This highly original collection of essays contributes to a critique of the common understanding of modernity as an enlightened project that provides rational grounds for orientation in all aspects and dimensions of the world. An international team of contributors contend that the modern principles of foundation show in themselves rather how modernity is disorienting itself. The book brings together discussions on the writings of philosophers who treat more systematically the questions of foundation and orientation, such as Kant, Nietzsche, Husserl, Heidegger, Pascal, and Patočka, and studies of literary works that explicitly thematize this question, such as Novalis, Hölderlin, Beckett, Platonov, and Benjamin. This multi-disciplinary approach brings to the fore the paradox that modern figures of grounding and orientation unground and disorient and demonstrates a critical path to review current understandings of modernity and post-modernity.

The fields of comparative and world literature tend to have a unidirectional, Eurocentric focus, with attention to concepts of “origin” and “arrival.” DisOrientations challenges this viewpoint. Kristin Dickinson employs a unique multilingual archive of German and Turkish translated texts from the early nineteenth through the mid-twentieth century. In this analysis, she reveals the omnidirectional and transtemporal movements of translations, which, she argues, harbor the disorienting potential to reconfigure the relationships of original to translation, past to present, and West to East. Through the work of three key figures—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schrader, and Sabahattin Ali—Dickinson develops a concept of translational orientation as a mode of omnidirectional encounter. She sheds light on translations that are not bound by the terms of economic imperialism, Orientalism, or Westernization, focusing on case studies that work against the basic premises of containment and originality that undergird Orientalism’s system of discursive knowledge production. By linking literary traditions across retroactively applied periodizations, the translations examined in this book act as points of connection that produce new directionalities and open new configurations of a future German-Turkish relationship. Groundbreaking and erudite, DisOrientations examines literary translation as a complex mode of cultural, political, and linguistic orientation. This book will appeal to scholars and students of translation theory, comparative literature, Orientalism, and the history of German-Turkish cultural relations.

Exploring the fraught processes of Spaniards' efforts to formulate a national identity - from the Enlightenment to the present - this book focuses on the nation's Islamic-African legacy, disputing the received wisdom that Spain has consistently rejected its historical relationship to Muslims and Africans.

Poetry. African American Studies. Drifting from New Mexico with lawman Elfego Baca to Ricardo Molinari's Buenos Aires all the way back to ancient Alexandria, DISORIENTATIONS: GROUNDINGS offers an erudite and at times dizzying exploration of our mortal limits. Metaphysical in both content and manner of metaphor, these poems are in constant dialogue with the physical sciences, mathematics, and number theory. The result is a startling, quixotic, and truly original poetry.

Sexual Disorientations brings some of the most recent and significant works of queer theory into conversation with the overlapping fields of biblical, theological and religious studies to explore the deep theological resonances of questions about the social and cultural construction of time, memory, and futurity. Apocalyptic, eschatological and apophatic languages, frameworks, and orientations pervade both queer theorizing and theologizing about time, affect, history and desire. The volume fosters a more explicit engagement between theories of queer temporality and affectivity and religious texts and discourses.

Can you imagine a life where you didnt have to go through anything, where you didnt have to worry or have struggles to overcome? Quiet lovely, isnt it? Though the next question would then be, will you still be able to call yourself a fighter, overcomer, and all these other courageous names we so often attach to our own character and often use to describe who we are in our essence? Not every bad thing in life ends up badly. Not every hopeless situation you find yourself in will end with you being even more hopeless or even suicidal. This book seeks to take you on a personal journey from wherever it is you find yourself at the moment to a place where you should be in order to experience the grace, love, and peace of God. This will surely surpass any situations you find yourself in and provide you the understanding of just how great, how awesome is this God that you serve.

Cultural Writing. Art. DISORIENTATIONS: ART ON THE MARGINS OF THE "CONTEMPORARY," the latest book by up-and-coming cult author Travis Jeppesen, proposes that rarest of things: a poetics of art criticism. Mirroring the author's years spent in Central and Eastern Europe, Jeppesen's writings on artists and scenes situated outside the radar of the larger art world bring together a motley crew of outsiders whose work is destined to push the margins to the center. Encompassing a selection of reviews, essays, riffs and rants on the state of the visual arts, Disorientations is a joltingly unconventional - and confrontational - addition to the literature of art criticism. Disorientations is destined to be the talk of the art world for years to come, and is a must-read for artists, critics, historians, gallerists, collectors, teachers and students alike. Other books by Jeppesen available from SPD include WOLF AT THE DOOR, POEMS I WROTE WHILE WATCHING TV, and VICTIMS.

In this groundbreaking work, Sara Ahmed demonstrates how queer studies can put phenomenology to productive use. Focusing on the “orientation” aspect of “sexual orientation” and the “orient” in “orientalism,” Ahmed examines what it means for bodies to be situated in space and time. Bodies take shape as they move through the world directing themselves toward or away from objects and others. Being “orientated” means feeling at home, knowing where one stands, or having certain objects within reach. Orientations affect what is proximate to the body or what can be reached. A queer phenomenology, Ahmed contends, reveals how social relations are arranged spatially, how queerness disrupts and reorders these relations by not following the accepted paths, and how a politics of disorientation puts other objects within reach, those that might, at first glance, seem awry. Ahmed proposes that a queer phenomenology might investigate not only how the concept of orientation is informed by phenomenology but also the orientation of phenomenology itself. Thus she reflects on the significance of the objects that appear—and those that do not—as signs of orientation in classic phenomenological texts such as Husserl’s Ideas. In developing a queer model of orientations, she combines readings of phenomenological texts—by Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Fanon—with insights drawn from queer studies, feminist theory, critical race theory, Marxism, and psychoanalysis. Queer Phenomenology points queer theory in bold new directions.

The very first thing one does in all situations of life is orient oneself. Decisions of orientation, which are mostly made under uncertainty and the pressure of time, largely determine subsequent decisions. But what is orientation? The problems of orientation are as old as humankind, the word is used everywhere, but the concept has never been thoroughly investigated. The philosopher Werner Stegmaier comprehensively clarifies for the first time the conditions and structures of orientation, including those of our sexual, economic, media, political, legal, scientific, artistic, religious, moral, and ethical orientations. He thereby establishes a new philosophical language and offers a philosophy for our time. "As if I unexpectedly slipped down into a deep vortex, I am swirled around in a way that I can neither put a foot down, nor swim to the surface. Nonetheless, I will work my way out ... " (René Descartes, Philosopher) "As often as my speculation seems to lead me too far from the paved road of common sense, I stand still and seek to orient myself. I look back at the point from which we started, and I seek to compare the two guideposts I have." (Moses Mendelssohn, Philosopher) "A philosophical problem has the form: ‘I do not know my way about.’" (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosopher) "The second O, orientation – as the repository of our genetic heritage, cultural tradition, and previous experiences – is the most important part of the O-O-D-A loop since it shapes the way we observe, the way we decide, the way we act." (John Boyd, Military Strategist)

Tamsin Wilton interviewed close to a hundred women in order to understand how we go about constructing a sexual identity as 'lesbian' or 'heterosexual'. How do women experience desire? What are the differences between men and women as sexual partners? How do desire, pleasure, intimacy, gender and morality become part of women's sense of self? Asking these, and other questions, this study breaks through the stand-off between essentialists and constructionists to propose a fresh re-thinking of the desiring self.