The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought

The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought PDF Author: Betty Rojtman
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030473228
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
This book analyses a cultural phenomenon that goes to the very roots of Western civilization: the centrality of death in our sense of human existence. It does so through a close reading of seminal works by the most creative authors of modern French thought, such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. These works encode an entire ethics of postmodernism. Betty Rojtman offers the reader a prism through which to see anew the key issues of the twentieth century: tragedy, finitude, nothingness—but also contestation, liberty, and sovereignty. Little by little we understand that this fascination with death may be just the other side of humankind’s great protest, its thirst for the infinite and its desire to be. Finally, Rojtman tries to offer another view on these fundamental questions by shifting to a parallel cultural reference: Kabbalah.

The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought

The Fascination with Death in Contemporary French Thought PDF Author: Betty Rojtman
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030473228
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 145

Get Book

Book Description
This book analyses a cultural phenomenon that goes to the very roots of Western civilization: the centrality of death in our sense of human existence. It does so through a close reading of seminal works by the most creative authors of modern French thought, such as Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. These works encode an entire ethics of postmodernism. Betty Rojtman offers the reader a prism through which to see anew the key issues of the twentieth century: tragedy, finitude, nothingness—but also contestation, liberty, and sovereignty. Little by little we understand that this fascination with death may be just the other side of humankind’s great protest, its thirst for the infinite and its desire to be. Finally, Rojtman tries to offer another view on these fundamental questions by shifting to a parallel cultural reference: Kabbalah.

The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes

The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes PDF Author: Elliot R. Wolfson
Publisher: Stanford University Press
ISBN: 1503635309
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description
The Philosophical Pathos of Susan Taubes offers a detailed analysis of an extraordinary figure in the twentieth-century history of Jewish thought, Western philosophy, and the study of religion. Drawing on close readings of Susan Taubes's writings, including her correspondence with Jacob Taubes, scholarly essays, literary compositions, and poems, Elliot R. Wolfson plumbs the depths of the tragic sensibility that shaped her worldview, hovering between the poles of nihilism and hope. By placing Susan Taubes in dialogue with a host of other seminal thinkers, Wolfson illumines how she presciently explored the hypernomian status of Jewish ritual and belief after the Holocaust; the theopolitical challenges of Zionism and the dangers of ethnonationalism; the antitheological theology and gnostic repercussions of Heideggerian thought; the mystical atheism and apophaticism of tragedy in Simone Weil; and the understanding of poetry as the means to face the faceless and to confront the silence of death in the temporal overcoming of time through time. Wolfson delves into the abyss that molded Susan Taubes's mytheological thinking, making a powerful case for the continued relevance of her work to the study of philosophy and religion today.

How the French Think

How the French Think PDF Author: Sudhir Hazareesingh
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465061664
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352

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Book Description
In France, perhaps more so than anywhere else, intellectual activity is a way of life embraced by the majority of society, not just a small group of élite thinkers. And because French thought has also shaped the Western world, Sudhir Hazareesingh argues in How the French Think, we cannot hope to understand modern history without first making sense of the French mind-set. Hazareesingh traces the evolution of French thought from Descartes and Rousseau to Sartre and Derrida. In the French intellectual tradition, he shows, recurring themes have pervaded nearly every aspect of French life, from the rhetorical flair once embodied by the philosophes to the country's modern embrace of secularism. Sweeping aside generalizations and easy stereotypes, Hazareesingh offers an erudite portrait of the venerated tradition of French thought and the people who embody it.

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture

The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture PDF Author: Dina Khapaeva
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472130269
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Popular culture has reimagined death as entertainment and monsters as heroes, reflecting a profound contempt for the human race

Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought

Encyclopedia of Modern French Thought PDF Author: Christopher John Murray
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135455643
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 748

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Book Description
In this wide-ranging guide to twentieth-century French thought, leading scholars offer an authoritative multi-disciplinary analysis of one of the most distinctive and influential traditions in modern thought. Unlike any other existing work, this important work covers not only philosophy, but also all the other major disciplines, including literary theory, sociology, linguistics, political thought, theology, and more.

Contemporary French Philosophy (Routledge Revivals)

Contemporary French Philosophy (Routledge Revivals) PDF Author: Colin Smith
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136832521
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 184

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Book Description
First published in 1964, this is not just a chronicle or encyclopaedia, but deals thoroughly in turn with meaning, view about reason, and views about values, particularly moral values. The author's knowledge of French literature is extensive and thorough, and a feature of the book is his analysis of the philosophical implications of literary works by Sartre, Paul Valery, Camus and others.

The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought

The Columbia History of Twentieth-century French Thought PDF Author: Lawrence D. Kritzman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231107914
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 828

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Book Description
Unrivaled in its scope and depth, "The Columbia History of Twentieth-Century French Thought" assesses the intellectual figures, movements, and publications that helped shape and define fields as diverse as history and historiography, psychoanalysis, film, literary theory, cognitive and life sciences, literary criticism, philosophy, and economics. More than two hundred entries by leading intellectuals discuss developments in French thought on such subjects as pacifism, fashion, gastronomy, technology, and urbanism. Contributors include prominent French thinkers, many of whom have played an integral role in the development of French thought, and American, British, and Canadian scholars who have been vital in the dissemination of French ideas.

Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy

Desert in Modern Literature and Philosophy PDF Author: Aidan Tynan
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474443370
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Aidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.

Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology

Georg Simmel and Contemporary Sociology PDF Author: M. Kaern
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 9400904592
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 383

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Book Description


Death and Tenses

Death and Tenses PDF Author: Neil Kenny
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191068861
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
In what tense should we refer to the dead? The question has long been asked, from Cicero to Julian Barnes. Answering it is partly a matter of grammar and stylistic convention. But the hesitation, annoyance, even distress that can be caused by the 'wrong' tense suggests that more may be at stake—our very relation to the dead. This book, the first to test that hypothesis, investigates how tenses were used in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century France (especially in French but also in Latin) to refer to dead friends, lovers, family members, enemies, colleagues, writers, officials, kings and queens of recent times, but also to those who had died long before, whether Christ, the saints, or the ancient Greeks and Romans who posthumously filled the minds of Renaissance humanists. Did tenses refer to the dead in ways that contributed to granting them differing degrees of presence (and absence)? Did tenses communicate dimensions of posthumous presence (and absence) that partly eluded more concept-based affirmations? The investigation ranges from funerary and devotional writing to Eucharistic theology, from poetry to humanist paratexts, from Rabelais's prose fiction to Montaigne's Essais. Primarily a work of literary and cultural history, it also draws on early modern grammatical thought and on modern linguistics (with its concept of aspect and its questioning of 'tense'), while arguing that neither can fully explain the phenomena studied. The book briefly compares early modern usage with tendencies in modern French and English in the West, asking whether changes in belief about posthumous survival have been accompanied by changes in tense-use.