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  [Description of] Drabble harvest #10: Space station duty free

  G.C. Goddu and J. Currier

  Welcome to a collection of 100-word tales of how many different items pass or do not pass through Duty-Free Space Stations. Our writers’ imaginations worked
  overtime on this one. Find out how to sneak in—or out—of the customs offices.
  You’ll find humor and serious points in these stories. So take a load off and escape this world for a little while.

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  [Introduction to] Nietzsche's Earth: Great Events, Great Politics

  Gary Shapiro

  We have Nietzsche to thank for some of the most important accomplishments in intellectual history, but as Gary Shapiro shows in this unique look at Nietzsche’s thought, the nineteenth-century philosopher actually anticipated some of the most pressing questions of our own era. Putting Nietzsche into conversation with contemporary philosophers such as Deleuze, Agamben, Foucault, Derrida, and others, Shapiro links Nietzsche’s powerful ideas to topics that are very much on the contemporary agenda: globalization, the nature of the livable earth, and the geopolitical categories that characterize people and places. Shapiro explores Nietzsche’s rejection of historical inevitability and its idea of the end of history. He highlights Nietzsche’s prescient vision of today’s massive human mobility and his criticism of the nation state’s desperate efforts to sustain its exclusive rule by declaring emergencies and states of exception. Shapiro then explores Nietzsche’s vision of a transformed garden earth and the ways it sketches an aesthetic of the Anthropocene. He concludes with an explanation of the deep political structure of Nietzsche’s “philosophy of the Antichrist,” by relating it to traditional political theology. By triangulating Nietzsche between his time and ours, between Bismarck’s Germany and post-9/11 America, Nietzsche’s Earth invites readers to rethink not just the philosopher himself but the very direction of human history.

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  [Introduction to] Believing Against the Evidence: Agency and the Ethics of Belief

  Miriam S. McCormick

  The question of whether it is ever permissible to believe on insufficient evidence has once again become a live question. Greater attention is now being paid to practical dimensions of belief, namely issues related to epistemic virtue, doxastic responsibility, and voluntarism.

  In this book, McCormick argues that the standards used to evaluate beliefs are not isolated from other evaluative domains. The ultimate criteria for assessing beliefs are the same as those for assessing action because beliefs and actions are both products of agency. Two important implications of this thesis, both of which deviate from the dominant view in contemporary philosophy, are 1) it can be permissible (and possible) to believe for non-evidential reasons, and 2) we have a robust control over many of our beliefs, a control sufficient to ground attributions of responsibility for belief.

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  [Introduction to] Racism and Sexual Oppression in Anglo-America: A Genealogy

  Ladelle McWhorter

  Does the black struggle for civil rights make common cause with the movement to foster queer community, protest anti-queer violence or discrimination, and demand respect for the rights and sensibilities of queer people? Confronting this emotionally charged question, Ladelle McWhorter reveals how a carefully structured campaign against abnormality in the late 19th and early 20th centuries encouraged white Americans to purge society of so-called biological contaminants, people who were poor, disabled, black, or queer. Building on a legacy of savage hate crimes—such as the killings of Matthew Shepard and James Byrd—McWhorter shows that racism, sexual oppression, and discrimination against the disabled, the feeble, and the poor are all aspects of the same societal distemper, and that when the civil rights of one group are challenged, so are the rights of all.

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  [Introduction to] Heidegger and the Earth Essays in Environmental Philisophy

  Ladelle McWhorter and Gail Stenstad

  Some of the fundamental questions of our time are ecological - urgent environmental problems demand newly conceived solutions for the betterment and preservation of life on this planet. In this newly revised and greatly expanded edition of Heidegger and the Earth, the contributors approach contemporary ecological issues through the medium of Heidegger's thought.

  Amid pressing concerns about wildlife and wilderness preservation, agricultural practices, and technological innovation, contributors discuss how thinking with Heidegger in the twenty-first century yields creative ideas about the natural world that are unconstrained by traditional theoretical frameworks. The conflicting viewpoints in some of the essays will inspire further conversation and debate among readers and break apart established thought patterns. Unconventional and provocative, Heidegger and the Earth urges us to set aside what we think we know in order to work through ecological problems and to discover new ways of living in the world.

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  [Introduction to] Archaeologies of Vision: Foucault and Nietzche on Seeing and Saying

  Gary Shapiro

  While many acknowledge that Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault have redefined our notions of time and history, few recognize the crucial role that "the infinite relation" between seeing and saying (as Foucault put it) plays in their work. Gary Shapiro reveals, for the first time, the full extent of Nietzsche and Foucault's concern with the visual.
  
  Shapiro explores the whole range of Foucault's writings on visual art, including the theory of visual resistance, the concept of the phantasm or simulacrum, and his interrogation of the relation of painting, language, and power in artists from Bosch to Warhol. Shapiro also shows through an excavation of little-known writings that the visual is a major theme in Nietzsche's thought. In addition to explaining the significance of Nietzsche's analysis of Raphael, Dürer, and Claude Lorrain, he examines the philosopher's understanding of the visual dimension of Greek theater and Wagnerian opera and offers a powerful new reading of Thus Spoke Zarathustra.
  
  Archaeologies of Vision will be a landmark work for all scholars of visual culture as well as for those engaged with continental philosophy.

