Suspending the distinction between headline news and high theory, Avital Ronell examines the diverse figures of finitude in our modernity: war, guerrilla video, trauma TV, AIDS, music, divorce, sadism, electronic tagging, rumor. Her essays address such questions as, How do rumors kill? How has video become the conscience of TV? How have the police come to be everywhere, even where they are not? Is peace possible? “[W]riting to the community of those who have no community—to those who have known the infiniteness of abandonment,” her work explores the possibility, one possibility among many, that “this time we have gone too far”: “One last word. It is possible that we have gone too far. This possibility has to be considered if we, as a species, as a history, are going to get anywhere at all.”

Having thought out the Enlightenment project of individualism, privacy, and autonomy to its end, Anglo-American ethical theory now finds itself unable to respond to the collapse of community in which the practices justified by this project have resulted. In the place of reasonable deliberation about the goals to be chosen and the means to them, we now, it seems, have only what MacIntyre has aptly called "interminable debate" among "rival" positions, debate in which each party merely contends with the others for its own advantage. And this circumstance MacIntyre himself seems unable to escape despite his best efforts. In further elaborating Hans-Georg Gadamer's hermeneutical reception of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, and Hegel, and in referring simultaneously to Edmund Burke's parallel political rhetoric, among other tradition-oriented arguments in the English language, this book seeks a recollection of shared ethical principles, a recollection which alone, it is argued, might prevent the devolution of discussion into war with words and make possible some measure of consensus, however provisional and shadowed by dissent it will be.

The wide range of disciplines represented here enables the volume to stand as a contextualizing work in Fanon studies. It contains new original essays on Africana philosophy, the human sciences, dialectical humanism, women of color studies, neocolonial and postcolonial studies, violence, and tragedy.

Glossalaliais not a conventional glossary or dictionary. Although arranged alphabetically, it is a cutting-edge introduction to the state of theory today. Here 26 newly commissioned "definitions" of theoretical keywords are presented in a playful A-Z format, ranging from "Animality" to "Zero." Leading theorists and critics including J. Hillis Miller, Gayatri Chavkravorty Spivak, Simon Critchley, Ernesto Laclau, and many others provide unusual and insightful interpretations of a range of unexpected terms such as "Zero," "X," and "Yarn." They also reflect with renewed vigor upon such familiar concerns as "Difference," "Jouissance," "Nation," and "Otherness." Like a standard glossary, the volume invites the reader to start almost anywhere. ButGlossala liasteps far beyond the parameters of a standard reference work that is simply "about theory" by encouraging readers to actively engage with and enjoy theory, and to consider the future possibilities of theory in the twenty-firstcentury.

Subjects and Simulations presents essays focused on suffering and sublimity, representation and subjectivity, and the relation of truth and appearance in the twenty-first century. Inspired by the work of Jean Baudrillard, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and JeanLuc Nancy, sixteen authors study how the real reasserts itself in an age of every more fragmented media, and how art and literature give us access to forms of truth that elude philosophy. How does representation grant us access to the place once occupied by the subject? Is political life possible? Can plural thinking be retrieved? Will metaphor and simulation give us ways of being in an evanescent world? The volume engages discussions of French and Continental philosophy, post-structuralism, deconstruction, simulacra, aesthetics, existentialism, and media theory.

Avital Ronell has won worldwide acclaim for her work across literature and philosophy, psychoanalysis and popular culture, political theory and feminism, art and rhetoric, drugs and deconstruction. In works such as The Test Drive, Stupidity, Crack Wars, and The Telephone Book, she has perpetually raised new and powerful questions about how we think, what thinking does, and how we fool ourselves about the troubled space between thought and action. In this collection, some of today's most distinguished and innovative thinkers turn their attention to Ronell's teaching, writing, and provocations, observing how Ronell reads and what comes from reading her. By reading Ronell, and reading Ronell reading, contributors examine the ethico-political implications of her radical dislocations and carefully explicate, extend, and explore the paraconcepts addressed in her works.