Plural Temporality traces out a dynamic historical relationship between the texts of Spinoza and Althusser. It interrogates Spinoza’s thought through Althusser's and vice versa, with the intention of opening new horizons for the question of materialism. From the fragmentary intuitions Althusser produced about Spinoza throughout his life, Morfino builds a new and comprehensive interpretation of Spinoza’s philosophy. In the later sections of the book, this interpretation is put to work to help to clarify some of the more problematic aspects of the late Althusser’s philosophy, thereby offering new concepts for a materialist position in philosophy and the development of Marxist theory.
Can the Marxist tradition still provide new resources for thinking the specificity of historical time? This volume proposes to transform our understanding of Marxism by reconnecting with the ‘subterranean currents’ of plural temporalities that have traversed its development. From Rousseau and Sieyès to Marx, from Bloch to Althusser, from Gramsci to Pasolini and Postcolonialism, the chapters in this volume seek both to valorise neglected resources from Marxism’s contradictory history, and also to read against the grain its orthodox and heterodox currents. Privileging not the single time of historical development, but the plural temporalities that intertwine in and constitute any given historical conjuncture, and arguing against merely subjectivist theories of temporal multiplicity, this volume studies the articulation of the real, plural temporalities of mass political action. Comprehending their dynamics is a necessary precondition for a renewed politics of emancipation. Contributors include: Luca Basso, Stefano Bracaletti, Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Fabio Frosini, Augusto Illuminati, Nicola Marcucci, Vittorio Morfino, Luca Pinzolo, Peter D. Thomas and Massimiliano Tomba.
Honorable Mention from the 2022 International Latino Book Awards for Best Nonfiction - Multi-Author Chapter 15 by Carolyn Fornoff is Winner of the 2022 Best Article in the Humanities Award, Latin American Studies Association, Mexico Mexican Literature as World Literature is a landmark collection that, for the first time, studies the major interventions of Mexican literature of all genres in world literary circuits from the 16th century forward. This collection features a range of essays in dialogue with major theorists and critics of the concept of world literature. Authors show how the arrival of Spanish conquerors and priests, the work of enlightenment naturalists, the rise of Mexican academies, the culture of the Mexican Revolution, and Mexican neoliberalism have played major roles in the formation of world literary structures. The book features major scholars in Mexican literary studies engaging in the ways in which modernism, counterculture, and extinction have been essential to Mexico's world literary pursuit, as well as studies of the work of some of Mexico's most important authors: Sor Juana, Carlos Fuentes, Octavio Paz, and Juan Rulfo, among others. These essays expand and enrich the understanding of Mexican literature as world literature, showing the many significant ways in which Mexico has been a center for world literary circuits.
Temporalities and Subjectivities in Migration Literature in Europe examines migrant stories through the lens of temporality as seen in the role of such issues as integration, waiting, detention, trauma, crisis, and imagined futures. This book argues that a focus on different time scales and perceptions of time will help us understand how the intimate and affective subjectivities of more complex narratives of migration, as articulated in literature, cross into the public sphere and challenge political ‘bubbles.’ This collection showcases new approaches to and innovative readings of different forms of literary and cultural migration narratives. In addition to developing theoretical tools for the study, the authors present innovative case studies addressing topics such as the European refugee crisis, migration narratives and border crossings in Britain, Spain, and Morocco, as well as experiences of migration in Finland and Norway.
Histories of sculpture within the Nordic region are under-studied and the region?s influence upon and translation of influences from elsewhere in Europe remain insufficiently traced. This volume brings to light individual histories of sculptural mobility from the early modern period onwards. Examining the movement of sculptures, sculptors, practices, skills, styles and motifs across borders, through studios and public architectures, within popular and print culture and via texts, the essays collected here consider the extent to which the sculptural artwork is changed by its physical movement and its transfigurations in other media. How does the meaning and form of these objects performatively respond to the pressure of their relocations and rematerialisations? Conversely, how do sculptures impact their new contexts of display? The contributing authors engage with a wide variety of objects and media in their essays. Each focuses on the contextualisation of sculpture in an original and timely way, exploring how mobility acts as a filter offering new perspectives on iconography, memorialisation, collecting, iconoclasm and exhibiting. From the stave churches of early Norway to the decoration of International Style monoliths of the twentieth century, from Italian quarries to Baroque palaces, from fountains to figurines, from text to performance, these wide-ranging and fascinating case studies contribute to the rich history of the Nordic region?s sculptural production.
