THE MOST DIFFICULT BOOKS EVER WRITTEN
Explore the most difficult books ever written, from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. A curated list of challenging philosophy, poetry, and criticism.
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Being and Nothingness
by Jean-Paul Sartre
Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.
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The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (The Seminar of Jacques Lacan , Book 11)
No summary available.
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Glas
by Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida is probably the most famous European philosopher alive today. The University of Nebraska Press makes available for the first English translation of his most important work to date, Glas. Its appearance will assist Derrida's readers pro and con in coming to terms with a complex and controversial book. Glas extensively reworks the problems of reading and writing in philosophy and literature; questions the possibility of linear reading and its consequent notions of theme, author, narrative, and discursive demonstration; and ingeniously disrupts the positions of reader and writer in the text. Glas is extraordinary in many ways, most obviously in its typography. Arranged in two columns, with inserted sections within these, the book simultaneously discusses Hegel’s philosophy and Jean Genet’s fiction, and shows how two such seemingly distinct kinds of criticism can reflect and influence one another. The customary segregation of philosophy, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, linguistics, history, and poetics is systematically subverted. In design and content, the books calls into question “types” of literature (history, philosophy, literary criticism), the ownership of ideas and styles, the glorification of literary heroes, and the limits of literary representation.
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Critique of Pure Reason (The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant)
No summary available.
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The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke
by Rainer Maria Rilke
"This miracle of a book, perhaps the most beautiful group of poetic translations this century has ever produced," (Chicago Tribune) should stand as the definitive English language version.
