Best of
Theory

1967

The Revolution of Everyday Life


Raoul Vaneigem - 1967
    Published in early 1968, it both kindled and colored the May 1968 upheavals in France, which captured the attention of the world. Naming and defining the alienating features of everyday life in consumer society: survival rather than living in full, the call to sacrifice, the cultivation of false needs, the dictatorship of the commodity, subjection to social roles, and the replacement of God by the economy, the book argues that the countervailing impulses that exist within deep alienation - creativity, spontaneity, poetry present an authentic alternative to nilhilistic consumerism. This carefully edited new translation marks the first North American publication of this important work and includes a new preface by the author.

Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias


Michel Foucault - 1967
    Although not reviewed for publication by the author and thus not part of the official corpus of his work, the manuscript was released into the public domain for an exhibition in Berlin shortly before Michel Foucault's death.

Language & Silence: Essays on Language, Literature, and the Inhuman


George Steiner - 1967
    How do we evaluate the power and utility of language when it has been made to articulate falsehoods in certain totalitarian regimes or has been charged with vulgarity and imprecision in a mass-consumer democracy? How will language react to the increasingly urgent claims of more exact speech such as mathematics and symbolic notation? These are some of the questions Steiner addresses in this elegantly written book, first published in 1967 to international acclaim.

Speech and Phenomena and Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs


Jacques Derrida - 1967
    His critique of Husserl attacks the position that language is founded on logic rather than on rhetoric; instead, he claims, meaningful language is limited to expression because expression alone conveys sense. Derrida's larger project is to confront phenomenology with the tradition it has so often renounced--the tradition of Western metaphysics.

Ennead III (Loeb Classical Library, 442)


Plotinus - 1967
    AD 205-270) can be regarded as the greatest Greek philosopher of late Antiquity, and as the father of Neoplatonism. His Enneads ("the nines") are now recognized as seminal works in the development of Western thought. This book is the only detailed scholarly commentary available on this part of Plotinus's work, and should be invaluable to all scholars interested in ancient philosophy and early Christian theology. All Greek in the commentary is translated.

Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty & Venus in Furs


Gilles Deleuze - 1967
    Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity." He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism; their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them - Masoch and Sade - lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles a part. Venus in Furs, the most famous of all of Masoch's novels was written in 1870 and belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes including love, war, and death. The present work is about love. Although the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome can be found here - fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment, and always the volatile presence of a terrible coldness - these do not eclipse the singular power of Masoch's eroticism.

Basic Number Theory


André Weil - 1967
    . .dsup.. The first part of this volume is based on a course taught at Princeton University in 1961-62; at that time, an excellent set of notes was prepared by David Cantor, and it was originally my intention to make these notes available to the mathematical public with only quite minor changes. Then, among some old papers of mine, I accidentally came across a long-forgotten manuscript by Chevalley, of pre-war vintage (forgotten, that is to say, both by me and by its author) which, to my taste at least, seemed to have aged very well. It contained a brief but essentially com plete account of the main features of classfield theory, both local and global; and it soon became obvious that the usefulness of the intended volume would be greatly enhanced if I included such a treatment of this topic. It had to be expanded, in accordance with my own plans, but its outline could be preserved without much change. In fact, I have adhered to it rather closely at some critical points."

The Metamorphoses Of The Circle


Georges Poulet - 1967
    

The Formation of the Economic Thought of Karl Marx: 1843 to Capital


Ernest Mandel - 1967
    He combines a historical retrospective and a review of current discussions on each of the subjects and problems central to Marxist economic theory. He traces the development of the concept of "alienation" in Marx, and its fate in the hands of succeeding generations, down to the present discussion in East and West Europe, summarizes the fascinating debates over the "Asiatic mode of production," and discusses labor theory of value, the problem of periodic crises, the theory of wages and the polarization of wealth and poverty, and the problem of progressive "disalienation" through the building of socialist society.

Time, work-discipline, and industrial capitalism


E.P. Thompson - 1967
    Thompson’s massively influential text, Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism, draws direct relationships between socio-economic changes and clock time. The paper raises and attempts to answer a string of questions about the role(s) played by clock time in the modernization of western European (and especially British) society. Attaching particular importance to the period from the late eighteenth century, it is arguably one of the most influential historical papers of the late twentieth century, being influential not just among historians but within many other disciplines as well (as its prominence in citation indices across the humanities and social sciences makes clear).