Intervervening in a lively debate in contemporary European philosophy, this book offers a radically revisioned account of the self subjected to experience. Patiently yet vigorously engaging Jean-Luc Marion's reading of selfhood in St Augustine, Martis reaches back deeply into the Western Philosophical tradition to propose a bold solution to the phemomenological problem of how a self can recognise an other, while remiaining itself. Insights from Descartes, Kant, Derrida, Blanchot, Romano and others are brought together to undergird an account of a self that remains itself only in ceaseless loss to necessary incursions of the other: "I Welcome therefore I am."

This book focuses on different forms of turning-to versus turning-away from speech across a range of experiences in clinical treatment and general life. The chapters of this volume deal with the entrapment involved in exile from mother tongue, the parasitic language that uses the other's language as a linguistic prosthesis, the language of blank mourning which separates the mourner from their mourning, the adhesive identification of the voice and the psychotic split between voice and meaning, the mental hypotonia associated with an internalized object that turns away, and the spectrum between revenge and forgiveness. Each chapter sheds light on a different angle of the psyche's ability to spot its own leverage point and use it to transcend the infinite varieties of helpless victimhood: from the position of the victim to the position of the witness, from being the object of the narrative to being its subject, and from the position of righteousness to the willingness to forgive and be forgiven. This book is a must read for psychoanalysts, psychotherapists and literary scholars, as well as philosophers of language and of the mind.

Radical Hospitality addresses a timely and challenging subject for contemporary philosophy: the ethical responsibility of opening borders, psychic and physical, to the stranger. Kearney and Fitzpatrick show how radical hospitality happens by opening oneself in narrative exchange to someone or something other than ourselves—by crossing borders, whether literal or figurative. Against the fears, dogmas, and demands for certainty and security that push us toward hostility, we also desire to wager with the unknown, leap into the unanticipated, and celebrate the new, a desire this book seeks to recognize and cultivate. The book contends that hospitality means chancing one’s hand, one’s arm, one’s very self, thereby opening a vital space for new voices to be heard, shedding old skins, and welcoming new understandings. Radical Hospitality engages with urgent moral conversations concerning identity, nationality, immigration, commemoration, and justice, moving between theory and praxis and on to the formative life of the classroom. Building on key critical debates on the question of hospitality ranging from phenomenology, hermeneutics and deconstruction to neo-Kantian moral critique and Anglo-American virtue ethics, the book explores novel possibilities for an ethics of hospitality in our contemporary world of border anxiety, refugee crises, and ecological catastrophe.

This edited collection examines conflicting assumptions, expectations, and perceptions of maternity in artistic, cultural, and institutional contexts. Over the past two decades, the maternal body has gained currency in popular culture and the contemporary art world, with many books and exhibitions foregrounding artists’ experiences and art historical explorations of maternity that previously were marginalized or dismissed. In too many instances, however, the maternal potential of female bodies—whether realized or not—still causes them to be stigmatized, censored, or otherwise treated as inappropriate: cultural expectations of maternity create one set of prejudices against women whose bodies or experiences do align with those same expectations, and another set of prejudices against those whose do not. Support for mothers in the paid workforce remains woefully inadequate, yet in many cultural contexts, social norms continue to ask what is “wrong” with women who do not have children. In these essays and conversations, artists and writers discuss how maternal expectations shape both creative work and designed environments, and highlight alternative ways of existing in relation to those expectations.

New biotechnologies have propelled the question of what it means to be human – or posthuman – to the forefront of societal and scientific consideration. This volume provides an accessible, critical overview of the main approaches in the debate on posthumanism, and argues that they do not adequately address the question of what it means to be human in an age of biotechnology. Not because they belong to rival political camps, but because they are grounded in a humanist ontology that presupposes a radical separation between human subjects and technological objects. The volume offers a comprehensive mapping of posthumanist discourse divided into four broad approaches—two humanist-based approaches: dystopic and liberal posthumanism, and two non-humanist approaches: radical and methodological posthumanism. The author compares and contrasts these models via an exploration of key issues, from human enhancement, to eugenics, to new configurations of biopower, questioning what role technology plays in defining the boundaries of the human, the subject and nature for each. Building on the contributions and limitations of radical and methodological posthumanism, the author develops a novel perspective, mediated posthumanism, that brings together insights in the philosophy of technology, the sociology of biomedicine, and Michel Foucault’s work on ethical subject constitution. In this framework, technology is neither a neutral tool nor a force that alienates humanity from itself, but something that is always already part of the experience of being human, and subjectivity is viewed as an emergent property that is constantly being shaped and transformed by its engagements with biotechnologies. Mediated posthumanism becomes a tool for identifying novel ethical modes of human experience that are richer and more multifaceted than current posthumanist perspectives allow for. The book will be essential reading for students and scholars working on ethics and technology, philosophy of technology, poststructuralism, technology and the body, and medical ethics.

In Subjectivity of 'Différance', Heecheon Jeon carefully explores the question of living well together in the midst of myriad differences and otherness in our living world. Living well together is not a concept void of naïve togetherness of various subjectivities, but rather the disclosure of the repressive subjectivity to welcome «strangers to ourselves» by sacrificing the very subjectivity. To this end, Jeon not only delves into the deconstruction of subjectivity, but also searches for poietic possibilities of subjectivity without the subject for living well together in Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Alain Badiou: ethical responsibility, political enunciation, cultural supplementarity, and theological imagination. Beyond the deconstructive critique of metaphysical subjectivity, the possibility of subjectivity without the subject must be investigated in terms of multifaceted aspects of our living together: subjectum, Deus, and communitas. Jeon insists that deconstruction radically commands us to say salut! to the Other at the brink of a democracy to come.

This exciting new book makes a major contribution to Continental philosophy, bringing together for the first time the crucial work on politics by two giants of contemporary French philosophy, Jacques Derrida and Alain Badiou. Derrida has long been recognised as one of the most influential and indeed controversial thinkers in contemporary philosophy and Badiou is fast emerging as a central figure in French thought, as well as in Anglo-American philosophy - his magnum opus, Being and Event, and its long-awaited sequel, Logics of Worlds, have confirmed his position as one of the most significant thinkers working in philosophy today. Both philosophers have devoted a substantial amount of their oeuvre to politics and the question of the nature of the political. Here Antonio Calcagno shows how the political views of these two major thinkers diverge and converge, thus providing a comprehensive exposition of their respective political systems. Both Badiou and Derrida give the event a central role in structuring politics and political thinking and Calcagno advances a theory about the relationship between political events and time that can account for both political undecidability and decidability. This book navigates some very intriguing developments in Continental thought and offers a clear and fascinating account of the political theories of two major contemporary thinkers.