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While Leo Bersani makes repeated stringent critiques of relationality and other-oriented sexuality, drawing on an array of literary examples including Gide, Proust, and Robbe-Grillet, he evinces a somewhat ambiguous relation to the question of sadism and to sadism's inherent relation to masochism. Very similar notions of self-shattering not structured by the other, the world, or the couple are formulated by Gilles Deleuze in the late 1960s, but in this case as characteristics of Sadean demonstrative reason fully distinct from a psychoanalytic position that would insist on the relation between sadism and masochism. This missed connection between Deleuze and Bersani is broached through Deleuze's reading of Michel Tournier's rewriting of Robinson Crusoe.

Although Alain Badiou's early work is deeply critical of French theories of libidinal economy that sought to synthesize Marx and Freud in the wake of May 1968, this essay seeks to summarize the central tenets of libidinal economy theory--the emphasis on the desire structure proper to use value; the boundaries of the human explored through the death drive; a thought of radical inertia--and argues that there is more overlap than might be thought, especially concerning inertia. Badiou's interest in Mao is considered in its connection to problems of periodization, of counting a century, and the thought of the party, and these link back to theories of libidinal economy through a shared fascination with the intemporal, if not the unconscious. -- ek

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Whistle While You Work: Deleuze and the Spirit of Capitalism -- 2. The Ethics of the Event: Deleuze and Ethics without Aρxń -- 3. While Remaining on the Shore: Ethics in Deleuze's Encounter with Antonin Artaud -- 4. Responsive Becoming: Ethics between Deleuze and Feminism -- 5. Deleuze, Values, and Normativity -- 6. Ethics and the World without Others -- 7. Deleuze and the Question of Desire: Towards an Immanent Theory of Ethics -- 8. "Existing Not as a Subject But as a Work of Art": The Task of Ethics or Aesthetics? -- 9. Deleuze, Ethics, Ethology, and Art -- 10. Never Too Late? On the Implications of Deleuze's Work on Death for a Deleuzian Moral Philosophy -- 11. Ethics between Particularity and Universality -- Notes on Contributors -- Index

This volume focuses on the relational aspect of Jean-Luc Nancy's thinking. As Nancy himself showed, thinking might be a solitary activity but it is never singular in its dimension. Building on or breaking away from other thoughts, especially those by thinkers who had come before, thinking is always plural, relational. This "singular plural" dimension of thought in Nancy's philosophical writings demands explication.In this book, some of today's leading scholars in the theoretical humanities shed light on how Nancy's thought both shares with and departs from Descartes, Hegel, Marx, Heidegger, Weil, Lacan, Merleau-Ponty, and Lyotard, elucidating "the sharing of voices," in Nancy's phrase, between Nancy and these thinkers.Contributors: Georges Van Den Abbeele, Emily Apter, Rodolphe Gasché, Werner Hamacher, Eleanor Kaufman, Marie-Eve Morin, Timothy Murray, Jean-Luc Nancy, and John H. Smith

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- part 1 Revolution and Theological Difference -- Tragedy and Revolution -- Metanoia: The Theological Praxis of Revolution -- The ''Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy'' -- Nothing Is, Something Must Be: Lacan and Creation from No One -- Revelation and Revolution -- part 2 Ontology, Capital, and Kingdom -- Capital and Kingdom: An Eschatological Ontology -- Neither Servility nor Sovereignty: Between Metaphysics and Politics -- Of Chrematology: Joyce and Money -- Only Jesus Saves: Toward a Theopolitical Ontology of Judgment -- part 3 Infinite Desire and the Political Subject -- The Political Subject and Absolute Immanence -- Rewriting the Ontological Script of Liberation: On the Question of Finding a New Kind of Political Subject -- Ecclesia: The Art of the Virtual -- The Univocalist Mode of Production -- part 4 Reenchanting the Political beyond Ontotheology -- The Commodification of Religion, or The Consummation of Capitalism -- The UnbearableWithness of Being: On the Essentialist Blind Spot of Anti-ontotheology -- ''To Cut Too Deeply and Not Enough'': Violence and the Incorporeal -- The Two Sources of the ''Theological Machine'': Jacques Derrida and Henri Bergson on Religion, Technicity, War, and Terror -- part 5 Theological Materialism -- Materialism and Transcendence -- Truth and Peace: Theology and the Body Politic in Augustine and Hobbes -- The Politics of the Eye: Toward a Theological Materialism -- Notes on Contributors -- Index