Living holds us between two places. It expresses what is most elementary – to be alive – and the absoluteness of our aspiration – finally living! But could we desire anything other than to live? In "The Philosophy of Living", Francois Jullien meditat...

In "This Strange Idea of the Beautiful", Francois Jullien explores what it means when we say something is beautiful. Bringing together ideas of beauty from both Eastern and Western philosophy, Jullien challenges the assumptions underlying our commonl...

One of the foremost poets of the French Resistance, Rene Char has been hailed by Donald Revell as "the conscience of modern French poetry". Translated by Mark Hutchinson, "The Inventors" is a companion volume to Char's critically acclaimed "Hypnos"....

Widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation, Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, "The Anchor's Long Chain" is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. En...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy essays on mass culture and then went...

Translated by Gila Walker for the first time into English, "Anthropology of the Name" is French thinker Sylvain Lazarus's response to the intellectual caesura of May 1968. Taking up thought, politics, and the name, Lazarus presents an original doctri...

In his well-known work of art criticism "Art of the Modern Age", Jean-Marie Schaeffer offered a lucid and powerful critique of what he identified as the historically dominant thinking about art and aesthetics from the Jena Romantics, to Nietzsche, He...

Prolific essayist, translator, and critic Pascal Quignard has described his Last Kingdom series as something unique. It consists, he says, "neither of philosophical argumentation, nor short learned essays, nor novelistic narration", but comes, rather...