"Marvelous, terrifying fun, especially if you've ever suspected that the world is an unreal construct built solely to keep you from knowing who you really are. Which it is, of course."--"Rolling Stone" Ragle Gumm has a unique job: every day he wins a newspaper contest. And when he isn't consulting his charts and tables, he enjoys his life in a small town in 1959. At least, that's what he thinks. But then strange things start happening. He finds a phone book where all the numbers have been disconnected, and a magazine article about a famous starlet he's never heard of named Marilyn Monroe. Plus, everyday objects are beginning to disappear and are replaced by strips of paper with words written on them like "bowl of flowers" and "soft drink stand." When Ragle skips town to try to find the cause of these bizarre occurrences, his discovery could make him question everything he has ever known.

Prodigiously influential, Jacques Derrida gave rise to a comprehensive rethinking of the basic concepts and categories of Western philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century, with writings central to our understanding of language, meaning, identity, ethics and values. In 1993, a conference was organized around the question, 'Whither Marxism?’, and Derrida was invited to open the proceedings. His plenary address, 'Specters of Marx', delivered in two parts, forms the basis of this book. Hotly debated when it was first published, a rapidly changing world and world politics have scarcely dented the relevance of this book.

The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze takes up Deleuze's most powerful argument on the task of contemporary philosophy in the West. Deleuze argues that it is only through a creative engagement with the forms of non-philosophy--notably modern art, literature and cinema--that philosophy can hope to attain the conceptual resources to restore the broken links of perception, language and emotion. In short, this is the only future for philosophy if it is to repair its fragile relationship to immanence to the world as it is.A sequence of dazzling essays analyze Deleuze's investigations into the modern arts. Particular attention is paid to Deleuze's exploration of Liebniz in relation to modern painting and of Borges to an understanding of the relationship between philosophy, literature and language. By illustrating Deleuze's own approach to the arts, and to modern literature in particular, the book demonstrates the critical significance of Deleuze's call for a future philosophy defined as an "art of inventing concepts."

The last published work that Jacques Derrida was involved with before his death in 2004, this title includes over 200 illustrations taken from the film of the same name, as well as essays, interviews and question and answer sessions.

This is the first book-length study of the uncanny, an important concept for contemporary thinking and debate across a range of disciplines and discourses, including literature, film, architecture, cultural studies, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and queer theory. Much of this importance can be traced back to Freud's essay of 1919, "The uncanny," where he was perhaps the first to foreground the distinctive nature of the uncanny as a feeling of something not simply weird or mysterious but, more specifically, as something strangely familiar. As a concept and a feeling, however, the uncanny has a complex history going back to at least the Enlightenment. Nicholas Royle offers a detailed historical account of the emergence of the uncanny, together with a series of close readings of different aspects of the topic. Following a major introductory historical and critical overview, there are chapters on the death drive, déjà-vu, "silence, solitude and darkness," the fear of being buried alive, doubles, ghosts, cannibalism, telepathy, and madness, as well as more "applied" readings concerned, for example, with teaching, politics, film, and religion. This is a major critical study that will be welcomed by students and academics but will also be of interest to the general reader.

In this detailed and comprehensive study of concepts from Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of time, Tromans undertakes a series of practice as research projects that reformulate Deleuze’s work via what Tromans calls a “musical-philosophical” practice. Tromans interweaves his own solo-piano improvisation and composition with analyses of his and others’ works in improvisation and experimental musics, leading to the creation of new, interdisciplinary concept or conceptual practice that he calls Rhythmicity: a way to rethink the temporal in respect of how we model its movements and relationships. Through the models of temporal interaction devised via each project, Deleuze’s concepts are transformed via their incorporation into the musical-philosophical mix. In addition, music improvisation and composition are shown to be utilisable for more than the making of music alone, with the thesis providing fresh insight for the fields of practice as research in music, Deleuze studies, experimental music, and Performance Philosophy in respect of its uniqueness of process and output.

DIVA critical analysis of contemporary racial and sexual politics involved in post-9/11 laws and culture, where practices of liberal tolerance and the inclusion of gay, lesbian, homosexual, and queer subjects into the nation-state have developed into a type/div