In this masterful work, Jean-Luc Marion shows how some of Descartes' most decisive points remain masked by the various "Cartesianisms" that historiography and convenient simplifications alike have constructed. The book's first half shows how Descartes lines up against Cartesianism, setting forth several closely argued attempts to free up the positive status of skepticism in the Cartesian corpus, the non-substantial (and non-reflexive) character of the ego cogito, the complex elabo...

While humanists have pondered the subject of love to the point of obsessiveness, philosophers have steadfastly ignored it. One might wonder whether the discipline of philosophy even recognizes love. The word philosophy means “love of wisdom,” but the absence of love from philosophical discourse is curiously glaring. So where did the love go? In The Erotic Phenomenon, Jean-Luc Marion asks this fundamental question of philosophy, while reviving inquiry into the concept of l...

Jean-Luc Marion has long endeavored to broaden our view of truth. In this illuminating new book—his deepest engagement with theology to date—Marion proposes a rigorous new understanding of human and divine revelation in a deeply phenomenological key.Although today considered the central theme of theology, the concept of Revelation was almost entirely unknown to the first millennium of Christian thought. In a penetrating historical deconstruction, Marion traces the developm...

A fresh, provocative look at the link between poetry and Christianity, both as it relates to the Bible itself as well as to Christian and religious life, by an accomplished scholar.The Bible is full of poems. In the Old Testament, there are the Psalms and the Song of Songs, the great exhortations and lamentations of the Prophets, and passages of poetry woven in throughout. In the New Testament, Jesus describes the kingdom of heaven with poetic epithets such as “a t...

Explore the forces and movements shaping contemporary Mexican politics and societyIn Mexico’s Unscripted Revolutions: Political and Social Change Since 1958, distinguished historian Stephen Lewis offers a well-argued—and provocative—presentation of Mexico’s recent “unofficial” grassroots revolutions. The book explores generational change and youthful rebellion in the 1960s and the emergence of second-wave feminism in the 1970s. It also discusses Mexico’s u...

A timely new work by one of France’s premier philosophers, A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment offers insight into what “catholic” truly means. In this short, accessible book, Jean-Luc Marion braids the sense of catholic as all-embracing and universal into conversation about what it is to be Catholic in the present moment. A Brief Apology for a Catholic Moment tackles complex issues surrounding church-state separation and addresses a larger Catholic audience that transc...

Now in paperback, Jean-Luc Marion's groundbreaking philosophy of human uncertainty.In Negative Certainties, renowned philosopher Jean-Luc Marion challenges some of the most fundamental assumptions we have developed about knowledge: that it is categorical, predicative, and positive. Following Descartes, Kant, and Heidegger, he looks toward our finitude and the limits of our reason. He asks an astonishingly simple—but profoundly provocative—question in order...

This book represents a continuation of Jean-Luc Marion’s work on givenness as a foundational concept. A former student of Jacques Derrida, Marion is known for his work in seventeenth-century French philosophy, for his theory of "God without being," and for his reformulation of phenomenology. Marion’s groundbreaking work on givenness is articulated through attentive readings in a striking array of philosophical texts. The four pieces collected here, based on the fall 2008 Richard Lectures a...

Mexico’s National Indigenist Institute (INI) was at the vanguard of hemispheric indigenismo from 1951 through the mid-1970s, thanks to the innovative development projects that were first introduced at its pilot Tseltal-Tsotsil Coordinating Center in highland Chiapas. This book traces how indigenista innovation gave way to stagnation as local opposition, shifting national priorities, and waning financial support took their toll. After 1970 indigenismo may have served the populist aims of pr...

In 1910 insurgent leaders crushed the Porfirian dictatorship, but in the years that followed fought among themselves, until a nationalist consensus produced the 1917 Constitution. This in turn provided the basis for a reform agenda that transformed Mexico in the modern era. The civil war and the reforms that followed receive new and insightful attention in this book.These essays, the result of the 45th annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures, presented by the University of Te...

The renowned philosopher expounds on the ideas he introduced in Homo Sacer with this analysis of the theological foundations of political power.In the early centuries of the Church, in order to reconcile monotheism with God's threefold nature, the doctrine of Trinity was introduced in the guise of an economy of divine life. It was as if the Trinity amounted to nothing more than a problem of managing and governing the heavenly house and the world.In

Struggling to free itself from a century of economic decline and stagnation, the town of San Miguel de Allende, nestled in the hills of central Mexico, discovered that its “timeless” quality could provide a way forward. While other Mexican towns pursued policies of industrialization, San Miguel—on the economic, political, and cultural margins of revolutionary Mexico—worked to demonstrate that it preserved an authentic quality, earning designation as a “typical Mexican town” by the Guanajua...