Philosophy/Critical Theory

This is Not a Diary

Zygmunt Bauman

Polity Press ISBN 9780745655703

Jan 2012

This is not a diary: while these observations were recorded in autumn 2010 and spring 2011 in the form of dated entries, they are not a personal reflection but an attempt to capture signs of our times in their movement - possibly at birth, at a stage when they are still barely perceptible, and in any case before they have matured into common, all too familiar forms, escaping our attention due to their banality. Some will perhaps settle in our daily life for a long time to come, others will fade and vanish before they would otherwise have a chance to be noted, recorded and explored in depth: in our fast moving, protean and kaleidoscopic world it is hardly possible to predict their future course and to decide in advance which of them will grow in volume and significance and which will prove to have been still-born. Whatever their fate, the author tried to take a leaf from William Blake's precept of seeing the universe in a grain of sand - and, having done so, alert us to what is or may be happening to our individual lives, forms of togetherness, shared prospects, to the ways we perceive and relate to each other, the forces that shape our life chances and itineraries, and to the ways we try to control, or at least influence, and sometimes even reform for the better, some or all those dimensions of our existence.

These timely meditations by one of the most perceptive social thinkers of our time will appeal to a wide range of readers.

Collateral Damage: Social Inequalities in a Global Age  

Polity Press ISBN 9780745652955

May 2011

The term "collateral damage" has recently been added to the vocabulary of military forces to refer to the unintended consequences of armed interventions, consequences that are unplanned but nevertheless damaging and often very costly in human and personal terms. But collateral damage is not unique to the world of armed intervention – it is also one of the most salient and striking dimensions of contemporary social inequality. The inflammable mixture of growing social inequality and the rising volume of human suffering marginalized as "collateral" is becoming one of most cataclysmic problems of our time.

For the political class, poverty is commonly seen as a problem of law and order – a matter of how to deal with individuals, such as unemployed youths, who fall foul of the law. But treating poverty as a criminal problem obscures the social roots of inequality, which lie in the combination of a consumerist life philosophy propagated and instilled by a consumer–oriented economy, on the one hand, and the rapid shrinking of life chances available to the poor, on the other. In our contemporary, liquid–modern world, the poor are the collateral damage of a profit–driven, consumer–oriented society – ‘aliens inside′ who are deprived of the rights enjoyed by other members of the social order.

In this new book Zygmunt Bauman – one of the most original and influential social thinkers of our time – examines the selective affinity between the growth of social inequality and the rise in the volume of "collateral damage" and considers its implications and its costs.

Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty

Polity Press ISBN 9780745639871

February 2007

The passage from "solid" to "liquid" modernity has created a new and unprecedented setting for individual life pursuits, confronting individuals with a series of challenges never before encountered. Social forms and institutions no longer have enough time to solidify and cannot serve as frames of reference for human actions and long–term life plans, so individuals have to find other ways to organise their lives. They have to splice together an unending series of short–term projects and episodes that don't add up to the kind of sequence to which concepts like "career" and "progress" could meaningfully be applied. Such fragmented lives require individuals to be flexible and adaptable – to be constantly ready and willing to change tactics at short notice, to abandon commitments and loyalties without regret and to pursue opportunities according to their current availability. In liquid modernity the individual must act, plan actions and calculate the likely gains and losses of acting (or failing to act) under conditions of endemic uncertainty. 

Zygmunt Bauman's brilliant writings on liquid modernity have altered the way we think about the contemporary world. In this short book he explores the sources of the endemic uncertainty which shapes our lives today and, in so doing, he provides the reader with a brief and accessible introduction to his highly original account, developed at greater length in his previous books, of life in our liquid modern times.

Liquid Modernity

Polity Press ISBN 9780745624105

March 2000

In this new book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a "heavy" and "solid", hardware–focused modernity to a "light" and "liquid", software–based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un–reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under–defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life–politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history. 

This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life – emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community – and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning. 

Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman's two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

Modernity and the Holocaust

Polity Press ISBN 9780745609300

November 1991

Sociology is concerned with modern society, but has never come to terms with one of the most distinctive and horrific aspects of modernity – the Holocaust.

The book examines what sociology can teach us about the Holocaust, but more particularly concentrates upon the lessons which the Holocaust has for sociology. Bauman′s work demonstrates that the Holocaust has to be understood as deeply involved with the nature of modernity. There is nothing comparable to this work available in the sociological literature.

