Together, these two novels comprise one of the most fascinating, obsessive, and erotic works of contemporary fiction. Both feature Octave, an elderly cleric, his striking, austere, yet sensual young wife, Roberte and their nephew, Antoine. In Roberte Ce Soir, the heroine engages in a ritual of hospitality, designed by Octave, whereby she offers herself to any guest who shows desire for her. This device becomes a circular game of realizing one's own identity through the reaction to a third person since, Klossowski asserts, the body is the envelope of the soul and its every expression is a permissible condition of spiritual progress. In The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes the scholastic aspect of Roberte Ce Soir gives way to a more complex story composed of situations that throw a strange light on human behaviour. Roberte is now a socially and politically well-situated member of the official council for censorship. Dissatisfied by marital legitimacy, she discovers the world of sexual perversion and imposes on herself the duty of exploring it — the ultimate goal of her scandalous yet farcical task is the achievement of complete freedom.

Raúl Ruiz, while considered one of the world's most significant filmmakers by several film critics, is yet to be the subject of any thorough engagement with his work in English. This volume sets out on this task by mapping, as fully as possible, Ruiz's cinematic trajectory across more than five decades of prolific work, up to his death in 2011; ranging from his earliest work in Chile to high-budget 'European' costume dramas culminating in Mysteries of Lisbon (2010). It does so by treating Ruiz's work – with its surrealist, magic realist, popular cultural, and neo-Baroque sources – as a type of 'impossible' cinematic cartography, mapping real, imaginary, and virtual spaces, and crossing between different cultural contexts, aesthetic strategies, and technical media. It argues that across the different phases of Ruiz's work identified, there are key continuities such as the invention of singular cinematic images and the interrogation of their possible and impossible combinations.

Long recognized as a masterpiece of Nietzsche scholarship, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is made available here for the first time in English. Taking a structuralist approach to the relation between Nietzsche's thought and his life, Klossowski emphasizes the centrality of the notion of Eternal Return (a cyclical notion of time and history) for understanding Nietzsche's propensities for self-denial, self-reputation, and self-consumption. Nietzsche's ideas did not stem from personal pathology, according to Klossowski. Rather, he made a pathological use of his best ideas, anchoring them in his own fluctuating bodily and mental conditions. Thus Nietzsche's belief that questions of truth and morality are at base questions of power and fitness resonates dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.

Sacred Eroticism addresses a neglected chapter in Latin American literature, namely, the influence of Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski's atheist mysticism in the Latin American erotic novel of the twentieth century. Combining a Lacanian analytical framework with an (Inter)textualist approach. Juan Carlos Ubilluz reveals how Julio Cortazar, Salvador Elizondo, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Juan Garcia Ponce adopted Sataille and Klossowski's aesthetic and philosophical models as a point of departure to rearticulate the modern subject's buried dimension of the sacred through various Innovations on the erotic novel's form. Ubilluz examines the dialectical irruption of these literary experiments into their particular aesthetic, theoretical, and political contexts; showing, for instance, that Cortazar's

Jacques Derrida explores the ramifications of what we owe to others. Hospitality reproduces a two-year seminar series delivered by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris between 1995 and 1997. In these lectures, Derrida asks a series of related questions about responsibility and “the foreigner”: How do we welcome or turn away the foreigner? What does the idea of the foreigner reveal about kinship and the state, particularly in relation to friendship, citizenship, migration, asylum, assimilation, and xenophobia? Derrida approaches these questions through readings of several classical texts as well as modern texts by Heidegger, Arendt, Camus, and others. Central to his project is a rigorous distinction between conventional, finite hospitality, with its many conditions, and the aspirational idea of hospitality as something offered unconditionally to the stranger. This volume collects the first year of the seminar.

In works of Western literature ranging from Homer’s Odyssey to Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? the giving and taking of hospitality is sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. Heffernan traces this leitmotiv through the history of our greatest writings, including Christ’s Last Supper, Macbeth’s murder of his royal guest, and Camus’s short story on French colonialism in Arab Algeria. By means of such examples and many more, this book considers what literary hosts, hostesses, and guests do to as well as for each other. In doing so, it shows how often treachery rends the fabric of trust that hospitality weaves.