Bücher der Reihe Forms of Living

In this provocative collection of essays, Francois Delaporte shows how every epistemological concern demands its own mode of engagement. Through six seemingly disparate cases, Figures of Medicine reanimates the methodological and intellectual stakes at the core of the history of science and medicine.

Situating itself within the context of current debates in continental philosophy, and through a series of readings of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida to recent developments in life sciences, this book offers a critical enquiry concerning the traditional way of understanding life in the history of metaphysics.

Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary provides an introduction to a legacy of philosophical and social scientific thinking about sciences, and their integral role in shaping modernities, a legacy that has contributed to a specifically anthropological form of inquiry.

Without wholly or consistently unseating the idea that instinct marked the proper province of women, workers and/or savages, this shift in instinct's appeal to civilized European men at the turn of the twentieth century nonetheless modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender.

Cytomegalovirus is a lucid and spare autobiographical narrative by Herve Guibert (1955-1991) of the everyday moments of his hospitalization due to complications of AIDS. In one of his last works, the acclaimed writer presents his struggle with the disease in terms that are unsentimental and deeply human.

Realizing the Witch follows the unfolding of Benjamin Christensen's visual narrative in his 1922 film, Haxan (The Witch). Through a close reading of Haxan, Baxstrom and Meyers examine the study of witchcraft from historical and anthropological perspectives, as well as the intersection of popular culture, artistic expression and scientific ideas.

In 1850, Hermann von Helmholtz conducted path breaking experiments on the propagation speed of the nervous impulse. This book reconstructs the cultural history of these experiments by focusing on Helmholtz's use of the "graphic method" and the subsequent use of his term "lost time" by Marcel Proust.

An examination of Foucault's last thought, centered on his ideas about biopolitics, governmentality, and subjectivity. This volume aims to explain why the politics and policies of neoliberalism are best understood as a "government of life" whose effects and consequences still remain to be fathomed.

An examination of Foucault's last thought, centered on his ideas about biopolitics, governmentality, and subjectivity. This volume aims to explain why the politics and policies of neoliberalism are best understood as a "government of life" whose effects and consequences still remain to be fathomed.

In Chagas Disease: History of a Continent's Scourge, Francois Delaporte describes how the interaction of public health policy with medical knowledge and epistemological transformations in the period 1900-1935 can account for the discovery of a continental endemic. It also deconstructs the myths that surround a number of major medical discoveries in both Brazil and Argentina.

Offers a series of epistemological histories that seek to establish and clarify the stakes, ambiguities, and emergence of philosophical and biological concepts that defined the rise of modern biology. This book explains how the movements of knowledge and life come to rest upon each other.

This book addresses the issue of trauma and psychic wounds to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology. In so doing, it reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather appears as its very locus. A philosophical approach of the "new wounded" (brain lesion patients) forms the matter of the confrontation.

The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor brings together a series of essays bridging intellectual history and the history of the body tracing the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century concept of digital organisms. The book looks at the rise and decline of "the great utopias of labor" in the first half of the twentieth century.

Sketches the history of the belief that human beings are essentially their brains, and documents and critically discusses its contemporary forms across a range of contexts, including mental health, the human sciences, and literature and film.

Bruno Latour is one of the major figures of contemporary thought. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, spanning from his early work in the sociology and anthropology of science to his recent philosophy of multiple "modes of existence."