This is an account of Jacques Derrida's involvement in debates about the university. Derrida has long argued that philosophy simultaneously belongs and does not belong to the university. This book asks whether a broader tension between 'belonging' and 'not belonging' also forms the basis of Derrida's political thinking and activism.

Counter Institution is a history of three re-purposed buildings in the Lower East Side--Peace Pentagon, ABC No Rio, and El Bohio--that have been used by activists as their headquarters to launch various actions over the past forty years.

This book establishes deconstructive dialogues between texts which are generically, chronologically and stylistically very different. Each chapter aligns one of Dickens's later novels with a work of contemporary literature and a post structuralist theoretical text. Working from the premise of Derrida's contre, the relationship developed between these texts is not so much intertextual as countertextual: each text re-enacts the procedures of its counterparts, simultaneously rearticulating and interrogating their status. In this triangular mode of reading, the contact zone between countertexts becomes the site on which new readings are generated, readings that use the ambivalent relationship between writings to mark an analogous self-difference within writing itself. This productive self difference is described as a “negotiation” of the contradictory drives of signification, a strategic management of the masterly and the contingent. This book argues that Dickens's texts perform their negotiations in an acutely strenuous manner, amplifying instability and exposing the means of literary production. This lack of discipline proves contagious as the reader re enacts the text's spasmodic shifts between mastery and contingency. As surrogate Dickensian readers in the countertextual economy, the contemporary novel and post structuralist theory also display this instability an effect which allows this study to develop not only a theory of poetics but a poetics of theory. This dramatic self difference is not simply restricted to writing, however. In later chapters, this study examines how racial and gender identities are also marked by ambivalence, and how their instability is exacerbated after contact with a Dickensian contre. In conclusion, the work is itself submitted to a ‘Dickensian’ reading. The author examines how the study’s own manoeuvres have been exposed through contact with many of the texts analysed within it, and how this dialogue deconstructs the ideal of academic writing.

The Business of Emotions in Modern History shows how businesses, from individual entrepreneurs to family firms and massive corporations, have relied on, leveraged, generated and been shaped by emotions for centuries. With a broad temporal and global coverage, ranging from the early modern era to the present day in Africa, Asia, Europe and North America, the essays in this volume highlight the rich potential for studying emotions and business in tandem. In exploring how emotions and emotional situations affect business, and in turn how businesses affect the emotional lives of individuals and communities, this book allows us to recognise the emotional structures behind business decisions and relationships, and how to question them. From emotional labour in family firms, to affective corporate paternalism and the role of specific emotions such as trust, fear, anxiety love and nostalgia in creating economic connections, this book opens a rich new avenue of research for both the history of emotions and business history.

Pronouncements such as “the avant-garde is dead,” argues James M. Harding, have suggested a unified history or theory of the avant-garde. His book examines the diversity and plurality of avant-garde gestures and expressions to suggest “avant-garde pluralities” and how an appreciation of these pluralities enables a more dynamic and increasingly global understanding of vanguardism in the performing arts. In pursuing this goal, the book not only surveys a wide variety of canonical and noncanonical examples of avant-garde performance, but also develops a range of theoretical paradigms that defend the haunting cultural and political significance of avant-garde expressions beyond what critics have presumed to be the death of the avant-garde. The Ghosts of the Avant-Garde(s) offers a strikingly new perspective not only on key controversies and debates within avant-garde studies but also on contemporary forms of avant-garde expression within a global political economy.

First published in 1977. The New Left, as an organised political phenomenon, came - and went - largely in the 1960s. Was the Movement that went into precipitate decline after 1969 the same New Left that had developed a decade earlier? Nigel Young's thesis is that the core New Left, as it had evolved by the mid-1960s, had a unique identity that set

This book—the culmination of forty years of friendship between J. Hillis Miller and Jacques Derrida, during which Miller also closely followed all Derrida’s writings and seminars—is “for Derrida” in two senses. It is “for him,” dedicated to his memory. The chapters also speak, in acts of reading, as advocates for Derrida’s work. They focus especially on Derrida’s late work, including passages from the last, as yet unpublished, seminars. The chapters are “partial to Derrida,” on his side, taking his part, gratefully submitting themselves to the demand made by Derrida’s writings to be read—slowly, carefully, faithfully, with close attention to semantic detail. The chapters do not progress forward to tell a sequential story. They are, rather, a series of perspectives on the heterogeneity of Derrida’s work, or forays into that heterogeneity. The chief goal has been, to borrow a phrase from Wallace Stevens, “plainly to propound” what Derrida says. The book aims, above all, to render Derrida’s writings justice. It should be remembered, however, that, according to Derrida himself, every rendering of justice is also a transformative interpretation. A book like this one is not a substitute for reading Derrida for oneself. It is to be hoped that it will encourage readers to do just that.