iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 30/09/2026

Just out: This early lecture course shows Derrida examining the premise posed by the title. Ultimately, Derrida, arrives at the conclusion that thinking is born not in negation but in an originary affirmation of the other. It's a crucial early statement of themes that would resurface later.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

Just out: Elettra Stimilli on the power of bodies, thinking means as something more than instrumentality. A major intervention in feminist thought and in contemporary political theory.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 23/09/2026

To watch out for in the spring

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

Just out: Giulio Pertile shows how early modern poetry about the creation of the world reconceptualized human creation as well. It's an insighful look at the relation between religion and poetics, with particular attention to human's impact on the planet. And it has a fabulous cover!

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

Just out: Brittany Murray takes on the French 1970s. Against readings of the post-68 moment as one marked by disorientation and a postmodern evasion of its own historicity, Murray shows how writers and filmmakers reimagined history in tackling gender, migration, and other questions of the era.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 29/06/2026

Just out: a collection of Catherine Malabou's writings from 1986 to 2003, as she develops the concept of plasticity. It's well translated and edited by Tyler Williams and Donald Cross. Adrian Johnston wrote the introduction, Malabou supplied an afterword, and we hit up Magritte for a fabulous cover.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 25/06/2026

Just out: Simone Stirner grapples with poetry in the wake of the Holocaust. Attentive to contexts well beyond the immediate aftermath, Stirner shows how the embodied experience of poetry, as it's mediated formally, shows us new ways of understading trauma and grief.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 15/06/2026

Just out: Steven Goldsmith reimagines materialism as a mode of loss. Against today's "affirmative" materialisms, Goldsmith identifies a countertradition premised premised on attrition, from Rembrandt thematizing a portrait's own own decay, to Melville's "gray aesthetics," and beyond.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 03/06/2026

Just out: Nazlı Konya looks at the Gezi protests in Istanbul as a resource for political theory. Konya's particularly attuned to the ways that moments of refusal that appear to fall outside political realm might in fact be something that can help us reimagine the possibilities of political thought.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

Just out: Chris Pye explicates autopoeisis by way of Shakespeare, and vice versa. Against vitalist accounts of worldmaking, Pye wants to show how the world is born in the process of distinguishing self and environment. The readings of Shakespeare's theater (of Velazquez) are simply brilliant.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 30/03/2026

Not a book I sponsored, but Daniel Tiffany is a wonderful poet. This one's just out.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 26/03/2026

A teaser for what's to come this fall and winter.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 12/03/2026

Just out: Nathan Brown's account of Baudelaire and the way he articulates agency together with its negation. This was originally published in Zagreb alongside the initial edition of his celebrated *Flowers of Evil* translation, but until now was barely available in North America.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

We published this wonderful annotated edition of Hart Crane's "The Bridge" about fifteen years ago, though in cloth only for rights reasons. Now that the poem is in the public domain, we've been able to put it in paperback and Larry Kramer has added a new preface for the occasion.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 04/03/2026

An intriguing book sponsered by a colleague, which may be of interest to some here. Spiro Jabbour was a Syrian Christian deacon writing in the 70s and 80s who sought an encounter between theology and psychoanalysis. Aaron Eldridge translated and edited this book, and Omnia El Shakry blurbed it.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 25/02/2026

Just out: Michael Allan's wonderful book on a set of short films of the Middle East made for the Lumiere Company in 1896. Through these, Allan gives a fresh reading of what "world cinema" can mean, not just as a matter of presenting the world but as the way film articulates the very idea of worlds.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 24/02/2026

We only publish a few journals, but I'm proud that Joyce Studies is one of them. Shinjini Chattapadhay, Chris GoGwilt, and Keri Walsh have put together a fine special issue on networks of transnationality.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 20/02/2026

For those seeking diversion: This is the funniest book I've read in years, a semi-epistolary murder mystery about tax lawyers in Venice and London, narrated (and solved) by an Oxford don of indeterminate gender. Hat tip to Helen Tartar, whose recommendation of it I neglected for more than a decade.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 18/02/2026

Martine Beugnet has the latest book for our Cutaways series, on how the blurriness of the image can be a feature, not a bug. The book explores a wonderful range of films, from the Ipcress File through Akerman, as well as art theory and cognitive science.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 12/02/2026

Just out: Jeffrey Sacks thinks settler colonial life philosophically, philologically and politically. An essential book that moves between close readings of Arabic poetry and art and broad questions of living in a world of slaughter.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 09/02/2026

Just out: Rebecca Oh on the ambivalence of the postcolonial state in the face of environmental catastrophe. Recognizing the state as both corrupt and a potentially funcitonal repository of utopian desires for a better world, Oh, traces the ambivalences of living amid toxicity in the global south.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 05/02/2026

Just out: John Drabinski reads Black and deconstructive thought together to grapple with the kinds of life that are possible in the face of social death. Don't miss it!

