Margaret A. Simons with Marybeth Timmermann. Foreword by Sylvie Le Bon de Beauvoir

University of Illinois Press, 2024

Written between the age of eighteen and twenty-one, the entries in the third volume of Diary of a Philosophy Student take readers into Simone de Beauvoir’s thoughts while illuminating the people and ideas swirling around her. The pages offer rare insights into Beauvoir’s intellectual development; her early experiences with love, desire, and freedom; and relationships with friends like Élisabeth “Zaza” Lacoin, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It also presents Beauvoir’s shocking account of Jean-Paul Sartre’s sexual assault of her during their first sexual encounter--a revelation certain to transform views of her life and philosophy.

In addition, the editors include a wealth of important supplementary material. Barbara Klaw provides a detailed consideration of the Diary’s role in the development of Beauvoir’s writing style by exploring her use of metanarrative and other literary techniques, part of a process of literary creation that saw Beauvoir use the notebooks to cultivate her talent. Margaret A. Simons’s essay places the assault by Sartre within an appraisal of Beauvoir’s complicated legacy for #MeToo while suggesting readers engage with the diary through the lens of trauma.

[more]
cover of Dickey Chapelle Under Fire: Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action

Dickey Chapelle Under Fire

Photographs by the First American Female War Correspondent Killed in Action

John Garofolo

Wisconsin Historical Society Press, 2026

Striking photographs and stories from more than two decades on the frontlines by a groundbreaking photojournalist—and the first female American war correspondent to be killed in action.

In 1941, twenty-two-year-old Georgette "Dickey" Chapelle sold her first photo essay to Look magazine. A year later, with World War II underway, she was photographing American soldiers in combat training in Panama. By the end of the war, she had captured the devastation at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and in the ensuing decades, Dickey and her camera were on the scene at many of the world’s hotspots—from Cuba and the Dominican Republic to Algeria and Lebanon to Vietnam and Laos. Dickey Chapelle Under Fire exposes her remarkable story and shares over 150 stunning images from her extraordinary career as a photojournalist.

In the male-dominated world of war journalism, Chapelle fought to be taken seriously. She eventually earned the respect of many of her male colleagues and broke down barriers for future generations of female journalists. She embedded herself with military units on frontlines around the globe, capturing not only the horrors of war but also the camaraderie and everyday routines of service men and women.

Always one to follow the action, Chapelle traveled with Algerian rebels across the North African desert and with Fidel Castro through the jungles of Cuba. She spent two months in a Hungarian prison after being caught smuggling aid to refugees fleeing a Soviet invasion. Beginning in 1961, Chapelle set her lens and viewfinder on Southeast Asia, capturing the growing conflict there, until she was killed while on patrol with marines in Vietnam in April 1965—making her the first female American war correspondent to be killed in action.

For twenty-five years, Chapelle's photographs graced the pages of National Geographic, the National Observer, Life, and other major publications. Despite her tragic end, Chapelle’s tenacity, courage, and compassion shine throughout her work, highlighting the human impact of war while revealing the larger stories beyond the battlefield. Her legacy lives on through this powerful collection. 

[more]
cover of Discovering Existence with Husserl

Discovering Existence with Husserl

Emmanuel Levinas

Northwestern University Press, 1997

Contemporary philosophers are increasingly turning to the work of Emmanuel Levinas to bring a consideration of ethics into their own thinking. As an exponent of the phenomenological tradition, Levinas ranks with Heidegger and Sartre; as a disciple of Husserl, he was one of the most independent and original interpreters, testifying to the fruitfulness of Husserl's phenomenology.

