Composed in a series of scenes, AisthesisRanciere's definitive statement on the aesthetictakes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarme to the Folies-Bergere, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Ranciere uses these sites and eventssome famous, others forgottento ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.
Margaret Thatcher branded the leaders of the 1984-85 miners strike ';the enemy within.' With the publication of this book, the full irony of that accusation became clear. Seumas Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destroy the power of Britain's miners' union. There was an enemy within. It was the secret services of the British state, operating inside the NUM itself.Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destroy the power of Britain's miners' union. Using phoney bank deposits, staged cash drops, forged documents, agents provocateurs and unrelenting surveillance, M15 and police Special Branch set out to discredit Scargill and other miners' leaders. Planted tales of corruption were seized on by the media and both Tory and Labour politicians in what became an unprecedentedly savage smear campaign.
Our fates lie in our genes and not in the stars, said James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. But Watson could not have predicted the scale of the industry now dedicated to this new frontier. Since the launch of the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project, the biosciences have promised miracle cures and radical new ways of understanding who we are. But where is the new world we were promised?In Genes, Cells, and Brains, feminist sociologist Hilary Rose and neuroscientist Steven Rose take on the bioscience industry and its claims. Examining the rivalries between public and private sequencers,the establishment of biobanks, and the rise of stem cell research, they ask why the promised cornucopia of health benefits has failed to emerge. Has bioethics simply become an enterprise? As bodies become increasingly commodified, perhaps the failure to deliver on these promises lies in genomics itself.
"Marvelously drawn tribute to free thinkers ... Engaging, informative, and inspiring." - Joe Sacco
';Watching the president's Christmas message produces this necropolar, white-mass sensation. Seeing the video broadcast of the Christmas service in the cathedral itself, with these pathetic screens and the young worshippers slumped around them here and there, you tell yourself that God and religion deserved better. Deserved to die, yes, but not this. However, watching the presidential figure and his sonorous inanity, you tell yourself that here at least you got what you deserved. Chirac is useless that goes without saying but so are we all ... Uselessness of this kind has no origin: it exists immediately, reciprocally; like a shared secret, you savour it implicitly with its warm bitterness particularly in these cold snaps, as the very essence of the social bond. Sanctioned by that other interactive uselessness the uselessness of the screen.'World-renowned for his lively and often iconoclastic reading of contemporary culture and thought, Jean Baudrillard here turns his hand to topical political debates and issues. In this stimulating collection of journalistic essays Baudrillard addresses subjects ranging from those already established as his trademark (virtual reality, Disney, television) to more unusual topics such as the Western intervention in Bosnia, children's rights, Holocaust revisionism, AIDS, the Rushdie fatwa, Formula One racing, mad cow disease, genetic cloning, and the uselessness of Chirac. These are coruscating and intriguing articles, not least because they show that Baudrillard is pace his critics still susceptible and alert to influences from social movements and the world beyond the hyperreal.
Louis Althusser is remembered today as the scourge of humanist Marxism, but that was his later incarnation, an identity formed by years grappling with the intellectual inheritance of Hegel and Catholicism. The Spectre of Hegel collects the writings of the young Althusser, before his final epistemological break with the philosopher's work in 1953. Including his famed essay ';Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', The Spectre of Hegel gives a unique insight into Althusser's engagement with a philosophy he would later renounce.
In this vehement defence of democracy, Jacques Ranciere explodes the complacency of Western politicians who pride themselves as the defenders of political freedom. As America and its allies use their military might in the misguided attempt to export a desiccated version democracy, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion abandon civil liberties, Ranciere argues that true democracygovernment by allis held in profound contempt by the new ruling class. In a compelling and timely analysis, Hatred of Democracy rethinks the subversive power of the democratic ideal.
Developing themes of his earlier works, Poulantzas here advances a vigorous critique of contemporary Marxist theories of the state, arguing against a general theory of the state, and identifying forms of class power crucial to socialist strategy that goes beyond the apparatus of the state.This new edition includes an introduction by Stuart Hall, which critically appraises Poulantzas's achievement.
In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley skewered New Labour's architectural legacy in all its witless swagger. Now, in the year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, he sets out to describe what the Coalition's altogether different approach to economic mismanagement and civic irresponsibility is doing to the places where the British live.In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, Hatherley takes us from Plymouth and Brighton to Belfast and Aberdeen, by way of the eerie urbanism of the Welsh valleys and the much-mocked splendour of modernist Coventry. Everywhere outside the unreal Southeast, the building has stopped in towns and cities, which languish as they wait for the next bout of self-defeating austerity.Hatherley writes with unrivalled aggression about the disarray of modern Britain, and yet this remains a book about possibilities remembered, about unlikely successes in the midst of seemingly inexorable failure. For as well as trash, ancient and modern, Hatherley finds signs of the hopeful country Britain once was and hints of what it might become.
