This book offers a bold rethinking of how modern ideas of life, nature, and subjectivity took shape in late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century German thought. Moving beyond familiar narratives based on Kantian autonomy or Romantic irrationalism, it uncovers a vitalist tradition stretching from Herder to Schiller and Goethe, one that understood nature as dynamic, self-forming, and internally animated by life-force. Drawing on philosophy, the life sciences, and aesthetics, this innovative study reveals how these thinkers challenged mechanistic models of matter and resisted strict divisions between mind and nature. In doing so, they developed a historically contingent and embodied concept of subjectivity in which reason emerges from natural, cultural, and physiological processes rather than standing outside them. By situating this tradition within debates about epigenesis, form, and development, the book not only reshapes our understanding of German intellectual history but also sheds new light on contemporary debates about naturalism, posthumanism, and theories of life.

Published by Bucknell University Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

A groundbreaking examination of Michel Foucault's history of truth.

Many blame Michel Foucault for our post-truth and conspiracy-laden society. In this provocative work, Daniele Lorenzini argues that such criticism fundamentally misunderstands the philosopher’s project. Foucault did not question truth itself but what Lorenzini calls “the force of truth,” or how some truth claims are given the power to govern our conduct while others are not. This interest, Lorenzini shows, drove Foucault to articulate a new ethics and politics of truth-telling precisely in order to evade the threat of relativism. The Force of Truth explores this neglected dimension of Foucault’s project by putting his writings on regimes of truth and parrhesia in conversation with early analytic philosophy and by drawing out the “possibilizing” elements of Foucault’s genealogies that remain vital for practicing critique today.

Frederic Jameson and Film Theory is the first collection of its kind, it assesses and critically responds to Fredric Jameson’s remarkable contribution to film theory. The essays assembled explore key Jamesonian concepts—such as totality, national allegory, geopolitics, globalization, representation, and pastiche—and his historical schema of realism, modernism, and postmodernism, considering, in both cases, how these can be applied, revised, expanded and challenged within film studies. Featuring essays by leading and emerging voices in the field, the volume probes the contours and complexities of neoliberal capitalism across the globe and explores world cinema's situation within these forces by deploying and adapting Jamesonian concepts, and placing them in dialogue with other theoretical paradigms. The result is an innovative and rigorously analytical effort that offers a range of Marxist-inspired approaches towards cinemas from Asia, Latin America, Europe, and North America in the spirit of Jameson's famous rallying cry: 'always historicize!'.