One-Way Street and Other Writings

Walter Benjamin

Translated by J. A. Underwood

Penguin Classics ISBN 9780141189475

October 2009

Walter Benjamin - philosopher, essayist, literary and cultural theorist - was one of the most original writers and thinkers of the twentieth century. This new selection brings together Benjamin's major works, including 'One-Way Street', his dreamlike, aphoristic observations of urban life in Weimar Germany; 'Unpacking My Library', a delightful meditation on book-collecting; the confessional 'Hashish in Marseille'; and 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', his seminal essay on how technology changes the way we appreciate art. Also including writings on subjects ranging from Proust to Kafka, violence to surrealism, this is the essential volume on one of the most prescient critical voices of the modern age.

Jewish Cultural Studies, Volume 1

Jewishness: Expression, Identity, and Representation

Edited by Simon J. Bronner

Littman Library of Jewish Civilization ISBN 9781904113454

May 2008

The Jewish Cultural Studies series offers a contemporary view of Jewish culture around the globe. Multidisciplinary, multi-focused, and eclectic, it covers the cultural practices of secular Jews as well as of religious Jews of all persuasions, and from historical as well as contemporary perspectives. It also considers the range of institutions that represent and respond to Jewishness, including museums, the media, synagogues, and schools. More than a series on Jewish ideas, it uncovers ideas of being Jewish.

Contributors Simon J. Bronner, Olga Gershenson, Bea Hollander-Goldfein, Miriam Isaacs, Hannah Kliger, Mikel J. Koven, Sergey R. Kravtsov, Judith Lewin, Ted Merwin, Jascha Nemtsov, Emilie S. Passow, Holly A. Pearse, Ilana Rosen, Joachim Schlör, Elly Teman

Simon J. Bronner is Professor of American Studies and Folklore at the Pennsylvania State University, Harrisburg. He is the author and editor of over twenty-five books, including the Encyclopedia of American Folklife (2006), Following Tradition: Folklore in the Discourse of American Culture (1998), and Manly Traditions: The Folk Roots of American Masculinities (2005). He has published in the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies, Jewish History, Yiddish, Markers, and Chuliyot: Journal of Yiddish Literature.

Perpetual Euphoria: On the Duty to Be Happy

Pascal Bruckner

Princeton University Press ISBN 9780691143736

January 2011

Happiness today is not just a possibility or an option but a requirement and a duty. To fail to be happy is to fail utterly. Happiness has become a religion--one whose smiley-faced god looks down in rebuke upon everyone who hasn't yet attained the blessed state of perpetual euphoria. How has a liberating principle of the Enlightenment--the right to pursue happiness--become the unavoidable and burdensome responsibility to be happy? How did we become unhappy about not being happy--and what might we do to escape this predicament? In Perpetual Euphoria, Pascal Bruckner takes up these questions with all his unconventional wit, force, and brilliance, arguing that we might be happier if we simply abandoned our mad pursuit of happiness.

Gripped by the twin illusions that we are responsible for being happy or unhappy and that happiness can be produced by effort, many of us are now martyring ourselves--sacrificing our time, fortunes, health, and peace of mind--in the hope of entering an earthly paradise. Much better, Bruckner argues, would be to accept that happiness is an unbidden and fragile gift that arrives only by grace and luck.

A stimulating and entertaining meditation on the unhappiness at the heart of the modern cult of happiness,Perpetual Euphoria is a book for everyone who has ever bristled at the command to "be happy."

The Tyranny of Guilt: An Essay on Western Masochism

Princeton University Press ISBN 9781400834310

January 2010

Fascism, communism, genocide, slavery, racism, imperialism - the West has no shortage of reasons for guilt. And, indeed, since the Holocaust and the end of World War II, Europeans in particular have been consumed by remorse. But Pascal Bruckner argues that guilt has now gone too far. It has become a pathology, and even an obstacle to fighting today's atrocities. Bruckner, one of France's leading writers and public intellectuals, argues that obsessive guilt has obscured important realities. The West has no monopoly on evil, and has destroyed monsters as well as created them--leading in the abolition of slavery, renouncing colonialism, building peaceful and prosperous communities, and establishing rules and institutions that are models for the world. The West should be proud--and ready to defend itself and its values. In this, Europeans should learn from Americans, who still have sufficient self-esteem to act decisively in a world of chaos and violence. Lamenting the vice of anti-Americanism that grips so many European intellectuals, Bruckner urges a renewed transatlantic alliance, and advises Americans not to let recent foreign-policy misadventures sap their own confidence. This is a searing, provocative, and psychologically penetrating account of the crude thought and bad politics that arise from excessive bad conscience.

Pascal Bruckner is the award-winning author of eighteen books of fiction and nonfiction, including the novelBitter Moon, which was made into a film by Roman Polanski. His other books include The Temptation of Innocence and The Tears of the White Man (Free Press) and the novels The Divine Child (Little, Brown) and Evil Angels (Grove).

Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence

Judith Butler

Verso ISBN 9781844675449

This profound appraisal of post-9/11 America considers the conditions of

heightened vulnerability and aggression that followed from the attack on

the US, and US retaliation. Judith Butler critiques the use of violence that

has emerged as a response to loss, and argues that the dislocation of

first-world privilege offers instead a chance to imagine a world in which

that violence might be minimized and in which interdependency becomes

acknowledged as the basis for a global political community.

Butler considers the means by which some lives become grief-worthy, while others are perceived as undeserving of grief or even incomprehensible as lives. She discusses the political implications of sovereignty in light of the prisoners in Guantánamo Bay. She argues against the anti-intellectual current of contemporary US patriotism and the power of censorship during times of war. Finally, she takes on the question of when and why anti-semitism is leveled as a charge against those who voice criticisms of the Israeli state. She counters that we have a responsibility to speak out against both Israeli injustices and anti-semitism, and argues against the rhetorical use of the charge of anti-semitism to quell public debate.

“If we are interested in arresting cycles of violence to produce less violent outcomes, it is no doubt important to ask what, politically, might be made of grief besides a cry for war.” — Judith Butler

Love Itself

Helene Cixous

Polity ISBN 9780745639895
June 2009

Love's memories, love recalling itself in letters lost and found over an interval of forty years: "Cixous"' writer-narrator advances here far into a labyrinth of passions long ago delivered and yet still arriving through the mail, through letters and literature, in other words, the poetry of the post. As for the lovers' returning scenes, they have their addresses in Paris (rue Olivier de Serres, Avenue de Choisy, street names that endlessly feed love's unconscious language) and in New York, but also in a lost oasis of the Egyptian desert during the Napoleonic wars, in Athens and along the shores of a great lake centuries ago in the country of myth.The lovers are poets or soldiers, philosophers or students madly in love with poetry and poets. They are as well mermaids or panthers. Panthers? Yes, for it is the passion of the animal that drives all these lovers to bare themselves, and sometimes their claws, before the beloved. Misunderstandings are often, even inevitably the result. Seconded and witnessed by her passionate, truth-telling cats, "Cixous"' narrator-writer returns unerringly to moments of errancy inflicted on address and language, those errors and faults when love, perhaps, is listening only to itself, without subject or object, lover or beloved, just love itself, l'amour meme, l'amour m'aime, love loving me, in the letter box of memory.

So Close

Polity ISBN 9780745644363

November 2009

In So Close, Hélène Cixous recounts a return to her native Algeria after a more than thirty-year absence. Before she can decide to go, she must sift through large parts of her past in a land where she never felt at home and, from a young age, knew she must leave. Above all, she must confront the depths of her mother's rejection of the country that had rejected her despite years of devotion to the poor women of Algiers. As she is struggling with this decision, she receives a message from Zohra Drif, with whom she has had no contact since their school days, which was just before Zohra joined the Algerian FLN and become a heroine in the uprising against French rule in her homeland. They meet in Paris for the first time in more than fifty years and soon afterward the narrator departs for Algiers.

The latter part of the narrative brings a rush of sensations, impressions, memories, and new encounters as the narrator revisits sites from her past in Algiers and especially in Oran, the city of her birth, the city of the family's happiness before her father's death when she was a young girl. The quest to find his grave again in the overgrown Jewish cemetery of Algiers leads to a startlingly moving scene that closes the voyage and the book.

Being Jewish and Doing Justice: Bringing Argument to Life

Brian Klug

Vallentine Mitchell ISBN 9780853039730

October 2010

Being Jewish and Doing Justice (part of the Parkes / Wiener Series published by Vallentine Mitchell) expands the standard concept of Jewish Studies. The prologue offers a novel reading of the idea of 'the people of God', placing the people firmly 'in the world'. The rest of the book, in this spirit, brings argument to bear on a broad range of contemporary moral and political controversies, many of them turning on puzzles about identity. The scope of the book exends from Judaism, Zionism and anti-Semitism to the language of race, the status of animals and the rights of the child. Drawing on his training as an academic philosopher, his Jewish education and his personal experience, Klug confronts uncomfortable questions with rigour, candour and humour. And while the chapters are not a series of steps in an overall argument, collectively they develop the title theme: the inner connection between being Jewish and doing justice.

