Negativity and politics: Dionysus and dialectics from Kant to poststructuralism [made in istanbul]

by Diana H. Coole

Although frequently invoked by philosophers and political theorists, the theory of negativity has received remarkably little sustained attention.Negativity and Politicsis the first full-length study of this crucial topic within philosophy and political theory. Diana Coole explores the meaning of negativity in modern and postmodern thinking, and examines its significance for politics and our understanding of what constitutes the political. Beginning with an insightful reading of Kant'sCritique of Pure Reasonand a consideration of the work of Hegel, Coole goes on to discuss the importance of negativity in the thought of a number of key theorists including Nietzsche, Adorno, Kristeva, Freud, Foucault, Habermas, Deleuze, Derrida and Butler. Throughout, Coole clearly and skillfully shows how the problem of negativity lies at the heart of philosophical and political debate.

http://www.mediafire.com/file/0im1mm2jwty/NEGATIVITY_AND_POLITICS__DIANA_C.pdf

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Rabinow - Essays on the Anthropology of Reason [made in istanbul]

link

French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century by Gary Gutting

French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century
by Gary Gutting

Paperback: 432 pages
Publisher: Cambridge University Press; 1 edition (May 21 2001)

French philosophers have a reputation as some of the most perplexing. American readers tend to dismiss them with a huff or venerate them over cigarettes and coffee. Gary Gutting does neither. His approach in French Philosophy in the Twentieth Century is scholarly, judicious, and clear. The result is an exceptional look at a rich philosophical tradition. Gutting is one of the world's leading authorities on the work of Michel Foucault, and his depth on the century's other Gallic thinkers is comparable. The book is more than a general survey; it is a careful history of ideas, as well as an excellent series of essays on the main French thinkers of the last 100 years.
Gutting devotes much of his time to the half dozen giants of recent French thought: Henri Bergson, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Foucault, and Jacques Derrida. Of course, there are legions of other influences--such as Marcel, Saussure, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, Kristeva, Lyotard, Deleuze, Irigaray, Levinas--and these get attention too, though in fewer pages. Gutting weaves the book together with a narrative history that accounts for the influences of literature and German thought. In addition, the carefully selected chapter epigraphs do more than supplement the text; they are windows into the vivid philosophy of Marcel Proust's literature. --Eric de Place

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Derrida - Writing and Difference

Jacques Derrida
Writing and Difference
Translated by Alan Bass. 362 p. 1978

First published in 1967, Writing and Difference, a collection of Jacques Derrida's essays written between 1959 and 1966, has become a landmark of contemporary French thought. In it we find Derrida at work on his systematic deconstruction of Western metaphysics. The book's first half, which includes the celebrated essay on Descartes and Foucault, shows the development of Derrida's method of deconstruction. In these essays, Derrida demonstrates the traditional nature of some purportedly nontraditional currents of modern thought—one of his main targets being the way in which "structuralism" unwittingly repeats metaphysical concepts in its use of linguistic models.

The second half of the book contains some of Derrida's most compelling analyses of why and how metaphysical thinking must exclude writing from its conception of language, finally showing metaphysics to be constituted by this exclusion. These essays on Artaud, Freud, Bataille, Hegel, and Lévi-Strauss have served as introductions to Derrida's notions of writing and différence—the untranslatable formulation of a nonmetaphysical "concept" that does not exclude writing—for almost a generation of students of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.

Writing and Difference reveals the unacknowledged program that makes thought itself possible. In analyzing the contradictions inherent in this program, Derrida foes on to develop new ways of thinking, reading, and writing,—new ways based on the most complete and rigorous understanding of the old ways. Scholars and students from all disciplines will find Writing and Difference an excellent introduction to perhaps the most challenging of contemporary French thinkers—challenging because Derrida questions thought as we know it.

TABLE OF CONTENTS
1. Force and Signification
2. Cogito and the History of Madness
3. Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book
4. Violence and Metaphysics: An Essay on the Thought of Emmanuel Levinas
5. "Genesis and Structure" and Phenomenology
6. La parole soufflée
7. Freud and the Scene of Writing
8. The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation
9. From Restricted to General Economy: A Hegelianism without Reserve
10. Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences
11. Ellipsis
Notes
Sources

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Madness: A Brief History - Roy Porter

Review:
Joanna Griffiths
Sunday February 10, 2002
The Observer


Roy Porter ends his short history of madness with a teasing question: 'Is Folly jingling its bells again?' More people 'are said to be suffering - indeed claiming to be suffering - from a proliferation of psychiatric syndromes, in a "victim culture" in which benefits may appear to lie in buying into psychiatric paradigms.' Madness is no longer the domain of the witch, the religious seer, or the poetic genius; it is now - as neurosis, trauma, anxiety - the domain of nearly everybody. Those who profess themselves to be unencumbered by mental fragility are seen to be as untrustworthy as the gibbering lunatics of Bedlam, who claimed they were sane.

