...Eli Friedlander This essay reflects on the questions introduced by Howard Eiland and Michael Jennings's biography Walter Benjamin: A Critical Life . In particular, it considers how the biography addresses the difficult problem of drawing together a unity of life and writings in Benjamin's existence...

...Michelle Speidel Duke University Press 2001 Are We Not Genes? Stanley Shostak’s Deathof Life and The Evolution of Sameness and Difference Michelle Speidel The modern evolutionary paradigm of neo-Darwinism is increasingly...

...Anindyo Roy Duke University Press 2001 Savage Pursuits: The Shaping of Colonial Civility in E. M. Forster’s ‘‘The Life to Come’’ Anindyo Roy For conquering Clive, or Wellesley’s mightier name, The wide...

...Antonia Birnbaum What is studying in its difference from institutions? Benjamin took up the problem of studying with all the energy of his student dissatisfaction. In one of his early texts he investigates the “life of students” under the aspect of a historical concept in which history appears to...

... anonymous woman pleas into the receiver for help, the discussion seeks to both locate and complicate the so-called human element captured in recordings of the voice. Using Eric Santner's notion of creaturely life as a conceptual lens, this piece argues that the melancholy poetics that often accompanies the...

...R. Radhakrishnan © 2008 by Duke University Press 2008 Grievable Life, Accountable Theory R. Radhakrishnan In a world structured in dominance, is it viable, justifiable, and “con- scionable” to indulge in ontological thinking? What...

... essay are my own. © 2011 by Duke University Press 2011 Intervention Better City, Better Life Better City There was a popular expression, in Shanghai anyway, that went “Miss the expo and you’ll regret it for...

...Anne Allison The essay takes on recent news stories of “missing elderly” (elderly whose deaths go unrecorded) and “lonely death” (bodies discovered days or weeks after someone has died all alone) to consider how life, death, and the bonds/debts of social relationality are getting recalibrated in...

... kind of beauty, so strong that it had to be forgotten. Her doomed life led me to reflect on how old inequalities are always repackaged in new ways. What does it mean, in the words of Harry Belafonte, to write about a “black woman” who had to pay a “price for her blackness”? Perhaps the only way right...

... principle of his writing is one of attachment to finite life, which is all the more profound because it remains faithful to the ambivalence of any attachment. The task is to “own” that this is the only life we have—for better and for worse—rather than seeking to leave this life behind. Karl Ove...

...Zhivka Valiavicharska What do we do with the monuments from the socialist past? This question continues to resurface with relentless persistence in Bulgaria’s public life. For the past twenty-five years, socialism’s monuments have suffered severe neglect, yet they have provided open terrains upon...

... differing domains: the family as a social institution and the family as a process of individual experiences, that is, the lived experience of family life. While the individualization of the family institution is mostly reflected in the weakening of the bonds between the family and the larger kinship...

... forces. As is happening elsewhere, Japan's construction of a new type of eco-city is being posed as a mediation of these varied conditions and forces; as a solution of sorts, it also promises to reorganize everyday life. Drawing on plans for the eco-city, this essay addresses the conditions of crisis and...

...Gerald Moore Much is made of Charles Darwin's concept of natural selection, but Bernard Stiegler has developed a theory of artificial selection that is arguably every bit as important for an understanding of human life, and the life of the mind and aesthetics, in particular. Building on work by the...

...Claire Colebrook Bernard Stiegler's corpus is at once a diagnosis of the human organism's capacities and incapacities in relation to technè at the same time as it couples this organology with the refusal and affirmation of a properly human technological life. His work is at once destructive of any...

... consciousness of the whole student body concretely instantiated in the life of each individual student. This dialectical idea of solitude in community entails “an inwardly grounded and, at the same time, highly social form of action among the students,” a life form that would maintain independence from all...

...Jim Merod Louis Armstrong's career inaugurated the commercial viability of jazz for five decades. It also created both the structural conditions and critical reception that allowed jazz to emerge into a “classical” art form, still in the process of reshaping itself today. Armstrong's life, however...

...David S. Randall; Robert P. Wilson This essay examines the confluence of personal memoir, scholarship, and classroom teaching in the intellectual life. The authors trace the theme of “bearing witness” as the axiom of the intellectual vocation at three different moments in the career of William V...

... experience, as elaborated here, speak in and through every word of his work and as such have formative power for the future because everyday life now is, as the title of this memoir declares, In the Neighborhood of Zero , that is, ever on the verge of extinction. What other critic’s work of the last half...

... informing an imperial power, beginning with the Romans. Finally, akin to Said in his commitment to the worldliness of life and art, Spanos contends that the messiness of life does not lend itself to the clear-cut oppositions that the nation-state tries to establish. I am thankful to Myrto Drizou and...