Miguel de Beistegui

Liberalism, Miguel de Beistegui argues in The Government of Desire, is best described as a technique of government directed towards the self, with desire as its central mechanism.  Whether as economic interest, sexual drive, or the basic longing for recognition, desire is accepted as a core component of our modern self-identities, and something we ought to cultivate. But this has not been true in all times and all places. For centuries, as far back as late antiquity and early Christianity, philosophers believed that desire was an impulse that needed to be suppressed in order for the good life, whether personal or collective, ethical or political, to flourish.  Though we now take it for granted, desire as a constitutive dimension of human nature and a positive force required a radical transformation, which coincided with the emergence of liberalism.

ISBN: 9780226547374

Miguel de Beistegui begins with an observation: throughout In Search of Lost Time, the two main characters seem prone to chronic dissatisfaction in matters of love, friendship and even art. Reality always falls short of expectation. At the same time, the narrator experiences unexpected bouts of intense elation, the cause and meaning of which remain elusive. Beistegui argues we should understand these experiences as acts of artistic creation, and that this is why Proust himself wrote that true life is the life of art.
He goes on to explore the nature of these joyful and pleasurable experiences and the transformation required of art, and particularly literature, if it is to incorporate them. He concludes that Proust revolutionises the idea of metaphor, extending beyond the confines of language to understand the nature of lived, bodily experience.

ISBN : 0415584329

This book focuses on a dimension of art which the philosophical tradition (from Plato to Hegel and even Adorno) has consistently overlooked, such was its commitment – explicit or implicit – to mimesis and the metaphysics of truth it presupposes. De Beistegui refers to this dimension, which unfolds outside the space that stretches between the sensible and the supersensible – the space of metaphysics itself – as the hypersensible and show how the operation of art to which it corresponds is best described as metaphorical. The movement of the book, then, is from the classical or metaphysical aesthetics of mimesis (Part One) to the aesthetics of the hypersensible and metaphor (Part Two). Against much of the history of aesthetics and the metaphysical discourse on art, he argues that the philosophical value of art doesn’t consist in its ability to bridge the space between the sensible and the supersensible, or the image and the Idea, and reveal the sensible as proto-conceptual, but to open up a different sense of the sensible. His aim, then, is to shift the place and role that philosophy attributes to art.

ISBN-10 : 1138921467

Bien qu’abstraite, l’œuvre de Chillida échappe au jeu de l’idéalisme pur et géométrique de l’abstraction formelle comme au matérialisme de l’abstraction brute. Elle ne vise ni une réalité stable et intemporelle surplombant la nature et son devenir, ni les profondeurs du chaos primitif. Elle trace plutôt une voie entre ces deux extrêmes et découvre un monde – celui-là même que nous habitons – étranger et familier à la fois, transformé et pourtant reconnaissable. Or ce monde n’est pas avant tout celui des choses, mais des éléments (la lumière, le feu, l’eau, l’air), véritable alphabet naturel dans lequel s’écrit notre existence, entre entre ciel et terre. Si l’artiste transforme la matière, ça n’est pas afin de lui échapper, mais afin d’en libérer un nouveau visage et une nouvelle sonorité, afin de la laisser rêver. C’est ainsi, comme le disait Bachelard, que le matérialisme externe de la pensée scientifique et technique s’efface devant le matérialisme songeur de l’art et que la lévitation l’emporte sur la gravitation.

ISBN : 2353401074

Immanence – Deleuze and Philosophy identifies the original impetus and the driving force behind Deleuze’s philosophy as a whole and the many concepts it creates. It seeks to extract the inner consistency of Deleuze’s thought by returning to its source or to what, following Deleuze’s own vocabulary, it calls the event of that thought. The source of Deleuzian thought, the book argues, is immanence. In six chapters dealing with the status of thought itself, ontology, logic, ethics, and aesthetics, Miguel de Beistegui reveals the manner in which immanence is realised in each and every one of those classical domains of philosophy. Ultimately, he argues, immanence turns out to be an infinite task, and transcendence the opposition with which philosophy will always need to reckon.

