Breaking Up (at) Totality
Breaking Up (at) Totality

Author: Debra Diane Davis

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 344

ISBN-13: 9780809322282

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Rhetoric and composition theory has shown a renewed interest in sophistic countertraditions, as seen in the work of such "postphilosophers" as Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Hélène Cixous, and of such rhetoricians as Susan Jarratt and Steven Mailloux. As D. Diane Davis traces today’s theoretical interest to those countertraditions, she also sets her sights beyond them. Davis takes a “third sophistics” approach, one that focuses on the play of language that perpetually disrupts the “either/or” binary construction of dialectic. She concentrates on the nonsequential third—excess—that overflows language’s dichotomies. In this work, laughter operates as a trope for disruption or breaking up, which is, from Davis’s perspective, a joyfully destructive shattering of our confining conceptual frameworks.

Tar for Mortar
Tar for Mortar

Author: Jonathan Basile

Publisher: punctum books

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 110

ISBN-13: 1947447505

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TAR FOR MORTAR offers an in-depth exploration of one of literature's greatest tricksters, Jorge Luis Borges. His short story "The Library of Babel" is a signature examplar of this playfulness, though not merely for the inverted world it imagines, where a library thought to contain all possible permutations of all letters and words and books is plumbed by pious librarians looking for divinely pre-fabricated truths. One must grapple as well with the irony of Borges's narration, which undermines at every turn its narrator's claims of the library's universality, including the very possibility of exhausting meaning through combinatory processing. Borges directed readers to his non-fiction to discover the true author of the idea of the universal library. But his supposedly historical essays are notoriously riddled with false references and self-contradictions. Whether in truth or in fiction, Borges never reaches a stable conclusion about the atomic premises of the universal library - is it possible to find a character set capable of expressing all possible meaning, or do these letters, like his stories and essays, divide from themselves in a restless incompletion? While many readers of Borges see him as presaging our digital technologies, they often give too much credit to our inventions in doing so. Those who elide the necessary incompletion of the Library of Babel compare it to the Internet on the assumption that both are total archives of all possible thought and expression. Though Borges's imaginings lend themselves to digital creativity (libraryofbabel.info is certainly evidence of this), they do so by showing the necessary incompleteness of every totalizing project, no matter how technologically refined. Ultimately, Basile nudges readers toward the idea that a fictional/imaginary exposition can hold a certain power over technology.

Theorizing War
Theorizing War

Author: N. Mansfield

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2008-09-30

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 0230234941

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War is always defined in relation to something else: peace, society, civilisation, friendship or love. What is the relationship between war and its 'other'? Are they opposites or versions of one another? This book surveys four hundred years of thinking about the definition of war, from Hobbes and Clausewitz to Badiou and Žižek.

Sensibility and Singularity
Sensibility and Singularity

Author: John E. Drabinski

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2012-02-01

Total Pages: 267

ISBN-13: 0791490874

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Is Emmanuel Levinas a dismissive critic of Husserlian phenomenology, or an important member of its movement? The standard account of Levinas's work assumes his distance from Husserl. In opposition to this account, Sensibility and Singularity contends that Husserl was a vital, living resource for Levinas throughout his philosophical career. The singularity of the Other is the centerpiece of Levinas's thought. The philosophical significance of this singularity, however, cannot be fully appreciated without attending to Levinas's transformation of the Husserlian themes of time, materiality, intentionality, and sense. This book documents those transformations and establishes their centrality to Levinas's notion of ethics. What emerges from this reading is a thorough account of Levinas's constant and productive debate with the Husserlian tradition of phenomenology.

The Sociology of Marx
The Sociology of Marx

Author: Henri Lefebvre

Publisher: Pantheon

Published: 2015-02-18

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0804152896

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The crucial importance of Karl Marx’s thought for his own time and for ours is beyond dispute, but the there have always been two considerable impediments to understanding: first, the supposed complexity with which Marx articulated his ideas; second, the accretions which commentators, disciples, and hagiographers have built into the original structure. Henri Lefebrve, who has held the chair in sociology at Strasbourg and since 1965 in Paris, has written an interpretative introduction which restores the clarity of outline and the vigor of the original. Lefebrvre also demonstrates by ample quotation that Marx, far from being the tortuous and intractable stylist we had imagined, is a masterful and witty writer. But beyond this, the reader is presented with a thesis. Lefebvre argues that Marx was not a sociologist, not an economist, not yet an historian or a philosopher. On the other hand, one can find in his writings a sociology, a political economy, a theory of history, and significant intimations of a philosophy. The explanation of this apparent paradox lies in the fact that Marx was writing in a period prior to the compartmentalizing of science, when the nature of things could still be grasped as a whole. Thus, through Marx, we can obtain a coherent picture of reality as it was at the inception of the modern age. An understanding of Marx is necessary for an understanding of our time. This book is indispensible not only as a guide to Marx, but for its sight into contemporary problems.

Understanding Social Dynamics in South Asia
Understanding Social Dynamics in South Asia

Author: Partha Nath Mukherji

Publisher: Springer

Published: 2019-02-26

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 9811303878

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This volume includes fourteen essays by eminent sociologists in memory of Ramkrishna Mukherjee (1919–2017), the last of the founding architects of sociology in India. It also includes two interviews with Ramkrishna Mukherjee by senior sociologists. The essays cover a variety of themes and topics close to the works of Ramkrishna Mukherjee: the idea of unitary social science, methodology of social research, the question of facts and values, rural society and social change, social mobility, family and gender, and nationalism. In the two interviews included here Mukherjee clarifies his intellectual trajectory as well as issues of methodology and methods in social research. Overall, this volume endorses his emphasis on the need for social researchers to transcend the ‘what’ and ‘how’ to ‘why’ in the pursuit of sociological knowledge. The volume is a valuable addition to the history of sociology in India. Students of sociology and other social sciences will find it useful as a book of substantive readings on social dynamics; those researching the social world will find in it a useful guide to issues in designing and execution of social research projects.

Labyrinths of Language
Labyrinths of Language

Author: Franson Manjali

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-10-04

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1000780740

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Thirteen essays in the book explore and investigate diverse contemporary philosophically current themes and issues. The title is derived from Wittgenstein's statement that 'anguage is a labyrinth of paths,' and it studiously avoids any conclusive claim on its central motif. What people, both users and theorists, do with language, rather than what it is, is the running theme. The book critically presents the views of a wide range of philosophically and analytically oriented authors including, de Saussure, Levinas, Lévi-Strauss, Wittgenstein, Derrida, Bakhtin, Benjamin, Kafka, Heidegger, Blanchot, Jean-Luc Nancy, Barthes and Deleuze. Only two essays diverge from the main concern with language: the one on the discourse of death, and another on the philosophy of image. One essay involves an analysis of the cultural and political discourse in a contemporary Malayalam novel. The concluding essay attempts to develop a postcolonial field of language studies, with reference to the works of the 18th century British jurist and linguist Sir William Jones and the subsequent philological tradition, whose political consequences are only beginning to be understood.