The study of relationships—a topic which has received considerable attention in Europe, the United States, and parts of Asia, until now has not been addressed in the Arab world. Here for the first time are articles written by native feminist scholars that focus on intimate Arab familial relationships and provide a scholarly discussion of gendering of the self (the process of intimate selving) in the Arab community. The book is divided into three parts: biographical and autobiographical; ethnographic; and literary accounts in which the authors identify key family relationships—mother-son, brother-sister, mother-daughter-granddaughter, co-wives, and father-daughter—and explore them in terms of shaping and defining gender in relation to others.

In Selving: A Relational Theory of Self Organization, Irene Fast invokes the basic distinction between the self as "me" and the self as "I" in order to develop a contemporary theory of the self as subject. In a return to Freud's clinical finding that all psychological processes are personally motivated, she elaborates a notion of the "I-self" that is intrinsically dynamic and relational. Within this conception, our perceiving, thinking, feeling, and acting are not what our self does; rather, they are what our self is. According to Fast, the basic unit of the dynamic I-self --of selving --is a scheme of personally motivated interaction between self and nonself. This notion, which comprehends development (and developmental failure) as a product of integration and differentiation among discrete I-schemes, provides a radically new framework for understanding those dynamic phenomena that Freud included within his structural model of the mind and that contemporary theorists have addressed within object relational perspectives. Via the notion of selving, Fast likewise brings fresh insight to a host of issues that have engaged psychoanalysts and developmental psychologists in recent years. These topics include the place of bodily experience in a relational model of mind, the organization of self as simultaneously individual and relational, the formulation of a constructivist model of psychic structure, among others. Selving is not only a lucid demonstration of how a relational theory of self can reorder clinical observations in conceptually and therapeutically illuminating ways. It is also a convincing demonstration of how a constructivist model emphasizing the interactive nature of meaning-making provides bridges to Piagetian theory, developmental research, and observational infancy studies.

William Desmond's original and creative work in metaphysics is attracting more and more attention from philosophers of religion. Putting Desmond in conversation with John D. Caputo, an important philosopher of religion from the Continental tradition, Christopher Ben Simpson casts new light on Desmond's complex, multifaceted, and nuanced thought. The comparative approach allows Simpson to get at the core of recent debates in the philosophy of religion. He develops a rich understanding of how ethics and religion are informed by metaphysics, and contrasts this approach to the decidedly anti-metaphysical stance in Continental philosophy. Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern presents a systematic analysis of Desmond's thought as it advances work on Caputo's thinking and on the philosophy of religion.

This book gathers a set of reflections on the gift of beauty and the passion of being. There is something surprising about beauty that we receive and that moves the passion of being in us. The book takes issue with an ambiguous attitude to beauty among some who proclaim their advanced aesthetic authenticity. Beauty seems bland and lacks the more visceral thrill of the ugly, indeed the excremental. We crave what disrupts and provokes us, not what gives delight or even consoles. By contrast, attention is given to how beauty arouses enigmatic joy in us, and we enjoy an elemental rapport with it as other. Surprised by beauty, our breath is taken away, but we are more truly there with the beautiful when we are taken outside of ourselves. We are first receivers of the gift of surprise and only then perceivers and conceivers. My attention to the passion of being stresses a patience, a receptivity to what is other. What happens is not first our construction. There is something given, something awakening, something delighting, something energizing, something of invitation to transcendence. The theme is amplified in diverse reflections: on life and its transient beauty; on soul music and its relation to self; on the shine on things given in creation; on beauty and Schopenhauer’s dark origin; on creativity and the dynamis in Paul Weiss’s creative ventures; on redemption in Romanticism in the thought of Stanley Cavell; on theater as a between or metaxu; on redeeming laughter and its connection with the passion of being.

Is nothingness found in nature or is it in some realm disconnected from nature? Nature and Nothingness: An Essay in Ordinal Phenomenology argues for the former and explores four types of nothingness as found in nature: holes in nature, totalizing nothingness in horror, naturing nothingness, and encompassing nothingness. Using ordinal phenomenology, Robert S. Corrington reveals the great perennial fissuring within the one nature that there is. The book includes a detailed analysis of religious violence as it correlates to the hoes in nature, such as anxiety, bereavement, loss, fear of fragmentation, and loss of identity. It also examines the various ways in which horror is encountered in a literary context, using the work of Edgar Allen Poe and H. P. Lovecraft. The analysis is comparative and makes use of feminist philosophy as well as Buddhist, Taoist, theosophical, and American philosophy. Using resources from ecstatic naturalism and deep pantheism, Corrington argues that though nothingness takes many forms, they are all guises of the same vast Nothingness.

Modern thinkers have often declared the end, or even the “death,” of the subject and have been searching for new ways of “being a self.” Indeed, many contemporary scholars regard this search as one of the most significant effects of the general crisis of secularity. Post-Subjectivity is a contribution to that search, conducted with a renewed attention to the centrality of religion, in a pluralistic and global context. This volume of essays guides the reader through, but also beyond, the crises of modernity and postmodernity, toward an attempt to “resurrect” the subject in new forms. The volume resonates with voices from across the humanistic disciplines: the theological turn in recent phenomenology, new directions in Christian and Jewish theology, and reappraisals of figures in the history of philosophy, psychoanalysis, and the study of sexuality—all are represented in an attempt to rethink, from the beginning, what it is to be a “self.”