Bøger udgivet af STANFORD UNIV PR

For more than three decades, Talal Asad has been engaged in a distinctive critical exploration of the conceptual assumptions that govern the West's knowledges--especially its disciplinary and disciplining knowledges--of the non-Western world. The essays that make up this volume treat diverse aspects of this remarkable body of work. Among them: the relationship between colonial power and academic knowledge; the historical shifts giving shape to the complexly interrelated categories of the secular and the religious, and the significance of these shifts in the emergence of modern Europe; and aspects of human embodiment, including some of the various ways that pain, emotion, embodied aptitude, and the senses connect with and structure cultural practices. While the specific themes and arguments addressed by the individual contributors range widely, the essays cohere in a shared orientation of both critical engagement and productive extension. Note that this is not a festschrift, nor a celebratory farewell, but a series of engagements with a thinker whose work is in full spate and deserves to be far better known and understood.

In The Time That Remains, Agamben seeks to separate the Pauline texts from the history of the Church that canonized them, thus revealing them to be "the fundamental messianic texts of the West." He argues that Paul's letters are concerned not with the foundation of a new religion but rather with the "messianic" abolition of Jewish law. Situating Paul's texts in the context of early Jewish messianism, this book is part of a growing set of recent critiques devoted to the period when Judaism and Christianity were not yet fully distinct, placing Paul in the context of what has been called "Judaeo-Christianity." >

This is the first account of Benjamin Netanyahu's political communication strategy during his term as prime minister. It presents the dramatic cultural and political changes that occurred in Israel in the 1990s with the creation of media-centered democracy. The author shows how Netanyahu used these to construct his political project--Telepopulism.

This is the first in a series of books in which one of the most influential of contemporary art theorists revised from within the conceptions underlying the history of art. The author's basic idea is that the rigor of linear perspective cannot encompass all of visual experience and that it could be said to generate an oppositional factor with which it interacts dialectically: the cloud.On a literal level, this could be represented by the absence of the sky, as in Brunelleschi's legendary first experiments with panels using perspective. Or it could be the vaporous swathes that Correggio uses to mediate between the viewer on earth and the heavenly prospect in his frescoed domes at Parma. Insofar as the cloud is a semiotic operator, interacting with the linear order of perspective, it also becomes a dynamic agent facilitating the creation of new types of pictorial space. (Damisch puts the signifer cloud between slashes to indicate that he deals with clouds as signs instead of realistic elements.)This way of looking at the history of painting is especially fruitful for the Renaissance and Baroque periods, but it is also valuable for looking at such junctures as the nineteenth century. For example, Damisch invokes Ruskin and Turner, who carry out both in theory and in practice a revision of the conditions of appearances of the cloud as a landscape feature. Even for the twentieth century, he has illuminating things to say about how his reading of cloud applies to the painters Leger and Batthus. In short, Damisch achieves a brilliant and systematic demonstration of a concept of semiotic interaction that touches some of the most crucial features of the Western art tradition.

Examining Levinas's critique of the Heideggerian conception of temporality, this book shows how the notion of the feminine both enables and prohibits the most fertile territory of Levinas's thought.According to Heidegger, the traditional notion of time, which stretches from Aristotle to Bergson, is incoherent because it rests on an inability to think together two assumptions: that the present is the most real aspect of time, and that the scientific model of time is infinite, continuous, and constituted by a series of more or less identical now-points. For Heidegger, this contradiction, which privileges the present and thinks of time as ongoing, derives from a confusion about Being. He suggests that it is not the present but the future that is the primordial ecstasis of temporality. For Heidegger, death provides an orientation for our authentic temporal understanding.Levinas agrees with Heidegger that mortality is much more significant than previous philosophers of time have acknowledged, but for Levinas, it is not my death, but the death of the other that determines our understanding of time. He is critical of Heidegger's tendency to collapse the ecstases (past, present, and future) of temporality into one another, and seeks to move away from what he sees as a totalizing view of time. Levinas wants to rehabilitate the unique character of the instant, or present, without sacrificing its internal dynamic to the onward progression of the future, and without neglecting the burdens of the past that history visits upon us.The author suggests that though Levinas's conception of subjectivity corrects some of the problems Heidegger's philosophy introduces, such as his failure to deal adequately with ethics, Levinas creates new stumbling blocks, notably the confining role he accords to the feminine. For Levinas, the feminine functions as that which facilitates but is excluded from the ethical relation that he sees as the pinnacle of philosophy. Showing that the feminine is a strategic part of Levinas's philosophy, but one that was not thought through by him, the author suggests that his failure to solidly place the feminine in his thinking is structurally consonant with his conceptual separation of politics from ethics.

