Kirjahaku

Cruelle existence que celle qui nourrit nos esperances et excite nos desirs afin de les reduire a neant Amere realite que celle contre laquelle notre imagination - libre, illimitee et enivrante - vient finalement se briser A la recherche du temps perdu semble faire de ce constat une loi, et s'imposer comme le roman de la souffrance et de l'ennui: la realite, ou du moins l'idee que l'on s'en fait, finit toujours par decevoir. Pourtant, il s'agit de montrer que cette insatisfaction nait d'un manque plus profond encore, inscrit au coeur du reel lui-meme, dans sa presence immediate et brute: notre rapport au monde revele un manque, qui n'est pas rien, mais un manque-a-etre, comme on parle d'un manque-a-gagner, et qui fonctionne comme le signe ou l'indice d'une verite par-dela ou plutot en creux de la seule realite presente. Ce manque ou ce deficit est bien ce dont on fait l'experience, ce qu'on ne peut s'empecher de ressentir, et meme ce qui definit le sens de l'experience (le sens du sensible, par consequent), tout en signifiant aussi, en pointille, l'au-dela ou l'envers de cette experience, sa face cachee, de laquelle Proust finit par extraire le sens de la litterature et de l'art en general. La litterature suit et file le reel dans sa propre derive, et jusque dans sa doublure.

Whether as economic interest, sexual drive, or the basic longing for recognition, desire is accepted as a core component of our modern selfidentities, and something we need to cultivate. But as Miguel de Beistegui charts in The Government of Desire, this has not been true in all times and all places. For centuries, as far back as late antiquity and early Christianity, philosophers believed that desire was an impulse that needed to be suppressed in order for the good life, whether personal or collective, ethical or political, to flourish. Though we now take it for granted, it was only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the naturalization of desire took place, and the pillars of the liberal self and form of government were erected. By critically exploring Foucault's claim that Western civilization is a civilization of desire, de Beistegui crafts a provocative and original genealogy of this shift in thinking. He shows how the relationship between identity, desire, and governance has been harnessed and transformed in the modern world, shaping our relations with others and ourselves, and establishing desire as an essential driving force for the constitution of a new and better social order. But is it? The Government of Desire argues that this is precisely what a contemporary politics of resistance must seek to overcome, questioning the supposed universality of a politics based on recognition and the economic satisfaction of desire. Relying on Foucault as well as on Deleuze and Guattari, de Beistegui highlights the need to elaborate a politics of difference and creation, raising the crucial question of how can we manage to be less governed today and positing strategic questions of possible contemporary forms of counter-conduct. Drawing on a host of thinkers from philosophy, political theory, and psychoanalysis, and concluding with a call for a sovereign and anarchic form of desire, The Government of Desire is a groundbreaking account of our freedom and unfreedom, of what makes us both governed and ungovernable.

Thought under Threat reveals and combats the forces diminishing the power and role of critical thinking, whether in our individual lives or collectively.Thought under Threat is an attempt to understand the tendencies that threaten thinking from within. These tendencies have always existed. But today they are on the rise and frequently encouraged, even in our democracies. People “disagree” with science and distrust experts. Political leaders appeal to the hearts and guts of “the people,” rather than their critical faculties. Stupidity has become a right, if not a badge of honor; superstition is on the rise; and spite is a major political force. Thinking is considered “elitist.” To see those obstacles as vices of thought, Miguel de Beistegui argues, we need to understand stupidity not as a lack of intelligence or judgment, but as the tendency to raise false problems and trivial questions. Similarly, we need to see spite not as a moral vice, but as a poison that blurs and distorts our critical faculties. Finally, superstition is best described not as a set of false beliefs, but as a system that neutralizes one’s ability to think for oneself. For de Beistegui, thinking is intrinsically democratic and a necessary condition for the exercise of freedom. Thought under Threat shows how a training of thought itself can be used to ward off those vices, lead to productive deliberation, and, ultimately, create a thinking community.

A philosopher excavates the origins of our state of permanent crisis and charts a more promising path forward. Crises abound—so many that it can be easy to lose perspective. In A Philosophy of Crisis, Miguel de Beistegui traces the intellectual development of ideas about crisis and identifies four distinct forms a crisis might take: crises of deviation, exception, contradiction, and extinction. Drawing on a range of examples (from economic crises to social uprisings, pandemics, and ecological devastation) and discourses (from ancient medicine to legal theory, political economy, philosophy, the earth sciences, and ecocriticism), A Philosophy of Crisis offers new conceptual tools for both understanding and avoiding the dangers of our crisis-saturated time.

