Chapter 1 provides an overview of how this project fits into the broader categories of critical eating studies and critical animal studies. Through a reading of Byron’s The Corsair, it offers an example of some of the book’s central arguments: that the development of vegetarianism and veganism must be understood as the result of an east–west dialogic relationship rather than as a one-way process of cultural transmission; that religion will often be used to explain away an individual’s dietary choice; that the connections with gender of vegetarianism and veganism are more complicated than has often been suggested.

Chapter 10 elaborates on an epistemic mutation that took place at the end of the nineteenth century and that Foucault missed. It is this that opened that conceptual universe within whose frameworks the theories analyzed in this book could emerge. This, thus, provides fundamental tools to understand the structure of those theories, as well as the problems they found to account for the issue of conceptual change. Finally, it discusses how this new episteme, in turn, starting dissolving, thus raising the issue of the constitutive incompleteness of systems. It will mark the transition from phenomenology to postphenomenology and from structuralism to postructuralism, which entailed, in turn, a new radical redefinition of the concept of the temporality of conceptual formations. Derrida´s criticism played a key role here. Lastly, as this chapter shows, this transformation, as the other epistemic mutations previously studied, traverse the whole thinking of the period, comprehending both the natural sciences and the humanities. It thus allows us to draw meaningful connections among the different areas of knowledge.

Using a short work by Jane Gallop on what the “theoretical” death of an author means when one is faced with an actual death of a writer one is writing on, the Epilogue argues that we have now entered an age in which an ethics of responsibility dictates that the death of the author is not just a theoretical problematic but one where both theory, personal loss, and mourning are brought together. The Epilogue thinks through the literary death of the writer. It is argued through close readings of three of his final works that Naipaul’s literary death coincides with the death of his first wife Patricia Naipaul in 1996. His final three major works are read as works symptomatic of a writer no longer in control of his great literary gifts. When the aesthetic impulse dies, the “author” dies too, but in the case of a great writer, which Naipaul is, before his “death” he had created worlds that no other writer had created. That achievement, singular and original, has to be acknowledged insofar as it now enables us to rethink and reconceptualize what it means to be a writer of “world literature.”

Chapter 2 asks how one constructs a tradition and transforms an available genre in the absence of one’s own. An essay on the flower “jasmine,” triggered by a remark that in the tropics one did not know what the daffodils in Wordsworth’s heavily anthologized poem meant, is the starting point of this chapter. How to connect language to thought and how to reconcile a language with an absent tradition takes Naipaul to a search for an appropriate genre that would function as creative structural plinths to his Trinidadian social comedies. At Oxford he had translated the picaresque novel Lazarillo de Tormes but had failed to find a publisher for it. Now he turns to the picaresque genre and its more immediate expressions in Joyce and Steinbeck as a vehicle for his representation of an essentially Trinidadian picaroon society. In the act, Naipaul consciously deconstructs the regulatory nature of the law of genre with its very opposite, its tendency towards disorder. The chapter examines Naipaul’s early works beginning with Miguel Street (1959), his first written work albeit third published, as well as the cinematic adaptation of The Mystic Masseur.

This chapter discusses the philosopher Richard Rorty’s influential writings on the contingent nature of ironic thinking and expression. Rorty argued that irony does not reveal foundational truths, but is employed to help us “depict the world through multiple points of view.” Irony provides a way of individually recreating the world for ourselves rather than offering a special device to demystify assumptions about reality that somehow exists outside of language. Rorty’s claimed that writers such as Proust, Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Derrida are ironists given their questions about the stories and vocabularies we inhabit. Literature is especially useful for creating spaces for irony as sites for creative, nonjudgmental self-examination. But philosophy is also a kind of playful ironic writing that helps us to create useful redescriptions of the world and our roles in it. Colebrook emphasizes that Rorty rejected the idea that irony is just a trope in which one thing is said and another is meant. Irony is “the very opposite of searching for essences,” which is why it is so important for understanding liberalism with its emphasis on the “politics of tolerance, anti-foundationalism, and freedom of speech.”

Generations of Christians, Janet Soskice demonstrates, once knew God and Christ by hundreds of remarkable names. These included the appellations ‘Messiah’, ‘Emmanuel’, ‘Alpha’, ‘Omega’, ‘Eternal’, ‘All-Powerful’, ‘Lamb’, ‘Lion’, ‘Goat’, ‘One’, ‘Word’, ‘Serpent’ and ‘Bridegroom’. In her much-anticipated new book, Soskice argues that contemporary understandings of divinity could be transformed by a return to a venerable analogical tradition of divine naming. These ancient titles – drawn from scripture – were chanted and sung, crafted and invoked (in polyphony and plainsong) as they were woven into the worship of the faithful. However, during the sixteenth century Descartes moved from ‘naming’ to ‘defining’ God via a series of metaphysical attributes. This made God a thing among things: a being amongst beings. For the author, reclaiming divine naming is not only overdue. It can also re-energise the relationship between philosophy and religious tradition. This path-breaking book shows just how rich and revolutionary such reclamation might be.

The Introduction sets out the key claims of the book, and provides an outline of its chapters. These claims are that the French tradition rejects understanding thinking and judging, that this leads to an ambivalent relationship with Hegel and a return to Kant, and that the French tradition develops a novel account of thinking, and a new model of sense.

