CRMEP books

Free e-books documenting research activities from the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy.

Volume 6

Futurethoughts: Critical Histories of Philosophy

Edited by Peter Osborne

Contributors: Isabelle Alfandary, Éric Alliez, Anna Argirò, Howard Caygill, Michel Foucault, Daniel Gottlieb, Louis Hartnoll. Orazio Irrera, Eric Prenowitz, Morteza Samanpour, Stella Sandford, Naomi Waltham-Smith, Simon Wortham

Post-Kantian European philosophy has always involved a process of reflection upon and contestation of its own problematic status as an independent discipline. The constant setting and the overstepping of boundaries – conceptual and institutional – are the hallmark of its development. The writings in this volume – organized according to the institutional genres of the presentations within CRMEP from which they derive – revisit some of these encounters of phil­osophy with anthropology, economy, sociology and psycho­analysis, respectively, in both the French and German traditions. Increasingly, thinkers such as Foucault and Derrida – the bookends of this collection – appear as singular figures only within the broader, densely imbricated contexts from which they depart. Still figures of the future, constituting our philosophical present with new pasts.

This book is available as a free eBook. The electronic version of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC-BYNC-ND). For more information, visit creativecommons.org.

Futurethoughts volume 6 book cover

Volume 5

Institution: Critical Histories of Law

Edited by Francis Cooper and Daniel Gottlieb

Contributors: Theodor W. Adorno, Norman Ajari, Étienne Balibar, Xenia Chiaramonte, Francis Cooper, Arnold Gehlen, Gerardo Munoz, Michele Spanò, Yan Thomas, Francois Tosquelles

This volume addresses a renewed interest in the concept of institution, no longer primarily as a means of thinking the fixity of social forms, but rather as the register of an ongoing process of instituting, maintained or made anew by each generation in their relations to the history of law. Opposing the revived naturalism of certain recent works, its authors reflect upon a range of philosophical forms connecting the institution of law to political histories: from Black 'extitutions' from the 'peculiar institution' of racial slavery, via the (de-)institutions of subjectivity in the bourgeois reception of Roman law, to those legal definitions of the family that continue to haunt struggles for various social rights.

This book is available as a free eBook. The electronic version of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC-BYNC-ND). For more information, visit creativecommons.org.

Volume 5

Volume 4

Afterlives: Transcendentals, Universals, Others

Edited by Peter Osborne

Contributors: Étienne Balibar, Antonia Birnbaum, Howard Caygill, Francis Cooper, Matt Hare, Marie Louise Krogh, Catherine Malabou

If, as Walter Benjamin believed, ‘historical understanding is to be viewed primarily as an afterlife of that which is to be understood', what are the afterlives of the central concepts of modern European philosophy today? These essays reflect on the afterlives of three such concepts – ‘the transcendental', ‘the universal' and ‘otherness' – as they continue to animate philosophical discussion at and beyond the limits of the discipline. Anthropology, law, mathematics and politics each provide occasions for testing the historical durability and transformative capacity of these concepts.

This book is available as a free ebook. The electronic version of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC-BYNC-ND). For more information, visit creativecommons.org.

Volume 4

Volume 3 (2021)

Vocations of the Political: Mario Tronti & Max Weber

Edited by Howard Caygill

Contributors: Howard Caygill, Alex Martin, Elettra Stimilli, Alberto Toscano, Mario Tronti

Asserting in 1966 that ‘Lenin was closer to Max Weber's "Politics as Vocation" than to the German working-class struggles', the Italian radical philosopher and political theorist Mario Tronti set about rethinking ‘the autonomy of the political'. These essays on and first English translations of four texts by Tronti (from 1976 to 2019) reflect on the conjunctions of his thought with Max Weber's.

This book is available as a free ebook. The electronic version of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC-BYNC-ND). For more information, visit creativecommons.org.

Vocations of the Political: Mario Tronti & Max Weber

Volume 2 (2020)

Thinking Art: Materialisms, Labours, Forms

Edited by Peter Osborne

Contributors: Caroline Bassett, Dave Beech, Ayesha Hameed, Klara Kemp-Welch, Jaleh Mansoor, Christian Nyampeta, Peter Osborne, Luger Schwarte, Keston Sutherland, Giovanna Zapperi.

‘In what way, if any, does art need philosophy, or philosophy art?' This transdisciplinary collection of essays provides a snapshot of current philosophical debates about contemporary art: debates about ‘vital' materialisms; the destabilizing effects of new technologies and social relations on formal categories; ecological crisis and postcoloniality.

This book is available as a free ebook. The electronic version of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC-BYNC-ND). For more information, visit creativecommons.org.

Volume 2 (2020)

Volume 1 (2019)

Capitalism: Concept, Idea, Image - Aspects of Marx's Capital Today

Edited by Peter Osborne, Éric Alliez and Eric-John Russell

Contributors: Éric Alliez, Étienne Balibar, Tithi Bhattacharya, Boris Buden, Sara. R. Farris, John Kraniauskas, Elena Louisa Lange, Maurizio Lazzarato, Antonio Negri, Peter Osborne, Eric-John Russell, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Keston Sutherland

Drawn from a conference held to mark the 150th anniversary of the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, these essays from a range of internationally established contributors offer readers a snapshot of debates about the book's current relevance across a variety of fields and contexts. The volume approaches Marx's Capital as an exemplary text in the continuation of the tradition of post-Kantian European Philosophy through transdisciplinary practices of critique and concept construction. The essays are grouped into four sections: Value-Form, Ontology & Politics; Capitalism, Feminism and Social Reproduction; Freedom, Democracy and War; The Poetics of Capital/Capital. Each section is accompanied by an image from the 2008 film by Alexander Kluge, News From Ideological Antiquity: Marx - Eisenstein - Capital.

This book is available as a free ebook. The electronic version of this book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial No Derivatives 4.0 International Licence (CC-BYNC-ND). For more information, visit creativecommons.org.

 

Volume 1 (2019)