Early Modern Histories of Time examines how a range of chronological modes intrinsic to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shaped the thought-worlds of those living during this time and explores how these temporally indigenous models can productively influence our own working concepts of historical period. This innovative approach thus moves beyond debates about where we should divide linear time (and what to call the ensuing segments) to reconsider the very concept of "period." Bringing together an eminent cast of literary scholars and historians, the volume develops productive historical models by drawing on the very texts and cultural contexts that are their objects of study. What happens to the idea of "period" when English literature is properly placed within the dynamic currents of pan-European literary phenomena? How might we think of historical period through the palimpsested nature of buildings, through the religious concept of the secular, through the demographic model of the life cycle, even through the repetitive labor of laundering? From theology to material culture to the temporal constructions of Shakespeare, and from the politics of space to the poetics of typology, the essays in this volume take up diverse, complex models of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century temporality and contemplate their current relevance for our own ideas of history. The volume thus embraces the ambiguity inherent in the word "contemporary," moving between our subjects' sense of self-emplacement and the historiographical need to address the questions and concerns that affect us today. Contributors: Douglas Bruster, Euan Cameron, Heather Dubrow, Kate Giles, Tim Harris, Natasha Korda, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Kristen Poole, Ethan H. Shagan, James Simpson, Nigel Smith, Mihoko Suzuki, Gordon Teskey, Julianne Werlin, Owen Williams, Steven N. Zwicker.
Drawing on a Marxist concept of world literature, this book is a study of the manipulations of time in contemporary anglophone fiction from Africa and South Asia. Through critical work and literary reading, this research explores the times other than the present that seem to haunt an era of capitalist globalisation: nostalgic feelings about bygone ideals of identity and community, appeals to Golden Ages, returns of the repressed and anxious anticipations of global extinction and catastrophe. The term non-synchronism explored in this book captures these dislocations of the present, while offering a critical lens to grasp the politics of time of an era marked by the continuing expansion of capitalist modernity. Most importantly, non-synchronism is a dialectical paradigm charged with antagonistic political valences. The literary analysis presented in the volume hence connects the literary manipulation of time to discourses on extinction, accumulation, nostalgia, modernity and survival in global politics and literature.
This book offers the first authoritative guide to assumptions about time in theories of contemporary world politics. It demonstrates how predominant theories of the international or global ‘present’ are affected by temporal assumptions, grounded in western political thought, that fundamentally shape what we can and cannot know about world politics today. The first part of the book traces the philosophical roots of assumptions about time in contemporary political theory. The second part examines contemporary theories of world politics, including liberal and realist International Relations theories and the work of Habermas, Hardt and Negri, Virilio and Agamben. In each case, it is argued, assumptions about political time ensure the identification of the particular temporality of western experience with the political temporality of the world as such and put the theorist in the unsustainable position of holding the key to the direction of world history. In the final chapter, the book draws on postcolonial and feminist thinking, and the philosophical accounts of political time in the work of Derrida and Deleuze, to develop a new ‘untimely’ way of thinking about time in world politics.
This volume traces the ways in which Heidegger’s philosophical thinking has been taken up, critically re-appropriated, and disseminated in literary and poetic writing since the middle of the 20th century.
While many scholars have noted Martin Heidegger's indebtedness to Christian mystical sources, as well as his affinity with Taoism and Buddhism, Elliot R. Wolfson expands connections between Heidegger's thought and kabbalistic material. By arguing that the Jewish esoteric tradition impacted Heidegger, Wolfson presents an alternative way of understanding the history of Western philosophy. Wolfson's comparison between Heidegger and kabbalah sheds light on key concepts such as hermeneutics, temporality, language, and being and nothingness, while yielding surprising reflections on their common philosophical ground. Given Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism and his use of antisemitic language, these innovative readings are all the more remarkable for their juxtaposition of incongruent fields of discourse. Wolfson's entanglement with Heidegger and kabbalah not only enhances understandings of both but, more profoundly, serves as an ethical corrective to their respective ethnocentrism and essentialism. Wolfson masterfully illustrates the redemptive capacity of thought to illuminate common ground in seemingly disparate philosophical traditions.