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 03/02/2026

Just out: Natania Meeker on the role of femininity in French materialist philosophy, as it developed in the eighteenth century. A fine account of women writers who weren't, strictly speaking, philosophers but who recentered pleasure in philosophical terms.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 02/02/2026

Just out: A volume of Geoffrey Hartman's writings on the Holocaust. Though it's now been a decade since Hartman's death, he had assembled the volume himself, at least in principle. My sincere thanks to Kevis Goodman and Brian McGrath for putting it together after it had languished in other hands.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 21/01/2026

Not a book I sponsored, but it sounds terrific. Robert Rushing thinks sound with Italo Calvino.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 12/01/2026

The Conversation has a good account of where we are in a scholarly publishing environment increasingly driven by commercial publishers. The culmination: "The scholarly system is overwhelmed by quantity, distorted by profit motives, and is stripped of its purpose of advancing knowledge."

theconversation.com

The 5 stages of the ‘enshittification’ of academic publishing

Academic publishing now shows the same decline that has hit social media and online marketplaces.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 07/01/2026

A splendid crop of book prizes. Special congratulations to Adela Pinch, who won the James Russell Lowell Prize, the single biggest book prize in literary studies. Kudos too to Jane and Marshall Brown and to Antonia Szabari. If you're in Toronto for MLA, stop by the booth and get copies of your own.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 06/01/2026

Just out: Miriam Tola on the return of the commons in the political imaginary. Bringing together feminist, postcolonial, and ecological traditions, Tola gives a fascinating account of urban politics in contemporary Rome in which the commons has returned as a force for political justice.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 23/12/2025

Just out: Marco Motta's ethnography of people who live in Haiti in the face of law that doesn't actually function. A poignant account of living within disillusionment.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 18/12/2025

Just out: Amal Eqeiq on South-South solidarity. Through work in Chiapas and Palestine and on narrative texts from both traditions, Eqeiq theorizes affinity as a framework for thinking nonreductive forms of connection and resistance.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 09/12/2025

Just out: Debarati Sanyal looks migration, displacement, and the arts produced by and around them. A fascinating and urgent account of the relation between politics and aesthetics. Many thanks to Marianne Hirsch and Miriam Ticktin for blurbing it.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 27/11/2025

I was proud when I heard Liron had won this well deserved award. And I am proud too of her statement in declining it. utotherescue.blogspot.com/2025/11/mla-...

utotherescue.blogspot.com

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 18/11/2025

Not a book I sponsored, but don't miss some early Ricoeur, courtesy of my colleague John Garza, who, along with Jack Caputo, is doing a wonderful job with the Perspectives in Continental Philosophy series. David Pellauer did an excellent job with the translation.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 29/10/2025

Just out: Zahid Chaudhary gives a superb psychoanalytic account of what we've been calling post-truth. Chaudhary is a superb reader of the realation of psychic and the social together, and the result is a major account of the psycho-politics of Trumpism and what lies behind and beyond it.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 16/09/2025

Just out: Massimiliano Tomba on "outdated" concepts that resurface in politically radical ways. My daughter recently asked me why I'm interested in things from the past if they can't change. My answer was that they do, they resurface and change the present. This book suggests how that might happen.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Just out: Basit Iqbal's accout of Islamic humanitarian organizations is a superb ethnography of aid in the wake of the Syrian civil war. But it's more than that too: a philosophically rich account of how Islamic theology might inflect the questions an ethnographer can ask.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

Just out: Chunjie Zhang explores an exchange of philosophical traditions in the early twentieth century in which German philosophers turned to Chinese thought and Chinese philosophers turned to German traditions -- and the entwined conceptiosn of modernity that these encounters produced.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 30/07/2025

Just out: May Hawas and Bruce Robbins have put together a terrific, and admirably international collection, called "Teaching Politically." Nobody needs me to say how important a topic this is at the moment.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

Just out: Rose Casey's sparkling account of the ways postcolonial literature has generated conceptual capacities for thinking in fresh ways about property law. A really fine account of the interplay between aesthetics and politics, especially beyond North American and European legal traditions.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 12/06/2025

Just out: Lauren Shizuko Stone on the queerness of German children's literature -- and how it imagines temporality in ways that challenge the anglophone discourse on that question. I hope some non-Germanists will take this up too - it's a fascinating account.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 19/05/2025

Just out: a final (alas) book by the brilliant anthropologist Rafael Sanchez that's quite a bit more than what the subtitle calls a memoir. It's a very personal acount of coming to terms with the ugliness of patriarchy, as well as the possibility of politics he found in the plazas of Venezuela.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 24/04/2025

Another book I didn't sponsor myself but wish I had: Andrea Moore on new music and memorialization. She's interested both in the question of who is, as Butler would say, grievable, as well as in how music thinks memory in ways that language -- or even the conventional languages of music -- don't.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 23/04/2025

Those who know Roz Morris as a brilliant scholar whose work moves between anthropology, philosophy, and literary studies, may know that she's also a superb poet. This book (which I didn't sponsor myself) shows the range of her talents.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 03/04/2025

Glad to be at SCMS for the first time. Come say hi if you’re here.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 02/04/2025

A fabulous entry in our new film series. For Jules O'Dwyer, the hotel is not just a setting but bound up with the techniques of cinema itself in its orchestration of space, its practices of labor, and its deleneation of the public and the private. Fun and fascinating.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 27/03/2025

Just out: a reissue of a classic, with a fine new preface. Butler's the best.

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Thomas Lay @thomas-lay.bsky.social · 05/03/2025

Elena Gorfinkel and JD Rhodes offer a theory of the film prop, from Sirk's bric-a-brac, to sexploitation's living rooms, to Risky Business's crystal egg, and beyond. This is the first in a new series of short books for cinephiles, examining a single object, technique, or motif across film history.

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