Writings on an Ethical Life

Alenka Zupancic

The Odd One in: On Comedy

A Lacanian look at how comedy might come to philosophy's rescue, with examples ranging from Hegel and Molière to George W. Bush and Borat.Why philosophize about comedy? What is the use of investigating the comical from philosophical and psychoanalytic perspectives? In The Odd One In, Alenka Zupančič considers how philosophy and psychoanalysis can help us understand the movement and the logic involved in the practice of comedy, and how comedy can help philosophy and psychoanalysis recognize some of the crucial mechanisms and vicissitudes of what is called humanity. Comedy by its nature is difficult to pin down with concepts and definitions, but as artistic form and social practice comedy is a mode of tarrying with a foreign object--of including the exception. Philosophy's relationship to comedy, Zupančič writes, is not exactly a simple story (and indeed includes some elements of comedy). It could begin with the lost book of Aristotle's Poetics, which discussed comedy and laughter (and was made famous by Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose). But Zupančič draws on a whole range of philosophers and exemplars of comedy, from Aristophanes, Molière, Hegel, ...

John Armstrong

In Search of Civilization

A self-effacing, humane and unparanoid call to change our wealthy yet often barbaric world for the better. * In this provocative cri de coeur, the philosopher John Armstrong rescues the idea of civilization from irrelevance and connects it to our search for individual happiness. Civilization once referred to a society's technological prowess, its political development, or its cultural achievement. In the modern era, however, the word became burdened by the legacy of colonialism and connotations of elitism. For it to have value once again, according to Armstrong, we must understand that a society balances material prosperity with spiritual prosperity if it is to merit the term civilized--and currently we are impoverished. In Search of Civilization is his corrective. As he roams from anecdote to aesthetic appreciation--from the banality of an early job at an insurance company to the redemptive wonders of a seventeenth-century church spire visible out an office window, from Adam Smith's philosophy to the Japanese tea ceremony--Armstrong reminds us that culture lies within us and that its nourishment is essential to a flourishing society.

Sharon Slater

Stand for the Family: Alarming Evidence and Firsthand Accounts from the Front Lines of Battle: A Call to Responsible Citizens Everywhere

Alarming evidence and firsthand accounts from the front lines of the battle for the family. A call to responsible citizens everywhere.