Why does anti-Semitism seem to be so deeply engrained in our societies, our institutions and our attitudes? To answer this question we need to look beyond our current practices and see that anti-Semitism has much deeper roots - that it is woven into the very structures of Western thought.
Jean-Luc Nancy argues that anti-Semitism emerged from the conflictual conjunction of two responses to the eclipse of archaic cultures. The Greek and the Jewish responses both affirmed a humanity freed from myth but put forward two very different conceptions of autonomy: on the one hand, the infinite autonomy of knowledge, of logos, and on the other, the paradoxical autonomy of a heteronomy guided by a hidden god. The first excluded the second while simultaneously absorbing and dominating it; the second withdrew into itself and its condition of exclusion and domination. How could the long and terrible history of the hatred of the Jew, masking a self-loathing, be generated by these intrinsically contradictory beginnings? That is the question to which this short book gives a compelling answer.
This is the first English-language introduction to Peter Sloterdijk, the distinguished German philosopher and controversial public intellectual. Sloterdijk, in the tradition of Nietzsche and Heine, is an iconoclast who uses humour and biting critique to challenge many of modernity?s sacred thinkers, from Kant to Heidegger, in the process radically reinterpreting the canon of Western philosophy. In this unique textbook, leading Sloterdijk expert Jean-Pierre Couture explains in accessible language Sloterdijk?s exceptional contribution, breaking his thought down into five key approaches: psychopolitics, anthropotechnics, spherology, controversy, and therapeutics. Sloterdijk?s frequent public controversies, with supporters of Habermas and the Frankfurt school in particular, are assessed and their significance for current philosophical debates explained. This fascinating book will be an essential companion for those interested in the hybrid aesthetics of thought situated at the crossroads of art and philosophy. Its up-to-date analyses of Sloterdijk?s recently translated corpus will make it essential reading for all students and scholars of modern European thought.
Few trends have had as much impact on television as formats have in recent years. Long confined to the fringes of the TV industry, they have risen to prominence since the late 1990s. Today, they are a global business with hundreds of programmes adapted across the world at any one time, from mundane game shows to blockbuster talent competitions, from factual entertainment to high-end drama. Based on exclusive industry access, this book provides an in-depth analysis of the complex world of the TV format from its origins to the present day.
Chalaby delivers a comprehensive account of the TV format trading system and conceptualizes the global value chain that underpins it, unpicking the corporate strategies and power relations within. Using interviews with format creators, he uncovers the secrets behind the world's most travelled formats, exploring their narrative structure and cultural meanings.
Alain Badiou was born in 1937 in Rabat and Jean-Claude Milner in 1941 in Paris. They were both involved in the "Red Years" at the end of the Sixties and both were Maoists, but while Badiou was focusing all his attention on China, Milner was already taking his distance from it. Over the years, that original dispute over the destiny of gauchisme was fueled by deep, new differences between them concerning the role of philosophy and politics.
In this wide-ranging and compelling dialogue, these two great thinkers explore the role of politics in today's world and consider the need for a formal theory of communist political organization. Whether they are addressing the era of revolutions, and in particular the Paris Commune and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, or discussing the infinite, the universal, the name "Jew", violence, capitalism, the left, or Europe, Jean-Claude Milner's dyed-in-the-wool skepticism constantly runs up against Alain Badiou's doctrinal passion.
This extraordinary debate ultimately leads to new areas of interrogation and shows that there is no better remedy for the crushing power of media-influenced thinking than the revival of the great disputes of the mind.
YouTube is one of the most well-known and widely discussed sites of participatory media in the contemporary online environment, and it is the first genuinely mass-popular platform for user-created video. In this timely and comprehensive introduction to how YouTube is being used and why it matters, Burgess and Green discuss the ways that it relates to wider transformations in culture, society and the economy.
The book critically examines the public debates surrounding the site, demonstrating how it is central to struggles for authority and control in the new media environment. Drawing on a range of theoretical sources and empirical research, the authors discuss how YouTube is being used by the media industries, by audiences and amateur producers, and by particular communities of interest, and the ways in which these uses challenge existing ideas about cultural `production' and `consumption'.
Rich with both concrete examples and featuring specially commissioned chapters by Henry Jenkins and John Hartley, the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the contemporary and future implications of online media. It will be particularly valuable for students and scholars in media, communication and cultural studies.
Why Philosophize? is a series of lectures given by Jean-François Lyotard to students at the Sorbonne embarking on their university studies. The circumstances obliged him to be both clear and concise: at the same time, his lectures offer a profound and far-reaching meditation on how essential it is to philosophize in a world where philosophy often seems irrelevant, outdated, or inconclusive.
