Walter Benjamin

Samuel Weber

Avalon Professor of Comparative Literature Samuel Weber

In this book, Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin's thought by focusing the critical suffix "-ability" that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin's thought by way of his language - and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin's work ever written.

Benjamin's -abilities

In Italy, the powerful Borromeo family of Milan have long been held up as a rare example of paternalist aristocrats who withstood the temptations of self-enrichment so many of their peers succumbed to during the period of Spanish rule. Aristocratic Power in the Spanish Monarchy, the first major study of the family in the seventeenth century, challenges this myth and explains how it came about. Based on research in the previously inaccessible Borromeo private papers, the volume details the Borromeo's increasing involvement with, and dependence on, the patronage of the kings of Spain. At the center of the analysis are the ways in which one family sought to rationalize and conceal this controversial relationship in the face of popular opposition to their methods of buying their way into political power. As their self-seeking behavior came under scrutiny, the clients of successive minister-favorites reinvented themselves as paternalist courtiers committed to delivering good governance for the subject populations under their rule. In doing so, the book offers new perspectives on broader questions: through a case study of three brothers from a representative noble family, it explains a major shift in aristocratic power in the seventeenth century, uncovering how dissimulation and subterfuge became central to the preservation of social privilege in an age of unprecedented threats to established power from below. Steeped in sociological and anthropological research on elite power, this captivating story from seventeenth-century Italy tells us much about the reproduction of social inequality in our own times.

The Borromeo Brothers of Milan, 1620-1680

Aristocratic Power in the Spanish Monarchy

In this major work, leading theorist Samuel Weber provides a much-needed introduction to the thought of Jacques Lacan. Professor Weber approaches his subject from a dual perspective: he reads Lacan in the light of Freud (whose work Lacan is concerned to interpret), and from the perspective of structuralism, above all Saussure, from whom Lacan borrows and develops a distinctive conception of language as 'signifier'. Lacan is shown to contribute crucially to the rethinking of subjectivity that marks much of contemporary literary theory, and his 'return to Freud' - the complex relationship between his work and its Freudian antecedents - is explored extensively. The result, made available here for the first time in English (in a form thoroughly revised, updated, and augmented by the author) is a constantly illuminating work of intellectual enquiry, with important implications for our age.

Jacques Lacan's Dislocation of Psychoanalysis

Return to Freud

Demarcating the Disciplines was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. With publication of this volume, Glyph begins a new stage in its existence: the move from Johns Hopkins University Press to the University of Minnesota Press is accompanied by a change in focus. In its first incarnation Glyph provided a forum in which established notions of reading, writing, and criticism could be questioned and explored. Since then, the greater currency of such concerns has brought with it new problems and priorities. Setting aside the battles of the past, the new Glyph looks ahead - to confront historical issues and to address the institutional and pedagogical questions emerging from the contemporary critical landscape. Each volume in the new Glyph series is organized around a specific issue. The essays in this first volume explore the relations between the practice of reading and writing and the operations of the institution. Though their approaches differ from one another, the authors of these essays all recognize that the questions of the institution - most notably the university - points toward a series of constraints that define, albeit negatively, the possibilities for change. The contributors: Samuel Weber, Jacques Derrida, Tom Conley, Malcolm Evans, Ruth Salvaggio, Robert Young, Henry Sussman, Peter Middleton, David Punter, and Donald Preziosi.

Philosophy, Literature, Art

Demarcating the Disciplines

A Reading of La Peau De Chagrin

Unwrapping Balzac

A Reading of La Peau de Chagrin

This radically new reading of La peau de charin presents a case for Balzac as a modern rather than a traditional, realist writer. Using the principles and languages of Marx, Derrida, Freud, Barthea, and others who have contributed to a redefinition of modern criticism, Samuel Weber presents a detailed and intricate explication of the text that challenges all standard interpretations of the novel. Traditional readings of La peau de chagrin, and of Balzac in general, have pursued a message in the novel, a reality beneath the allegory. Weber demonstrates that Balzac's text can be grasped both as a mise en scène and as a play of representations that reflects no original truth, reality, or meaning beneath the text to which the representation can be referred and by which they can be authenticated. To unwrap Balzac in this manner is to discover that there is no thing inside, that there is only the 'wrapping.' Weber's conclusions are not only startingly original, but they also solve problems which have puzzled traditional readers of the novel since the earliest commentators of 1831. Unwrapping Balzac is a brilliant tour de force that will create controversy among Balzac scholars for years to come.

Werner Holly

Peter Krapp

Ludwig Jäger

Simone Heekeren

Das Ziel des Handbuchs ist es, die 'kulturwissenschaftliche Lücke' in der Sprachwissenschaft historisch und systematisch zu reflektieren sowie einen Beitrag zu ihrer Schließung zu leisten. Die Klärung der Frage: "Wie ist Sprachwissenschaft als Kulturwissenschaft möglich?" soll sowohl aus der disziplinären Innenperspektive vorliegender Ansätze der Sprachwissenschaft, als auch aus der Außenperspektive benachbarter Disziplinen fokussiert werden.

Ein internationales Handbuch zu Linguistik als Kulturwissenschaft / An International Handbook of Linguistics as a Cultural Discipline

Sprache - Kultur - Kommunikation / Language - Culture - Communication

"Psychoanalysis is dead!" Again and again this obituary is pronounced, with ever-increasing conviction in newspapers and scholarly journals alike. But the ghost of Freud and his thought continues to haunt those who would seal the grave. The Legend of Freud shows why psychoanalysis has remained uncanny, not just for its enemies but for its advocates and practitioners as welland why it continues to fascinate us. For psychoanalysis is not just a theory of psychic conflict: it is a thought in conflict with itself. Often violent, the conflicts of psychoanalysis are most productive where they remain unresolved, thus producing a text that must be read: deciphered, interpreted, rewritten. Psychoanalysis: legenda est. Review "The Legend of Freud is a fine example of what can be done with Freud's texts when philosophical and literary approaches converge, and you leave the couch in the other room. . . . Like Lacan and Derrida, Weber doesn't so much explain or interpret Freud as engage him, performing what Freud would have called an Auseinandersetzung, a discussion or argument that's also a taking apart, a deconstruction. . . . Deconstruction has picked up a bad name, especially in the minds of those who don't understand it; but this wouldn't be the case if there were more books like Weber's. The Legend of Freud is the best deconstructive work I've seen lately, and the best response to Freud; it merits close attention from anyone who wants a challenge, not merely a guide to what's right and wrong. . . . Weber is brilliantly imaginative, respectful of his subject and his readers, and productive of new ideas." Village Voice Literary Supplement

Freud-Legende

Hent de Vries

Counter The twenty-five contributors to this volume - who include such influential thinkers as Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Nancy, Talal Asad, and James Siegel - confront the conceptual, analytical, and empirical difficulties involved in addressing the complex relationship between religion and media. The book's introductory section offers a prolegomenon to the multiple problems raised by an interdisciplinary approach to these multifaceted phenomena. The essays in the following part provide exemplary approaches to the historical and systematic background to the study of religion and media. The third part presents case studies by anthropologists and scholars of comparative religion. The book concludes with two remarkable documents: a chapter from Theodor W. Adorno's study of the relationship between religion and media in the context of political agitation (The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas's Radio Addresses) and a section from Niklas Luhmann's monumental Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft (Society as a Social System).

Samuel Weber

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