Chapter 5 explores Derrida’s analysis of the problem of judgement through an extended analysis of Derrida’s analysis of presence and différance. It analyses three of Derrida’s readings of other philosophers: Plato, Hegel, and Husserl, with the aim of showing how in each case, Derrida believes that the priority of presence (and hence judgement) rests on a transcendental idea that exceeds the given. It argues that despite Derrida’s apparent hostility to the phenomenological tradition, his work is indebted to Sartre, and echoes Bergson’s analysis of resemblance.

The world and the globe are digital and inscriptive events. Before the advent of digital media in its narrow sense, conceptions of humanity presuppose a shared globe and horizon of sense; this presupposed harmony requires various technical systems that also threaten to produce an entropic dissolution. If globalism is the assumed common horizon of sense, hyperglobalism promises the destruction of communalism and the possibility of other worlds.

This chapter provides the framework for the book’s analysis of the ICTR’s archive. First it establishes, theoretically, the link between archives, and the formation of community, as the archive is presented as a site where the themes of law, knowledge and governance coalesce. Second, it looks at other scholarly work on international courts for insights on the interrelationship between law, knowledge and governance and argues that this work has, to date, wrongly treated courts as sites of ‘knowledge deficit’, and further that there is a need to understand how the inner workings of the court contribute to the formation of particular types of community. Finally, drawing on Foucault and Ann Stoler’s work, it shows how the archive can function as an analytical and methodological tool to examine the politics of knowledge production in international courts.

This chapter examines the dynamics of the notion of peregrinatio in Augustine’s thought, with particular attention given to its use in the Enarrationes in Psalmos. It uses Derrida’s reflections on metaphor to explore the rich regression of images in peregrinatio. Augustine uses the concept, literally denoting the status of a resident alien, to express the affective dynamics of a Christian living away from their home in the heavenly Jerusalem: their sense of misalignment in the world, but also their sense of joy in the very transience of their existence. For no one can be a peregrinus without having a home from which he has traveled, and to which he looks forward to returning. Derrida’s phrase the “destinerrancy of desire” perfectly captures this Augustinian notion.

In 1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, then a sixty-year-old German philosophy professor at Heidelberg, published Truth and Method ( Wahrheit und Methode). Although he had authored many essays, articles, and reviews, to this point Gadamer had published only one other book, his habilitation on Plato in 1931: Plato’s Dialectical Ethics. As a title for this work on a theory of interpretation, he first proposed to his publisher, Mohr Siebeck, “Philosophical Hermeneutics.” The publisher responded that “hermeneutics” was too obscure a term. Gadamer then proposed “Truth and Method” for a work that found, over time, great resonance and made “hermeneutics” and Gadamer’s name commonplace in intellectual circles worldwide. Truth and Method has been translated into many languages, including Chinese and Japanese. It found and still finds a receptive readership, in part, because, as the title suggests, it addresses large and central philosophical issues in an attempt to find a way between or beyond objectivism and relativism, and scientism and irrationalism. He accomplishes this by developing an account of what he takes to be the universal hermeneutic experience of understanding. Understanding, for Gadamer, is itself always a matter of interpretation. Understanding is also always a matter of language.

Hermeneutics, critical theory, and deconstruction designate three intellectual orientations that have dominated debates in continental philosophy. All three exhibit the “linguistic turn.” The debate between Habermas and Gadamer brought Gadamer to prominence. Important for both is the Aristotelian distinction between the practical and the technical. Gadamer is more negatively critical of the Enlightenment than is Habermas. Both are concerned with the instrumentalization of reason in modernity. Yet Gadamer sees Habermas as too utopian. Habermas sees Gadamer as insensitive to the way dialogue is distorted by social forces and political power. This chapter concludes with a consideration of Gadamer in relation to Derrida and deconstruction. Both were profoundly influenced by Heidegger. Yet Gadamer emphasizes continuity, while Derrida emphasizes rupture and break. Gadamer shows us the achievement of understanding, while Derrida is preoccupied with the ways we misunderstand. Derrida and Gadamer serve as correctives of the other, just as Habermas and Gadamer serve as correctives of the other.

This chapter provides a biography of Gadamer and includes an overview of the philosophical work that Gadamer produced. It provides an account of his youth and education, his early career in Nazi Germany, and his career after World War II. He was named Rektor of Leipzig University in East Germany but gave up the position and came to West Germany, first to Frankfurt and then to Heidelberg. In 1960 he published Truth and Method, which slowly became recognized world-wide. He retired in 1968 and was very productive throughout his old age.

This chapter focuses on Rorty’s engagements with Heidegger, Derrida, and Foucault. It argues that, however much he enjoyed these encounters, Rorty’s philosophical views were largely unaffected by them. He tended to endorse what could be assimilated to his own Deweyan pragmatism and reject the rest. In this way, Rorty endorses Heidegger’s diagnosis of the history of European philosophy, while disavowing his criticism of modernity and his nostalgia for an authentic language of Being. He denounces Foucault’s supposed commitment to anarchism and revolution as incompatible with his preferred Deweyan social democratic politics. Only his writings on Derrida provide evidence of deepening understanding of and sympathy with a philosophical project irreducible to his own. Overall, Rorty refuses to accept any philosophical invention on the part of these thinkers. Derrida’s deconstructive argument in favor of an elusive quasi-metaphysics of difference, and Foucault’s genealogies of present institutions and ways of thinking are either ignored or denounced as residues of the tradition they seek to escape. Rorty characterizes each of them as essentially private thinkers, “ascetic priests” who aspire to stand apart from the herd and to be in touch with a reality more profound than the life they share with others.