A philosopher excavates the origins of our state of permanent crisis and charts a more promising path forward. Crises abound—so many that it can be easy to lose perspective. In A Philosophy of Crisis, Miguel de Beistegui traces the intellectual development of ideas about crisis and identifies four distinct forms a crisis might take: crises of deviation, exception, contradiction, and extinction. Drawing on a range of examples (from economic crises to social uprisings, pandemics, and ecological devastation) and discourses (from ancient medicine to legal theory, political economy, philosophy, the earth sciences, and ecocriticism), A Philosophy of Crisis offers new conceptual tools for both understanding and avoiding the dangers of our crisis-saturated time.

". . . a real philosophical page-turner, a book that is difficult to put down, even given the complexity of its issues." —Jeffrey Powell "This is a fine addition to existing books on Heidegger's thought. . . . The author has both a command of Heidegger and of how best to elucidate him to a contemporary audience." —David Wood In Thinking with Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui looks into the essence of Heidegger's thought and engages the philosopher's transformative thinking with contemporary Western culture. Rather than isolate and explore a single theme or aspect of Heidegger, de Beistegui chooses multiple points of entry that unfold from the same question or idea. De Beistegui examines Heidegger's translations of Greek philosophy and his interpretations and displacements of anthropology, ethics and politics, science, and aesthetics. Thinking with Heidegger proposes fresh answers to some of philosophy's most fundamental questions and extends Heideggerian discourse into philosophical regions not treated by Heidegger himself.

". . . an attempt to revive ontology (or metaphysics)—indeed philosophy itself—by means of a two-sided conception of being. . . . This is a remarkable idea which has produced a powerful book." —Leonard Lawlor ". . . a major philosophical study: rich, brilliant . . . a tour de force, a seminal study that will be a starting-point for future research in this area." —Robert Bernasconi In Truth and Genesis, Miguel de Beistegui considers the role and meaning of philosophy today. Calling for a new departure for philosophy, one that brings together philosophy's scattered identities, de Beistegui proposes a robust and unified philosophy that would find itself equally at home in artistic and scientific disciplines. To build this renewed philosophy, de Beistegui turns to Aristotle and the earliest foundations of thought. He traces philosophy's development through the medieval and modern periods before comparing and investigating the work of two of the 20th century's most influential thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. In particular, de Beistegui focuses on Deleuze's Difference and Repetition and Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy for their handling of the concept of difference. De Beistegui concludes that Deleuze and Heidegger are irreconcilable, but it is in their disagreements that he sees a way to liberate philosophy from its current crisis.

". . . a real philosophical page-turner, a book that is difficult to put down, even given the complexity of its issues." —Jeffrey Powell "This is a fine addition to existing books on Heidegger's thought. . . . The author has both a command of Heidegger and of how best to elucidate him to a contemporary audience." —David Wood In Thinking with Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui looks into the essence of Heidegger's thought and engages the philosopher's transformative thinking with contemporary Western culture. Rather than isolate and explore a single theme or aspect of Heidegger, de Beistegui chooses multiple points of entry that unfold from the same question or idea. De Beistegui examines Heidegger's translations of Greek philosophy and his interpretations and displacements of anthropology, ethics and politics, science, and aesthetics. Thinking with Heidegger proposes fresh answers to some of philosophy's most fundamental questions and extends Heideggerian discourse into philosophical regions not treated by Heidegger himself.

Recent studies of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism have often presented Heidegger's philosophy as a forerunner to his political involvement. This has occured often to the detriment of the highly complex nature of Heidegger's relation to the political. Heidegger and the Political redresses this imbalance and is one of the first books to critically assess Heidegger's relation to politics and his conception of the political.Miguel de Beistegui shows how we must question why the political is so often displaced in Heidegger's writings rather than read the political into Heidegger. Exploring Heidegger's ontology where politics takes place after a forgetting of Being and his wish to think a site more originary and primordial than politics, Heidegger and the Political considers what some of Heidegger's key motifs - his emphasis on lost origins, his discussions of Holderlin's poetry, his writing on technology and the ancient Greek polis - may tell us about Heidegger's relation to the political. Miguel de Beistegui also engages with the very risks implicit in Heidegger's denial of the political and how this opens up the question of the risk of thinking itself.Heidegger and the Political is essential reading for students of philosophy and politics and all those interested in the question of the political today.

Recent studies of Heidegger's involvement with National Socialism have often presented Heidegger's philosophy as a forerunner to his political involvement. This has occured often to the detriment of the highly complex nature of Heidegger's relation to the political. Heidegger and the Political redresses this imbalance and is one of the first books to critically assess Heidegger's relation to politics and his conception of the political.Miguel de Beistegui shows how we must question why the political is so often displaced in Heidegger's writings rather than read the political into Heidegger. Exploring Heidegger's ontology where politics takes place after a forgetting of Being and his wish to think a site more originary and primordial than politics, Heidegger and the Political considers what some of Heidegger's key motifs - his emphasis on lost origins, his discussions of Holderlin's poetry, his writing on technology and the ancient Greek polis - may tell us about Heidegger's relation to the political. Miguel de Beistegui also engages with the very risks implicit in Heidegger's denial of the political and how this opens up the question of the risk of thinking itself.Heidegger and the Political is essential reading for students of philosophy and politics and all those interested in the question of the political today.

