On Love: In the Muslim Tradition by Rusmir Mahmutcehajic, is a study of the Islamic faith, most specifically Sufism. In addition to being an astute scholarly collection, the book looks at the relationship between love and faith, knowledge and spirituality. Sufism is Islamic Mysticism, but the book is written in a language that is universal and simple to understand–like the language of love itself.

In Poets of Divine Love: The Rhetoric of Franciscan Spiritual Poetry, Alessandro Vettori examines the vernacular of a different faith–that of the pre-Renaissance Franciscans. The poets in this case are St. Francis of Assisi and Jacopone da Todi, two Franciscans writing in Umbria during the 13th century. The resulting poems form a backbone of vernacular Italian literary tradition, and establish an essential relationship between faith and love.

Switching gears completely, Love and Other Technologies: Retrofitting Eros for the Information Age takes a look at love through the lens of modern technology–what is love’s place in our contemporary plugged-in culture? Love, as Dominic Pettman sees it, is every society’s interpretation of self in relation to others. So in today’s world, is love just another form of technology? For Pettman, the articulation of love is a technique of belonging: a way of responding to the basic plurality of everyone’s identity, a process that becomes increasingly complex as the forms of mediated communication, from cell phone and text messaging to the mass media, multiply and mesh together. This book brings love from the romance-cloaked past firmly into the here and now.

Vist our website and receive a 20% discount on all books this Valentine’s Day!

In Hits: Philosophy of the Juke Box, author Peter Szendy analyzes “Imagine” and other popular songs. He probes the ever-growing and ever more global phenomenon of the hit song. The hit song, Szendy concludes functions like a myth, a force of repetition that grows by force of repetition. After reading this book, one can no longer avoid realizing that music is more than a soundtrack: It is the condition of our Lives.

Hits: Philosophy of the Juke Box will publish in July 2011.

This past weekend, we were treated to both lion cubs AND tiger cubs, as well as a visit to the Mouse House and the Monkey House.

The trees were aflame with color and the entire lion family was enjoying the final warmth of a November afternoon.

One of the new tiger cubs explores his Bronx habitat.

Degus cuddle.

The monkeys were too fast for my camera!

For more on the animals we share our planet with:

In The Animal Therefore I Am, Derrida ponders the distinction, dating back to Descartes, between animals and humans. Derrida pulls apart the idea that thought separates all animals into a broad category of “other” from humans, wondering what his cat is thinking as she follows him into the bathroom each morning. It’s a profound investigation into being and thought, and the nature of rationality.

Manhattan: Letters from Prehistory is the story of Hélène Cixous, a young French student who traveled to the US in 1965 to study the manuscripts of several beloved authors. The narrative shifts from the original journey, forward in time, and then back in memory, tracing the importance of writing and reading literature in our lives. It’s “an investigation of the power of Literature, of the ways in which fiction keeps secret what it seems to expose, lies and tells the truth at the same time. Hélène Cixous infuses this haunting story of deception with her unique poetic style, incisive wit, and philosophical acumen.”—Brigitte Weltman-Aron, University of Florida

NOW: $12 (was $24)

William Carlos Williams once said, “A poem can be made of anything.” On the Anarchy of Poetry and Philosophy: A Guide for the Unruly explores the meaning of art–in our modern culture, where are the boundaries? What is the difference between art and product? Gerald Bruns ruminates on the ways in which art becomes philosophy. In this provocative study, Bruns answers that the culture of modernism is a kind of anarchist community, where the work of art is apt to be as much an event or experience—or, indeed, an alternative form of life—as a formal object. In modern writing, philosophy and poetry fold into one another. In this book, Bruns helps us to see how.

NOW: $13 (was $25)

The Geoffrey Hartman Reader gathers the work of one of the most revered literary critics of the twentieth century into a collection of essays spanning the vast depth of his interests, including (but not limited to)  poetry, trauma studies, Romantic literature, and modern media. The book was the winner of the 2006 Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism.

NOW: $10 (was $40.00)

Euthanasia has been a topic of passionate national debate, with Kevorkian at the center of the storm. Two states, Oregon and Washington, have legalized doctor-assisted suicide since Kevorkian’s crusade began in the late 1980s. With a myriad of ethical, legal, and medical implications, there is always something new to say about the topic.

Killing and Letting Die, edited by Bonnie Steinbock and Alistair Norcross, is a collection of essays examining what euthanasia means, especially in relation to letting a patient die. What are the differences? What are the similarities?

The book is divided into two sections. The first, “Euthanasia and the Termination of Life-Prolonging Treatment” includes an examination of the 1976 Karen Quinlan Supreme Court decision and selections from the 1990 Supreme Court decision in the case of Nancy Cruzan. Featured are articles by law professor George Fletcher and philosophers Michael Tooley, James Rachels, and Bonnie Steinbock, with new articles by Rachels, and Thomas Sullivan. The second section, “Philosophical Considerations,” probes more deeply into the theoretical issues raised by the killing/letting die controversy, illustrating exceptionally well the dispute between two rival theories of ethics, consequentialism and deontology. It also includes a corpus of the standard thought on the debate by Jonathan Bennet, Daniel Dinello, Jeffrie Murphy, John Harris, Philipa Foot, Richard Trammell, and N. Ann Davis, and adds articles new to this edition by Bennett, Foot, Warren Quinn, Jeff McMahan, and Judith Lichtenberg.

