Philosophy/Critical Theory

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).