In collecting almost all of Levinas's articles on Husserlian phenomenology, this volume gathers together a wealth of thoughtful exposition and interpretation by one of the most important European philosophers of the twentieth century. Levinas's thought is relevant to a broad variety of disciplines and concerns. This volume serves as a reliable introduction for the beginning student, as well as satisfying the expert's more demanding and critical desire for insight into the complexities of Levinas's thought.
[more]
cover of Disorienting Phenomenology: Queer Space and Trans Life

Disorienting Phenomenology

Queer Space and Trans Life

Eden Kinkaid

University of Minnesota Press, 2026

Rethinking space from the ground up through trans theory, philosophy, and radical possibility

Disorienting Phenomenology takes as its point of departure the trans mundane: entering a public restroom, moving through airport security, navigating professional spaces. These ordinary yet unsettling encounters become portals into urgent philosophical questions about space, embodiment, perception, power, and violence. Attending closely to how trans people experience everyday life, Eden Kinkaid shows that space is never neutral. It is felt, negotiated, and contested at the level of the body, shaping one’s capacities, safety, and sense of self.

Weaving together philosophy, queer and trans studies, geography, and personal narrative, Kinkaid develops an intersectional theory of space grounded in lived experience. They bring the foundational spatial theories of Henri Lefebvre together with critical phenomenologies of gender, race, and disability to demonstrate how systems of oppression are built into the environments we inhabit, configuring movement and constraining possibility for minoritized people. Bold and interdisciplinary, Disorienting Phenomenology offers vital conceptual tools for understanding—and transforming—the worlds we move through each day.

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly.

[more]
cover of Dissemination

Dissemination

Jacques Derrida

University of Chicago Press, 1981

"The English version of Dissemination [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson . . . . Derrida's central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosophy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives—against the grain of language—to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature—on the other hand—flaunts its own meretriciousness, abandons itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In Dissemination—more than any previous work—Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to 'deconstruct' both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to the literature of truth."—Peter Dews, New Statesman
[more]
cover of Dissemination

Dissemination

Jacques Derrida

University of Chicago Press, 1981

"The English version of Dissemination [is] an able translation by Barbara Johnson . . . . Derrida's central contention is that language is haunted by dispersal, absence, loss, the risk of unmeaning, a risk which is starkly embodied in all writing. The distinction between philosophy and literature therefore becomes of secondary importance. Philosophy vainly attempts to control the irrecoverable dissemination of its own meaning, it strives—against the grain of language—to offer a sober revelation of truth. Literature—on the other hand—flaunts its own meretriciousness, abandons itself to the Dionysiac play of language. In Dissemination—more than any previous work—Derrida joins in the revelry, weaving a complex pattern of puns, verbal echoes and allusions, intended to 'deconstruct' both the pretension of criticism to tell the truth about literature, and the pretension of philosophy to the literature of truth."—Peter Dews, New Statesman
[more]
cover of Distracted: A Philosophy of Cars and Phones

Distracted

A Philosophy of Cars and Phones

Robert Rosenberger

University of Minnesota Press, 2024

Applying insights from philosophy and cognitive science to address the urgent issue of smartphone-induced distracted driving
 

Although the dangers of texting while driving are widely known, many people resist the idea that phone usage will impair their driving. And connectivity features in new cars have only made using technology behind the wheel more tempting. What will it take to change people’s minds and behavior? Robert Rosenberger contends that a better understanding of why this combination of technologies is so dangerous could effectively adjust both habits and laws.

 

Rosenberger brings together ideas from philosophy and cognitive science to leverage a postphenomenological perspective that reveals how our smartphones make us such bad drivers. Reviewing decades of empirical studies in cognitive science, he shows that we have developed habits of perception regarding our compulsive technology use—habits that may wrest our attention away from the road. 

 

Distracted develops innovative concepts for understanding technology-related habits and the ways that our relationships to our devices influence how we perceive the world. In turn, these ideas can help drivers be more cognizant of the effect that smartphone usage has on their perceptions, better inform efforts to enact stricter regulations, and help us all to be more reflective about the technologies that shape our lives.