Porter is no stranger to the mad, having previously written and edited various books on the theme, including the wonderfully cluttered Mind-Forg'd Manacles: A History of Madness in England from the Restoration to the Regency. In Madness: A Brief History he widens the historical remit - to pretty much the Whole of Time - and shortens the book. The result is not quite, as Oliver Sacks suggests in the puff on the back, 'scarcely short of a miracle', but is rather the thrilling rigour of Mind-Forg'd Manacles in expansive holiday-mode - a montage of Porter's favourite lunatics, poets, psychiatrists and phrase-makers.

Porter moves from the 'rational and naturalistic thinking about madness developed by Graeco-Roman philosophers and doctors' to the Christian interpretation of madness as the rage of the divinely inspired or demonically possessed.

He dallies briefly in the lurid realms of medieval witch-hunting, before arriving in the bursting dawn of the Enlightenment, where 'religious madness' was 'pathologised' and understood in medical terms. After ploughing through literary and artistic presentations of insanity, Porter turns to the vogue for institutions, dips briefly into the eighteenth-century cultural fascination with Bedlam, and emerges to discuss the rise of psychiatry and prescription drugs.

Cleverly, Porter suggests that any attempt to define madness is doomed to failure, recycling a favourite quotation from Polonius: to 'define true madness,/ What is't but to be nothing else but mad?' This dispels any need for quibbling over definitions and diagnoses, and allows him to move into a vivid series of case studies, of heroes and villains on both sides of the straitjacket.

Robert Burton is given his due: a mournful seventeenth-century don, who spent his life writing and re-writing The Anatomy of Melancholy , an obsessive account of the depressive disposition, inspired by a sense that 'to live in this sordid, base world, surrounded by despots, tyrants, misers, thieves, slanderers, adulterers, and whole broods of knaves and fools was a melancholy matter'.

William Blake enters for an unsurprising cameo. Blake dreamed that the poet William Cowper - hardly noted for his steely grip on reality - came to him and pleaded: 'O that I were insane always... Can you not make me truly insane?... You retain health and yet are as mad as any of us all - over us all.'

Madness recurs, in its innumerable manifestations, but the understanding of madness is conditioned by time and place. A few theories are rejected: Foucault's whispering theory of the 'great confinement' - incarceration as state power games, not medicine - is dismissed as 'simplistic and over-generalised', disproved by the example of England, where 'not until 1808 was an Act of Parliament passed even permitting the use of public funds for asylums'. Freud is neatly summarised as a 'materialist', 'lionised by the avant-garde as the conquistador of the unconscious'. Porter dismisses retrospective psychoanalysis, suggesting in the case of the fourteenth-century mystic Margery Kempe that 'modern attempts to pin contemporary psychiatric labels on her' will flounder in the absence of a 'master key to Margery's mind'.

Porter appears generally to prefer the eccentric and raving to the experts who fastidiously chained, electric-shocked, doped or hypnotised their patients, depending on the medical consensus of the time.

Treatments nearly as strange as their recipients are held up for gentle ridicule: one of George III's doctors, Francis Willis, ran a Lincolnshire madhouse where the miracle cure lay in the compulsory wearing of 'black coats, white waistcoats, black silk breeches and stockings, and the head of each bien poudrée, frisée, and arrangée'.

Zooming energetically towards the present day, Porter suggests that the rich history of theoretical insights may have all been bluster to no real end: confusion remains. Clinics abound: treating eating disorders, psycho-social problems, sexual dysfunctions.

One generation's obsession with the modish necessity of psychoanalysis becomes the next generation's reliance on the seratonin-kick of Prozac. Mental hypochondria becomes conventional, as the 'idioms of the psychological and the psychiatric replace Christianity and humanism as the ways of making sense of self'.

But, despite the 'ship of fools' ending, Porter stops short of forecasting the decline of the West. His interest is less in commanding polemic, than in the extraordinary variety of attitudes to madness across the centuries.

Through the enthusiastic density of the preceding pages, Porter answers his own question: 'Folly' has never stopped jingling its bells, but we hear different tunes, depending on where we're standing in history.

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