Nietzsche and Heidegger, Smith argues, have made possible a far more revolutionary critique of modernity than even their most ardent postmodern admirers have realized.

Heidegger, Art, and Postmodernity offers a radical new interpretation of Heidegger's later philosophy, developing his argument that art can help lead humanity beyond the nihilistic ontotheology of the modern age. Providing pathbreaking readings of Heidegger's 'The Origin of the Work of Art' and his notoriously difficult Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), this book explains precisely what postmodernity meant for Heidegger, the greatest philosophical critic of modernity, and what it could still mean for us today. Exploring these issues, Iain D. Thomson examines several postmodern works of art, including music, literature, painting and even comic books, from a post-Heideggerian perspective. Clearly written and accessible, this book will help readers gain a deeper understanding of Heidegger and his relation to postmodern theory, popular culture and art.

Since the publication of Victor Farias's Heidegger and Nazism, the discussion about the political significance of Martin Heidegger's thinking has been distorted. Because of his association with the Third Reich, some have dismissed Heidegger out of hand while others have sought to explain away certain connections. What is often lost in the writing of critics and advocates alike is an honest assessment of Heidegger as a political thinker and a frank interest in understanding his work. Martin Heidegger: Paths Taken, Paths Opened takes Heidegger's philosophy on its own terms and explores the pivotal significance of his phenomenology for political theory. Heidegger opposed, at the deepest level, everything that informs the global, technological civilization that seems to be the fate of humanity. Yet even in the liberal and technologically oriented West we cannot proceed without a confrontation with his thought. In this timely addition to the 20th Century Political Thinkers series, Gregory Bruce Smith shows Heidegger's thought to be an inescapable challenge to our current ethical habits and contemporary political institutions. In this path-breaking work, Smith establishes the centrality of Heidegger's thought, even to those who would claim to be his most ardent critics. Smith also addresses difficult interpretative questions regarding the relationship of Heidegger's early and later work and the status of political ideas with respect to Heidegger's phenomenological project. A work of broad interpretative breadth and keen political insight, Martin Heidegger: Paths Taken, Paths Opened establishes the undeniable importance of Heidegger's thought for the future of the tradition of political philosophy.

Between Eternities reflects on the possibility of political philosophy as an ongoing, architectonic activity that is necessarily linked to both the past and future. Almost all contemporary work in political philosophy either studies the subject with an eye to past tradition—choosing a winner from that tradition and then deducing what follows from the posited premises in a thoroughly modern, constructivist fashion—or else limits itself to drawing out what follows from already accepted premises and principles. There is almost no effort to reflect upon the prerequisites for the tradition being an ongoing undertaking that can have a unique future. Between Eternities attempts to set loose that thinking toward the future.

Using Phillipe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy's groundbreaking study of the persistence of German Idealist philosophy as his starting point, Justin Clemens presents a valuable study of the links between Romanticism and contemporary theory. The central contention of this book is that contemporary theory is still essentially Romantic - despite all its declarations to the contrary, and despite all its attempts to elude or exceed the limits bequeathed it by Romantic thought. The argument focuses on the ruses of 'Romanticism's indefinable character' under two main rubrics, 'Contexts' and 'Interventions'. The first three chapters investigate 'Contexts', examining some of the broad trends in the historical and institutional development of Romantic criticism; the second section, 'Interventions', comprises close readings of the work of Jacques Lacan, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Ian Hunter and Alain Badiou. In the first chapter Clemens identifies and traces the development of two interlocking recurrent themes in Romantic criticism: the Romantic desire to escape Romanticism, and the problem posed to aesthetico-philosophical thought by the modern domiciliation of philosophy in the university. He develops these themes in the second chapter by examining the link forged between aesthetics and the subject in the work of Immanuel Kant. In the third chapter, Clemens shows how the Romantic problems of the academic institution and aesthetics were effectively bound together by the philosophical diagnosis of nihilism. Chapter Four focuses on two key moments in the work of Jacques Lacan - his theory of the 'mirror stage' and his 'formulas of sexuation' - and demonstrates how Lacan returns to the grounding claims of Kantian aesthetics in such a way as to render him complicit with the Romantic thought he often seems to contest. In the following chapter, taking Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'multiplicity' as a guiding thread, Clemens links their account to their professed 'anti-Platonism', showing how they find themselves forced back onto emblematically Romantic arguments. Chapter Six provides a close reading of Sedgwick's most influential text, Epistemology of the Closet. Clemens' reading localizes her practice both in the newly consolidated academic field of 'Queer Theory' and in a conceptual genealogy whose roots can be traced back to a particular anti-Enlightenment strain of Romanticism. Clemens next turns to the professedly anti-Romantic arguments of Ian Hunter, a major figure in the ongoing re-writing of modern histories of education. In the final chapter he examines the work of the contemporary French philosopher Alain Badiou. Clemens argues that, if Badiou's hostility to the diagnosis of nihilism, his return to Plato and mathematics, and his expulsion of poetry from philosophical method, all place him at a genuine distance from dominant Romantic trends, even this attempt admits ciphered Romantic elements. This study will be of interest to literary theorists, philosophers, political theorists, and cultural studies scholars.

