Overview

For the past thirty years, Howard Caygill has been a distinctive and radical voice in continental philosophy. For the first time, this volume gathers together Caygill’s most significant philosophical essays, the majority of which are not freely available and many of which are previously unpublished. Here, a major philosopher is at work, offering rich, rigorous and politically-engaged readings of canonical and lesser-known figures and texts. From Kant and Frantz Fanon to Herman Kahn, founder of the Hudson Institute, Caygill uncovers the untapped resources that the history of philosophy provides for contemporary thought, whilst critically pushing beyond the limits of the tradition. Divided into two parts, the first part of the collection reveals the philosophical backdrop to Caygill’s acclaimed study of political resistance, On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (2015), whilst the second part sees Caygill further develop his account of resistance through wide-ranging analyses of contemporary culture. Exploring numerous subjects, including Nietzsche, metaphysics, radical politics, and digital resistance, to name but a few, Force and Understanding introduces readers to the orienting themes of Caygill’s thought and provides the opportunity to engage with one of the most astute, learned, and critical philosophical minds around.

Full Product Details

Author:   Howard Caygill (Kingston University, UK) ,  Jacqueline Rose ,  Stephen Howard (KU Leuven, Belgium)
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Bloomsbury Academic
ISBN:  

9781350366374

ISBN 10:   1350366374
Pages:   504
Publication Date:   22 September 2022
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Tertiary & Higher Education
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   Manufactured on demand  
We will order this item for you from a manufactured on demand supplier.

Table of Contents

Editor’s Introduction, Stephen Howard Acknowledgements PART ONE: CONDITIONS Section one: Starting points 1. Gillian Rose 1947-1995: Art, Justice and Metaphysics 2. The Return of Nietzsche and Marx 3. Violence, Civility and the Predicaments of Philosophy 4. Politics and War: Hegel and Clausewitz 5. Perpetual Police? Kosovo and the Elision of Police and Military Violence Section two: Affirmation 6. The Consolation of Philosophy, or ‘Neither Dionysus Nor the Crucified’ 7. Philosophy and Cultural Reform in the Early Nietzsche 8. Affirmation and Eternal Return in the Free-Spirit Trilogy 9. Under the Epicurean Skies 10. That Perhaps Abused Word… Section three: Life 11. Drafts for a Metaphysics of the Gene 12. Liturgies of Fear: Biotechnology and Culture 13. Life and Aesthetic Pleasure 14. Soul and Cosmos in Kant: A Commentary upon ‘Two Things Fill the Mind’ 15. Life and Energy Section four: Philosophy/science 16. The Topology of Selection: The Limits of Deleuze’s Biophilosophy 17. The Force of Kant’s Opus postumum 18. Technology and the Propitiation of Chance 19. Bataille and the Neanderthal Extinction 20. Inhuman Destruction: The Critique of Violence According to Geological Scales Section five: Immanence 21. Kafka's Exit: Exile, Exodus and Messianism 22. The Fate of the Pariah: Arendt and Kafka’s “Nature Theatre of Oklahama” 23. Benjamin's Natural Theology 24. Levinas’s Silence 25. Tableaux for a Massacre: Shatila, Thursday-Sunday 16-19 September 1982 PART TWO: RESISTANCE 26. Philosophy and the Black Panthers 27. The White Mask: Light and Shadow in Fanon 28. The Spirit of Resistance and its Fate 29. Clausewitz and Idealism 30. Debt and the Origins of Obedience 31. Resisting Escalation: The Image of Villa Amalias 32. Strategic Intervention and the Digital Capacity to Resist 33. XR: Thinking Resistance at the End of the World Afterword by Jacqueline Rose

Reviews

For the past three decades Howard Caygill has been one of the two or three leading practitioners and exponents of European philosophy in the UK. This remarkable collection of selected essays is an intellectual event in itself, demonstrating Caygill's remarkable range, depth and unique form of critical engagement. Of especial note are the five exquisite essays on Nietzsche, the parallel essays on life and the life sciences, and the defiant series of essays that anticipate and complement Caygill's resistance trilogy. And then there is the beautiful, moving, and great demystifying opening essay on Gillian Rose. * J. M. Bernstein, University Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, The New School for Social Research, USA * Caygill is one of our foremost practitioners of the past, present and future philosophical difficulties of Kant's [so-called] Copernican revolution. This collection essays the life force of understanding, resisting both metaphysics and the death of metaphysics with a non-resentful joyous living in the turmoil of the loss of the 'object in-itself'. * Nigel Tubbs, Professor of Philosophical and Educational Thought, University of Winchester, UK * Ringing true and brilliant and crystal clear, Force and Understanding confirms what we have long thought and have yet to say: Howard Caygill is to be counted among the great thinkers of our time. * George Smith, Edgar E. Coons, Jr. Professor of New Philosophy and Founder and President of the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts, Portland, USA *

Author Information

Howard Caygill is Professor of Modern European Philosophy at CRMEP, Kingston University, London, UK. He is author of On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (Bloomsbury, 2013) and Kafka: In Light of the Accident (Bloomsbury, 2017). Stephen Howard is a Postdoctoral Fellow at KU Leuven, Belgium.

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