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor is the first book to try and connect Proust’s implicit ontology of experience with the question of style, and of metaphor in particular.Miguel de Beistegui begins with an observation: throughout In Search of Lost Time, the two main characters seem prone to chronic dissatisfaction in matters of love, friendship and even art. Reality always falls short of expectation. At the same time, the narrator experiences unexpected bouts of intense elation, the cause and meaning of which remain elusive. Beistegui argues we should understand these experiences as acts of artistic creation, and that this is why Proust himself wrote that true life is the life of art.He goes on to explore the nature of these joyful and pleasurable experiences and the transformation required of art, and particularly literature, if it is to incorporate them. He concludes that Proust revolutionises the idea of metaphor, extending beyond the confines of language to understand the nature of lived, bodily experience.

Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time has long fascinated philosophers for its complex accounts of time, personal identity and narrative, amongst many other themes. Proust as Philosopher: The Art of Metaphor is the first book to try and connect Proust’s implicit ontology of experience with the question of style, and of metaphor in particular.Miguel de Beistegui begins with an observation: throughout In Search of Lost Time, the two main characters seem prone to chronic dissatisfaction in matters of love, friendship and even art. Reality always falls short of expectation. At the same time, the narrator experiences unexpected bouts of intense elation, the cause and meaning of which remain elusive. Beistegui argues we should understand these experiences as acts of artistic creation, and that this is why Proust himself wrote that true life is the life of art.He goes on to explore the nature of these joyful and pleasurable experiences and the transformation required of art, and particularly literature, if it is to incorporate them. He concludes that Proust revolutionises the idea of metaphor, extending beyond the confines of language to understand the nature of lived, bodily experience.

Immanence - Deleuze and Philosophy identifies the original impetus and the driving force behind Deleuze's philosophy as a whole and the many concepts it creates. It seeks to extract the inner consistency of Deleuze's thought by returning to its source or to what, following Deleuze's own vocabulary, it calls the event of that thought. The source of Deleuzian thought, the book argues, is immanence. In five chapters dealing with the status of thought itself, ontology, logic, ethics, and aesthetics, Miguel de Beistegui reveals the manner in which immanence is realised in each and every one of those classical domains of philosophy. Ultimately, he argues, immanence turns out to be an infinite task, and transcendence the opposition with which philosophy will always need to reckon.

Immanence - Deleuze and Philosophy identifies the original impetus and the driving force behind Deleuze's philosophy as a whole and the many concepts it creates. It seeks to extract the inner consistency of Deleuze's thought by returning to its source or to what, following Deleuze's own vocabulary, it calls the event of that thought. The source of Deleuzian thought, the book argues, is immanence. In five chapters dealing with the status of thought itself, ontology, logic, ethics, and aesthetics, Miguel de Beistegui reveals the manner in which immanence is realised in each and every one of those classical domains of philosophy. Ultimately, he argues, immanence turns out to be an infinite task, and transcendence the opposition with which philosophy will always need to reckon.

A comprehensive and accessible overview of, and introduction to, the work of one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers, Martin Heidegger, by one of the world's foremost Heidegger scholars. Martin Heidegger's work is pivotal in the history of modern European philosophy. The New Heidegger presents a comprehensive and stimulating overview of, and introduction to, the work of one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of our time. Heidegger has had an extraordinary impact on contemporary philosophical and extra-philosophical life: on deconstruction, hermeneutics, ontology, technology and techno-science, art and architecture, politics, psychotherapy, and ecology. The New Heidegger takes a thematic approach to Heidegger's work, covering not only the seminal Being and Time, but also Heidegger's lesser-known works. Lively, clear and succinct, the book requires no prior knowledge of Heidegger and is an essential resource for anyone studying or teaching the work of this major modern philosopher.

A comprehensive and accessible overview of, and introduction to, the work of one of the twentieth century's most influential philosophers, Martin Heidegger, by one of the world's foremost Heidegger scholars. Martin Heidegger's work is pivotal in the history of modern European philosophy. The New Heidegger presents a comprehensive and stimulating overview of, and introduction to, the work of one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of our time. Heidegger has had an extraordinary impact on contemporary philosophical and extra-philosophical life: on deconstruction, hermeneutics, ontology, technology and techno-science, art and architecture, politics, psychotherapy, and ecology. The New Heidegger takes a thematic approach to Heidegger's work, covering not only the seminal Being and Time, but also Heidegger's lesser-known works. Lively, clear and succinct, the book requires no prior knowledge of Heidegger and is an essential resource for anyone studying or teaching the work of this major modern philosopher.