Offence: The Jewish Case (Manifestos for the Twenty-first Century)

University of Chicago Press ISBN 9781906497392

September 2009

Part of an ongoing series published in cooperation with "Index on Censorship" that deals with religion and free expression, "The Jewish Case" is distinctive in several ways. To begin with, even calling Judaism a religion is problematic: the breadth of Judaism, combined with its antiquity, gives Jewish sensibility a complexity that defies the simple distinction between 'religious' and 'secular'. That complexity affects the entire discussion of the Jewish case on tolerance and censorship - especially today, when Israel and its relationship to Zionism are central political and social concerns. In the light of this difficulty, Brian Klug in "The Jewish Case" develops a critique of Jewish sensibilities from within - confronting Judaism with itself - rather than attacking it from the outside. Focusing on the current controversy over Israel, and drawing on three basic features of Judaism - iconoclasm, commitment to argument, and respect for human dignity - Klug makes a Jewish case for outspokenness.

Stranger from Abroad: Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, Friendship and Forgiveness

Daniel Maier-Katkin

Norton Books ISBN 9780393068337

March 2010

Shaking up the content and method by which generations of students had studied Western philosophy, Martin Heidegger sought to enoble Man’s existence in relation to Death. Yet in a time of crisis, he sought personal advancement, becoming the most prominent German intellectual to join the Nazis.

Hannah Arendt, his brilliant, beautiful student and young lover, sought to enable a decent society of human beings in relation to one other. She was courageous in the time of crisis. Years later, she was even able to forgive Heidegger and to find in his behavior an insight into Nazism that would influence her reflections on “the banality of evil”—a concept that remains bitterly controversial and profoundly influential to this day.

Eloquent and moving, Stranger from Abroad dramatizes some of the greatest questions of the twentieth century—revealing bonds connecting the personal, philosophical, and political, highlighting the responsibility of intellectuals in dark times.

A Philosophical Retrospective: Facts, Values and Jewish Identity

Alan Montefiore

Columbia University Press ISBN 9780231153003

April 2011

As a young lecturer in philosophy and the eldest son of a prominent Jewish family, Alan Montefiore faced two very different understandings of his identity: the more traditional view that an identity such as his carried with it, as a matter of given fact, certain duties and obligations, and an opposing view, emphasized by his studies in philosophy, according to which there can be no rationally compelling move from statements of fact -whatever the alleged facts may be- to "judgments of value." According to this second view, individuals must in the end take responsibility for determining their own values and obligations. In this book, Montefiore looks back on his attempts to understand the nature of this conflict and the misunderstandings it may engender. In the process, he illustrates through personal experience the practical implications of a characteristically philosophical issue. Montefiore finally settles on the following: while everyone has to accept that facts, including those of their own situation, are whatever they may be, both the "traditional" assumption that individuals must recognize certain values and obligations as rooted in those very facts, and the contrary view that individuals are ultimately responsible for determining their own values, are deeply embedded in differing conceptions of society and its relation to its members. Montefiore then examines the misunderstandings between those for whom identity constitutes in effect a conceptual bridge connecting the facts of who and what a person may be to the value commitments incumbent upon them, and those for whom the very idea of such a bridge can be nothing but a confusion. Using key examples from the notoriously vexed case of Jewish identity and from his own encounters with its conflicting meanings and implications, Montefiore depicts the practical significance of the differences between these worldviews, particularly for those who hove to negotiate them.

Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists

Susan Neiman

Bodley Head ISBN 9781847920447

June 2009

Susan Neiman is one of the most distinguished scholars writing today. Her previous book, Evil in Modern Thought, has been widely hailed as a classic. She is a moral philosopher committed to making the tools of her trade relevant to real life. In Moral Clarity, she shows how the resources of the eighteenth century Enlightenment can help us to reconstruct a progressive politics that does not repeat the mistakes of Marxism or succumb to the appeal of unreason. 

Against a background of books that have sought to call a halt to the very idea of the left, Neiman argues for a commitment to a more just world that is rationally grounded, implacable and insatiable.

In her commitment to reason and the facts of the world, in her brilliant readings of the Western canon, and above all in her fierce commitment to politics as a moral endeavour, Neiman makes it possible to believe that the Enlightenment is not yet exhausted and that we are free to join it if we wish.

Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

University Press of California, Columbia and Princeton ISBN 9780691117928

March 2004

Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope that the world

makes sense. For eighteenth-century Europeans, the Lisbon earth-

quake was manifest evil. Today we view evil as a matter of human

cruelty, and Auschwitz as its extreme incarnation.

Examining our understanding of evil from the Inquisition to terrorism,

SusanNeiman explores who we have become in the three centuries

that separate us from the early Enlightenment. In the process, she

rewrites the history of modern thought and points philosophy back to the

questions that originally animated it. Whether expressed in theological or secular terms, evil poses a problem about the world's intelligibility. It confronts philosophy with fundamental questions: can there be meaning in a world where innocents suffer? Can belief in divine power or human progress survive a cataloging of evil? Is evil profound or banal?

