James Cuno Museums Matter in Praise of the Encyclopedic Museum
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Recently Published Fall 2013 Contents General Interest 1 Special Interest 33 Paperbacks 88 Darwin Deleted From Stone to Flesh Imagining a World without Darwin A Short History of the Buddha Distributed Books 124 Peter J. Bowler Donald S. Lopez Jr. ISBN-13: 978-0-226-06867-1 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49320-6 Cloth $30.00/£21.00 Cloth $26.00/£18.00 Author Index 204 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-00984-1 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-49321-3 Title Index 206 Subject Index 208 Ordering Inside Information back cover How Animals Grieve A Manual for Writers of Barbara J. King Research Papers, Theses, ISBN-13: 978-0-226-43694-4 Cloth $25.00/£17.50 and Dissertations E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04372-2 Chicago Style for Students and Researchers, Eighth Edition Kate L. Turabian ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81638-8 Paper $18.00/£12.50 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-81639-5 Payback Signature Derrida The Case for Revenge Jacques Derrida Thane Rosenbaum Edited and with a Preface by Jay Williams ISBN-13: 978-0-226-72661-8 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92454-0 Cloth $26.00/£18.00 Paper $27.50s/£19.50 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-04369-2 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-92455-7 Cover design by Alice Reimann Catalog design by Alice Reimann and Mary Shanahan JACQUES DERRIDA The Death Penalty, Volume I Translated by Peggy Kamuf n this newest installment in Chicago’s series of Jacques Derrida’s seminars, the renowned philosopher attempts one of his most Iambitious goals: the first truly philosophical argument against the death penalty. While much has been written against the death penalty, Derrida contends that Western philosophy is massively, if not always obviously, complicit with a logic in which a sovereign state has the right to take a life. Haunted by this notion, he turns to the key places where such logic has been established—and to the place it has been most The Seminars of Jacques Derrida effectively challenged: literature. With his signature genius and patient yet dazzling readings of an NOVEMBER 328 p. 6 x 9 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14432-0 impressive breadth of texts, Derrida examines everything from the Cloth $35.00s/£24.50 E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-09068-9 Bible to Plato to Camus to Jean Genet, with special attention to Kant PHILOSOPHY LITERARY CRITICISM and post–World War II juridical texts, to draw the landscape of death penalty discourses. Keeping clearly in view the death rows and execution chambers of the United States, he shows how arguments surrounding cruel and unusual punishment depend on what he calls an “anaes- Also published in The Seminars of Jacques Derrida series: thesial logic,” which has also driven the development of death penalty technology from the French guillotine to lethal injection. Confronting The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I a demand for philosophical rigor, he pursues provocative analyses of ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14429-0 Paper $22.50s/£16.00 the shortcomings of abolitionist discourse. Above all, he argues that the death penalty and its attendant technologies are products of a The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume II desire to put an end to one of the most fundamental qualities of our ISBN-13: 978-0-226-14430-6 Cloth $35.00s/£24.50 finite existence: the radical uncertainty of when we will die. Arriving at a critical juncture in history—especially in the United States, one of the last Christian-inspired democracies to resist abolition —The Death Penalty is both a timely response to an important ethical debate and a timeless addition to Derrida’s esteemed body of work. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) was director of studies at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris, and professor of humanities at the Univer- sity of California, Irvine. He is the author of many books published by the University of Chicago Press. Peggy Kamuf is the Marion Frances Chevalier Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California. She has written, edited, or translated many books, by Derrida and others, and is coeditor of the series of Derrida’s seminars at the University of Chicago Press. general interest 1 JOSHUA MITCHELL Tocqueville in Arabia Dilemmas in a Democratic Age he Arab Spring, with its calls for sweeping political change, marked the most profound popular uprising in the Middle T East for generations. But if the nascent democracies born of these protests are to succeed in the absence of a strong democratic tradition, their success will depend in part on an understanding of how Middle Easterners view themselves, their allegiances to family and religion, and their relationship with the