Dimitris Vardoulakis (ed.): Spinoza Now (2011)

“What does it mean to think about, and with, Spinoza today? This collection, the first broadly interdisciplinary volume dealing with Spinozan thought, asserts the importance of Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence for contemporary cultural and philosophical debates.

Engaging with Spinoza’s insistence on the centrality of the passions as the site of the creative and productive forces shaping society, this collection critiques the impulse to transcendence and regimes of mastery, exposing universal values as illusory. Spinoza Now pursues Spinoza’s challenge to abandon the temptation to think through the prism of death in order to arrive at a truly liberatory notion of freedom. In this bold endeavor, the essays gathered here extend the Spinozan project beyond the disciplinary boundaries of philosophy to encompass all forms of life-affirming activity, including the arts and literature.

The essays, taken together, suggest that “Spinoza now” is not so much a statement about a “truth” that Spinoza’s writings can reveal to us in our present situation. It is, rather, the injunction to adhere to the attitude that affirms both necessity and impossibility.”

Contributors: Alain Badou, Mieke Bal, Cesare Casarino, Justin Clemens, Simon Duffy, Sebastian Egenhofer, Alexander García Düttmann, Arthur Jacobson, A. Kiarina Kordela, Michael Mack, Warren Montag, Antonio Negri, Christopher Norris, Anthony Uhlmann.

Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2011
ISBN 0816672814, 9780816672813
384 pages

Review: Sean Grattan (Mediations, 2011).

Publisher

PDF, PDF (updated on 2019-5-12)

Eugene Thacker: After Life (2010)

Life is one of our most basic concepts, and yet when examined directly it proves remarkably contradictory and elusive, encompassing both the broadest and the most specific phenomena. We can see this uncertainty about life in our habit of approaching it as something at once scientific and mystical, in the return of vitalisms of all types, and in the pervasive politicization of life. In short, life seems everywhere at stake and yet is nowhere the same.

In After Life, Eugene Thacker clears the ground for a new philosophy of life by recovering the twists and turns in its philosophical history. Beginning with Aristotle’s originary formulation of a philosophy of life, Thacker examines the influence of Aristotle’s ideas in medieval and early modern thought, leading him to the work of Immanuel Kant, who notes the inherently contradictory nature of “life in itself.” Along the way, Thacker shows how early modern philosophy’s engagement with the problem of life affects thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, and Alain Badiou, as well as contemporary developments in the “speculative turn” in philosophy.

At a time when life is categorized, measured, and exploited in a variety of ways, After Life invites us to delve deeper into the contours and contradictions of the age-old question, “what is life?”

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2010
ISBN 0226793729, 9780226793726
312 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)

Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text (2009)

Gilles Deleuze: Image and Text focuses on the intersection between Deleuzian philosophy and the arts. Deleuze combined exceptionally rigorous insight into important Western philosophers with an extraordinary sensitivity to literature, music, painting and film. He was intensely interested in the medium of thought, which is by no means limited to philosophy alone: it also takes place in science, mathematics, literature, painting and cinema, to name just some of the genres of thought to which Deleuze most often refers. His own thinking emerged almost as often in conversation with artists and literary writers as in engagement with other philosophers, and his philosophy cannot be fully grasped without an understanding of his engagement with the arts.

This significant and timely collection of essays from an international team of leading Deleuze scholars brings together interpretations and commentaries from Deleuzian perspectives on subjects such as literature, painting, music and film.

The book represents diverse modes of engagement with Deleuze’s philosophical concepts and problems and demonstrates the central role the arts play in any understanding of his philosophical ideas.

Editors Eugene W. Holland, Daniel Warren Smith, Charles J. Stivale
Publisher Continuum International Publishing Group, 2009
ISBN 0826439233, 9780826439239
276 pages

publisher
google books

PDF (updated on 2013-1-24)