$50.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Over the past several decades, scholars in both the social sciences and humanities have moved beyond the idea that there is a "body proper": a singular, discrete biological organism with an individual psyche. They have begun to perceive embodiment as dynamic rather than static, as experiences that vary over time and across the world as they are shaped by discourses,(...)
Beyond the body proper: Reading the anthropology of material life
Actions:
Price:
$50.95
(available to order)
Summary:
Over the past several decades, scholars in both the social sciences and humanities have moved beyond the idea that there is a "body proper": a singular, discrete biological organism with an individual psyche. They have begun to perceive embodiment as dynamic rather than static, as experiences that vary over time and across the world as they are shaped by discourses, institutions, practices, technologies, and ideologies. What has emerged is a multiplicity of bodies, inviting a great many disciplinary points of view and modes of interpretation. The forty-seven readings presented in this volume range from classic works of social theory, history, and ethnography to more recent investigations into historical and contemporary modes of embodiment. "Beyond the body proper" includes nine sections conceptually organized around themes such as everyday life, sex and gender, and science. Each section is preceded by interpretive commentary by the volume’s editors. Within the collection are articles and book excerpts focused on bodies using tools and participating in rituals, on bodies walking and eating, and on the female circumcision controversy, as well as pieces on medical classifications, spirit possession, the commodification of body parts, in vitro fertilization, and an artist/anatomist’s "plastination" of cadavers for display. Materialist, phenomenological, and feminist perspectives on embodiment appear along with writings on interpretations of pain and the changing meanings of sexual intercourse. Essays on these topics and many others challenge Eurocentric assumptions about the body as they speak to each other and to the most influential contemporary trends in the human sciences.
Critical Theory
Queer forms
$39.95
(available in store)
Summary:
In "Queer forms," Ramzi Fawaz explores how the central values of 1970s movements for women’s and gay liberation-- including consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the closet?were translated into a range of American popular culture forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly(...)
Queer forms
Actions:
Price:
$39.95
(available in store)
Summary:
In "Queer forms," Ramzi Fawaz explores how the central values of 1970s movements for women’s and gay liberation-- including consciousness-raising, separatism, and coming out of the closet?were translated into a range of American popular culture forms. Throughout this period, feminist and gay activists fought social and political battles to expand, transform, or wholly explode definitions of so-called "normal" gender and sexuality. In doing so, they inspired artists, writers, and filmmakers to invent new ways of formally representing, or giving shape to, non-normative genders and sexualities. This included placing women, queers, and gender outlaws of all stripes into exhilarating new environments?from the streets of an increasingly gay San Francisco to a post-apocalyptic commune, from an Upper East Side New York City apartment to an all-female version of Earth-- and finding new ways to formally render queer genders and sexualities by articulating them to figures, outlines, or icons that could be imagined in the mind’s eye and interpreted by diverse publics.
Critical Theory
Altered states
$30.00
(available to order)
Summary:
What are altered states of consciousness? Can altered states produce altered worlds? "Altered states" brings together poetic journeys that explore the varieties of revelatory experience. These poems expand our sense of selfhood and place in the cosmos, complicating the boundaries between alterity and the ordinary, to propose a new psychedelic style for the 21st century.
Altered states
Actions:
Price:
$30.00
(available to order)
Summary:
What are altered states of consciousness? Can altered states produce altered worlds? "Altered states" brings together poetic journeys that explore the varieties of revelatory experience. These poems expand our sense of selfhood and place in the cosmos, complicating the boundaries between alterity and the ordinary, to propose a new psychedelic style for the 21st century.
Critical Theory
Immaterialism
$13.95
(available in store)
Summary:
What objects exist in the social world and how should we understand them? Is a specific Pizza Hut restaurant as real as the employees, tables, napkins and pizzas of which it is composed, and as real as the Pizza Hut corporation with its headquarters in Wichita, the United States, the planet Earth and the social and economic impact of the restaurant on the lives of its(...)
