An immensely challenging and sophisticated work, it is generally considered Levinas's most important contribution to the contemporary debate surrounding the closure of metaphysical discourse, much commented upon by Jacques Derrida. The work contains a fundamentally original theory of the ethical relationship and describes the face-to-face relationship, sensibility, responsibility and speech. The process of the revelation of Being as laid out by modern phenomenological ontology is severely criticized, as the author claims that the ultimate account of these phenomena is not in ontology, the exposition of the meaning of Being, but in a paradoxical discourse, in a skeptical mode, of what is beyond Being.

    How then could our own "societies of the State" ever have arisen from these rich and complex stateless societies, and why?Clastres brilliantly and imaginatively addresses these questions, meditating on the peculiar shape and dynamics of so-called "primitive societies," and especially on the discourses with which "civilized" (i.e., political, economic, literate) peoples have not ceased to reduce and contain them. He refutes outright the idea that the State is the ultimate and logical density of all societies. On the contrary, Clastres develops a whole alternate and always affirmative political technology based on values such as leisure, prestige, and generosity.Through individual essays he explores and deftly situates the anarchistic political and social roles of storytelling, homosexuality, jokes, ruinous gift-giving, and the torturous ritual marking of the body, placing them within an economy of power and desire very different from our own, one whose most fundamental goal is to celebrate life while rendering the rise of despotic power impossible. Though power itself is shown to be inseparable from the richest and most complex forms of social life, the State is seen as a specific but grotesque aberration peculiar only to certain societies, not least of which is our own.Not for sale in the U.K. and British Commonwealth, South Africa, Burma, Jordan, and Iraq.

    This entailed many revisions and changes which he himself never tried to standardize rigidly into a definitive conceptual system. The need for some sort of a reliable guide which would spell out both the pattern of the evolution of Freud's thinking, as well as establish its inherent logic, was felt for a long time by both scholars and students of psychoanalysis. Drs. Laplanche and Pontalis of the Association Psychoanalytique de France succeeded admirably in providing a dictionary of Freud's concepts which is more than a compilation of mere definitions. After many years of creative and industrious research, they were able to give an authentic account of the evolution of each concept with pertinent supporting texts from Freud's own writing (in the Standard Edition translation), and thus have endowed us with an instrument for work and research which is characterized by its thoroughness, exactitude and lack of prejudice towards dogma.

    The University of Nebraska Press makes available for the first English translation of his most important work to date, Glas. Its appearance will assist Derrida's readers pro and con in coming to terms with a complex and controversial book. Glas extensively reworks the problems of reading and writing in philosophy and literature; questions the possibility of linear reading and its consequent notions of theme, author, narrative, and discursive demonstration; and ingeniously disrupts the positions of reader and writer in the text.Glas is extraordinary in many ways, most obviously in its typography. Arranged in two columns, with inserted sections within these, the book simultaneously discusses Hegel’s philosophy and Jean Genet’s fiction, and shows how two such seemingly distinct kinds of criticism can reflect and influence one another. The customary segregation of philosophy, rhetoric, psychoanalysis, linguistics, history, and poetics is systematically subverted. In design and content, the books calls into question “types” of literature (history, philosophy, literary criticism), the ownership of ideas and styles, the glorification of literary heroes, and the limits of literary representation.

    In these and in a summary chapter on the dialectics of revolution the authors furnish a picture of the principal aspects of Marxism, Leninism, Maoism, and the other currents of Marxism active in the revolutions of our times. A second section is devoted to the United States, and begins with a survey of the class forces in American history from the settlement of the original thirteen colonies to the present, with special attention to the enslaved black population. Thereafter, the authors present their ideas on the objects and means of an American Revolution.Includes new introduction by Grace Lee Boggs.

    Topophilia examines the search for environment in the city, suburb, countryside, and wilderness from a dialectical perspective, distinguishes different types of environmental experience, and describes their character.

    Some are important historically, some intrinsically; others have both historic and intrinsic value. Apart from presenting such writings by dramatic theorists and critics, the book also aims to offer works by philosophers, psychologists, and social theorists, and by dramatic authors. The selections include theories and analyses of the major, traditional dramatic genres, from ancient to modern times, and of modern genres, forms of drama, and conceptions of theatre. It is a thread that may be traced throughout the anthology. Another thread is a contrast between traditional and more 'avant garde' dramas. In addition, there is discussion of social contexts and resonances of the drama, dramatic action and playwriting, dramatic illusion, and Shakespearean criticism.

    

    The linking of psychosomatic to literary and literary to a larger political horizon raises the question of conservative premises to linguistic, pyschoanalystic, philisophical, and literary theories and criticisms of such.

    Simone Forti is a dancer who has always forged her own path. She arrived in New York in the early 60's from California. She brought with her a series of pieces that proved to be of serious influence on the development of "post modern" dance and sculpture in years to come. Her "dance-constructions" were based on a concern with bodies in action, the movement not being stylized or presented for its visual line but rather as a physical fact. The artist traces the development of her work intuitively rather than chronologically, including narratives about a time of participation in the drug culture that sheds light on the changes in her dancing. The book includes drawings, "dance reports" (short descriptions of events whose movement made a deep impression on the author's memory), and documentary materials such as scores, descriptions, and photographic records of performances.

    Written at a time when the political sequences of the New Left had collapsed into crisis and violence, with widespread political exhaustion for the competing sectarian visions of Marxism from 1968, Karatani's Marx laid the groundwork for a new reading, unfamiliar to the existing Marxist discourse in Japan at the time. Karatani's Marx takes on insights from semiotics, deconstruction, and the reading of Marx as a literary thinker, treating Capital as an intervention in philosophy that could be read as itself a theory of signs. Marx is unique in this sense, not only because of its importance in post-68 Japanese thought, but also because the heterodox reading of Marx that Karatani debuts in this text, centered on his theory of the value-form, will go on to form the basis of his globally-influential work.

    The emphasis is on essential probabilistic reasoning, which is illustrated with a large number of samples. The fourth edition adds material related to mathematical finance as well as expansions on stable laws and martingales.From the reviews: "Almost thirty years after its first edition, this charming book continues to be an excellent text for teaching and for self study." -- STATISTICAL PAPERS