wider world in which they are increasingly integrated. “Tocqueville in Arabia is a profound medi- Many of these same questions were raised by Alexis de Tocqueville tation on students in different cultures in during his 1831 tour of America, itself then a rising democracy. Joshua the twenty-first century and the dif- Mitchell spent years teaching Tocqueville’s classic account, Democracy in ficulties faced by mature democracy in America, in America and the Arab Gulf and, with Tocqueville in Arabia, America and emerging democracy in the he offers a profound personal take. One of the reasons for the book’s Muslim Arab world. Flowing smoothly widespread popularity in the region is that its commentary on the from one issue to another, from personal challenges of democracy and the seemingly contradictory concepts of experience to works of political philoso- equality and individuality continue to speak to current debates. While phy, and from the United States to the Mitchell’s American students tended to value individualism and com- Arab Gulf and back again, Joshua Mitchell mercial self-interest, his Middle Eastern students had grave doubts succeeds marvelously in identifying the about individualism and a deep suspicion for capitalism, which they expectations, aspirations, and anxieties saw as risking the destruction of long-held loyalties and obligations. that characterize young people today, and Mitchell describes modern democratic man as becoming what Toc- he illuminates their common psychologi- queville predicted: a “distinct kind of humanity” that would be increas- cal and spiritual proclivities by means ingly isolated and alone. Whatever their differences, students in both of deft and succinct exposition of the worlds were grappling with a sense of disconnectedness that social ideas of Tocqueville, as well as Rousseau, media does little to remedy. Marx, and Smith.” —Peter Berkowitz, We live in a time rife with mutual misunderstandings between Stanford University America and the Middle East, and Tocqueville in Arabia offers a guide to the present, troubled times, leavened by the author’s hopes about the future. SEPTEMBER 208 p. 51/2 x 81/2 ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08731-3 Cloth $20.00/£14.00 Joshua Mitchell is professor of political theory in the Department of Govern- E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-08745-0 ment at Georgetown University. From 2005 to 2010, he taught first at George- CURRENT EVENTS town University’s School of Foreign Service in Qatar, and then at the Ameri- can University of Iraq, Sulaimani. He is the author of several books, including The Fragility of Freedom: Tocqueville on Religion, Democracy, and the American 2 general interest Future, also published by the University of Chicago Press. DORI KATZ Looking for Strangers The True Story of My Hidden Wartime Childhood ori Katz is a Jewish Holocaust survivor who thought that her lost childhood years in Belgium were irrecoverable. But after Da chance viewing of a documentary about hidden children in German-occupied Belgium, she realized that she might, in fact, be able to unearth those years. Looking for Strangers is the deeply honest record of her attempt to do so, a detective story that unfolds through one of the most horrifying periods in history in an attempt to under- “Looking for Strangers is absolutely com- stand one’s place within it. pelling, both deeply personal and histori- In alternating chapters, Katz resurrects her multiple pasts, setting cally important, giving us a glimpse of details from her mother’s stories that have captivated her throughout a small aspect, overlooked in the larger her life alongside an account of her own return to Belgium forty years chronicles, of Holocaust trauma and, at later—against her mother’s urgings—in search of greater clarity. She the same time, describing a quest that is reconnects her sharp but fragmented memories: being sent by her at once incredibly brave and penetrating- mother in 1942, at the age of three, to live with a Catholic family under ly honest. It is one of those rare memoirs, a Christian identity; then being given up, inexplicably, to an orphan- telling a story that is universal in its ap- age in the years immediately following the war. Only after that, amid peal and profound in its understanding.” postwar confusion, was she able to reconnect with her mother. Fol- —Barbara L. Estrin, lowing this trail through Belgium to her past places of hiding, Katz author of The American Love Lyric after Auschwitz and Hiroshima eventually finds herself in San Francisco, speaking with a man who claimed to have known her father in Auschwitz—and thus known his SEPTEMBER 208 p. 51/2 x 81/2 end. Weighing many other stories from the people she meets along her ISBN-13: 978-0-226-05862-7 Cloth $22.50/£16.00 way—all of whom seem to hold something back—she attempts to stitch E-book ISBN-13: 978-0-226-06333-1 thread after thread into a unified truth, to understand the countless BIOGRAPHY motivations and circumstances that determined her remarkable life.