Levinas’s ethical metaphysics is essentially a meditation on what makes ethical agency possible – that which enables us to act in the interest of another, to put the well-being of another before our own. This line of questioning found its inception in and drew its inspiration from the mass atrocities that occurred during the Second World War. The Holocaust , like the Cambodian genocide, or those in Rwanda and Srebrenica, exemplifies what have come to be known as the ‘never again’ situations. After these events, we looked back each time, with varying degrees of incomprehension, horror, anger and shame, asking ourselves how we could possibly have let it all happen again. And yet, atrocity crimes are still rampant. After Rwanda (1994) and Bosnia-Herzegovina (1992–1995), came Kosovo (1999) and Darfur (2003). In our present-day world , hate crimes motivated by racial, sexual, or other prejudice, and mass hate such as genocide and terror, are on the rise (think, for example, of Burma, Zimbabwe, Sri Lanka and North Korea). A critical revaluation of the conditions of possibility of ethical agency is therefore more necessary than ever. This volume is committed to the possibility of ‘never again’. It is dedicated to all the victims – living and dead – of what Levinas calls the ‘sober, Cain-like coldness’ at the root of all crime against humanity , as much as every singular crime against another human being .

Radical Passivity examines the notion of passivity in the work of Levinas, Blanchot, and Agamben, three thinkers of exceptional intellectual privacy whose writings have decidedly altered the literary and philosophical cultures of our era. Placing their use of passivity in the context of Heidegger and Kant, Wall argues that any philosophical understanding of Levinas's ethics, Blanchot's aesthetics, or Agamben's community must begin with an understanding of a "logic" of passivity that in fact originates (in the modern era at least) in Kant's analysis of the transcendental schema.

In The Birth of Sense, Don Beith proposes a new concept of generative passivity, the idea that our organic, psychological, and social activities take time to develop into sense. More than being a limit, passivity marks out the way in which organisms, persons, and interbodily systems take time in order to manifest a coherent sense. Beith situates his argument within contemporary debates about evolution, developmental biology, scientific causal explanations, psychology, postmodernism, social constructivism, and critical race theory. Drawing on empirical studies and phenomenological reflections, Beith argues that in nature, novel meaning emerges prior to any type of constituting activity or deterministic plan. The Birth of Sense is an original phenomenological investigation in the style of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and it demonstrates that the French philosopher’s works cohere around the notion that life is radically expressive. While Merleau-Ponty’s early works are widely interpreted as arguing for the primacy of human consciousness, Beith argues that a pivotal redefinition of passivity is already under way here, and extends throughout Merleau-Ponty’s corpus. This work introduces new concepts in contemporary philosophy to interrogate how organic development involves spontaneous expression, how personhood emerges from this bodily growth, and how our interpersonal human life remains rooted in, and often thwarted by, domains of bodily expressivity.

In our current times of global crises and spiking collective anxiety, Tara Brach’s transformative practice of Radical Acceptance offers a pathway to inner freedom and a more compassionate world. This classic work now features an insightful new introduction, an exclusive bonus chapter, and additional guided meditations. “Radical Acceptance offers us an invitation to embrace ourselves with all our pain, fear, and anxieties, and to step lightly yet firmly on the path of understanding and compassion.”—Thich Nhat Hanh “Believing that something is wrong with us is a deep and tenacious suffering,” says Tara Brach at the start of this illuminating book. This suffering emerges in crippling self-judgments and conflicts in our relationships, in addictions and perfectionism, in loneliness and overwork—all the forces that keep our lives constricted and unfulfilled. Radical Acceptance offers a path to freedom, including the day-to-day practical guidance developed over Dr. Brach’s forty years of work with therapy clients and Buddhist students. Writing with great warmth and clarity, Tara Brach brings her teachings alive through personal stories and case histories, fresh interpretations of Buddhist tales, and guided meditations. Step by step, she shows us how we can stop being at war with ourselves and begin to live fully every precious moment of our lives.

