Publications

Knighthood and chivalry are commonly associated with courtly aristocracy and military prowess. Instead of focusing on the relationship between chivalry and nobility, Jesús D. Rodríguez-Velasco asks different questions. Does chivalry have anything to do with the emergence of an urban bourgeoisie? If so, how? And in a more general sense, what is the importance of chivalry in inventing and modifying a social class?

Binding Violence exposes the relation between literary imagination, autonomous politics, and violence through the close analysis of literary texts—in particular Sophocles’ Antigone, D. A. F. de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom, and Vargas Llosa’s The Feast of the Goat—that speak to a blind spot in democratic theory, namely, how we decide democratically on the borders of our political communities. These works bear the imprint of the anxieties of democracy concerning its other—violence—especially when the question of a redefinition of membership is at stake.

The novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. Its canon has been widened to include less well-known authors alongside Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Maria Edgeworth, and Thomas Love Peacock. This Companion offers an overview of British fiction written between roughly the mid-1760s and the early 1830s and is an ideal guide to the major authors, historical and cultural contexts, and later critical reception. The contributors to this volume represent the most up-to-date directions in scholarship, charting the ways in which the period’s social, political, and intellectual redefinitions created new fictional subjects, forms, and audiences.

Radical Atheism presents a profound new reading of the influential French philosopher Jacques Derrida. Against the prevalent notion that there was an ethical or religious “turn” in Derrida’s thinking, Hägglund argues that a radical atheism informs Derrida’s work from beginning to end. Proceeding from Derrida’s insight into the constitution of time, Hägglund demonstrates how Derrida rethinks the condition of identity, ethics, religion, and political emancipation in accordance with the logic of radical atheism. Hägglund challenges other major interpreters of Derrida’s work and offers a compelling account of Derrida’s thinking on life and death, good and evil, self and other.

This book takes a bold step in entirely overturning the most common perspective in the study of Zionist national culture. Instead of looking at the importance, centrality, conquest, and cultivation of the Land of Israel, while altogether ignoring the Mediterranean Sea, this book chooses to turn deliberate on the importance of the sea itself. Instead of putting at its center the territory, the very land of the land of Israel – the book examines the role of the sea in the imagined community of Eretz Israel and the State of Israel. Thus, the book develops an alternative analysis of the national culture even as it detects fractures and discontinuities in the imagined national community.