Lyotard begins by drawing on Plato, Proust and Lacan to show that philosophy is a never-ending desire - for wisdom, for the `other'. In the second lecture he draws on Heraclitus and Hegel to explore the close relation between philosophy and history: the same restlessness, the same longing for a precarious unity, drives both. In his third lecture, Lyotard examines how philosophy is a form of utterance, both communicative and indirect. Finally, he turns to Marx, exploring the extent to which philosophy can be a transformative action within the world.
These wonderfully accessible lectures by one of the most influential philosophers of the last 50 years will attract a wide readership, since, as Lyotard says, `How can one not philosophize?' They are also an excellent introduction to Lyotard's mature thought, with its emphasis on the need for philosophy to bear witness, however obliquely, to a recalcitrant reality.
This important book by two leading scholars of Africa examines a series of issues that are central to the question of the postcolonial. The postcolonial paradigm, and the more recent decolonial paradigm, raise the issue of the universal: is the postcolonial the first phase of a new universalism, one which would be truly universal because it would be fully inclusive, or is it on the contrary the denial of all universalism, the triumph of the particular and of fragmentation?
In addressing this issue Diagne and Amselle also tackle many related themes, such as the concepts of race, culture and identity, the role of languages in philosophy as practised in different cultural areas, the various conceptions of Islam, especially in West Africa, and the outlines of an Africa which can be thought of at the same time as singular and as plural. Each thinker looks back at his writings on these themes, comparing and contrasting them with those of his interlocutor. While Amselle seeks to expose the essentialist and culturalist logics that might underlie postcolonial and decolonial thought, Diagne consistently refuses to adopt the trappings of the Afrocentrist and particularist thinker. He argues instead for a total decentring of all thought, one that rejects all `centrisms' and highlights instead branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time.
This volume is a timely contribution to current debates on the postcolonial question and its new decolonial form. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, from African studies and Black studies to philosophy, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in the debates around postcolonial studies and decolonial thought
This important book by two leading scholars of Africa examines a series of issues that are central to the question of the postcolonial. The postcolonial paradigm, and the more recent decolonial paradigm, raise the issue of the universal: is the postcolonial the first phase of a new universalism, one which would be truly universal because it would be fully inclusive, or is it on the contrary the denial of all universalism, the triumph of the particular and of fragmentation?
In addressing this issue Diagne and Amselle also tackle many related themes, such as the concepts of race, culture and identity, the role of languages in philosophy as practised in different cultural areas, the various conceptions of Islam, especially in West Africa, and the outlines of an Africa which can be thought of at the same time as singular and as plural. Each thinker looks back at his writings on these themes, comparing and contrasting them with those of his interlocutor. While Amselle seeks to expose the essentialist and culturalist logics that might underlie postcolonial and decolonial thought, Diagne consistently refuses to adopt the trappings of the Afrocentrist and particularist thinker. He argues instead for a total decentring of all thought, one that rejects all `centrisms' and highlights instead branchings and connections, transfers, analogies and reciprocal influences between cultural places and intellectual fields that may be distant but are not distinct in space and time.
This volume is a timely contribution to current debates on the postcolonial question and its new decolonial form. It will be of great interest to students and scholars in a variety of fields, from African studies and Black studies to philosophy, anthropology, sociology and cultural studies, as well as to anyone interested in the debates around postcolonial studies and decolonial thought
This book presents the first comprehensive and critical account of Jeffrey Alexander's cultural sociology. Alexander has proposed a "strong program" in cultural sociology that analyses the cultural pragmatics of social performance, and his hermeneutical approach connects meaningful political action with deeper symbolic structures of social life. His highly original account of the civil sphere, as an institutionalized domain that is shaped by the discourse of liberty and solidarity and that sustains universalizing cultural aspirations provides an illuminating perspective on how democracy functions, and fails to function, in contemporary societies. This book charts the development of Alexander's thought in all its complexity. Through its critical readings, it also opens up a dialogue with other contemporary approaches in sociology, situating Alexander's work in relation to others and highlighting alternative views that challenge his ideas. It is an invaluable introduction for anyone who wishes to learn more about the work of one of the most creative sociologists of our time.
Certain philosophers of Antiquity compared the world to a large animal; but if the world were an animal, it would have a skin similar to the skin that envelops each living being and gives it unity. The world is neither an animal nor a machine but an interminable jumble whose destination is nothing other than the maelstrom in which the very idea of the world slips away. The world has no skin other than the turbulence that makes histories, customs, moments of grandeur and decadence. Because it is not a skin, this extension of space-time is much more fragile than the skins that are already always fragile, because everything here touches its extremities. The world is everything that passes between us - ourselves and everything that happens to us, everything that becomes of our contacts, our gazes, our movements; and through referrals from skin to skin, from the fleeting to the immemorial, you reach, without even knowing it, the entire actuality of the world: the act of its existence. This act is made up of works and disasters, splendours, horrors, and catastrophes. As long as it is ours, it is the act of an infinite emergence that is all the sense there is: a sense that incessantly goes from skin to skin and is itself never enveloped by anything. The texts in this volume are all oriented by the concern for what is currently happening to us - we, late humanoids - when we arrive at an extremity of our history, whether this extremity should turn out to be a stage, a rupture, or quite simply a last breath.