ISBN : 9780748638307

Cruelle existence que celle qui nourrit nos espérances et excite nos désirs afin de les réduire à néant! Amère réalité que celle contre laquelle notre imagination – libre, illimitée et enivrante – vient finalement se briser! À la recherche du temps perdu semble faire de ce constat une loi, et s’imposer comme le roman de la souffrance et de l’ennui: la réalité, ou du moins l’idée que l’on s’en fait, finit toujours par décevoir. Pourtant, il s’agit de montrer que cette insatisfaction naît d’un manque plus profond encore, inscrit au coeur du réel lui-même, dans sa présence immédiate et brute: notre rapport au monde révèle un manque, qui n’est pas rien, mais un manque-à-être, comme on parle d’un manque-à-gagner, et qui fonctionne comme le signe ou l’indice d’une vérité par-delà ou plutôt en creux de la seule réalité présente. Ce manque ou ce déficit est bien ce dont on fait l’expérience, ce qu’on ne peut s’empêcher de ressentir, et même ce qui définit le sens de l’expérience (le sens du sensible, par conséquent), tout en signifiant aussi, en pointillé, l’au-delà ou l’envers de cette expérience, sa face cachée, de laquelle Proust finit par extraire le sens de la littérature et de l’art en général. La littérature suit et file le réel dans sa propre dérive, et jusque dans sa doublure.

EAN13 : 9782841864003

Cosa significa “pensare”? Quale immagine si sprigiona dal pensiero (filosofico, artistico o scientifico) non appena questo si sia liberato dalle forme della rappresentazione? A questa domanda, Deleuze ha tentato di dare una risposta: è dalla sua capacità di raggiungere l’immanenza e di neutralizzare le istanze di trascendenza incessantemente risorgenti che giudicheremo la salute e l’efficacia di un pensiero. Se l’immanenza si dimostra difficile da cogliere, e ancor più da definire, è perché bisogna innanzitutto farla. In questo saggio, ci proponiamo di seguire il percorso sinuoso di un’immanenza che si cerca e di un pensiero che si fa. Ci proponiamo di elevare l’immanenza a pietra angolare della filosofia.

ISBN : 9788884833068

Martin Heidegger’s work is pivotal in the history of modern European philosophy. The New Heidegger presents a comprehensive and stimulating overview of, and introduction to, the work of one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of our time.
Heidegger has had an extraordinary impact on contemporary philosophical and extra-philosophical life: on deconstruction, hermeneutics, ontology, technology and techno-science, art and architecture, politics, psychotherapy, and ecology.
The New Heidegger takes a thematic approach to Heidegger’s work, covering not only the seminal Being and Time, but also Heidegger’s lesser known works. Lively, clear and succinct, the book requires no prior knowledge of Heidegger and is an essential resource for anyone studying or teaching the work of this major modern philosopher.

ISBN : 9781441114280

In Truth and Genesis, Miguel de Beistegui considers the role and meaning of philosophy today. Calling for a new departure for philosophy, one that brings together philosophy’s scattered identities, de Beistegui proposes a robust and unified philosophy that would find itself equally at home in artistic and scientific disciplines. To build this renewed philosophy, de Beistegui turns to Aristotle and the earliest foundations of thought. He traces philosophy’s development through the medieval and modern periods before comparing and investigating the work of two of the 20th century’s most influential thinkers, Martin Heidegger and Gilles Deleuze. In particular, de Beistegui focuses on Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy for their handling of the concept of difference. De Beistegui concludes that Deleuze and Heidegger are irreconcilable, but it is in their disagreements that he sees a way to liberate philosophy from its current crisis.

ISBN: 978-0-253-21671-7

In Thinking with Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui looks into the essence of Heidegger’s thought and engages the philosopher’s transformative thinking with contemporary Western culture. Rather than isolate and explore a single theme or aspect of Heidegger, de Beistegui chooses multiple points of entry that unfold from the same question or idea. De Beistegui examines Heidegger’s translations of Greek philosophy and his interpretations and displacements of anthropology, ethics and politics, science, and aesthetics. Thinking with Heidegger proposes fresh answers to some of philosophy’s most fundamental questions and extends Heideggerian discourse into philosophical regions not treated by Heidegger himself.

ISBN: 978-0-253-34230-0

Miguel de Beistegui shows how we must question why the political is so often displaced in Heidegger’s writings rather than read the political into Heidegger. Exploring Heidegger’s ontology where politics takes place after a forgetting of Being and his wish to think a site more originary and primordial than politics, Heidegger and the Political considers what some of Heidegger’s key motifs – his emphasis on lost origins, his discussions of Holderlin’s poetry, his writing on technology and the ancient Greek polis – may tell us about Heidegger’s relation to the political. Miguel de Beistegui also engages with the very risks implicit in Heidegger’s denial of the political and how this opens up the question of the risk of thinking itself.