Through analysis of Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," this book analyzes major questions in Melville's literature as well as philosophical, theological, political, juridical, psychiatric, and literary discourses of his age and the America in which he lived.
Levinas’s ethical metaphysics is essentially a meditation on what makes ethical agency possible – that which enables us to act in the interest of another, to put the well-being of another before our own. This line of questioning found its inception in and drew its inspiration from the mass atrocities that occurred during the Second World War. The Holocaust , like the Cambodian genocide, or those in Rwanda and Srebrenica, exemplifies what have come to be known as the ‘never again’ situations. After these events, we looked back each time, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger and shame, asking ourselves how we could possibly have let it all happen again. And yet, atrocity crimes are still rampant. After Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–1995), came Kosovo (1999) and Darfur (2003). In our present-day world , hate crimes motivated by racial, sexual, or other prejudice, and mass hate such as genocide and terror, are on the rise (think, for example, of Burma, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and North Korea). A critical revaluation of the conditions of possibility of ethical agency is therefore more necessary than ever. This volume is committed to the possibility of ‘never again’. It is dedicated to all the victims – living and dead – of what Levinas calls the ‘sober, Cain-like coldness’ at the root of all crime against humanity , as much as every singular crime against another human being .
Is it always better to be active than passive? Is passivity a sign of cowardice - or prudence? Are people who keep their thoughts to themselves passive, or might they be actively preparing for well-considered future actions? Seemingly simple concepts turn out to be deeper and more significant than they first appear. Have you ever been accused of being passive? Do you feel as though you think too much and don’t act enough? Have you wondered if thinking in itself constitutes doing something? This book explores active and passive behaviors and the relationship of each to thought—good, bad or otherwise. In keeping with a long dialogic tradition, On Passivity encourages complex thought in the context of a simple setting. The two main characters, Director and Friend, explore the idea of passivity while attending a wedding reception. Throughout the dialogue they explore these core questions: • What is passivity and is it inherently bad? • How do we demonstrate both active and passive thought? • Why should we concentrate on thought? Director and Friend go beyond a definition of passivity and investigate the role thought plays in both passivity and activity. Is thinking doing nothing? What is thought? Are we passive when we think, only to become active when we ‘do’? How do we bridge the gap between activity and passivity? The role thought plays in gaining knowledge, reasoning, telling the truth, and living life are concepts disassembled and reassembled in a courageous way. Can we be true to ourselves and accepted for what we choose to ‘do’ even if it seems passive to those around us? As the book ends, we see a glimpse of how scary it might be if everyone were active all the time. In brief, we’re left rethinking everything.
Why do people record TV programmes instead of watching them? Why are former alcoholics pleased to let other people drink in their place? Why can ritual machines pray in place of believers? Robert Pfaller advances the theory of 'interpassivity' as delegated consumption and enjoyment. Applicable to both art and everyday life, the concept allows him to tackle a vast range of phenomena: culture, art, sports and religion. Pfaller criticises dominant assumptions, offers an escape from prevailing ideologies and exposes how cultural capitalism promotes commodities with the promise of happiness.
And Oberlin offer a clear definition of passive-aggression and show readers not only how to end the behavior, but also how to avoid falling victim to other people's hidden anger.
A Companion to Derrida is the most comprehensive single volume reference work on the thought of Jacques Derrida. Leading scholars present a summary of his most important accomplishments across a broad range of subjects, and offer new assessments of these achievements. The most comprehensive single volume reference work on the thought of Jacques Derrida, with contributions from highly prominent Derrida scholars Unique focus on three major philosophical themes of metaphysics and epistemology; ethics, religion, and politics; and art and literature Introduces the reader to the positions Derrida took in various areas of philosophy, as well as clarifying how derrideans interpret them in the present Contributions present not only a summary of Derrida’s most important accomplishments in relation to a wide range of disciplines, but also a new assessment of these accomplishments Offers a greater understanding of how Derrida’s work has fared since his death
In The Birth of Sense, Don Beith proposes a new concept of generative passivity, the idea that our organic, psychological, and social activities take time to develop into sense. More than being a limit, passivity marks out the way in which organisms, persons, and interbodily systems take time in order to manifest a coherent sense. Beith situates his argument within contemporary debates about evolution, developmental biology, scientific causal explanations, psychology, postmodernism, social constructivism, and critical race theory. Drawing on empirical studies and phenomenological reflections, Beith argues that in nature, novel meaning emerges prior to any type of constituting activity or deterministic plan. The Birth of Sense is an original phenomenological investigation in the style of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and it demonstrates that the French philosopher’s works cohere around the notion that life is radically expressive. While Merleau-Ponty’s early works are widely interpreted as arguing for the primacy of human consciousness, Beith argues that a pivotal redefinition of passivity is already under way here, and extends throughout Merleau-Ponty’s corpus. This work introduces new concepts in contemporary philosophy to interrogate how organic development involves spontaneous expression, how personhood emerges from this bodily growth, and how our interpersonal human life remains rooted in, and often thwarted by, domains of bodily expressivity.
This unique volume comprises a monograph and a set of articles by renowned typologist Emma Geniušienė which all focus on the topic of morphologically passive constructions in Lithuanian. It is the first translation into English of the author’s original work from the 1970s. It offers a rich treasury of data, a detailed structural description of all morphologically passive constructions, and an examination of the functions which these constructions have in the discourse. The addition of modern interlinear morpheme-by-morpheme glosses to hundreds of linguistic examples and expert editorial work have turned the hard-to-access material into a timeless resource available for the first time to a broad international readership. The volume will be of value to descriptive linguists, typologists, morphologists and formal syntacticians, as well as to scholars of information structure and functional text analysis. It is an exciting addition to the linguistic literature and a fitting tribute to the author.