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Publics and Counterpublics revolves around a central question: What is a public? The idea of a public is a cultural form, a kind of practical fiction, present in the modern world in a way that is very different from other or earlier societies. Like the idea of rights, or nations, or markets, it can now seem universal. But it has not always been so. Publics exist only by virtue of their imagining. They are a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and very potent life at that.Publics have some regular properties as a form, with powerful implications for the way our social world takes shape; but much of modern life involves struggles over the nature of publics and their interrelation. There are ambiguities, even contradictions in the idea of a public. As it is extended to new contexts and media, new polities and rhetorics, its meaning can be seen to change, in ways that we have scarcely begun to appreciate.By combining historical analysis, theoretical reflection, and extended case studies, Publics and Counterpublics shows how the idea of a public works as a formal device in modern culture and traces its implications for contemporary life. Michael Warner offers a revisionist account at the junction of two intellectual traditions with which he has been associated: public-sphere theory and queer theory. To public-sphere theory, this book brings a new emphasis on cultural forms, and a new focus on the dynamics of counterpublics. To queer theory, it brings a new way of seeing how queer culture (among other examples) is shaped by the counterpublic environment.

Working with material from the prehistory of solitary sex in the Bible to third wave, "Solitary Sex" is a fact-filled history of masturbation.

The new form of "humanitarian government" emerging from natural disasters and military occupations that reduces people to mere lives to be rescued.

An exploration of the roles of conflict and forgetting in ancient Athens.

How the far North offered a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination.

An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into what it means to feel alive.

Chantal Thomas presents the history of the mythification of one of the most infamous queens in all history, whose execution still fascinates us today.

In this classic meditation on the problem of style in art history, Henri Focillon describes how art forms change over time.

A consideration of blandness not as the absence of defining qualities but as the harmonious union of all potential values-an infinite opening into human experience.

A study of the word pair "action and reaction" embracing philosophy, semantics, literature, and science.

An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras discovered the secrets of harmony within a forge when he came across five men hammering with five hammers, producing a wondrous sound. Four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, harmonizing; but there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he understand its discordant sound. Pythagoras therefore discarded it. What was this hammer, such that Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? Since antiquity, "harmony" has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds; it has offered a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the natural world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal signs of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resists being written down, transcribed in a stable set of ideal elements. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound.

The philosophical genealogy of a remarkable antagonist: the pirate, the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe.

A meditation on the human body as described by the classical Greeks and by the ancient Chinese.

Essays by Gilles Deleuze on the search for a new empiricism.

In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna: in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors' testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it. Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made it necessary to clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, heva been advanced in the name of ethics.

In this analysis of one major philosopher by another, Gilles Deleuze identifies three pivotal concepts - duration, memory, and elan vital - that are found throughout Bergson's writings and shows the relevance of Bergson's work to contemporary philosophical debates.

Why do nation-states wall themselves off despite widespread proclamations of global connectedness?

If Marx¿s opus Capital provided the foundational account of the forces of production in all of their objective, machine formats, what happens when the concepts of political economy are applied not to dead labor, but to its living counterpart, the human subject? The result is Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt¿s History and Obstinacy, a groundbreaking archaeology of the labor power that has been cultivated in the human body over the last two thousand years. First published in German 1981, and never before translated into English, this epochal collaboration between Kluge and Negt has now been edited, expanded, and updated by the authors in response to global developments of the last decade to create an entirely new analysis of ¿the capitalism within us.¿

A new narrative for the emergence of human music, drawing from archaeology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory.

A new form of investigative practice that uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction.

The purposeful discontinuities and juxtapositions of Aby Warburg's iconography and how they can be used to analyze other imagery.

Revisiting an era when the discipline of architecture staked out a role in global environmental governance and the biopolitical management of populations.

Essays by a provocative Italian philosopher on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains.

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay provides a compelling rethinking of the political and ethical status of photography. In her extraordinary account of the "civil contract" of photography, she thoroughly revises our understanding of the power relations that sustain and make possible photographic meanings. Photography, she insists, must be thought of and understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. Azoulay argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals to the power that governs them, and, at the same time, a form of relations among equal individuals that constrains this power. Her book shows how anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph's addressee, is or can become a citizen in the citizenry of photography. The civil contract of photography enables him or her to share with others the claim made or addressed by the photograph.

The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century.

Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself.

Design objects, bachelor pads, and multimedia rotating beds as expressions of the relationships among architecture, gender, and sexuality.

Gilles Deleuze examines the work of the late-nineteenth-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher--Masoch.