For René Girard, human life revolves around mimetic desire, which regularly manifests itself in acquisitive rivalry when we find ourselves wanting an object because another wants it also. Noting that mimetic desire is driven by our sense of inadequacy or insufficiency, Girard arrives at a profound insight: our desire is not fundamentally directed toward the other’s object but toward the other’s being. We perceive the other to possess a fullness of being we lack. Mimetic desire devolves into violence when our quest after the being of the other remains unfulfilled. So pervasive is mimetic desire that Girard describes it as an ontological illness. In Intimate Domain, Reineke argues that it is necessary to augment Girard’s mimetic theory if we are to give a full account of the sickness he describes. Attending to familial dynamics Girard has overlooked and reclaiming aspects of his early theorizing on sensory experience, Reineke utilizes psychoanalytic theory to place Girard’s mimetic theory on firmer ground. Drawing on three exemplary narratives—Proust’s In Search of Lost Time, Sophocles’s Antigone, and Julia Kristeva’s The Old Man and the Wolves—the author explores familial relationships. Together, these narratives demonstrate that a corporeal hermeneutics founded in psychoanalytic theory can usefully augment Girard’s insights, thereby ensuring that mimetic theory remains a definitive resource for all who seek to understand humanity’s ontological illness and identify a potential cure.

Eminent domain entered the awareness of many Americans with the recent U.S. Supreme Court case Kelo v. New London. Across the political spectrum, people were outraged when the Court majority said that a local government may transfer property from one private party to another under the ''public use'' clause of the Constitution, for the sake of ''economic development. Carla T. Main - who in the past, as a lawyer, has represented the condemning authorities in eminent domain cases - examines how property rights in America have come to be so weak, tracing the history of eminent domain from the Revolutionary War to the Kelo case. But the heart of Bulldozed is a story of how eminent domain has affected an American family and the small-town community where they have lived and worked for decades. In the 1940s, Pappy and Isabel Gore established a shrimp processing plant in Freeport, Texas. Three generations of Gores built Western Seafood into a thriving business that stood up to fierce competition and market flux. But Freeport was struggling, and city officials decided that a private yacht marina on the Old Brazos River might save it. They would use eminent domain to take the Gores' waterfront property and hand it over to the developer, an heir of a legendary Texas oil family, in a risky sweetheart deal. For three years, the Gores resisted the taking with every ounce of strength they had. Around them, the fabric of the community unraveled as friends and neighbors took sides. Bulldozed vividly recounts the Gores' fight with city hall, and at the same time ponders larger questions of what property rights mean today and who among us is entitled to hold on to the American Dream.

In the Socialist Utopia of the People's Republic of Britain a routine criminal investigation spirals out of control with world-shattering consequences. The Cold War ended thirty years ago, the Communists have won in Europe and the world has settled into two blocks divided by a silicon curtain, The Partition. The tranquil backwater of the People's Republic of Britain is due to host an international sporting event, the Games, and celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of the country becoming a republic. When the organiser of the Games dies suddenly and his office is broken into, Barrow, the retired security operative enlisted to investigate, is drawn into a conspiracy that has implications not only for him and his team of young and inexperienced assistants, but for their entire way of life. How is the American research student Julia Verona implicated? Is some kind of attack being planned? Who is really in command of the operation? Is there a double agent within the PRBs security apparatus? What is the significance of the reclusive novelist Vernon Crane? Fusing the trappings of a literary thriller with experimental style, Eminent Domain explores the art, culture, politics, personalities, conflicts, loves and losses of a range of boldly realised characters in a Utopian world radically different to our own but recognizably the way that things, at one time, might have been. A kaleidoscopic satire of our present moment, Eminent Domain is both a dark thriller and a radical neo-modernist experiment that probes at the limits of Utopia, a formally dazzling reimagining of the political novel in which lives, worlds and even realities collide to devastating effect.

Investigating how intimacy is constructed across the restless world of empire

The Model Rules of Professional Conduct provides an up-to-date resource for information on legal ethics. Federal, state and local courts in all jurisdictions look to the Rules for guidance in solving lawyer malpractice cases, disciplinary actions, disqualification issues, sanctions questions and much more. In this volume, black-letter Rules of Professional Conduct are followed by numbered Comments that explain each Rule's purpose and provide suggestions for its practical application. The Rules will help you identify proper conduct in a variety of given situations, review those instances where discretionary action is possible, and define the nature of the relationship between you and your clients, colleagues and the courts.