logo for Harvard University Press
Illustration
J. Hillis Miller
Harvard University Press, 1992

front cover of Inorganic Life
Inorganic Life
On Post-Vitalism
Eckardt Lindner
Diaphanes, 2024
A theory of passive vitalism.

Contemporary theory has pushed the boundaries of the concept of the living, urging us to consider a vitality that manifests beyond the human, animal, or even the organic altogether. Recognizing the vast variety of modes of existence and vibrancy entails—such is the claim—a new ethics and politics. In Inorganic Life, the philosopher Eckardt Lindner intervenes in this discussion. He claims that we have not yet properly understood how and to what effect we can break the organo-centrism of philosophy and have neglected to consider the inner contradictions of such novel amalgams of vitalism and materialism.

As an unlikely ally in his critical project, he investigates the inner tension in Deleuze’s works between an overtly vitalist stance and critiques of classical forms of vitalism, bordering on a novel anti-vitalism. Against active forms of vitalism, interested in more immersion in the world, interconnectedness, and ever more efficacious praxis, one can find in Deleuze a passive vitalism. This subterranean thought in the philosophy of immanence highlights the capacity of life to disorient itself, to be out of line with itself, to detach itself from purposeful action and its own inner goals.

Lindner explores this passive vitalism by drawing together thinkers such as Deleuze, Cioran, Laruelle, Kant, and Derrida. Suspicious of the moralistic and enthusiastic tendency of new materialisms, this vitalism would be inherently critical—even of its own commitments to liveliness—and thus gestures to a new politics and ethics of life.
 
[more]

front cover of The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and Media
The Intoxication of Destruction in Theory, Culture and Media
A Philosophy of Expenditure after Georges Bataille
Erin K. Stapleton
Amsterdam University Press, 2022
This book examines the desire for, and intoxication with, destruction as it appears in cultural objects and representation, arguing that all cultural and aesthetic value is fundamentally predicated on its own fragility, as well as the living transience of those who make and encounter it. Beginning with a philosophy of expenditure after Georges Bataille, each chapter maps different operations of destruction in media and culture. These operations are expressed and located in representations of human extinction and explosive architecture, in the body and in sexuality, and in media and digital archives, which constitute a further destabilisation of the notion of destruction in the dynamic between aspirational immortality and material volatility embedded in the archival systems of digital cultures.
[more]

front cover of Islam and the West
Islam and the West
A Conversation with Jacques Derrida
Mustapha Chérif
University of Chicago Press, 2008
In the spring of 2003, Jacques Derrida sat down for a public debate in Paris with Algerian intellectual Mustapha Chérif. The eminent philosopher arrived at the event directly from the hospital where he had just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, the illness that would take his life just over a year later. That he still participated in the exchange testifies to the magnitude of the subject at hand: the increasingly distressed relationship between Islam and the West, and the questions of freedom, justice, and democracy that surround it.
 
As Chérif relates in this account of their dialogue, the topic of Islam held special resonance for Derrida—perhaps it is to be expected that near the end of his life his thoughts would return to Algeria, the country where he was born in 1930. Indeed, these roots served as the impetus for their conversation, which first centers on the ways in which Derrida’s Algerian-Jewish identity has shaped his thinking. From there, the two men move to broader questions of secularism and democracy; to politics and religion and how the former manipulates the latter; and to the parallels between xenophobia in the West and fanaticism among Islamists.
 
Ultimately, the discussion is an attempt to tear down the notion that Islam and the West are two civilizations locked in a bitter struggle for supremacy and to reconsider them as the two shores of the Mediterranean—two halves of the same geographical, religious, and cultural sphere. Islam and the West is a crucial opportunity to further our understanding of Derrida’s views on the key political and religious divisions of our time and an often moving testament to the power of friendship and solidarity to surmount them.
[more]


Send via email Share on Facebook Share on Twitter