Birth to Presence

Compare retailer offers

About this product

The epoch of representation is as old as the West. Indeed, representation is the West, understood as what at once designates and expands its own limits. But what comes after the West? What comes after representation's disclosure of its own limit? The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade of work, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, the birth that characterizes being. We are now at the limit of representation, where objects as we experience them have been show to be merely objects of representation—or rather, of presentation, since there is nothing to (re)present. The first part of this book, "Existence," asks how, today, one can give sense of meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it comes nude into the world, must now be our "sense." In examining what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what presence "is"; rather we should conceive presence as presence to someone, including to presence itself. This birth is not the constitution of an identity, but the endless departure of an identity from, and from within, its other, or others. Its coming is not desire but jouissance , the joy of ave

More from Stanford University Press