Maurice Blanchot: The Book to Come (1959‒) [EN, PT]
Filed under book | Tags: · book, literary theory, literature, philosophy, writing
“During the last half of the twentieth century in France, Maurice Blanchot was a key figure in exploring the relation between literature and philosophy. He developed early on a distinctive, limpid form of essay writing, and his essays, in form and substance, left their unmistakable imprint on the work of the most distinguished French theorists. The writings of Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida, for example, are hardly imaginable without Blanchot.
The Book to Come gathers together essays originally published in La Nouvelle Revue Française. Not a random collection of essays, this book is organized into four sections: “the secret of literature”; literature as exigence and as meaning; literature and the novel; and the future of writing and of the book. The authors discussed constitute a veritable repertoire: Rousseau, Proust, Artaud, Brach, Musil, James, Beckett, Bataille, Mallarmé, Joubert, and Claudel, among others.”
Originally published as Le livre à venir, Gallimard, Paris, 1959
English edition
Translated by Charlotte Mandell
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2002
Meridian: Crossing Aesthetics series
ISBN 0804742235
267 pages
Review (Mark Cohen, 2004)
The Book to Come (English, trans. Charlotte Mandell, 2002, 15 MB)
O livro por vir (Portuguese, trans. Leyla Perrone-Moises, 2005, 7 MB)
Peter K. J. Park: Africa, Asia, and the History of Philosophy: Racism in the Formation of the Philosophical Canon, 1780–1830 (2013)
Filed under book | Tags: · africa, asia, china, egypt, empiricism, history of philosophy, idealism, india, pantheism, persia, philosophy, race, racism, religion, science
“A historical investigation of the exclusion of Africa and Asia from modern histories of philosophy.
In this provocative historiography, Peter K. J. Park provides a penetrating account of a crucial period in the development of philosophy as an academic discipline. During these decades, a number of European philosophers influenced by Immanuel Kant began to formulate the history of philosophy as a march of progress from the Greeks to Kant—a genealogy that supplanted existing accounts beginning in Egypt or Western Asia and at a time when European interest in Sanskrit and Persian literature was flourishing. Not without debate, these traditions were ultimately deemed outside the scope of philosophy and relegated to the study of religion. Park uncovers this debate and recounts the development of an exclusionary canon of philosophy in the decades of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. To what extent was this exclusion of Africa and Asia a result of the scientization of philosophy? To what extent was it a result of racism?
This book includes the most extensive description available anywhere of Joseph-Marie de Gérando’s Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, Friedrich Schlegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy, Friedrich Ast’s and Thaddä Anselm Rixner’s systematic integration of Africa and Asia into the history of philosophy, and the controversy between G. W. F. Hegel and the theologian August Tholuck over ‘pantheism.'”
Review (Carlin Romano, Chronicle of Higher Education, 2014)
Discussion (Warp, Weft, and Way blog, Oct 2014)
Publisher SUNY Press, 2013
Philosophy and Race series
ISBN 9781438446417
237 pages
Jean-Luc Nancy: The Inoperative Community (1986–) [EN, ES, CR, RO]
Filed under book | Tags: · community, literature, love, myth, philosophy, politics, subjectivity, writing
“In this powerful work, Jean-Luc Nancy examines community as an idea that has dominated modern thought and traces its relation to concepts of experience, discourse, and the individual. Contrary to popular Western notions of community, Nancy shows that it is neither a project of fusion nor production. Rather, he argues, community can be defined through the political nature of its resistance against immanent power.”
Publisher Christian Bourgois, Paris, 1986
New edition, 2004
ISBN 22670008939
278 pages
English edition
Edited by Peter Connor
Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney
Foreword by Christopher Fynsk
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1991
Theory and History of Literature series, 76
176 pages
Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (FR)
WorldCat (EN)
The Inoperative Community (English, ed. Peter Connor, 1991)
La comunidad inoperante (Spanish, trans. Juan Manuel Garrido Wainer, 2000)
Dva ogleda. Razdjelovljena zajednica. O singularnom pluralnom bitku (Croatian, trans. Tomislav Medak, 2003)
Comunitatea absentă (Romanian, trans. Emilian Cioc, 2005, 69 MB)