Neiman argues that these questions impelled modern philosophy. Traditional philosophers from Leibniz to Hegel sought to defend the Creator of a world containing evil. Inevitably, their efforts - combined with those of more literary figures like Pope, Voltaire, and the Marquis de Sade - eroded belief in God's benevolence, power, and relevance, until Nietzsche claimed He had been murdered. They also yielded the distinction between natural and moral evil that we now take for granted.

Neiman turns to consider philosophy's response to the Holocaust as a final moral evil, concluding that two basic stances run through modern thought. One, from Rousseau to Arendt, insists that morality demands we make evil intelligible. The other, from Voltaire to Adorno, insists that morality demands that we don't.

Beautifully written and thoroughly engaging, this book tells the history of modern philosophy as an attempt to come to terms with evil. It reintroduces philosophy to anyone interested in questions of life and death, good and evil, suffering and sense.

Proust among the Nations: From Dreyfus to the Middle East

Jacqueline Rose

University of Chicago Press ISBN 9780226725789

January 2012

Known for her far-reaching examinations of psychoanalysis, literature, and politics, Jacqueline Rose has in recent years turned her attention to the Israel-Palestine conflict, one of the most enduring and apparently intractable conflicts of our time. In Proust among the Nations, she takes the development of her thought on this crisis a stage further, revealing it as a distinctly Western problem. In a radical rereading of the Dreyfus affair through the lens of Marcel Proust in dialogue with Freud, Rose offers a fresh and nuanced account of the rise of Jewish nationalism and the subsequent creation of Israel. Following Proust's heirs, Beckett and Genet, and a host of Middle Eastern writers, artists, and filmmakers, Rose traces the shifting dynamic of memory and identity across the crucial and ongoing cultural links between Europe and Palestine. A powerful and elegant analysis of the responsibility of writing, Proust among the Nations makes the case for literature as a unique resource for understanding political struggle and gives us new ways to think creatively about the violence in the Middle East.

The Jacqueline Rose Reader

Jacqueline Rose, Justin Clemens and Ben Naparstek

Duke University Press ISBN 9780822349785

May 2011

Jacqueline Rose is a world-renowned critic and one of the most influential and provocative scholars working in the humanities today. She is also among the most wide-ranging, with books on Zionism, feminism, Sylvia Plath, children's fiction, and psychoanalysis. During the past decade, through public talks and pieces that Rose has contributed to the London Review of Books, the Guardian, and other publications, she has played a vital role in public debate about the policies and human-rights record of Israel in its relation to the Palestinians. Representing the entire spectrum of her writing, The Jacqueline Rose Reader brings together essays, reviews, and book excerpts, as well as an extract from her novel. In the introduction, the editors provide a profound overview of her intellectual trajectory, highlighting themes that unify her diverse work, particularly her commitment to psychoanalytic theory as a uniquely productive way of analyzing literature, culture, politics, and society. Including extensive critical commentary, and a candid interview with Rose, this anthology is an indispensable introduction for those unfamiliar with Jacqueline Rose's remarkably original work, and an invaluable resource for those well-acquainted with her critical acumen.

Jewish Philosophy and Western Culture - A Modern Introduction

Victor Seidler

IB Tauris ISBN 9781845112813
November 2007

This is one of the first textbooks to try to set the entire discipline of Jewish philosophy in its proper cultural and historical contexts. In so doing, it introduces the vibrant Jewish philosophical tradition to students while also making a significant contribution to inter-religious dialogue.

Victor J Seidler argues that the dominant Platonic tradition in the West has led to a form of cultural ethics which asserts false superiority in its relationships with others. He offers a critical reappraisal of the philosophical underpinnings of this western Christian culture which for so long has viewed Judaism with hostility. Examining the work of seminal Jewish thinkers such as Philo, Buber, Mendelsohn, Herman Cohen, Leo Baeck, Levinas, Rosenzweig and others, the author argues for a code of ethics which prioritises particular and personal moral responsibility rather than the impersonal and universal emphases of the Greek tradition. His provocative and original overview of Jewish philosophy uncovers a vital and neglected tradition of thought which works against the likelihood of a Holocaust recurring.

Victor J Seidler is Professor of Social Theory and Philosophy at Goldsmiths College in the University of London. His books include Shadows of the Shoah: Jewish Identity and Belonging (2000), Man Enough: Embodying Masculinities (1997) and Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory (1993).