Claire Colebrook

Death of the PostHuman undertakes a series of critical encounters with the legacy of what had come to be known as 'theory,' and its contemporary supposedly post-human aftermath. There can be no redemptive post-human future in which the myopia and anthropocentrism of the species finds an exit and manages to emerge with ecology and life. At the same time, what has come to be known as the human - despite its normative intensity - can provide neither foundation nor critical lever in the Anthropocene epoch. Death of the PostHuman argues for a twenty-first century deconstruction of ecological and seemingly post-human futures.

Death of the PostHuman

Claire Colebrook examines how postapocalyptic cinema uses images from the past and present to depict what it means to preserve the world--and who is left out of the narrative of rebuilding society.

Who Would You Kill to Save the World?

Why has Western thought been so persistent in its organisation of human bodies, and other categories, in terms of the binary opposition male and female? Is gender nothing more than an ideology, or does it have its basis in sexual difference? This invaluable introductory guide offers a clear overview of the concept, and problem, of gender. Claire Colebrook places the term in its historical contexts and traces its development from the Enlightenment to the present, before moving on to the evolution of the concept of gender from within the various stances of feminist criticism, and exploring recent developments in queer theory and post-feminism. Close analysis of key literary texts, including Frankenstein, Paradise Lost and A Midsummer Night's Dream, shows how specific styles of literature enable reflection on gender.

Gender

Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Gilles Deleuze is undoubtedly one of the seminal figures in modern Continental thought. However, his philosophy makes considerable demands on the student; his major works make for challenging reading and require engagement with some difficult concepts and complex systems of thought. Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed is the ideal text for anyone who needs to get to grips with Deleuzian thought, offering a thorough, yet approachable account of the central themes in his work: sense; univocity; intuition; singularity; difference. His ideas related to language, politics, ethics and consciousness are explored in detail and - most importantly - clarified. The book also locates Deleuze in the context of his philosophical influences and antecedents and highlights the implications of his ideas for a range of disciplines from politics to film theory. Throughout, close attention is paid to Deleuze's most influential publications, including the landmark texts The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition. >

Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed

Drawing on recent theories of digital media and on the materiality of words and images, this fascinating study makes three original claims about the work of William Blake. First, Blake offers a critique of digital media. His poetry and method of illuminated printing is directed towards uncovering an analogical language. Second, Blake's work can be read as a performative. Finally, Blake's work is at one and the same time immanent and transcendent, aiming to return all forms of divinity and the sacred to the human imagination, stressing that 'all deities reside in the human breast,' but it also stresses that the human has powers or potentials that transcend experience and judgement: deities reside in the human breast. These three claims are explored through the concept of incarnation: the incarnation of ideas in words and images, the incarnation of words in material books and their copies, the incarnation of human actions and events in bodies, and the incarnation of spirit in matter.

Blake, Deleuzian Aesthetics, and the Digital

The intensification of interest in Deleuze over the last decade has coincided with the end of the linguistic paradigm in both continental and analytic philosophy. Indeed, the division between the two traditions appears to be closing and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze seems to be crucial to this convergence, as he is both indebted to the phenomenological tradition at the same time as he operates with concepts drawn from the sciences. Claire Colebrook explores these ideas and offers a new and alternative assessment of Deleuze's contribution to philosophy. She argues that while Deleuze does draw upon sciences that explain the emergence of language, art and philosophy, his own thought is distinguished by a discontinuist thesis: systems may emerge from tendencies of life but always have the capacity to operate without reference to their original aim. Colebrook makes new claims regarding how Deleuze's philosophy might be used to read contemporary art and thus offers an original and crucial contribution to the Deleuzian debate.

Deleuze and the Meaning of Life

Sebastian Groes

Peter Childs

9/11 is not simple a date on the calendar but marks a distinct historical threshold, ushering in the war on terror, various states of emergency, a supposed “clash of civilizations,” and the putative legitimation of counter-democratic procedures ranging from extraordinary renditions to enhanced interrogation. Perhaps no date, since Virginia Woolf declared that “on or about December 1910 human character changed,” has marked such a singular point in the perception of time, identity and nature. Women’s writing has always been something of a counter-canon, offering modes of voice and point of view beyond that of the “man” of reason. This collection of essays explores the two problems of what it means to write as a woman and what it means to write in the twenty-first century.

Women's Fiction and Post-9/11 Contexts

Deleuze is a giant in contemporary thought - literary people are becoming more and more interested in him Claire Colebrook is making quite a name for herself as a rising star

Gilles Deleuze

Jacques Derrida

In an era that proclaims itself postironic, the question and problem of irony are of more interest than ever. In this compelling inquiry, Claire Colebrook first takes up all the majorøfigures in post-Cartesian philosophy on the subject of irony: Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche. She similarly examines the modern thinkers in the Anglo-Saxon tradition: Rorty, Searle, and de Man. She then engages in an analysis of the Continental canon and the ironic dimension that marks contemporary philosophy. Beyond the question of irony, Colebrook treats the presence of irony in the history of philosophy and those points of overlap between nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and philosophy. Ultimately, she extends what has belonged primarily to the domain of literature into a world of concepts.

Irony in the Work of Philosophy

Exploring the Kantian and phenomenological background of Derrida, Deleuze, Foucault and Irigaray, this book raises some key questions and issues in critical theory. Is it still possible to sustain a transcendental critical project? How do such projects fare in the terrain of cultural studies and anti-representationalism?

