This volume, written from a diachronic perspective, is devoted to the initatic and deeply transformative dimension of religious experience in Neoplatonic philosophy which aims at restoring the soul’s condition prior to its descent into matter. It brings together philosophers and historians of religions, specializing in the study of mithraism, theurgy, Christian mysticism and the philosophical exegesis of the Chaldean Oracles.

Bergson is rightly considered the philosopher of duration. Has this theory, however, been sufficiently elucidated? Is there a domain, aside from life itself, to which the characteristics of duration can be meaningfully ascribed? Why, in his thesis from 1907, does Bergson write of a “real” duration? His subsequent work Duration and Simultaneity: With Reference to Einstein’s Theory (1922) is the only volume written by Bergson in the period separating Creative Evolution (1907) and The Two Sources of Morality and Religion (1932). Duration and Simultaneity represents a polemical, unique, mature and relatively neglected work, one that allows us however to respond to these questions – provided that we read it as a work of philosophy and metaphysics. This book was awarded the 2020 Polydore de Paepe Prize of the Royal Academy of Science, Letters and Fine Arts of Belgium.

Our historical period is characterized by a vision of liberal heritage and a capitalist economic path. But it is far from obvious what “liberal” really means here, and what connection it has with capitalism. The current volume thus first attempts to provide a clarification of the long-term genesis of “liberal reason” in the West, following its development in the seventeenth century down to the present day. Secondly, the text aims to identify the basic logic that feeds liberal reason, a logic that nourishes capitalist processes but goes far beyond them. This analysis provides a picture in which liberal reason no longer needs to be 'represented' because it has tacitly occupied the entire conceptual space of the political. It now plays all the parts in the political comedy, both majorities and oppositions, right and left, concealing the systematic operation of distortion that has taken place. The ramifications of liberal reason have also taken root among intellectuals and movements that consider themselves to be 'neutral', or even 'anti-capitalist'. Liberalism's occupation, as pervasive as it is unnoticed, lies at the basis of the perceived impossibility of conceiving alternatives, and therefore of the continual deadlock in which contemporary consciousness struggles.

The volume contains the proceedings of an international conference exploring the concept of 'contemporaneity' from different perspectives and in reference to different disciplinary fields (philosophy, literature and art theory). In the chronological motion of historiography, contemporaneity is conceptualised as simply being the present era, one that follows modernity. Such thinking overlooks a more complex understanding of the contemporary, which is, in its original meaning, the co-presence of different times, a disconnection of temporal continuity, a rupture in the present, which becomes a meeting point where the past and the future intersect. The contemporary is untimely and, in this sense, is just in time, as it relates to time through anachronism. It is more present than the present of actuality.

The Kyoto School was the most important philosophical current in Japan during the 20th century. In the context of a growing interest in Japanese philosophy, as well as in non-European philosophy in general, this essay represents the first attempt to set the political thought of Kiyoshi Miki (1897-1945) and Jun Tosaka (1900-1945) in dialogue with contemporary thought. Miki and Tosaka were both leftist thinkers interested in thinking through political action “from below. ” This book introduces their concepts of “basic experience” and “everydayness” through conversation with contemporary theories of speculative realism, especially that of Mark Fisher. According to Miki and Tosaka, social myths are not just fictions but political “objects” with a life of their own, capable of generating political subjects and subverting the dominant ideology.

Offering an overview of the relationship between smell and atmospheres as proposed within the humanities, this volume aims at interpreting the “olfactive” as a cross-sensorial and ecological modality of perception. It investigates osmospheres - i.e. , the olfactory irradiances which provide persons, commodities, situations and places with an aura, a vague but unique flavour—from the perspective of relational and social aesthetics. For reasons that are addressed extensively, the central case study is of food, which exemplifies the porous boundaries between subject and environment, identity and alterity, knowing and feeling. In the light of contemporary artistic and marketing practices, in which food osmospheres are staged in order to convey emotions and drive consumer behavior, this work speculates on the socio-political aesthetic implications of osmospheric foodification attempting to capture the essence of today’s urban and domestic dwelling.

This book aims to reflect on mental illness through considering the influence that criticism and German idealism exerted on directions of philosophical, scientific and psychoanalytical thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which can still be perceived today. It aims, therefore, not only to offer today's cultural and scientific debate an analysis of otherwise undetected aspects of classical German philosophy but also to shed light on subjects and issues present within current philosophical, psychiatric and scientific investigation.

Written by four hands, the current volume moves on two planes that fruitfully intersect and sometimes conflict in their interpretations. On the one hand, Petar Bojanič proposes that gestures are not parasitic of social acts but instead constitute a supporting element. From this interpretative angle, gestures contribute to the constitution of a group or institution. On the other hand, Virgilio Cesarone first presents a phenomenology of gesture, showing that non-instrumental gestural expression, which refers to the constitution of another's body as alter ego, is truly human. Furthermore, gesture shows its essentiality precisely at the moment when it serves no purpose. He thus proposes a hermeneutics of gesture, aiming to show that gesture cannot be considered an accessory and expressive element of a thought that is inwardly closed, but part of a thought that moves with the hand itself.

The book offers a study of ancient rhetoric within a philosophical reflection that aims to reconstruct its history. Through the various definitions of rhetoric and all its practical, ethical, social and political implications, the author leads us to the rhetorical languages of today, developed within the democracies and the so-called populisms that characterize the West – or rather, what remains of it.

