This book portrays the introduction of the mathematical sign zero as a major signifying event, both within the writing of numbers and as an emblem of parallel events in other sign systems.

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A bold book, built of close readings, striking in its range and depth, The Signifying Eye shows Faulkner's art take shape in sweeping arcs of social, labor, and aesthetic history. Beginning with long-unpublished works (his childhood sketches and his hand-drawn and handillustrated play The Marionettes) and early novels (Mosquitoes and Sartoris), working through many major works (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Sanctuary, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!), and including more popular fictions (The Wild Palms and The Unvanquished) and late novels (notably Intruder in the Dust and The Town), The Signifying Eye reveals Faulkner's visual obsessions with artistic creation as his work is read next to Wharton, Cather, Toomer, and—in a tour de force intervention—Willem de Kooning. After coloring in southern literature as a "reverse slave narrative," Waid's Eye locates Faulkner's fiction as the "feminist hinge" in a crucial parable of art that seeks abstraction through the burial of the race-defined mother. Race is seen through gender and sexuality while social fall is exposed (in Waid's phrase) as a "coloring of class." Locating "visual language" that constitutes a "pictorial vocabulary," The Signifying Eye delights in literacy as the oral meets the written and the abstract opens as a site to see narrative. Steeped in history, this book locates a heightened reality that goes beyond representation to bring Faulkner's novels, stories, and drawings into visible form through Whistler, Beardsley, Gorky, and de Kooning. Visionary and revisionist, Waid has painted the proverbial big picture, changing the fundamental way that both the making of modernism and the avant-garde will be seen. A Friends Fund publication

Most people have wondered whether anything really matters, some have temporarily thought that nothing really matters, and some philosophers have defended the view that nothing really matters. However, if someone thinks that nothing matters--if they are a "nihilist about value"--then it seems that it is irrational for them to care about anything. It seems that nihilism about value mandates total indifference. This is the "problem of nihilism" Allan Hazlett addresses in The Epistemology of Desire and the Problem of Nihilism. Hazlett argues that the problem of nihilism arises because desire--and thus caring--is a species of evaluation that admits of irrationality. This contradicts the influential Humean view that desire does not admit of irrationality, which has a ready solution to the problem of nihilism: since desire does not admit of irrationality, it cannot be irrational to care about something that you believe does not matter. However, following G.E. Anscombe, Hazlett argues that desire has the same relationship to goodness as belief has to truth: just as truth is the accuracy condition for belief, goodness is the accuracy condition for desire. This reveals desire as an appropriate target of epistemological inquiry, in the same way that belief is an appropriate target of epistemological inquiry. Desires can amount to knowledge (in the same way that beliefs can amount to knowledge) and, crucially for the problem of nihilism, desire admits of irrationality (in the same way that belief admits of irrationality). Nevertheless, although it is obviously irrational to believe something that you believe is not true, Hazlett argues that it is not irrational to desire something you believe is not good, despite the fact that goodness is the accuracy condition for desire. This provides a solution to the problem of nihilism, and shows that nihilism about value can coherently be combined with the anti-Humean view that desire is a species of evaluation.