Immaterialism
Actions:
Price:
$13.95
(available in store)
Summary:
What objects exist in the social world and how should we understand them? Is a specific Pizza Hut restaurant as real as the employees, tables, napkins and pizzas of which it is composed, and as real as the Pizza Hut corporation with its headquarters in Wichita, the United States, the planet Earth and the social and economic impact of the restaurant on the lives of its employees and customers? In this book the founder of object-oriented philosophy develops his approach in order to shed light on the nature and status of objects in social life. While it is often assumed that an interest in objects amounts to a form of materialism, Harman rejects this view and develops instead an "immaterialist" method. By examining the work of leading contemporary thinkers such as Bruno Latour and Levi Bryant, he develops a forceful critique of "actor-network theory." In an extended discussion of Leibniz’s famous example of the Dutch East India Company, Harman argues that this company qualifies for objecthood neither through "what it is" or "what it does," but through its irreducibility to either of these forms. The phases of its life, argues Harman, are not demarcated primarily by dramatic incidents but by moments of symbiosis, a term he draws from the biologist Lynn Margulis. This book provides a key counterpoint to the now ubiquitous social theories of constant change, holistic networks, performative identities, and the construction of things by human practice. It will appeal to anyone interested in cutting-edge debates in philosophy and social and cultural theory.
Critical Theory
$19.95
(available in store)
Summary:
In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive. Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity – even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic. Intense life today means first of all more performance or more consumption. We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that(...)
Vita Contemplativa: In praise of inactivity
Actions:
Price:
$19.95
(available in store)
Summary:
In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive. Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity – even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic. Intense life today means first of all more performance or more consumption. We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life. For Byung-Chul Han, inactivity constitutes the human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. When life follows the rule of stimulus–response and need–satisfaction, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity. In a beautifully crafted ode to the art of being still, Han shows that the current crisis in our society calls for a very different way of life: one based on the "vita contemplative." He pleads for bringing our ceaseless activities to a stop and making room for the magic that happens in between. Life receives its radiance only from inactivity.
Critical Theory
$39.95
(available in store)
Summary:
"Contemporanea" is a nascent lexicon for the twenty-first century edited by seasoned philosophers and authors Michael Marder and Giovanbattista Tusa. The collection showcases perspectives from a range of noteworthy thinkers in philosophy, ecology, and cultural studies, as well as artists, from across the globe, including Slavoj Zizek, Timothy Morton, Denise Ferreira Da(...)
Contemporanea: a glossary for the twenty-first century
Actions:
Price:
$39.95
(available in store)
Summary:
"Contemporanea" is a nascent lexicon for the twenty-first century edited by seasoned philosophers and authors Michael Marder and Giovanbattista Tusa. The collection showcases perspectives from a range of noteworthy thinkers in philosophy, ecology, and cultural studies, as well as artists, from across the globe, including Slavoj Zizek, Timothy Morton, Denise Ferreira Da Silva, and Vandana Shiva, who each describe what they anticipate will be the concepts shaping the trajectory of this century—everything from the world state to the nuclear taboo, automation to Teslaism, plant sexuality to arachnomancy, and ecotrauma to resonances, to name a few. This century, as the editors explain, has to date grounded itself in the debris of the preceding century, whose revolutions and struggles failed to transform our time: post-colonialism, post-fascism, and post-liberalism have morphed into neocolonialism, neoliberalism, and neofascism, often combined in a previously unimaginable mix. And, just as the political developments at the beginning of the twenty-first century revived and reshuffled those of the preceding epoch, so too have philosophical trends sought to breathe fresh life into the stillborn -isms of the past—realism, vitalism, logicism, materialism, empiricism, criticism—adding the adjective "new" and sometimes "radical" before them. To articulate a different future, another language is needed. And, to develop another language, one needs to develop fresh concepts, including the concepts proposed in this collection.
Critical Theory
$19.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The stirring speech given by Peter Sloterdijk in Lucerne in October 2022. From time immemorial, humanity has had to organize their "metabolism with nature." For Marx, the most important factor in this process was labor. When Prometheus, according to the myth, brought fire to earth, another crucial input was added. Fire has been used to cook food and harden tools for(...)