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  [Introduction to] Bodies and Pleasures: Foucault and the Politics of Sexual Normalization

  Ladelle McWhorter

  Sexual identities are dangerous, Michel Foucault tells us. Categories of desire harden into stereotypes by which the forces of normalization hold us and judge us. In Bodies and Pleasures, Ladelle McWhorter reads Foucault from an original and personal angle, motivated by the differences this experience has made in her life. At the same time, her analysis advances discussion of key issues in Foucault scholarship: the genealogical critique, the status of the subject and humanism, essentialism versus social construction, and the relationships between identity, community, and political action. Weaving her own experience of coming to grips with her lesbian sexual identity into her readings of Foucault's most recent writings on sexuality and power, McWhorter argues compellingly that Foucault's texts should be read less for the arguments they advance and more for their transformative effect. By exploring bodies and pleasures—gardening, line dancing, or doing philosophy, for example—McWhorter shows that it isn't necessary to conform with socially recognized sexual identities. Bodies and Pleasures takes the reader beyond unexplored norms and imposed identities as it points the way toward a personal politics, ethics, and style that challenges our sexual selves.

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  [Introduction to] Earthwards: Robert Smithson and Art after Babel

  Gary Shapiro

  The death of Robert Smithson in 1973 robbed postwar American art of an unusually creative practitioner and thinker. Smithson's pioneering earthworks of the 1960s and 1970s anticipated contemporary concerns with environmentalism and the site-specific character of artistic production. His interrogation of authorship, the linear historiography of high modernism, and the limitations of the museum prefigures key themes in postmodern criticism while underscoring the uniqueness of Smithson's own work as an artist, filmmaker, and writer.
  
  Gary Shapiro's elegant and incisive study of Smithson's career is the first book to address the full range of the artist's dazzling virtuosity. Ranging from Smithson's best known works such as Spiral Jetty and Partially Buried Woodshed to his photographs, films, and theoretical readings and writings, Shapiro's masterful book analyzes Smithson's art in relation to the legacy of American art of the 1960s and central philosophical themes in its contemporary reception.

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  [Introduction to] Heidegger and the Earth: Essays in Environmental Philosophy

  Ladelle McWhorter

  Though each essayist presents his or her thinking as it has arisen out of the texts of Martin Heidegger, as this brief overview surely makes clear, the thoughts a reader will encounter here are diverse and perhaps at points conflicting. However, the essayists' differences in many cases actually grow out of a common sense, namely, a sense of urgency born of the knowledge that for many regions of the earth and for many of the beings within them time is running out. The book itself, including its conflicting assertions, is the embodiment of a kind of anxiety and a kind of care. This book is a beginning, an opening, an attempt, and we hope, in the best Nietzschean sense of the word, a temptation for further thought.

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  [Introduction to] Alcyone: Nietzsche on Gifts, Noise, and Women

  Gary Shapiro

  Shapiro explores an interrelated series of themes that contest and offer alternatives to some of the traditional concepts of metaphysics. The notion of gift giving and related ideas are seen to play fundamental roles in the economy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Shapiro articulates the relevance of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Marcel Mauss, and Georges Bataille for the thought of the gift and shows that Nietzsche's writing contains a conception of an archaic economy that is radically different from the order of property and exchange usually associated with Western metaphysics. This leads to a critique of Martin Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche as a philosopher of value.
  
  Shapiro reads the fourth part of Zarathustra as the libretto for an anti-Wagnerian, postmodern opera in which food, noise, feasting, and parasitism are the major themes, and in which the thought of eternal recurrence is sung and orchestrated in ways that usually go unnoticed. He demonstrates that the fourth part constitutes a rigorous analysis of the logic of the supplementary and the parasitic.
  
  In the final chapter, Shapiro undertakes a reading of the classical texts presupposed by Nietzsche's claim that Zarathustra will not be understood unless one hears its "halcyon tone." By juxtaposing Nietzsche's halcyon with the Homeric version of the myth, Shapiro shows how Nietzsche's appeal to the halcyon evokes a premetaphysical economy and a voice suppressed by ontotheology.

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  [Introduction to] After the Future: Postmodern Times and Places

  Gary Shapiro

  This book brings together diverse aspects of postmodernism by philosophers, literary critics, historians of architecture, and sociologists. It addresses the nature of postmodernism in painting, architecture, and the performing arts, and explores the social and political implications of postmodern theories of culture.
  
  The book raises the question of whether postmodernism is to be seen as one more epoch or period within a succession of eras, or as a challenge to the modernist practice of periodization itself.
  
  The nature of the subject and of subjectivity is explored in order to resituate and contextualize the autonomous subject of the modern literary traditions.
  
  Postmodern approaches to philosophy, both analytical and continental (including the work of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Rorty, and Cavell) are scrutinized and compared with a view to the question of foundationalism and with respect to philosophy's historical reflection on its own exclusionary practices.
  
  After the Future discusses the ramifications of technology and programs for the renewal of community in a radically pluralistic society. It also discusses the question of language and the diverse ways of distinguishing the articulate from the inarticulate.

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  [Introduction to] Nietzschean Narratives

  Gary Shapiro

  Taking issue with a widely held view that Nietzsche's writings are essentially fragmentary or aphoristic, Gary Shapiro focuses on the narrative mode that Nietzsche adopted in many of his works. Such themes as eternal recurrence, the question of origins, and the problematics of self-knowledge are reinterpreted in the context of the narratives in which Nietzsche develops or employs them.

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  [Introduction to] Hermeneutics: Questions and Prospects

  Gary Shapiro and Alan Sica

  The essays in this collection are meant to be representative both of the current work on the nature of interpretation and of the necessity for such work to go beyond narrow disciplinary interests. Several individuals and institutions aided in bringing the essays together. Since a 1981 conference, many of these papers have been revised to take into account the exchange of views that took place. The other essays in the book are intended to reflect the broad range of hermeneutical alternatives that are now being actively explored.