Bøger i Cultural Memory in the Present serien

"Originally published in French under the title La marque du sacre."

This book combines loosely "autobiographical" texts by two of the most influential French intellectuals of our time. "Savoir," by Helene Cixous is an account of her experience of recovered sight after a lifetime of severe myopia; Jacques Derrida's "A Silkworm of One's Own" muses on a host of motifs, including his varied responses to "Savoir."

This ambitious work engages several major philosophical genres. It responds to current discussions of the "gift," which lie on the frontier of literature, anthropology, and economics, notably in the work of Jacques Derrida, and offers a detailed critique of the basis on which those discussions have proceeded.

This book analyzes the relation of public memory to history, forgetting, and selective memory in three late-twentieth-century cities that have confronted major social or political traumas-Berlin, Buenos Aires, and New York.

Reinhart Koselleck is regarded as one of the most important theorists of history and historiography of the late 20th century, and is an exponent and practitioner of "Begriffsgeschichte". The 18 essays in this volume illustrate the four theses of Koselleck's concept of history.

This book argues that the extraordinary force of the image in contemporary life-the contemporary imaginary-can be traced back to the Byzantine iconoclastic controversy of the eighth and ninth centuries.

"The Belated Witness is a remarkable book and a stunning accomplishment. This beautiful, finely wrought, and impeccably argued text makes a vital and refreshing contribution to existing scholarship in a number of fields: Holocaust literary studies, contemporary German literature, psychoanalytic literary criticism, and literary theory, more generally. Timely, profound, thoughtful, and ambitious in scope, it could very well become an instant classic of literary criticism."--Elissa Marder, Emory University"The book's importance lies not only in its insights into particular texts, but in its redefinition of testimony and our responses to it. This is an outstanding work."--Marianne Hirsch, Columbia University

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.

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.

"This innovative study of the works of Baudelaire and Celan opens a new window on the history of modern identity in western culture."--Germanic Notes and Reviews

This book revisits and revises some of the most basic concepts of time in the Judeo-Christian tradition, drawing on St. Paul's writings to rethink a new kind of radical faith in truth as an event, as the advent of the incalculable, a modality that remakes the pairing religious/secular.

Gerhard Richter's book explores the aesthetic and political ramifications of the literary genre of the Denkbild, or thought-image, as it was employed by four major German-Jewish writers and philosophers of the first half of the twentieth century: Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch, and Siegfried Kracauer.

Revisiting the history of Western religious thought and the role of nature and creation therein, this book paves the way for a new natural theology by bringing medieval theologian John the Scot Eriugena into conversation with American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Arguing that the familiar categories of victim, perpetrator, and bystander do not adequately account for our involvement in historical violence and contemporary inequality, this book introduces a new theory of political responsibility through the figure of the implicated subject.

This book shows how early economic ideas structured Christian thought and society, giving crucial insight into why money holds such power in the West.

This new collection of previously untranslated essays by renowned German conceptual historian and theorist Reinhart Koselleck provides new insight into his theory of history, an ambitious attempt to unearth the conditions of all possible histories.