In December 1991 Oswald Ducrot gave a series of five lectures on the nature of his theory of argumentation in the language-system to postgraduate students of Discourse Studies at the ISH, Institute for the Study of Humanities in Ljubljana, Slovenia.Since, on the one hand, there is growing interest for Prof. Ducrot’s theory, while on the other hand very few of his works were translated into English (the modern lingua franca, whether we like it or not), we decided to republish these l...

Since its first publication in English in 1985, Mieke Bal's Narratology has become the international classic and comprehensive introduction to the theory of narrative texts. Narratology is a systematic account of narrative techniques, methods, their transmission, and reception, in which Bal distills years of study of the ways in which we understand both literary and non-literary works. In this third edition, Bal updates the book to include more analysis of film narrati...

Since its first publication in English in 1985, Mieke Bal's Narratology has become an international classic and the comprehensive introduction to the theory of narrative texts, both literary and non-literary. Providing insights into how readers interpret narrative text, the fourth edition of Narratology is a guide for students and scholars seeking to analyze narratives of any language, period, and region with clear, systematic, and reliable concepts.With the addit...

This collection of specially commissioned essays by academics and practising psychoanalysts, first published in 2003, explores key dimensions of Jacques Lacan's life and works. Lacan is renowned as a theoretician of psychoanalysis whose work is still influential in many countries. He refashioned psychoanalysis in the name of philosophy and linguistics at the time when it underwent a certain intellectual decline. Advocating a 'return to Freud', by which he meant a close reading in the origi...

With an emphasis on readers and reading, Jonathan Culler considered deconstruction in terms of the questions raised by psychoanalytic, feminist, and reader-response criticism. On Deconstruction is both an authoritative synthesis of Derrida's thought and an analysis of the often-problematic relation between his philosophical writings and the work of literary critics. Culler's book is an indispensable guide for anyone interested in understanding modern critical thought. This edition...

Jacques Derrida's writings often embed the key themes of deconstruction in a notion of the thing. The Event of the Thing is the most complete examination to date of Derrida's understanding of thinghood and its crucial role in psychoanalysis, ethics, literary theory, aesthetics, and Marxism.Arguing that the thing, as a figure of otherness, destabilizes the metaphysical edifice it underlies, Michael Marder reveals the contributions it makes to critiques of humanism and ideal...

Both Jacques Derrida and Julia Kristeva have made an enormous impact throughout the humanities with their work on signification, identity and difference, and yet the nature of the relation between their theories seems oddly indeterminate: they have sometimes been regarded as more or less indistinguishable and sometimes as incompatible This book aims at establishing precisely how Kristeva's and Derrida's writings may be articulated, tracing intersections and divergences, parallels and disco...

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in the work of Emmanuel Levinas, widely recognized as one of the most important yet difficult philosophers of the 20th century.In this much-needed introduction, Davis unpacks the concepts at the centre of Levinas's thought - alterity, the Other, the Face, infinity - concepts which have previously presented readers with major problems of interpretation.Davis traces the development of Levinas's thought over six decades, ...

Being an extract from a letter by Professor Henri Bergson

This is a comprehensive investigation into the theme of time in the work of Jacques Derrida and shows how temporality is one of the hallmarks of his thought. Drawing on a wide array of Derrida's texts, Joanna Hodge:compares and contrasts Derrida's arguments concerning time with those Kant, Husserl, Augustine, Heidegger, Levinas, Freud, and Blanchotargues that Derrida's radical understanding of time as non-linear or irregular is essential to his aim of blurring the d...

Alain Badiou is one of the most inventive and compelling philosophers working in France today—a thinker who, in these days of cynical resignation and academic specialization, is exceptional in every sense. Guided by disciplines ranging from mathematics to psychoanalysis, inspired as much by Plato and Cantor as by Mao and Mallarmé, Badiou’s work renews, in the most varied and spectacular terms, a decidedly ancient understanding of philosophy—philosophy as a practice conditioned by truths, u...

This book aims at outlining what the Dialectic of Desire is in Lacan. Starting from the analysis of the concept of desire-for-desire, I dwell on considering the function that “the desire for the Other” has in structuring, both in the Logic of Fantasy (or of Unconscious) and in the way the phenomenic representation of the Real is established. Moreover I examine how the classical aesthetic theory, subjected to the Logic of Fantasy, is taken back to an ethic of intersubjectivity and how, with...