At least since Aristotle's Peri hermeneias, there has been talk of the pathos of language, of language as "symbols of the affections in the soul." The way these affections are registered, however, suggests that they are themselves structured like language. For Aristotle and others, language is suffered before any sense can be voiced. The pathos of language thus becomes a question of how language affects the subject of speech and, in the last analysis, of how language could respond to these questions of language. Passive Voices (On the Subject of Phenomenology and Other Figures of Speech) approaches these questions, first, through readings of Augustine's investigations into language and mind and Edmund Husserl's descriptions of passive synthesis. It then traces the further resonance of Augustine's and Husserl's interventions in selected literary experiments by Georges Bataille, Franz Kafka, and Maurice Blanchot that recall Husserl and Augustine while exceeding the restrictive fictions of phenomenological "science." In drawing out the echoes that emerge across confessional, philosophical, and fictional writings, this book exposes the ways in which speech occurs in the passive voice and affects any claim to experience.

Walter Benjamin claimed that the notion of novelty took on unprecedented importance with the growth of high capitalism in the nineteenth century. In this book, Kristina Mendicino analyzes a selection of canonical texts that reflect profound concern with novelty and its apparent contrary, the eternal return of the same, including Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Baudelaire's lyric and prose poetry, and Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto. She also addresses Eternity by the Stars by Louis-Auguste Blanqui, who is less well known and often underestimated in considerations of his significance for revolutionary political theory. Mendicino argues that the notion of a novum cannot be understood without attentiveness to the language of announcement, not least of all because the "new" has always been associated with a particular mode of linguistic performance. Through close readings of emphatically annunciatory texts, she demonstrates how the extreme possibilities of expression that they present through specific citational and rhetorical praxes render the language of announcement overdetermined and anachronistic in ways that exceed any systematic account of historical time and experience. This excess in and through language is precisely what opens hitherto unheard of alternatives for conceiving of historical temporality and political possibility.

Drawing on the original phenomenological work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Simone de Beauvoir, and John Russon, as well as recent research in child psychology, The Other in Perception argues for perception's inherently existential significance: we always perceive a world and not just objective facts. The world is the rich domain of our personal and interpersonal lives, and central to this world is the role of other people. We are "paired" with others such that our perception is really the enactment of a coinhabiting of a shared world. These relations with others shape the very way in which we perceive our world. Susan Bredlau explores two uniquely formative domains in which our pairing relations with others are particularly critical: childhood development and sexuality. It is through formative childhood experience that the essential, background structures of our world are instituted, which has important consequences for our developed perceptual life. Sexuality is an analogous domain of formative intersubjective experience. Taken as a whole, Bredlau demonstrates the unique, pervasive, and overwhelmingly important role of other people within our lived experience.

Drawn from a series of lectures that Bernhard Waldenfels delivered in honour of the Chinese philosopher Tang Chun-I, The Question of the Other is a collection of seven papers introducing what he calls a new sort of responsive phenomenology. This means that our experience does not start from our own intentions or from our common understanding, but from something that happens and appeals to us, disturbing our projects and forcing us to respond. We only become ourselves by responding to the Other. Hence otherness is not restricted to the otherness of the Other or to that of another order, it rather penetrates ourselves. Bernhard Waldenfels, born in 1934, earned his Ph.D. from the University of Munich in 1959. He taught at Munich until 1976 when he was appointed Professor of Philosophy at the Ruhr-Universit?t Bochum. Since 1999 he is Professor Emeritus. He has been a visiting professor in Rotterdam, Paris, New York, Louvain-la Neuve, Costa Rica, Debrecen, Prague, Rome, Vienna, and Hong Kong. He is a cofounder of the German Society for Phenomenological Research. The tremendous success of China's economic reform, in contrast with the vast difficulties encountered by the former Soviet Union and Eastern European countries in their transition, has attracted worldwide attention. Using a historical, comparative and analytic approach grounded in mainstream economics, the authors develop a consistent and rational framework of state-owned enterprises and individual agents to analyze the internal logic of the traditional planning system. They also explain why the Chinese economy grew slowly before the market-oriented reform in 1979 but became one of the fastest growing economies afterwards, and why the vigour/chaos cycle became part of China's reform process. The book also addresses to the questions that whether China can continue its trend of reform and development and become the largest economy in the world in the early 21st century, and what the general implications of China's experience of development and reform are for other developing and transition economies. The first edition has been well-received and is the standard textbook or reference for students and researchers of China studies. In this thoroughly revised edition, the authors have updated the data and information in the book and include a new chapter on the impact of China's WTO accession on its economic reforms and causes of the current deflation. 5

Radical Passivity examines the notion of passivity in the work of Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben, three thinkers of exceptional intellectual privacy whose writings have decidedly altered the literary and philosophical cultures of our era. Placing their use of passivity in the context of Heidegger and Kant, Wall argues that any philosophical understanding of Levinas's ethics, Blanchot's aesthetics, or Agamben's community must begin with an understanding of a "logic" of passivity that in fact originates (in the modern era at least) in Kant's analysis of the transcendental schema.

In this work, Paul M. Postal supports the universalist theory of language by examining passive clauses. Contrary to a skeptical tradition, Postal argues that passive clauses are cross-linguistically identifiable and characterizable. This study proposes refinements of the analysis of the natural language grammatical category Passive Clause. These refinements include an account of the notion 'dummy nominal,' central to the analysis of impersonal passive clauses; additions permitting a proper typology of the major known subtypes of Passive Clause; a generalization permitting application to clauses whose subjects are not earlier level direct objects; and, construction of precise rule concepts to represent restrictions on passive clauses. The passive domain supports the universalist approach in three distinguishable ways: (1) by permitting formulation of otherwise apparently unstatable lawful characteristics of all passive structures; (2) by facilitating statement of language-specific passive constraints holding in diverse languages; and, (3) by allowing uniform statement in grammars of recurrent constraints on passives. Each mode of support is applied to actual cases based on material from more than a dozen languages from English and French to Quiche (Mayan) and Chi-Mwi:ni (Bantu).

Speech and phenomena.--Form and meaning.--Differance.