Prometheus's remorse: From the gift of fire to global arson
Actions:
Price:
$19.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The stirring speech given by Peter Sloterdijk in Lucerne in October 2022. From time immemorial, humanity has had to organize their "metabolism with nature." For Marx, the most important factor in this process was labor. When Prometheus, according to the myth, brought fire to earth, another crucial input was added. Fire has been used to cook food and harden tools for hundreds of thousands of years. In this sense, it can be said that all history implies the history of the uses of fire. But whereas trees could only be burnt once, labor and fire shifted with the discovery of underground deposits of coal and oil. Modern humanity, according to Peter Sloterdijk, can be considered a collective of arsonists who set fire to the underground forests and moors. If Prometheus were to return to earth today, he might regret his gift; after all, what looms is nothing less than Ekpyrosis, the demise of the world in fire. And only a new, energetic pacifism can prevent this catastrophe.
Critical Theory
$36.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The world is marked by deepening conflicts—between democracies and autocracies, woke and populist identity politics, rich and poor, continued environmental exploitation and harsh complications like climate change. In "The monadic age," Ingo Niermann argues that, stirred by rapid developments in automation and AI, these manifold crises are about to culminate in a new(...)
The monadic age: Notes on the coming social order
Actions:
Price:
$36.95
(available to order)
Summary:
The world is marked by deepening conflicts—between democracies and autocracies, woke and populist identity politics, rich and poor, continued environmental exploitation and harsh complications like climate change. In "The monadic age," Ingo Niermann argues that, stirred by rapid developments in automation and AI, these manifold crises are about to culminate in a new paradigm of self-sufficiency—monadism—that overturns the liberal era and forces a reinvention of all social parameters. Today, two major post-liberal dispositions are unfolding. On the one side, people envision a harmonious community of all human and nonhuman beings (multi-species kinship, a rainbow of identities). On the other side, people isolate themselves within their own identities and belongings (filter bubbles, safe spaces, gated communities, charter cities, prepping). Monadism recognizes that these two seemingly contradictory dispositions stem from a similar understanding of the world: one is more optimistic, the other more pessimistic, but ultimately they’re interdependent. Before seeking harmony, we humans, a highly dominant species, must first of all restrain ourselves from coercive interactions with our environment. And to protect ourselves sufficiently from our environment, we must minimize its abuse.
Critical Theory
$12.95
(available in store)
Summary:
Against the pernicious machinations of modern-day capitalism and a perverse optimism that sustains it, ''Disconsolate Dreamers'' explores the extent to which pessimism is compatible with a radical utopian goal - namely, a collective escape from the misery of modern existence. It shows that, in a thoroughly hopeless world devoid of rational alternatives, it is time for the(...)
Disconsolate dreamers: On pessimism and utopia
Actions:
Price:
$12.95
(available in store)
Summary:
Against the pernicious machinations of modern-day capitalism and a perverse optimism that sustains it, ''Disconsolate Dreamers'' explores the extent to which pessimism is compatible with a radical utopian goal - namely, a collective escape from the misery of modern existence. It shows that, in a thoroughly hopeless world devoid of rational alternatives, it is time for the Left to consider the pessimist a helpful guide out of the somnolence of capitalist realism, revealing how pessimism necessitates a radical revision of utopian alterity.
Critical Theory
Frugalité : Un récit heureux
$15.95
(available to order)
Summary:
La frugalité dit la juste récolte des fruits de la Terre. Les Romains, avec les Grecs, l'accordaient à un idéal personnel, à la santé, au plaisir, à une vertu politique, mais pas à une abstinence et une mortification. La frugalité est joyeuse, créative, et propose une autre façon de vivre qui valorise le déjà-là, la mutualisation, le partage, et prônes les usages(...)
Frugalité : Un récit heureux
Actions:
Price:
$15.95
(available to order)
Summary:
La frugalité dit la juste récolte des fruits de la Terre. Les Romains, avec les Grecs, l'accordaient à un idéal personnel, à la santé, au plaisir, à une vertu politique, mais pas à une abstinence et une mortification. La frugalité est joyeuse, créative, et propose une autre façon de vivre qui valorise le déjà-là, la mutualisation, le partage, et prônes les usages transitoires. La frugalité en territoires ménage plutôt qu'elle aménage. La frugalité est une autre façon d'« être au monde », une relation à la Terre qui se veut heureuse et durable. Dans ce carnet de 48 pages illustré par les dessins de Judith Potin, l'architecte Philippe Madec pose les principes fondateurs d'une philosophie devenue Mouvement, celui de la Frugalité heureuse et créative.
Critical Theory