Philosophy - Columbia University Press Blog

February 15, 2011

New Book Tuesday — A New Book from Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, and Cornel West

The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere Judith Butler, Jurgen Habermas, Charles Taylor, Cornel West, Edited by Eduardo Mendieta, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues Edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller; with...

February 14, 2011

Roland Barthes — The Preparation of the Novel

This week we will be featuring the recently published The Preparation of the Novel: Lecture Courses and Seminars at the Collège de France (1978-1979 and 1979-1980). Completed just weeks before his death, the lectures in this volume mark a critical...

February 1, 2011

Slavoj Zizek: From Democracy to Divine Violence

“Instead of perceiving what goes on in today’s China as an oriental-despotic distortion of capitalism, one should see in it the repetition of the development of capitalism in Europe itself.”—Slavoj Zizek With an excerpt from Slavoj Zizek’s “From Democracy to...

January 31, 2011

Kristin Ross: Democracy for Sale

“All today’s ‘advanced industrial democracies’ are in fact oligarchic democracies: they represent the victory of a dynamic oligarchy, a world government centered on great wealth and the worship of wealth, but capable of building consensus and legitimacy through elections that,...

January 26, 2011

Jacques Ranciere on Democracies Against Democracy

“It is not in the least evident to me that democracy enjoys total unquestioning support. Things were different during the cold war, when it was democracy versus totalitarianism. But since the Berlin Wall fell, what we’ve witnessed in the countries...

January 25, 2011

Jean-Luc Nancy on Finite and Infinite Democracy

“The power drive outstrips or surpasses power, while at the same time seeking power for its own sake. The surpassing of power is the very principle of democracy—but as its truth and grandeur (indeed its majesty), not as its annihilation.”—Jean-Luc...

January 24, 2011

The New York Times on David Foster Wallace

Yesterday’s New York Times Book Review had two mentions of David Foster Wallace’s book Fate, Time, and Language: An Essay on Free Will. The book was discussed in both in their Inside the List feature and in James Ryerson’s excellent...

January 21, 2011

"We Are All Democrats Now…" — Wendy Brown on Democracy

“What I am sure of, however, is that this is not a time for sloganeering that averts our glance from the powers destroying the conditions for democracy.”—Wendy Brown Continuing our series of excerpts from Democracy in What State? , Wendy...

January 20, 2011

Daniel Bensaid on Democracy

“The widely trumpeted victory of democracy soon yielded a crop of new Tocquevilles voicing their ill-concealed dislike of it…”—Daniel Bensaid Continuing our series of excerpt from Democracy in What State? (for excerpts by Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou), we feature...

January 19, 2011

Alain Badiou on Democracy — From "Democracy in What State?"

“We will only ever be true democrats, integral to the historic life of peoples, when we become communists again. Roads to that future are gradually becoming visible even now.”—Alain Badiou Yesterday we posted an excerpt from Giorgio Agamben’s contribution to...

January 18, 2011

Giorgio Agamben on Democracy

“Is it meaningful to call oneself a democrat? And if so, how do you interpret the word?” In the recently published Democracy in What State? , a group of iconic and iconoclastic thinkers responded to the above question. This timely...

January 12, 2011

Clare Palmer on Animal Ethics in Context

In a fascinating essay published in Rorotoko, Clare Palmer recently wrote about the aims and arguments of her new book Animal Ethics in Context . As the title of her book suggests, Palmer is interested in exploring the argument that...