Investigating modern art, literature, theory and the law, this book illustrates the different ways in which sex, gender and time intersect. It demonstrates that time offers new critical perspectives on sex and gender and makes problematic reductive understandings of sexual identity as well as straight and queer time

Militant Acts presents a broad history of the concept and practice of investigations in radical political struggles from the nineteenth century to the present. Radicals launched investigations into the conditions and struggles of the oppressed and exploited to stimulate their political mobilization and organization. These investigations assumed a variety of methodological forms in a wide range of geographical and institutional contexts, and they also drew support from the participation of intellectuals such as Marx, Lenin, Mao, Dunayevskaya, Foucault, and Badiou. Marcelo Hoffman analyzes newspapers, pamphlets, reports, and other source materials, which reveal the diverse histories, underappreciated difficulties, and theoretical import of investigations in radical political struggles. In so doing, he challenges readers to rethink the supposed failure of these investigations and concludes that the value of investigations in radical political struggles ultimately resides in the possibility of producing a new political "we."

DIVProminent queer theorist offers a "low theory" of culture knowledge drawn from popular texts and films./div

What are the stakes of cultural production in a time of war? How is artistic expression prone to manipulation by the state and international humanitarian organizations? In the charged political terrain of post-genocide Rwanda, post-civil war Uganda, and recent violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Laura Edmondson explores performance through the lens of empire. Instead of celebrating theatre productions as expression of cultural agency and resilience, Edmondson traces their humanitarian imperatives to a place where global narratives of violence take precedence over local traditions and audiences. Working at the intersection of performance and trauma, Edmondson reveals how artists and cultural workers manipulate narratives in the shadow of empire and how empire, in turn, infiltrates creative capacities.

Bringing the word sustainability back from the brink of cliché—to a substantive, truly sustainable future Is sustainability a hopelessly vague word, with meager purpose aside from a feel-good appeal to the consumer? In The Three Sustainabilities, Allan Stoekl seeks to (re)valorize the word, for a simple reason: it is useful. Sustainability designates objects in time, their birth or genesis, their consistency, their survival, their demise. And it raises the question, as no other word does, of the role of humans in the survival of a world that is quickly disappearing—and perhaps in the genesis of another world. Stoekl considers a range of possibilities for the word, touching upon questions of object ontology, psychoanalysis, urban critique, technocracy, and religion. He argues that there are three varieties of sustainability, seen from philosophical, cultural, and economic perspectives. One involves the self-sustaining world “without us”; another, the world under our control, which can run the political spectrum from corporatism to Marxism to the Green New Deal; and a third that carries a social and communitarian charge, an energy of the “universe” affirmed through, among other things, meditation and gifting. Each of these carves out a different space in the relations between objects, humans, and their survival and degradation. Each is necessary, unavoidable, and intimately bound with, and infinitely distant from, the others. Along the way, Stoekl cites a wide range of authors, from philosophers to social thinkers, literary theorists to criminologists, anthropologists to novelists. This beautifully written, compelling, and nuanced book is a must for anyone interested in questions of ecology, energy, the environmental humanities, contemporary theories of the object, postmodern and posthuman aesthetics, or religion and the sacred in relation to community.

How the phenomenology of pain allows us to rethink human incarnation While the phenomenological tradition has carefully treated both the objective and the lived body, Espen Dahl explores a dimension of the body that does not fall neatly into either category, suggesting that philosophers should take account of the inner density of our organic, material body. By integrating the dimension of “flesh-and-blood” into the phenomenological notion of the body, Dahl argues that it is possible to reach a more adequate notion of human incarnation. The author explores the body in its subjectivity and its resistance, in activity founded on passivity, and in the ambiguous limits of its skin. The phenomenon of pain is given particular attention in this investigation, since pain is, as Dahl argues, what makes the body inescapably manifest in its otherwise hidden dimensions, including its ambiguity and vulnerability. Related to this focus, Dahl also engages with the Christian theological concerns of incarnation, pain, and hope. Phenomenologists have long drawn on this religious inheritance, particularly in what has been dubbed the French “theological turn.” In a similar manner, Incarnation, Pain, Theology: A Phenomenology of the Body draws on these theological sources while firmly holding to its philosophical commitments in methodological approach and analytic aims.