Print and Politics offers a cultural history of a late Qing newspaper, Shibao, the most influential reform daily of its time. Exploring the simultaneous emergence of a new print culture and a new culture of politics in early-twentieth-century China, the book treats Shibao as both institution and text and demonstrates how the journalists who wrote for the paper attempted to stake out a "middle realm" of discourse and practice.>

"This is a very useful book because it makes Blanchot's powerful text widely available in both French and English."--The European Legacy

In the three essays that make up this stimulating and often startling book, Jacques Derrida argues against the notion that the basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through, argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychoanalysis is here examined in the various "resistances" to analysis--conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself, an insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of analysis itself. Derrida not only shows how the interest of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing can be renewed today, but these essays afford him the opportunity to revisit and reassess a subject he first confronted (in an essay on Freud) in 1966. They also serve to clarify Derrida's thinking about the subjects of the essays--Freud, Lacan, and Foucault--a thinking that, especially with regard to the last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood.The first essay, on Freud, is a tour de force of close reading of Freud's texts as philosophical reflection. By means of the fine distinctions Derrida makes in this analytical reading, particularly of The Interpretation of Dreams, he opens up the realm of analysis into new and unpredictable forms--such as meeting with an interdiction (when taking an analysis further is "forbidden" by a structural limit).Following the essay that might be dubbed Derrida's "return to Freud," the next is devoted to Lacan, the figure for whom that phrase was something of a slogan. In this essay and the next, on Foucault, Derrida reencounters two thinkers to whom he had earlier devoted important essays, which precipitated stormy discussions and numerous divisions within the intellectual milieus influenced by their writings. In this essay, which skillfully integrates the concept of resistance into larger questions, Derrida asks in effect: What is the origin and nature of the text that constitutes Lacanian psychoanalysis, considering its existence as an archive, as teachings, as seminars, transcripts, quotations, etc.?Derrida's third essay may be called not simply a criticism but an appreciation of Foucault's work: an appreciation not only in the psychological and rhetorical sense, but also in the sense that it elevates Foucault's thought by giving back to it ranges and nuances lost through its reduction by his readers, his own texts, and its formulaic packaging.

This volume presents detailed analyses of the accommodations between chiefs and states in 13 Pacific societies. In some states, traditional perquisites and political authority have overlapped so that the state is a contemporary form of chiefdom. Elsewhere, chiefs operate as a mechanism of local accommodation to centralized state authority, facilitating state operations in the local community. This text is concerned with the renewed significance of chiefs, and considers how the discussions and disagreements that surround them are a vital part of debates about identity and power in the Pacific today. In some cases, these debates produce calls for the revitalization and reempowerment of chiefs; in others, they spark attempts to constrict or otherwise regulate their powers. Pacific societies examined are: Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Marshall Islands, Rotuma, Solomon Islands, Tana Toraja, Tonga, Vanuatu, Western Samoa, and New Zealand.

This incisive book deals with the use of the criminal law to enforce morality, in particular sexual morality, a subject of particular interest and importance since the publication of the Wolfenden Report in 1957.Professor Hart first considers John Stuart Mill's famous declaration: "The only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilized community is to prevent harm to others." During the last hundred years this doctrine has twice been sharply challenged by two great lawyers: Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, the great Victorian judge and historian of the common law, and Lord Devlin, who both argue that the use of the criminal law to enforce morality is justified.The author examines their arguments in some detail, and sets out to demonstrate that they fail to recognize distinction of vital importance for legal and political theory, and that they espouse a conception of the function of legal punishment that few would now share.