Lacan: A Genealogy provides a genealogical account of Lacan’s work as a whole, from his early writings on paranoid psychosis to his later work on the real and surplus enjoyment. Beistegui argues that Lacan's work requires an in-depth genealogy to chart and interpret the his key concept of desire. The genealogy is both a historical and critical approach, inspired by Foucault, which consists in asking how – that is, by what theoretical and practical transformations, by the emergence of which discourses of truth, which institutions, and which power relations – our current subjectivity was shaped. Desire is a crucial thread throughout because it lies at the heart not only of liberal political economy, psychiatry and psychopathology, and the various discourses of recognition (from philosophy to psychology and the law) that shape our current politics of identity, but also, and more importantly, of the manner in which we understand, experience and indeed govern ourselves, ethically and politically.A novel reading of Lacan that foregrounds the radicality and urgency of his concepts and the relationship between desire, norm and the law.

Lacan: A Genealogy provides a genealogical account of Lacan’s work as a whole, from his early writings on paranoid psychosis to his later work on the real and surplus enjoyment. Beistegui argues that Lacan's work requires an in-depth genealogy to chart and interpret the his key concept of desire. The genealogy is both a historical and critical approach, inspired by Foucault, which consists in asking how – that is, by what theoretical and practical transformations, by the emergence of which discourses of truth, which institutions, and which power relations – our current subjectivity was shaped. Desire is a crucial thread throughout because it lies at the heart not only of liberal political economy, psychiatry and psychopathology, and the various discourses of recognition (from philosophy to psychology and the law) that shape our current politics of identity, but also, and more importantly, of the manner in which we understand, experience and indeed govern ourselves, ethically and politically.A novel reading of Lacan that foregrounds the radicality and urgency of his concepts and the relationship between desire, norm and the law.

Crises abound. The ‘end of history’ in the form of the triumph of liberalism has given way to a proliferation of crises internal to liberal, and especially neoliberal democracies: our economies and ecosystems, democracies, social and labour relations, constitutions, cultures, identities, and bodies are subjected to repeated and increasingly severe shocks. Unsurprisingly, the vocabulary of crisis is ubiquitous. Ours, we are told, is an age of chronic, multiple, and mutually reinforcing cataclysms. But what exactly do we mean when we speak of crisis? Deceptively simple, the term has become a repository for a mass of fears, hopes and assumptions, bound up with the very institutions and techniques of government it so often claims to address. Overused and emptied out, it leads to either indecision and paralysis, or, at the other extreme, its cynical instrumentalization. To counter this, we need a philosophy, specifically a critique, of crisis. Crisis: A Critique presents crisis as a construction through which we understand, experience and order the world; as a discursive event, producing a range of effects. Drawing on a range of examples (from economic crises to social uprisings, pandemics, genocides, and ecological devastation) and discourses (from ancient medicine to legal theory, political economy, philosophy, the earth sciences, and eco-criticism), this ambitious work of conceptual archaeology and typology engages with a range of authors who have questioned the nature of the connection between crisis and critique. If our time “out of joint” presents a crisis of critique itself, Miguel de Beistegui takes a vital step towards re-calibrating our language and thought for an age of seemingly unrelenting catastrophe.

Crises abound. The ‘end of history’ in the form of the triumph of liberalism has given way to a proliferation of crises internal to liberal, and especially neoliberal democracies: our economies and ecosystems, democracies, social and labour relations, constitutions, cultures, identities, and bodies are subjected to repeated and increasingly severe shocks. Unsurprisingly, the vocabulary of crisis is ubiquitous. Ours, we are told, is an age of chronic, multiple, and mutually reinforcing cataclysms. But what exactly do we mean when we speak of crisis? Deceptively simple, the term has become a repository for a mass of fears, hopes and assumptions, bound up with the very institutions and techniques of government it so often claims to address. Overused and emptied out, it leads to either indecision and paralysis, or, at the other extreme, its cynical instrumentalization. To counter this, we need a philosophy, specifically a critique, of crisis. Crisis: A Critique presents crisis as a construction through which we understand, experience and order the world; as a discursive event, producing a range of effects. Drawing on a range of examples (from economic crises to social uprisings, pandemics, genocides, and ecological devastation) and discourses (from ancient medicine to legal theory, political economy, philosophy, the earth sciences, and eco-criticism), this ambitious work of conceptual archaeology and typology engages with a range of authors who have questioned the nature of the connection between crisis and critique. If our time “out of joint” presents a crisis of critique itself, Miguel de Beistegui takes a vital step towards re-calibrating our language and thought for an age of seemingly unrelenting catastrophe.