[more]
cover of Domesticating Brown: Movements of Racial Imagination

Domesticating Brown

Movements of Racial Imagination

Christopher B. Patterson

Duke University Press, 2026

Domesticating Brown interrogates the slippery senses that brownness as a racial form has manifested over time, charting its transitions across historical colonial contexts and into the transpacific dynamics of contemporary empire. Christopher B. Patterson rethinks universalist definitions of race to consider the constant movements in racial contexts, meanings, and practices that “brownness” reveals: as a site for the ungovernable brown mass, as peoples marked for domestication through strategies of colonial containment, and as the complex shades that reveal troubling genealogies and shameful intimacies. Tracing the emergences and transformations of brownness in various contexts of transpacific encounter—from the Mongol Empire to Filipino plantation migration in Hawaiʻi, from the imperial management of Hong Kong to contemporary brown authorship—Domesticating Brown explores how colonial subjects and other marginalized peoples have strategized ways of resisting and reversing dominating notions of brownness through art, story, and embodied difference.
[more]
cover of Don't Act, Just Dance: The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture

Don't Act, Just Dance

The Metapolitics of Cold War Culture

Catherine Gunther Kodat

Rutgers University Press, 2014

At some point in their career, nearly all the dancers who worked with George Balanchine were told “don’t act, dear; just dance.” The dancers understood this as a warning against melodramatic over-interpretation and an assurance that they had all the tools they needed to do justice to the steps—but its implication that to dance is already to act in a manner both complete and sufficient resonates beyond stage and studio. 

Drawing on fresh archival material, Don’t Act, Just Dance places dance at the center of the story of the relationship between Cold War art and politics. Catherine Gunther Kodat takes Balanchine’s catch phrase as an invitation to explore the politics of Cold War culture—in particular, to examine the assumptions underlying the role of “apolitical” modernism in U.S. cultural diplomacy. Through close, theoretically informed readings of selected important works—Marianne Moore’s “Combat Cultural,” dances by George Balanchine, Merce Cunningham, and Yuri Grigorovich, Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus, and John Adams’s Nixon in China—Kodat questions several commonly-held beliefs about the purpose and meaning of modernist cultural productions during the Cold War. 

Rather than read the dance through a received understanding of Cold War culture, Don’t Act, Just Dance reads Cold War culture through the dance, and in doing so establishes a new understanding of the politics of modernism in the arts of the period. 
[more]
cover of Dreamland of Humanists: Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School

Dreamland of Humanists

Warburg, Cassirer, Panofsky, and the Hamburg School

Emily J. Levine

University of Chicago Press, 2013

Deemed by Heinrich Heine a city of merchants where poets go to die, Hamburg was an improbable setting for a major intellectual movement. Yet it was there, at the end of World War I, at a new university in this commercial center, that a trio of twentieth-century pioneers in the humanities emerged. Working side by side, Aby Warburg, Ernst Cassirer, and Erwin Panofsky developed new avenues in art history, cultural history, and philosophy, changing the course of cultural and intellectual history in Weimar Germany and throughout the world.

In Dreamland of Humanists, Emily J. Levine considers not just these men, but the historical significance of the time and place where their ideas took form. Shedding light on the origins of their work on the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, Levine clarifies the social, political, and economic pressures faced by German-Jewish scholars on the periphery of Germany’s intellectual world. By examining the role that context plays in our analysis of ideas, Levine confirms that great ideas—like great intellectuals—must come from somewhere.
 
[more]
cover of Duns Scotus on Time and Existence

Duns Scotus on Time and Existence

John Duns Scotus

Catholic University of America Press, 2014

An English translation of John Duns Scotus's The Questions on Aristotle's "De Interpretatione" including an extensive commentary on some of Scotus's more difficult ideas.
[more]
cover of Dürer's Coats: Renaissance Men and Material Cultures of Social Recognition

Dürer's Coats

Renaissance Men and Material Cultures of Social Recognition

Ulinka Rublack

Central European University Press, 2025

During the Renaissance, clothing became more and more elaborately decorated and expensive. It often emphasised the privilege of the male elite. Yet clothing could also subvert or reshape conventional cultural norms. Ulinka Rublack argues that cloaks and gowns gained in importance during this period and were among the things that mediated social relationships for centuries to come. An investigation into outerwear opens a new window into how people and things were connected in the Renaissance and how important clothing was in shaping subjectivities in everyday life. Using the example of Dürer and his wife as emerging social types, the study follows the artist and the men and women of his time through the streets of Venice, Nuremberg, Augsburg and Antwerp.
[more]