In the past, pandemics were considered divine punishment, but we now understand the biological characteristics of viruses and we know they are spread through social interaction. What used to be divine has become human - all too human, as Nietzsche would say. But while the virus dispels the divine, we are discovering that living beings are more complex and harder to define than we had previously imagined, and also that political power is more complex than we may have thought. And this, argues Nancy, helps us to see why the term `biopolitics' fails to grasp the conditions in which we now find ourselves. Life and politics challenge us together. Our scientific knowledge tells us that we are dependent only on our own technical power, but can we rely on technologies when knowledge itself includes uncertainties? If this is the case for technical power, it is much more so for political power, even when it presents itself as guided by objective data. The virus is a magnifying glass that reveals the contradictions, limitations and frailties of the human condition, calling into question as never before our stubborn belief in progress and our hubristic sense of our own indestructibility as a species.
As a philosopher and a novelist, Tristan Garcia inhabits two worlds, metaphysics and literary fiction, like an amphibious creature moving between the land and the sea, breathing in both air and water. He is drawn to metaphysics because, as he puts it, metaphysics is the edge of the abyss of thought, the unstable frontier of indeterminacy where thinking is no longer constrained by the principles of logic or the law of non-contradiction. Metaphysics seeks to describe the world from outside one's own point of view. It aims at an ecstatic reconstruction of what keeps us locked up in our conditions, in our time and place, here among the living, with our subjectivities and within our situations. It gives us an idea of all constraints from a point of view that posits the possible absence of the constraint of having a point of view. The ambition of this slender book - which is at the same time a concise introduction to Garcia's work and thought - is to help us grasp and transform the conditions of our existence by paying equal attention to what is ending and what is just beginning, to the dusk and to the dawn. Until we cannot hold our breath any longer.
The AI revolution can seem powerful and unstoppable, extracting data from every aspect of our lives and subjecting us to unprecedented surveillance and control. But at ground level, even the most advanced `smart' technologies are not as all-powerful as either the tech companies or their critics would have us believe.
From gig worker activism to wellness tracking with sex toys and TikTokers' manipulation of the algorithm, this book shows how ordinary people are negotiating the datafication of society. The book establishes a new theoretical framework for understanding everyday experiences of data and automation, and offers guidance on the ethical responsibilities we share as we learn to live together with data-driven machines.
Everyday Data Cultures is essential reading for students and researchers in digital media and communication, as well as for anyone interested in the role of data and AI in society.
From the Sivens forest in France to the Hambach forest in Germany, from the Broadback forest in Canada to the rainforests of Borneo, something has shifted in these wild spaces over the last decade or two. People have begun to inhabit the forests, oppose the loggers and use their bodies as shields, motivated by the determination to resist the lethal ecosystem of commercial exploitation. Forests have become a battleground in the struggle between groups with fundamentally divergent aims and objectives. Forests are made up of insurgents. Jean-Baptiste Vidalou went to see some of these forests and meet those who are defending them: he discovered a completely different way of understanding the world, sharply opposed to the mentality of planners who see forests as just one more territory to be managed. Here he recounts this encounter, relays what these forest peoples and struggles convey, not to offer any recipes or ready-made solutions to the crises of our times but to be the forest, like a force that grows, stem by stem, leaf by leaf, slowly becoming ungovernable.
The Middle East, often referred to as the cradle of the three monotheisms, is saturated with symbolism. Situated at the crossroads of Asia, Africa, and Europe, it is a land marked by the rich confluence of religions and peoples. It has also been the focal point of endemic tensions and conflicts, many of which stretch back into the mists of time. In this new history of the Middle East, Jean-Pierre Filiu looks beyond religion and focuses his attention on the processes by which powers and their areas of domination were established over time. His starting point is 395, the year when the Roman Empire was divided into eastern and western halves: at that point, the Middle East emerged as a specific entity, freed from external domination, and a Christianity of the East asserted itself, turned towards Byzantium rather than towards Rome. From this point on, Filiu follows a strictly Middle Eastern dynamic, tracing the rise and fall of powers linked to the three principal centres of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq and recounting the procession of empires, invasions, and assertions of imperialist ambition that have characterized the region since then. The book closes in 2022, when the men and women of the Middle East were still struggling for the right to define their destiny by telling their stories in their own voices. This magisterial and up-to-date history of the Middle East will be essential reading for students and scholars and for anyone interested in the history and politics of one of the most important and contested regions of the modern world.