For two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Republican tradition celebrated the execution of princes and aristocrats, defending the Terror that the Revolution inflicted upon on its enemies. But recent decades have brought a marked change in sensibility. The Revolution is no longer judged in terms of historical necessity but rather by ';timeless' standards of morality. In this succinct essay, Sophie Wahnich explains how, contrary to prevailing interpretations, the institution of Terror sought to put a brake on legitimate popular violencein Danton's words, to ';be terrible so as to spare the people the need to be so'and was subsequently subsumed in a logic of war. The Terror was ';a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty, the only alternatives being to defeat tyranny or die for liberty.'
Following his acclaimed history of the Situationist International, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark continues the SI's story, charting its post-sixties legacy and putting the late work of the Situationists in a broader, deeper context. He uncovers a contemporary relevance and searching critique of modernity. Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the ';disintegrating spectacle.' The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, Ren Vinet's earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sanguinetti's pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice Becker-Ho's account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord's late films and his surprising work as a game designer.At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to action in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century and plots an exit from the twenty-first.The dustjacket unfolds to reveal a fold-out poster of the collaborative graphic essay combining text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.
The political nature of Absolutism has long been a subject of controversy within historical materialism. Developing considerations advanced in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, this book situates the Absolutist states of the early modern epoch against the prior background of European feudalism. It is divided into two parts. The first discusses the overall structures of Absolutism as a state-system in Western Europe, from the Renaissance onwards. It then looks in turn at the trajectory of each of the specific Absolutist states in the dominant countries of the WestSpain, France, England and Sweden, set off against the case of Italy, where no major indigenous Absolutism developed. The second part of the work sketches a comparative prospect of Absolutism in Eastern Europe. The peculiarities, as well as affinities, of Eastern Absolutism as a distinct type of royal state, are examined. The variegated monarchies of Prussia, Austria and Russia are surveyed, and the lessons asked of the counter-example of Poland. Finally, the structureof the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans is taken as an external gauge by which the singularity of Absolutism as a European phenomenon is assessed. The work ends with some observations on the special position occupied by European development within universal history, which draws themes from both Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism andLineages of the Absolutist State together into a single argumentwithin their common limitsas materials for debate.
Verso's classic Mapping series, published in association with New Left Review, collects the most important writings on key topics in a changing world and delineates the controversies among the most important scholars in each field.
School Wars tells the story of the struggle for Britain's education system. Established during the 1960s and based on the progressive ideal of good schools for all, the comprehensive system has over the past decades come under sustained attack from successive governments.Now, with the growing inequalities of our current system, the damaging impact of spending cuts, the rise of ';free schools' and the growth of the private sector in education, the values embodied in the comprehensive ideal are under threat. The situation is expertly anatomized by journalist and educational campaigner Melissa Benn, who explores the dangerous example of US education reform, where privatization, punitive accountability and the rise of charter schools have intensified social, economic and ethnic divisions.The policies of successive British governments have been muddled and confused, but one thing is clear: that the relentless application of market principles signals a fundamental shift from the ideal of quality education as a public good, to education as market-controlled commodity. Benn ends by outlining some key principles for restoring strong educational values within a fair, non-selective public education system.
The Lives of Things collects Jos Saramago's early experiments with the short story form, attesting to the young novelist's imaginative power and incomparable skill in elaborating the most extravagant fantasies. Combining bitter satire, outrageous parody and Kafkaesque hallucinations, these stories explore the horror and repression that paralyzed Portugal under the Salazar regime and pay tribute to human resilience in the face of injustice and institutionalized tyranny.Beautifully written and deeply unsettling, The Lives of Things illuminates the development of Saramago's prose and records the genesis of themes that resound throughout his novels.
Blistering and timely interrogation of the politics and motives of an infamous ex-leftist
Key theorists discuss the future of communism in New York.
Originally published in 2012 to wide acclaim, this updated edition, Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere, includes coverage of the most recent events in the wave of revolt and revolution sweeping the planetriots in Athens, student occupations in the UK, Quebec and Moscow, the emergence of the Occupy Movement and the tumult of the Arab Spring. Economic crisis, social networking and a new political consciousness have come together to ignite a new generation of radicals.BBC journalist and author Paul Mason combines the anecdotes gleaned through first-hand reportage with political, economic and historical analysis to tell the story of today's networked revolution. Why It's Still Kicking Off Everywhere not only addresses contemporary struggles, it provides insights into the future of global revolt.
In Marxism and Philosophy Korsch argues for a reexamination of the relationship between Marxist theory and bourgeois philosophy, and insists on the centrality of the Hegelian dialectic and a commitment to revolutionary praxis. Although widely attacked in its time, Marxism and Philosophy has attained a place among the most important works of twentieth-century Marxist theory, and continues to merit critical reappraisal from scholars and activists today.