Nietzsche's Mirror introduces the reader to one of the most central and pervasive themes in Friedrich Nietzsche's works—will to power. The book traces Nietzsche's use of the terms 'power,' 'will,' and 'will to power' as they are presented in both the works he authorized for publication and his literary remains, called the Nachlass. The author demonstrates that will to power as it is presented in the Nachlass differs from the way it is presented in the works Nietzsche authorized for publication before his collapse in 1889. Then it is argued that the problems that the Nachlass poses for scholars suggests that the Nachlass material should not be held in the same regard as the works Nietzsche authorized for publication. Because of the discrepancy between the published and unpublished writings, will to power should not be interpreted as a metaphysical principle operating behind the world, since the metaphysical-sounding passages are located in the Nachlass, but rather as a tool for interpreting relations, especially human relations, within the world. The final chapter examines Nietzsche's unique style of writing, which the author calls 'mirror writing.' Mirror writing is a technique Nietzsche deliberately employs in order to have such visionary themes as will to power, master morality, and eternal recurrence reflect the reader's values back to himself. Since this book is meant to be an introduction to will to power, at the end of each chapter is a list of additional books, so that the reader can delve further into the themes presented in the chapter, such as Nietzsche's biography, ethics, writings on truth, and eternal recurrence.

This accessible and comprehensive overview of the main issues on the modernity-postmodernity controversy is the first clear-sighted book on the subject. It surveys modern social theory, from Kant to Weber with economy and masterly precision. And evaluates the work of the Frankfurt School, Arendy, Strauss, Luhmann, Habermas, Heller, Castoriadis and Touraine, before moving on to consider the approaches of the leading writers on postmodenrity: Lyotard, Vattimo, Derrida, Foucault and Jameson. The result is a new way of conceptualizing the modernity-postmodernity debate, and an exciting new approach to the roots of contemporary social theory.

Few philosophers have been as popular, prolific, and controversial as Friedrich Nietzsche, who has left his imprint not only on philosophy but on all the arts. Whether it is his concept of the übermensch or his nihilistic view of the world, Nietzsche's writings have aroused enormous interest, as well as anathema, in scholars for centuries. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Nietzscheanism covers the history of this philosophy through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 400 hundred cross-referenced entries on his major writings, his contemporaries, and his successors. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Friedrich Nietzsche.

In The Spatial Reformation, Michael J. Sauter offers a sweeping history of the way Europeans conceived of three-dimensional space, including the relationship between Earth and the heavens, between 1350 and 1850. He argues that this "spatial reformation" provoked a reorganization of knowledge in the West that was arguably as important as the religious Reformation. Notably, it had its own sacred text, which proved as central and was as ubiquitously embraced: Euclid's Elements. Aside from the Bible, no other work was so frequently reproduced in the early modern era. According to Sauter, its penetration and suffusion throughout European thought and experience call for a deliberate reconsideration not only of what constitutes the intellectual foundation of the early modern era but also of its temporal range. The Spatial Reformation contends that space is a human construct: that is, it is a concept that arises from the human imagination and gets expressed physically in texts and material objects. Sauter begins his examination by demonstrating how Euclidean geometry, when it was applied fully to the cosmos, estranged God from man, enabling the breakthrough to heliocentrism and, by extension, the discovery of the New World. Subsequent chapters provide detailed analyses of the construction of celestial and terrestrial globes, Albrecht Dürer's engraving Melencolia, the secularization of the natural history of the earth and man, and Hobbes's rejection of Euclid's sense of space and its effect on his political theory. Sauter's exploration culminates in the formation of a new anthropology in the eighteenth century that situated humanity in reference to spaces and places that human eyes had not actually seen. The Spatial Reformation illustrates how these disparate advancements can be viewed as resulting expressly from early modernity's embrace of Euclidean geometry.