Bookshelf

Frontiers (Kant, Hegel, Frege, Wittgenstein)

Electronic volume of the 26 extant sessions of the 'Frontiers' seminar held at the University of Sussex, 1989-92.

ISBN 0-9754996-0-2

ISBN13 978-0-9754996-0-3

x+490pp.

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$12.00

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Other Analyses: Reading Philosophy

The 16 essays collected in this electronic volume have a variety of sources, subjects, dates, and manners. Two are written in French. If anything justifies their virtual binding into this new form of book, it is that they are all concerned, more or less directly, with philosophical reading. A conviction underlying all these essays (and those in the companion volume, Open Book), is that philosophy defines itself in part by a repression (or at least an avoidance) of the issue of reading. Reading, in the sense these pieces elaborate more or less obliquely, is an event that philosophy as such cannot quite register. Contrary to widespread misconceptions, this does not mean that these essays engage in a 'literary' approach to philosophical texts. They all in fact endeavour to present arguments, often of a recognisably philosophical kind, in favour of an essentially non-philosophical understanding of reading. Reading, in the sense I am concerned to elaborate, must be taking place before philosophy: the point would be to develop an understanding of that 'taking place' that would not be simply pre-philosophical.

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ISBN 0-9754996-1-0

ISBN13 978-0-9754996-1-0

x+448pp.

$12.00

Open Book / Livre ouvert

The 15 essays (7 in English, 8 in French) gathered in this volume attempt, from an angle which is more ‘literary’ than those in the companion volume Other Analyses (published simultaneously), to ask questions about reading, and more especially about the minimal preliminary gesture of opening a book in order to read. Over the twenty-five year span and across the different occasions for which they were written, they all ask more or less insistently: what makes reading possible and impossible, and how are that possibility and impossibility figured in the texts we read? The concern here is not with ‘how to read’, nor with the ‘fate of reading’, but with a much more modest, but perhaps also more nagging, question: what does reading demand if it is to be reading? What, beyond or short of mere reading, or reading-for, is reading itself? One constant thread here is this: reading entails the unreadable. The unreadable, rather than the merely readable, is the ‘object’ of reading. And once what is read is the unreadable, then the supposed unit of the book must be opened, certainly, but must also remain open beyond any normal calculation of reading time or interpretative outcomes. The open book is just what cannot be read like an open book, is not entirely open, cannot ever quite be read.

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ISBN 0-9754996-2-9

ISBN13 978-0-9754996-2-7

x+344pp.

$12.00

Deconstruction is Not What You Think, and other short pieces and interviews

A collection of occasional pieces and interviews, in English and French, on philosophy, literature, art, architecture and politics.

Contents

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viii+273 pp.

ISBN 0-9754996-3-7

ISBN13 978-0-9754996-3-4

$10.00

Lyotard: Writing the Event (Electronic re-issue of the 1988 volume)

Lyotard has been associated primarily in the English-speaking world with the 'postmodern debate', but his work is of a breadth and importance beyond what this would suggest. This book, the first general introduction to Lyotard's work to appear in any language, presents the arguments which mark the crucial moments of a complex career, taking as its guiding thread Lyotard's preoccupation with the event (perhaps the major concern of recent French thought) through his reflections on desire, production, justice and language.
Lyotard's fundamental drive to account for the event takes his work through phenomenology, psychoanalysis, politics and art to a general and ambitious 'philosophy of sentences' which bears comparision with the work of Jacques Derrida.
The more obviously 'political' aspects of Lyotard's writing are discussed and situated as integral to Lyotard's view of philosophy as such.

The book has been corrected and reset to respect the original pagination.

x+189 pp.

ISBN 0-9754996-4-5

ISBN13 978-0-9754996-4-1

$10.00

Late Lyotard

The first four essays collected in this volume form a kind of sequel to my earlier monograph Lyotard: Writing the Event (Manchester University Press, 1988, re-issued as an ebook in 2005). That book attempted a general presentation of Lyotard’s thought up to, and a little beyond, his ‘book of philosophy’ Le différend (1983), in a context where the English-speaking reception of Lyotard, limited by the paucity of translations at that time, was dominated by discussion of ‘postmodernism’. Since 1988, many more translations have appeared, but more importantly, Lyotard continued to produce a good deal of work up to his death in 1998. This work was in many ways surprising enough to make me reconsider some of the positions taken in Writing the Event, and the essays gathered here are all in different ways attempts to register that surprise and to record that reconsideration. All were written in response to specific invitations, and reflect that specificity in a variety of ways. Unlike Writing the Event, this volume has no particular pretensions to generality: each essay attempts to bring out one or more events in Lyotard’s thought, and to present those events both on their own terms, and in the ways in which they might encourage re-reading of the earlier work.

I also include by way of an appendix a previously uncollected earlier essay on Lyotard’s book Au juste.

Contents

x+125 pp.

ISBN 0-9754996-5-3

ISBN13 978-0-9754996-5-8

$8.00

Sententiousness and the Novel

Re-issue of the 1985 volume.

Sententiousness and the Novel has been corrected and re-set, respecting the original pagination.

Searchable text and linked endnotes.

xiii+273pp.

ISBN 0-9754996-6-1

ISBN13 978-0-9754996-6-5

$10.00