Three interesting books

Paperback: 120 pages
Publisher: Stanford University Press (31 Jan 2004)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0804747385
ISBN-13: 978-0804747387
Synopsis
In "The Open", contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben considers the ways in which the "human" has been thought of as either a distinct and superior type of animal, or a kind of being that is essentially different from animal altogether.
Source:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Open-Man-Animal-Crossing-Aesthetics/
dp/0804747385/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198844607&sr=1-1

Paperback: 400 pages
Publisher: Stanford University Press (31 Aug 2005)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0804742448
ISBN-13: 978-0804742443
Synopsis

Using the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy as an anchoring point, Jacques Derrida in this book conducts a profound review of the philosophy of the sense of touch, from Plato and Aristotle to Jean-Luc Nancy, whose ground-breaking book Corpus he discusses in detail. Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Edmund Husserl, Didier Franck, Martin Heidegger, Francoise Dastur, and Jean-Louis Chretien are discussed, as are Rene Descartes, Diderot, Maine de Biran, Felix Ravaisson, Immanuel Kant, Sigmund Freud, and others. The scope of Derrida's deliberations makes this book a virtual encyclopedia of the philosophy of touch (and the body). Derrida gives special consideration to the thinking of touch in Christianity and, in discussing Jean-Luc Nancy's essay "Deconstruction of Christianity," devotes a section of the book to the sense of touch in the Gospels. Another section concentrates on "the flesh," as treated by Merleau-Ponty and others in his wake. Derrida's critique of intuitionism, notably in the phenomenological tradition, is one of the guiding threads of the book. On Touching includes a wealth of notes that provide an extremely useful bibliographical resource. Personal and detached all at once, this book, one of the first published in English translation after Jacques Derrida's death, serves as a useful and poignant retrospective on the work of the philosopher. A tribute by Jean-Luc Nancy, written a day after Jacques Derrida's death, is an added feature.
Source:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Touching-Jean-Luc-Meridian-Crossing-Aesthetics/
dp/0804742448/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198844785&sr=1-1



Paperback: 272 pages
Publisher: Routledge (10 Feb 2000)
Language English
ISBN-10: 0415908809
ISBN-13: 978-0415908801
Book Description
Vital Signs offers a radical new understanding of the role of psychoanalytic theory in contemporary French thought. Drawing on the work of Lacan, Kristeva, Foucault, and lesser-known thinkers Eugenie Lemoine-Luccioni and Catherine Millot, Shepherdson argues that we have misinterpreted the nature/culture distinction in relation to psychoanalysis.

Synopsis
Vital Signs offers a radical new understanding of the role psychoanalytic theory in contemporary French thought. Drawing on Lacan, Kristeva and Foucault among others the author bridges the gap between theory and clinical practice.

Source: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Vital-Signs-Nature-Culture-Psychoanalysis/
dp/0415908809/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1198845165&sr=1-1