From Kant to Deleuze

Philosophy and Post-structuralist Theory

Irony

2024 Hugh J. Silverman Book Prize in Philosophy and Literature Who Would You Kill to Save the World? examines how postapocalyptic cinema uses images from the past and present to depict what it means to preserve the world--and who is left out of the narrative of rebuilding society. Claire Colebrook redefines "the world" as affluent Western society and "saving the world" as preventing us from becoming the othered them who are viewed in their suffering. Colebrook further examines how the use of postapocalyptic cinema is a humanist--Western, capitalist, colonizing, white, heteronormative, and individualist--creation and challenges the notion that a world built on foundations of exploitation is worth saving. Colebrook combines postapocalyptic fiction, concern over the global climate crisis, colonialism, and anti-Blackness to explain how contemporary postapocalypse blockbusters circulate ideas of whiteness and the right of the privileged to rebuild the world. Who Would You Kill to Save the World? is a provocative addition to the field of extinction studies and challenges the conceptual frames we use to define ourselves.

Rather than accept that there is a single body of literature that can be labeled "women's writing," this volume explores the ways in which twenty-first-century crises have problematized identity, literature, and narration.

Milton, Evil and Literary History addresses the ways in which we read literary history according to quite specific images of growth, development, progression, flourishing and succession. Goodness has always been aligned with a life of expansion, creation, production and fruition, while evil is associated with the inert, non-relational, static and stagnant. These associations have also underpinned a distinction between good and evil notions of capitalism, where good exchange enables agents to enhance their living potential and is contrasted with the evils of a capitalist system that circulates without any reference to life or spirit. Such images of a ghostly and technical economy divorced from animating origin are both central to Milton's theology and poetry and to the theories of literary history through which Milton is read. Regarded as a radical precursor to Romanticism, Milton's poetry supposedly requires the release of his radical spiritual content from the fetters of received orthodoxy. This literary and historical imagery of releasing the radical spirit of a text from the dead weight of received tradition is, this book argues, the dominant doxa of historicism and one which a counter-reading of Milton ought to question.

Milton, Evil and Literary History

Continuum's Guides for the Perplexed are clear, concise and accessible introductions to thinkers, writers and subjects that students and readers can find especially challenging. Concentrating specifically on what it is that makes the subject difficult to fathom, these books explain and explore key themes and ideas, guiding the reader towards a thorough understanding of demanding material. Gilles Deleuze is undoubtedly one of the seminal figures in modern Continental thought. However, his philosophy makes considerable demands on the student; his major works make for challenging reading and require engagement with some difficult concepts and complex systems of thought. Deleuze: A Guide for the Perplexed is the ideal text for anyone who needs to get to grips with Deleuzian thought, offering a thorough, yet approachable account of the central themes in his work: sense; univocity; intuition; singularity; difference. His ideas related to language, politics, ethics and consciousness are explored in detail and - most importantly - clarified. The book also locates Deleuze in the context of his philosophical influences and antecedents and highlights the implications of his ideas for a range of disciplines from politics to film theory. Throughout, close attention is paid to Deleuze's most influential publications, including the landmark texts The Logic of Sense and Difference and Repetition.

Tom Cohen

J. Hillis Miller

with a manuscript by Paul de Man

Paul de Man is often associated with an era of ‘high theory’, an era it is argued may now be coming to a close. This book, written by three leading contemporary scholars, includes both a transcript and facsimile print of a previously unpublished text by de Man of his handwritten notes for a lecture on Walter Benjamin. Challenging and relevant, this volume presents de Man’s work as a critical resource for dealing with the most important questions of the twenty-first century and argues for the place of theory within it. The humanities are flooded with crises of globalism, capitalism and terrorism, contemporary narratives of financial collapse, viral annihilation, species extinction, environmental disaster and terrorist destruction. Cohen, Colebrook and Miller draw out the implications of these crises and their narratives and, reflecting on this work by de Man, explore the limits of political thinking, of historical retrieval and the ethics of archives and cultural memory.

On de Man, On Benjamin

Theory and the Disappearing Future

'The best introduction to Deleuze, and to the collective writings of Deleuze and Guattari, available yet! Claire Colebrook has produced a truly accessible pathway into the labyrinthine enchantments offered for contemporary thought by Deleuzianism, making concepts clear, showing their political and theoretical complexity, elaborating their social and artistic relevance. A wonderful, lucid opening onto the new worlds of Deleuze.' Elizabeth Grosz, Rutgers University 'A wonderfully clear introduction to key Deleuzian concepts and to their effectiveness in fields ranging from ethics and politics to cinema, literary and cultural studies. Claire Colebrook provides a series of effortless transitions from Deleuze's philosophical concerns (eg: difference, representation, desire and affect) to concrete problems in a variety of fields. This book is an excellent guide to an important body of critical thought.' Paul Patton, Professor of Philosophy, University of NSW A genuine attempt to think differently, Gilles Deleuze's work challenges, provokes and frustrates. Surprisingly practical as well as innovative, it is now being seen as a 'must read' for students and scholars across the humanities and social sciences. Claire Colebrook's Understanding Deleuze offers a comprehensive and very accessible introduction to his work. hink differently. It is built on the notion of an immanent ethics: how can we have a political and ethical theory without some external foundation such as the subject or morality? He argues that the only way we can do this is with a theory of the virtual, and he sees all life (not just cyberculture) as virtual. Deleuze goes further than Foucault or Derrida in questioning the boundaries of the subject and knowledge. For Deleuze perception extends beyond the human, to animals, machines and microorganisms. Deleuze's writing is challenging and hard to read, and so far there is no introduction to his work. Claire Colebrook's primer offers an accessible introduction to the whole Deleuzian oeuvre, including the work he did with Guattari.

Claire Colebrook

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