In this major new book, AndreGorz expands on the political implications of his prescient and influential Paths to Paradise and Critique of Economic Reason. Against the background of technological developments which have transformed the nature of work and the structure of the workforce, Gorz explores the new political agendas facing both left and right. Each is in disarray: the right, torn between the demands of capital and the ';traditional values' of its supporters, can only offer illusory solutions, while the left either capitulates to these or remains tempted by regressive, ';fundamentalist' projects inappropriate to complex modern societies. Identifying the grave risks posed by a dual society with a hyperactive minority of full-time workers confronting a silenced majority who are, at best, precariously employed, Gorz proposes a new definition of a key social conflict within Western societies in terms of the distribution of work and the form and content of non-working time.Taking into account changing cultural attitudes to work, he re-examines socialism's historical projectwhich, he contends, has always properly been to lay down the rules and limits within which economic raitonality may be permitted to function, not to create some statist, productivist countersystem. Above all, he offers a vital fresh perspective for the left, whose objective, in his view, must be to extend the sphere to autonomous human activity, and increase the possibilities for individual self-fulfilment.
This book is the result of a research project begun by the author in 1958 with the aim of answering two questions:First, what is the rationality of the economic systems that appear and disappear throughout historyin other words, what is their hidden logic and the underlying necessity for them to exist, or to have existed?Second, what are the conditions for a rational understanding of these systemsin other words, for a fully developed comparative economic science?The field of investigation opened up by these two questions is vast, touching on the foundations of social reality and on how to understand them. The author, being a Marxist, sought the answers, as he writes, ';not in philosophy or by philosophical means, but in and through examining the knowledge accumulated by the sciences.' The stages of his journey from philosophy to economics and then to anthropology are indicated by the divisions of his book.Godelier rejects, at the outset, any attempt to tackle the question of rationality or irrationality of economic science and of economic realities from the angle of an a priori idea, a speculative definition of what is rational. Such an approach can yield only, he feels, an ideological result. Rather, he treats the appearance and disappearance of social and economic systems in history as being governed by a necessity ';wholly internal to the concrete structures of social life.
This volume contains the first complete translations of Wilhelm Reich's writings from his Marxist period. Reich, who died in 1957, had a career with a single goal: to find ways of relieving human suffering. And the same curiosity and courage that led him from medical school to join the early pioneers of Freudian psychoanalysis, and then to some of the most controversial work of this centuryhis development of the theory of the orgoneled him also, at one period of his life, to become a radical socialist.The renewed interest in Reich's Marxist writings, and particularly in his notions about sexual and political liberation, follows the radical critiques of Herbert Marcuse, Frantz Fanon and Paul Goodman, the political protest movements toward personal liberation in the present decade.
The concepts of modernity and modernism are amongst the most controversial and vigorously debated in contemporary philosophy and cultural theory. In this intervention, Fredric Jamesonperhaps the most influential and persuasive theorist of postmodernityexcavates and explores these notions in a fresh and illuminating manner.The extraordinary revival of discussions of modernity, as well as of new theories of artistic modernism, demands attention in its own right. It seems clear that the (provisional) disappearance of alternatives to capitalism plays its part in the universal attempt to revive ';modernity' as a social ideal. Yet the paradoxes of the concept illustrate its legitimate history and suggest some rules for avoiding its misuse as well.In this major interpretation of the problematic, Jameson concludes that both concepts are tainted, but nonetheless yield clues as to the nature of the phenomena they purported to theorize. His judicious and vigilant probing of both termswhich can probably not be banished at this late datehelps us clarify our present political and artistic situations.
Feuerbach's departure from the traditional philosophy of Hegel opened the door for generations of radical philosophical thought. His philosophy has long been acknowledged as the influence for much of Marx's early writings.Indeed, a great amount of the young Marx must remain unintelligible without reference to certain basic Feuerbachian texts. These selections, most of them previously untranslated, establish the thought of Feuerbach in an independent role. They explain his fundamental criticisms of the ';old philosophy' of Hegel, and advance his own humanistic thought, which finds its bases in life and sensuality. Feuerbach's contemporaneity as an existentialist, humanist, and atheist is clearly presented, and the reader can readily grasp the liberating influence of this too-long neglected philosopher.Professor Zawar Hanfi has written an excellent introduction establishing Feuerbach's environment, importance, and relevance and his translations surpass most previous Feuerbach translators.
The clearest, boldest and most systematic statement of Simon Critchley's influential views on philosophy, ethics, and politics, Infinitely Demanding identifies a massive political disappointment at the heart of liberal democracy. Arguing that what is called for is an ethics of commitment that can inform a radical politics, Critchley considers the possibility of political subjectivity and action after Marx and Marxism, taking in the work of Kant, Levinas, Badiou and Lacan. Infinitely Demanding culminates in an argument for anarchism as an ethical practice and a remotivating means of political organization.
"Once again, Lynne Segal cuts through feminist ambivalence about sex with great intelligence, verve, and courage. "Straight Sex" is not only a masterful analysis of sexuality and gender, but a stunning manifesto of sexual liberation."--Barbara Ehrenreich
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