Private Henrik Hahnemann is an eighteen-year-old Missouri farm boy growing up in the hard scrabble times of the Great Depression. Known for his hunting skills, his close-knit family often depend on him to bring home dinner. Shaken and bitter by the attack on Pearl Harbor, he is fixated on revenge and chooses the Marine Corps as the means for his personal retribution. Granted an early high school graduation, "Handyman" Henrik struggled with the change from a peaceful famer's son, but his platoon come to recognize his shooting and hunting skills. When the chips were down he summons the determination necessary to survive against hopeless odds. Superior Private Obatia Yoshiro is an average twenty-year-old student expected to eventually take over his father's glassworks. To most an unassuming economics student, he has another side – a side shaped by long hours crewing an uncle's fishing boat where he is exposed to the physical and mental demands of the elements. His school plans suddenly undermined by a draft notice, he makes the best of a dismal and brutal life of absolute obligation and unquestioning obedience. Both will end up on a rugged and brutal South Pacific island called Guadalcanal, where, two determined nations pit all they could spare; committing every airplane, ship, and soldier they could funnel into the cauldron. Values and beliefs, discipline and obedience, massed firepower or skill at arms – what will prevail in this nightmare?

Octobers traces the four great tumults of the author’s life, all of which originated in that jagged month of different years: The US invasion and occupation of her native Afghanistan, the death of her father, the sudden end of a love, and the birth of her daughter. The poems chart heartbreak along a helix, progressively and recursively, where “echoes are inevitable.” Ultimately, the collection is concerned with language - as witness and buoy in the white waters of loss, as a tool for violences small and state-crafted, as an asymptote both approaching ideas of “home” and estranged from it, and, beyond it all and still, as a source of wild wonder.

Considers allegory as a catalyst of transformative thinkingAllegorical Moments is a set of essays dedicated to rethinking allegory and arguing for its significance as a creative and critical response to sociopolitical, environmental, and existential turmoil affecting the contemporary world. Traditionally, allegorical interpretation was intended to express an orthodoxy and support an ideology. Hejinian attempts to liberate allegory from its dogmatic usages. Presenting modern and contemporary materials ranging from the novel to poetry to painting and cinema to activist poetry of the Occupy movement, each essay in the book "begins again" with different materials and from different perspectives. Hejinian's generative scholarship looks back to experimental modernism and forward into a future for a vital, wayward poetry resistant to the crushing global effects of neoliberalism.

Indispensable volume of previously unavailable poetry by an American masterBe Brave to Things shows legendary San Francisco Renaissance poet Jack Spicer at the top of his form, with his blistering intelligence, painful double-edged wit, and devastating will to truth everywhere on display. Much of the poetry here has never before been published, but the volume also includes much out-of-print or hard to find work, as well as Spicer's three major plays, which have never been collected. Here one finds major unfinished projects, early and alternate versions of well-known Spicer poems, shimmering stand-alone lyrics, and intricate extended "books" and serial poems. This new cache of Spicer material will be indispensable for any student of 20th century American poetry, proffering a trove of primary material for Spicer's growing readership to savor and enjoy."When your body brushed against me. . ."When your body brushed against me I rememberedHow we used to catch butterflies in our handsDown in the garden.We were such patient childrenFollowing them from flower to flowerWaiting and hoping.With our cupped hands we used to catch themAnd they answered us with a soft tickleFor they never stopped flying.In bed I remembered them and cried forThe touch of their fast wings, the impatienceOf their bright colorsI am too old for such gamesBut even tonight, now your body has reminded me of butterfliesI lie here awake, pretending.

Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection reminds us that the elegy is lament but also - as it has been for centuries - a work of loveIn Peter Gizzi's powerful new collection, we find, in the poet's words, that "the elegy is a mode that can transform a broken heart in a fierce world into a fierce heart in a broken world." For Gizzi, ferocity can be reimagined as vulnerability, bravery and discovery, a braiding of emotional and otherworldly depth, "a holding open." In Gizzi's voice joy and sorrow make a complex ecosystem. One of our foremost practitioners of the lyric, Gizzi here extends his mastery of the form. In their quest for a lyric reality, these poems remind us that elegy is lament but also - as it has been for centuries - a mode of love poetry as well. "This new poetry," Kamau Brathwaite has written about Gizzi, "taking such care of temperature - the time & details of the world - meaning the space(s) in which we live - defining love in this way. Writing along the edge. A way of writing about hope."[sample poem]Creely Songall that is lovelyin words, evenif gone to piecesall that is lovelygone, all of itfor love andautobiographyas if I werewriting thishello, listenthe plan isthe body andall of it for lovenow in piecesall that is lovelyechoes stillin life & deathstill memorygardens openonto windowslovely, the charmthat mirrorsall that was, allthat is, lovelyin a song

A contemporary artist is out to win a portrait prize by sketching a Che Guevara rebel from the old Australian colony in Paraguay. The artist’s brother is troubled by doubts about the rebel’s heroic identity and feels obliged to investigate.Set largely in South America, the novel explores divergent approaches to the truth in the wilds of Bolivia where Che sought to ignite a widespread revolution. The investigation ends in Sydney where Che’s ambitious dreams are still revered and the prize will soon be awarded. The counter-factual mysteries to be unravelled mirror South America’s own ingenious literary form, magic realism, a form reflecting the post-modern world’s richly-imagined but often bizarre perceptions.

mahogany is about the passing of time and unimaginable loss, strength, humor, and lovemahogany takes its name from the dark wood prized for its durability, workability, and elegant look, and from the Diana Ross movie, whose theme song asks if what lies ahead is what you really want. This book is the third in a trilogy, and like the first two books it is steeped in pop music. Each poem here takes its title from a line of a Diana Ross and The Supremes song, as well as songs from Diana Ross' solo career. Short lines flow down the page like postmodern psalms, connecting dailyness to timelessness, merging the historical and the beloved through reverence for family, music, and the life we actually live. mahogany is a lament for the passing of time and unimaginable loss, and at the same time it models the daily search for joy, and the deep shine that can arise from the darkest times.