Alain Badiou

Jason E. Smith

Susan Spitzer

Kenneth Reinhard

Theological Figure, Being 2

Malebranche

In recent decades digital devices have reshaped daily life, while tech companies’ stock prices have thrust them to the forefront of the business world. In this rapid, global development, the promise of a new machine age has been accompanied by worries about accelerated joblessness thanks to new forms of automation. Jason E. Smith looks behind the techno-hype to lay out the realities of a period of economic slowdown and expanding debt: low growth rates and an increase of labor-intensive jobs at the bottom of the service sector. He shows how increasing inequality and poor working conditions have led to new forms of workers’ struggles. Ours is less an age of automation, Smith contends, than one in which stagnation is intertwined with class conflict.

Automation in an Age of Stagnation

Smart Machines and Service Work

Hasana Sharp

An original collection of essays that presents a wide-ranging reassessment of the relationship between Hegel and Spinoza, the two major alternatives to mainstream Enlightenment thought.

A Volume of Critical Essays

Between Hegel and Spinoza

Recent work in political philosophy and the history of ideas presents Spinoza and Hegel as the most powerful living alternatives to mainstream Enlightenment thought. Yet, for many philosophers and political theorists today, one must choose between Hegel or Spinoza. As Deleuze's influential interpretation maintains, Hegel exemplifies and promotes the modern "cults of death," while Spinoza embodies an irrepressible "appetite for living." Hegel is the figure of negation, while Spinoza is the thinker of "pure affirmation". Yet, between Hegel and Spinoza there is not only opposition. This collection of essays seeks to find the suppressed kinship between Hegel and Spinoza. Both philosophers offer vigorous and profound alternatives to the methodological individualism of classical liberalism. Likewise, they sketch portraits of reason that are context-responsive and emotionally contoured, offering an especially rich appreciation of our embodied and historical existence. The authors of this collection carefully lay the groundwork for a complex and delicate alliance between these two great iconoclasts, both within and against the Enlightenment tradition.

In Religious but Not Religious, Jungian analyst Jason E. Smith explores the idea, expressed by C.G. Jung, that the religious sense is a natural and vital function of the human psyche. We suffer from its lack. The symbolic forms of religion mediate unconscious and ineffable experiences to the field of consciousness that infuse our lives with meaning and purpose. That is why we cannot be indifferent toward the decline of traditional religious observance so widely discussed today. The great religions house the accumulated spiritual wisdom of humankind, and their loss would be catastrophic to the human soul. As human beings, we hunger for spiritual experience. To be “spiritual but not religious” is one possible response, but it often doesn’t go far enough. All too easily it can become a kind of do-it-yourself spirituality, which lacks the capacity to effect the kind of growth and transformation that is the true goal of all the religious traditions. Smith argues that we need to be “religious but not religious.” We need an approach to religion that recognizes the essential importance of the individual spiritual adventure while also affirming the value of collective religious tradition. He articulates an understanding of religion as a participation in the symbolic life as opposed to a mere content of belief. By recovering our personal sensitivity for symbolic experience together with a symbolic understanding of religion, we facilitate a profound encounter with life and with the human condition through which one may be tested, tried, and transformed.

Living a Symbolic Life

Religious but Not Religious

Annette Weisser

Jacques Rancière (born 1940) is one of the few living French philosophers to have established a significant dialogue with contemporary art. Rancière unites a politicized perspective on art's ability to rupture everyday life with his influential theorizations of education ("The Ignorant Schoolmaster") and politics ("The Nights of Labor"). His profile has ascended dramatically in the U.S. over the past decade, and this volume considers the continuity of his work across aesthetics, politics and education. With essays by Evan Calder Williams, Arne de Boever, Claire Fontaine, Peter Friedl, Jeremy Gilbert-Rolfe, Maria Muhle, Frank Ruda, Jason E. Smith, Jan Voelker and Rancière himself, this volume asks the question: how might a new model of aesthetic education transform our concepts of art, politics and pedagogy?

Jason E. Smith

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