Ecospirit: Religions and Philosophies of the Earth, edited by Laurel Kearns and Catherine Keller, examines the increasing shift toward awareness, even as the intensity of environmental destruction continues. The essays in this volume posit that nothing short of an epic epiphany in global thinking can begin to reverse the damaging effects we’ve wreaked on the planet thus far. This change in thinking would involve the very overhaul of the way we practice religion and philosophy–what Ecospirit proposes is a shift so profound, it would challenge the very foundations of the way humans have talked about, written about, and studied the Earth for thousands of years. It’s a radical challenge, but a call to action we all need.

Also from Catherine Keller, and Chris Boesel, comes Apophatic Bodies: Negative Theology, Incarnation, and Relationality, a study of Apophatics, or the study of negative theology, in which God is described in what CANNOT be said about the divine. This volume pursues the unlikely conjunction of apophasis and the body, not for the cachet of the “cutting edge” but rather out of an ethical passion for the integrity of all creaturely bodies as they are caught up in various ideological mechanisms—religious, theological, political, economic—that threaten their dignity and material well-being.

New this Spring, Apophatic Bodies contributor Virginia Burrus has collaborated with Mark D. Jordan and Karmen MacKendrick on Seducing Augustine: Bodies, Desires, Confessions. Seducing Augustine analyzes the iconic Confessions, exploring religion and theology in a sexual context–a perspective not often tackled by critics. Often ambivalent but always passionately engaged, their readings of the Confessions center on four sets of intertwined themes—secrecy and confession, asceticism and eroticism, constraint and freedom, and time and eternity.

Discussion of the Earth and the environment has its roots in theology, philosophy, and human nature itself. Join the discourse with Fordham!

In his review, Christopher Higgs writes, “For Derrida, the fact that we refer to all living creatures that are not human as “animals” is absurdly reductive. He makes a good point. Lumping together the cricket and the whale, the mountain lion and the parakeet, the giraffe and the marmot, seems lazy and dismissive, yet, as Derrida points out, this is exactly what philosophers from Aristotle to Heidegger are guilty of doing. And part of his project is to shine a light on this unexamined assumption.”

Along this vein of questioning on the distinction between human and animal, this week’s podcast of “This American Life” tells the story of Lucy, a chimpanzee that was adopted by an American couple, who raised her as a human. They treated her upbringing as an experiment in just how human an animal can become–with tragic results. The story is fascinating, heartbreaking, and thought-provoking. The story comes from WNYC’s Radiolab show.

INTERVIEW: Fordham Conversations at WFUV (90.7 FM)

Drucilla Cornell, Professor of Law, Women’s Studies and Political Science at Rutgers University, will discuss her latest book Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity (Fordham University Press, 2009) this Saturday at 7am on WFUV (90.7FM).  The book views the iconic actor’s films through a feminist and philosophical point of view. For more information, visit www.wfuv.org .

This here’s a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and it can blow your head clean off. Now, you must ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well do you, punk? -Clint Eastwood, Dirty Harry

Tune in this Saturday!

Geoffrey Bennington, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of French and Professor of Comparative Literature at Emory University, is one of the country’s premier Derrida scholars. Commenting on Michael Naas’ book, Derrida From Now On, Bennington writes:

Of course, nothing says that doing or saying something in the name of someone or
something makes it a good thing to say or do. If I was mentioning what I imagine to be
Michael’s anxiety a moment ago, that is because what I say in his name always might go horribly
wrong in some way. Indeed in his book, other examples of things done in the name of
something are not always reassuring at all: for example, in the chapter entitled “Derrida’s
Laïcité,” Naas quotes one of the few as yet published pieces by Derrida on the death-penalty,
and explains that in the exemplary cases of Socrates, Jesus, al-Hallâj and Joan of Arc, the deathpenalty
was invoked by the state and “each was thus condemned in the name of a certain
transcendence for worshipping or claiming a relationship with another transcendence or a
counter-transcendence.” (67) [I’ll skip a couple of further examples.] And just a little later,
Naas glosses the point further, writing “Rather than simply opposing the theological, the state
wishes to have a monopoly over it. It thus uses the death penalty not so much to protect the
lives of its citizens as to take or sacrifice natural life in the name of an excess or hyperbolization
of life, that is, in the name of a certain transcendence.” (Ibid.) Or more generally, helpfully
unpacking the mysteries of Derrida’s late interest in the question of life, “it is this emphasis on
sovereignty and life, on superabundant life, on what can easily become sacrifice in the name of
that life, that has to be questioned if not countered, I believe Derrida believed, by a relentless,
vigilant, and affirmative interrogation of the way in which life as such is only ever possible in
relation to death.”

To read more of Bennington’s take on Derrida, through Naas’ lens, you can find the paper in its entirety here.

Michael Naas also spoke at the session. To read his remarks, click here.

On October 29, the conference presented a panel titled “Derrida From Now On,” featuring Fordham’s Samir Haddad as moderator, and speakers Zeynep Direk (of Galatasaray University) and Geoffrey Bennington.  Michael Naas, professor of philosophy at DePaul University, and author of Fordham Press’ Derrida From Now On, was there to respond.

Here’s an excerpt from Zeynep Direk’s paper:

Micheal Naas’ latest book Derrida From Now On is comprised of several essays on Derrida’s late philosophy of politics, taking up the questions of nation state, secularism, globalization, democracy and Derrida’s latest assessments of Europe and United States. The title of the book is interesting for even though it locates itself in the “now” it performs not only a break with the past, but also perhaps with the present in order to open the future for a new philosophical engagement with Derrida. What about the now of Derrida, the now in which he lives on in the memories of family, friends, and students, and for others the now in which his signature no longer represents a living body but an immense corpus?

The full paper is available for download here.

Stay tuned for more from SPEP 2009!