Jeffrey S. Librett

Inscriptions: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism

An investigation of two divergent yet related philosophical movements: phenomenology, from the later Husserl through Sartre and Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty; and structuralism, from Saussure through Levi-Strauss and Lacan to Barthes. This reading of the tradition culminates in an assessment of Derrida and Foucault. From this foundation, Silverman develops his own philosophical position in the context of semiotics, hermeneutics, and deconstruction, and establishes the conditions for a theory of textuality.

Is psychoanalysis a science

Freud Among the Philosophers: the Psychoanalytic Unconscious and its Philosophical Critics, by Donald Levy, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996, 189 pages.

Stolen Goods: Cultural Identity after the Counterenlightenment in Salomon Maimon's Autobiography (1792)

ness which dialectically entails in turn the excessive materiality of the letter of Jewish law. Analogously, Maimons materialist view of the law as a purely material institution overcomes the idealization of the law in Mendelssohn, an idealization that induces Mendelssohn to retain, unbeknownst to himself, a merely political stance on the Jewish law. By taking a materialist view of the law, Maimon thinks he is able to liberate This content downloaded from 157.55.39.45 on Wed, 05 Oct 2016 05:15:37 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Finitude of Method: Mourning Theory from the New Criticism to the New Vitalism

THE RETURN OF POLITICIZED RELIGION since the 1980s, which troubles those of us who cling to the notion of modernity as necessary secularization, requires that we reconceptualize recent humanities methodology in terms that account for its connections with the history of religious and philosophical politics. From Reaganism to fundamentalisms to the current Tea-Party movement, global religio-political neoconservatism should prompt us to rethink the ways in which apparently secular methodological tendencies and dogmas may repeat aspects of an early, incomplete secularization. For only the consciously self-critical completion of its secularization could protect contemporary theory in principle from the neoconservative accusation that it has not outgrown its dependence on irrational and dogmatic faith commitments. However, one cannot

Serenity in crisis : a preface to Paul de Man, 1939-1960

A polymath well versed in European literature and philosophy, one of the founders of deconstruction, and a widely respected teacher, Paul de Man brought unprecedented attention and acclaim to the so-called Yale Critics. His fame was at a zenith when he died suddenly in 1983. A few years later, Ortwin de Graef found the de Man had written for the collaborationist press during the Nazi occupation, a discovery that ignited an international reassessment of de Mans work. Serenity in Crisis is the first sustained account of the complex, intertextual tradition in which de Man wrote and of the persistent concerns expressed in his early work. It reconstructs the truth-models with which de Man justified his political choice before and during the occupation and traces them back to an ambitious intention to integrate the competing truths of the natural sciences, the social sciences, and literature. The significance of de Mans ideational framework and the decisions that followed from it have extended well beyond the disasters of World War II. De Graef clearly illuminates and critiques the abstruse paths of logic in de Mans early writings as well as in the reformulations of de Mans thought expressed in his writings of the 1950s.

Mass Death in Venice

In the summer of 1969 the sun weighed down for weeks on the city and waterways of Venice. The steamers and motorboats ploughed through the green waters of the lagoons which surrounded the houses like thick soup. Over 100 old people were lodged in the San Lorenzo Old Age Home, a palace of stone. They could not breathe. On one of the last days in July, 24 of the old people died within a few hours. Those who remained caught unawares by these sudden events which they had no time to assimilate refused to tolerate the removal of the dead.