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"Butler, Erik, 1971- translator"
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Felt time : the psychology of how we perceive time
We have widely varying perceptions of time. Children have trouble waiting for anything. ("Are we there yet?") Boredom is often connected to our sense of time passing (or not passing). As people grow older, time seems to speed up, the years flitting by without a pause. How does our sense of time come about? In Felt Time , Marc Wittmann explores the riddle of subjective time, explaining our perception of time -- whether moment by moment, or in terms of life as a whole. Drawing on the latest insights from psychology and neuroscience, Wittmann offers a new answer to the question of how we experience time.Wittmann explains, among other things, how we choose between savoring the moment and deferring gratification; why impulsive people are bored easily, and why their boredom is often a matter of time; whether each person possesses a personal speed, a particular brain rhythm distinguishing quick people from slow people; and why the feeling of duration can serve as an "error signal," letting us know when it is taking too long for dinner to be ready or for the bus to come. He considers the practice of mindfulness, and whether it can reduce the speed of life and help us gain more time, and he describes how, as we grow older, subjective time accelerates as routine increases; a fulfilled and varied life is a long life. Evidence shows that bodily processes -- especially the heartbeat -- underlie our feeling of time and act as an internal clock for our sense of time. And Wittmann points to recent research that connects time to consciousness; ongoing studies of time consciousness, he tells us, will help us to understand the conscious self.
eBook
Atmosphere, mood, Stimmung : on a hidden potential of literature
What are the various atmospheres or moods that the reading of literary works can trigger? Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht has long argued that the function of literature is not so much to describe, or to re-present, as to make present. Here, he goes one step further, exploring the substance and reality of language as a material component of the world—impalpable hints, tones, and airs that, as much as they may be elusive, are no less matters of actual fact.
Reading, we discover, is an experiencing of specific moods and atmospheres, or Stimmung. These moods are on a continuum akin to a musical scale. They present themselves as nuances that challenge our powers of discernment and description, as well as language's potential to capture them. Perhaps the best we can do is to point in their direction. Conveying personal encounters with poetry, song, painting, and the novel, this book thus gestures toward the intangible and in the process, constitutes a bold defense of the subjective experience of the arts.
eBook
Politics of Deconstruction
The book offers a new introduction to Jacques Derrida and to Deconstruction as an important strand of Continental Philosophy. From his early writings on phenomenology and linguistics to his later meditations on war, terrorism, and justice, Jacques Derrida (1930–2004) achieved prominence on an international scale by addressing as many different audiences as he did topics. Yet despite widespread acclamation, his work has never been considered easy. Rendering accessible debates that marked more than four decades of engagement and inquiry, Susanne Lüdemann traces connections between the philosopher's own texts and those of his many interlocutors, past and present.
Unlike conventional introductions, Politics of Deconstruction offers a number of personal approaches to reading Derrida and invites readers to find their own. Emphasizing the relationship between philosophy and politics, it shows that, with Deconstruction, there is much more at stake than an \"academic\" discussion, for Derrida's work deals with all the burning political and intellectual challenges of our time. The author's own professional experience in both the United States and in Europe, which particularly inform her chapter on Derrida's reception in the United States, opens a unique perspective on a unique thinker, one that rewards specialists and newcomers alike.
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Disagreeable tales
Thirty tales of theft, onanism, incest, murder and a host of other forms of perversion and cruelty from the \"ungrateful beggar\" and \"pilgrim of the absolute,\" Léon Bloy. \"Disagreeable Tales,\" first published in French in 1894, collects Bloy's narrative sermons from the depths: a cauldron of frightful anecdotes and inspired misanthropy that represents a high point of the French Decadent movement and the most emblematic entry into the library of the \"Cruel Tale\" christened by Villiers de l'Isle-Adam. Whether depicting parents and offspring being sacrificed for selfish gains, or imbeciles sacrificing their own individuality on a literary whim, these tales all draw sustenance from an underlying belief: the root of religion is crime against man, nature and God, and that in this hell on earth, even the worst among us has a soul.
Book
The truth of the technological world : essays on the genealogy of presence
Friedrich Kittler (1943–2011) combined the study of literature, cinema, technology, and philosophy in a manner sufficiently novel to be recognized as a new field of academic endeavor in his native Germany. \"Media studies,\" as Kittler conceived it, meant reflecting on how books operate as films, poetry as computer science, and music as military equipment. This volume collects writings from all stages of the author's prolific career. Exemplary essays illustrate how matters of form and inscription make heterogeneous source material (e.g., literary classics and computer design) interchangeable on the level of function—with far-reaching consequences for our understanding of the humanities and the \"hard sciences.\" Rich in counterintuitive propositions, sly humor, and vast erudition, Kittler's work both challenges the assumptions of positivistic cultural history and exposes the over-abstraction and language games of philosophers such as Heidegger and Derrida. The twenty-three pieces gathered here document the intellectual itinerary of one of the most original thinkers in recent times—sometimes baffling, often controversial, and always stimulating.
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