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Introduction: Thoreau's Vegetal Ontology: The Aerial, the Rootless and the AnalogousIn Branka Arsic? & Vesna Kuiken (eds.), Dispersion: Thoreau and vegetal thought, Bloomsbury Academic. 2021.
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1Chapter 7 Thinking LeavingIn Ian Buchanan & Gregg Lambert (eds.), Deleuze and Space, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 126-143. 2005.
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9ArticlesIn Claire Colebrook & Jami Weinstein (eds.), Deleuze and Gender: Deleuze Studies Volume 2: 2008, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 34-136. 2019.
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12The Passive Eye: Gaze and Subjectivity in BerkeleyStanford University Press. 2003.The Passive Eye is a revolutionary and historically rich account of Berkeley's theory of vision. In this formidable work, the author considers the theory of the embodied subject and its passions in light of a highly dynamic conception of infinity. Arsic shows the profound affinities between Berkeley and Spinoza, and offers a highly textual reading of Berkeley on the concept of an "exhausted subjectivity." The author begins by following the Renaissance universe of vision, particularly the paradox…Read more
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12The Other Emerson (edited book)Univ of Minnesota Press. 2010.Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most significant figures in nineteenth-century American literature and culture-indeed, this collection argues, in the history of philosophy. The Other Emerson is a thorough reassessment of the philosophical underpinnings, theoretical innovations, and ethical and political implications of the prose writings of one of America's most enduring thinkers. Considering Emerson first and foremost as a daring and original thinker, _The Other Emerson_ focuses on three Emer…Read more
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3On Leaving: A Reading in EmersonHarvard University Press. 2010.Arsic unpacks Ralph Waldo Emerson's repeated assertion that our reality and our minds are in constant flux. Her readings of a broad range of Emerson's writings are guided by a central question: what does it really mean to maintain that everything fluctuates, is relational, and so changes its identity?
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26Melville's Celibatory Machines -- Bartleby, Pierre, and The Paradise of BachelorsDiacritics 35 (4): 81-100. 2005.Branka Arsić's essay analyzes the complex relations among law, writing, and marriage described by Melville in Pierre, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids," and Bartleby, the Scrivener. The major argument of the essay is that Melville conceives of both writing and marriage as "celibatory machines," cut in two by the power of the law, which explains the obsessive return to the question of the law in his writing. The celibatory machine functions to divide the same in two such that …Read more
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181The Experimental Ordinary: Deleuze on Eating and Anorexic EleganceDeleuze and Guatarri Studies 2 (Suppl): 34-59. 2008.The paper discusses Deleuze's concept of the feminine through exploration of the questions of eating, cooking, and specifically anorexia, as well as an ‘anorexic relation’ to fashion and dressing. It argues that anorexia should be understood as a micro-political experimentation in fashioning one's own body on its flight to becoming woman. In accordance with Deleuze's ontology of the surface, the anorexic body can be seen as the invention of the BWO that forms an assemblage with clothes and, in s…Read more
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48Bodies, Masses, Power, Spinoza and His Contemporaries (review)Review of Metaphysics 56 (4): 892-893. 2003.Warren Montag’s book is a fine analysis of the ways in which Spinoza’s materialism, as it was formulated in The Ethics, affects his political theory. Even though Montag’s analysis is historical, and sensitive to the theoretical and political context of Spinoza’s thinking, it also takes decisively into account contemporary political theories and so works to frame the context within which Montag himself thinks. Constantly referring to Louis Althusser’s remarks about the connection between Spinoza’…Read more
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32The Huron-Wendat Feast of the Dead: Indian-European Encounters in Early North AmericaCommon Knowledge 19 (1): 143-144. 2013.
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22Bartleby or a Loose Existence: Melville with Jonathan EdwardsJanus Head 9 (1): 35-60. 2006.Following allusions that Melville scatters throughout “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the article develops the writer’s subtle criticism of Jonathan Edwards. The attorney’s way of thinking is taken as an example of reasoning on the basis of “necessary” assumptions, which Melville finds in Edwards’ “The Freedom of the Will.” From the perspective of that philosophy, Barleby’s existence appears inexplicable, or understandable only as a “loose existence,” which, according to Edwards, would have to represe…Read more
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Columbia UniversityRegular Faculty
New York City, New York, United States of America
Areas of Interest
19th Century Philosophy |
20th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |