It takes unholy courage to win a holy war--in the soaring battlefields of Tibet! (from the book cover).

The highway became the Red Sea. We moved through the storm like a sheer valley. You drove; I looked at you with love. —from "Storm" One of the most gifted and readable poets of his time, Adam Zagajewski is proving to be a contemporary classic. Few writers in either poetry or prose can be said to have attained the lucid intelligence and limpid economy of style that have become a matter of course with Zagajewski. It is these qualities, combined with his wry humor, gentle skepticism, and perpetual sense of history's dark possibilities, that have earned him a devoted international following. This collection, gracefully translated by Clare Cavanagh, finds the poet reflecting on place, language, and history. Especially moving here are his tributes to writers, friends known in person or in books—people such as Milosz and Sebald, Brodsky and Blake—which intermingle naturally with portraits of family members and loved ones. Eternal Enemies is a luminous meeting of art and everyday life.

The Total Enemy explores the most radicalized forms of enmity, trying to unravel some of its historical and contemporary expressions. Starting from the premise that one of modernity's constitutive values is non-violence, the book explores how non-violence, or rather the making of a world free of violence, becomes a cause of violence, in some instances even extreme violence and totalitarian terror. The book consists of six case studies each exploring and discussing historically specific expressions of depicting an enemy as one the actors believe they can only deal with violently. It begins by looking at two important sites in the development of the total enemy, the French Revolution and the emergence of terrorist thinking in the middle of the nineteenth century. The book then turns to the twentieth century, beginning with the pre-WWII conceptualizations of the "total" in European political thought as an answer to a liberal state deemed unfit to manage and control mass society. Secondly, it considers the totalitarian enemy in Nazi Germany, especially Soviet Russia. Finally the book turns to two forms of contemporary total enmity: Islamism and in right-wing extremism. These concluding chapters look specifically at what happens to the total enemy concept once it goes from the state concept of the twentieth century to the private practice of the twenty-first.

Volume four of this translation of the wonderful tales of the Arabian nights.

First published in 1986. An unabashed and accurate translation of the wonderful and enchanting tales of the Arabian Nights, complete in four volumes.

Philosophers have long struggled to reconcile Martin Heidegger’s involvement in Nazism with his status as one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century. The recent publication of his Black Notebooks has reignited fierce debate on the subject. These thousand-odd pages of jotted observations profoundly challenge our image of the quiet philosopher’s exile in the Black Forest, revealing the shocking extent of his anti-Semitism for the first time. For much of the philosophical community, the Black Notebooks have been either used to discredit Heidegger or seen as a bibliographical detail irrelevant to his thought. Yet, in this new book, renowned philosopher Donatella Di Cesare argues that Heidegger’s “metaphysical anti-Semitism” was a central part of his philosophical project. Within the context of the Nuremberg race laws, Heidegger felt compelled to define Jewishness and its relationship to his concept of Being. Di Cesare shows that Heidegger saw the Jews as the agents of a modernity that had disfigured the spirit of the West. In a deeply disturbing extrapolation, he presented the Holocaust as both a means for the purification of Being and the Jews’ own “self-destruction”: a process of death on an industrialized scale that was the logical conclusion of the acceleration in technology they themselves had brought about. Situating Heidegger’s anti-Semitism firmly within the context of his thought, this groundbreaking work will be essential reading for students and scholars of philosophy and history as well as the many readers interested in Heidegger’s life, work, and legacy.