Écrits


Jacques Lacan - 1966
    This new translation of his complete works offers welcome, readable access to Lacan's seminal thinking on diverse subjects touched upon over the course of his inimitable intellectual career. .

Marx for Beginners


Rius - 1976
    He's put it all in: the origins of Marxist philosophy, history, economics; of capital, labor, the class struggle, socialism. And there's a biography of "Charlie" Marx besides.Like the companion volumes in the series, Marx for Beginners is accurate, understandable, and very, very funny.

Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals


Immanuel Kant - 1785
    In Kant's own words its aim is to search for and establish the supreme principle of morality, the categorical imperative. This edition presents the acclaimed translation of the text by Mary Gregor, together with an introduction by Christine M. Korsgaard that examines and explains Kant's argument.

Reflections on Violence


Georges Sorel - 1908
    Sorel was a civil servant who fervently believed that only the clearest and most brutal expression of class war could effect lasting social change. This, his most important work, is a passionate outcry for the socialist overthrow of society.Reflections on Violence first appeared as a series of articles in Le Mouvement Socialiste in 1906; it appeared in book form two years later, and translations extended its influence around the world. Sorel addresses the factors underlying revolutionary movements and examines the roles of violence (the revolutionary denial of the existing social order) and force (the state's power of coercion). He further explores sources of political power, the weapons of revolutions — the insurrection and the general strike — and the significant role of "myths" in recruiting and motivating potential revolutionaries.

Time and Narrative, Volume 1


Paul Ricœur - 1983
    Ricoeur here examines the creation of meaning at the textual level, with narrative rather than metaphor as the ruling concern.Ricoeur finds a "healthy circle" between time and narrative: time is humanized to the extent that it portrays temporal experience. Ricoeur proposes a theoretical model of this circle using Augustine's theory of time and Aristotle's theory of plot and, further, develops an original thesis of the mimetic function of narrative. He concludes with a comprehensive survey and critique of modern discussions of historical knowledge, understanding, and writing from Aron and Mandelbaum in the late 1930s to the work of the Annales school and that of Anglophone philosophers of history of the 1960s and 1970s."This work, in my view, puts the whole problem of narrative, not to mention philosophy of history, on a new and higher plane of discussion."—Hayden White, History and Theory "Superb. . . . A fine point of entrance into the work of one of the eminent thinkers of the present intellectual age."—Joseph R. Gusfield, Contemporary Sociology

The Cultural Politics of Emotion


Sara Ahmed - 2004
    Of interest to readers in gender studies and cultural studies, the psychology and sociology of emotions, and phenomenology and psychoanalysis, The Cultural Politics of the Emotions offers new ways of thinking about our inner and our outer lives.

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being


Christina Sharpe - 2016
    Initiating and describing a theory and method of reading the metaphors and materiality of "the wake," "the ship," "the hold," and "the weather," Sharpe shows how the sign of the slave ship marks and haunts contemporary Black life in the diaspora and how the specter of the hold produces conditions of containment, regulation, and punishment, but also something in excess of them. In the weather, Sharpe situates anti-Blackness and white supremacy as the total climate that produces premature Black death as normative. Formulating the wake and "wake work" as sites of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility for living in diaspora, In the Wake offers a way forward.

The Birth of Tragedy


Friedrich Nietzsche - 1871
    Nietzsche outlined a distinction between its two central forces: the Apolline, representing beauty and order, and the Dionysiac, a primal or ecstatic reaction to the sublime. He believed the combination of these states produced the highest forms of music and tragic drama, which not only reveal the truth about suffering in life, but also provide a consolation for it. Impassioned and exhilarating in its conviction, The Birth of Tragedy has become a key text in European culture and in literary criticism.

Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition


Cedric J. Robinson - 1983
    Marxist analyses tend to presuppose European models of history and experience that downplay the significance of Black people and Black communities as agents of change and resistance. Black radicalism, Robinson argues, must be linked to the traditions of Africa and the unique experiences of Blacks on Western continents, and any analyses of African American history need to acknowledge this. To illustrate his argument, Robinson traces the emergence of Marxist ideology in Europe, the resistance by Blacks in historically oppressive environments, and the influence of both of these traditions on such important twentieth-century Black radical thinkers as W. E. B. Du Bois, C. L. R. James, and Richard Wright. This revised and updated third edition includes a new preface by Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, and a new foreword by Robin D. G. Kelley.

No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive


Lee Edelman - 2004
    His main target is the all-pervasive figure of the child, which he reads as the linchpin of our universal politics of “reproductive futurism.” Edelman argues that the child, understood as innocence in need of protection, represents the possibility of the future against which the queer is positioned as the embodiment of a relentlessly narcissistic, antisocial, and future-negating drive. He boldly insists that the efficacy of queerness lies in its very willingness to embrace this refusal of the social and political order. In No Future, Edelman urges queers to abandon the stance of accommodation and accede to their status as figures for the force of a negativity that he links with irony, jouissance, and, ultimately, the death drive itself.Closely engaging with literary texts, Edelman makes a compelling case for imagining Scrooge without Tiny Tim and Silas Marner without little Eppie. Looking to Alfred Hitchcock’s films, he embraces two of the director’s most notorious creations: the sadistic Leonard of North by Northwest, who steps on the hand that holds the couple precariously above the abyss, and the terrifying title figures of The Birds, with their predilection for children. Edelman enlarges the reach of contemporary psychoanalytic theory as he brings it to bear not only on works of literature and film but also on such current political flashpoints as gay marriage and gay parenting. Throwing down the theoretical gauntlet, No Future reimagines queerness with a passion certain to spark an equally impassioned debate among its readers.

The Politics of Aesthetics


Jacques Rancière - 2000
    Jacques Rancière reveals its intrinsic link to politics by analysing what they both have in common: the delimitation of the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the thinkable and the unthinkable, the possible and the impossible. Presented as a set of inter-linked interviews, The Politics of Aesthetics provides the most comprehensive introduction to Rancière's work to date, ranging across the history of art and politics from the Greek polis to the aesthetic revolution of the modern age. Already translated into five languages, this English edition of The Politics of Aesthetics includes a new afterword by Slavoj Zizek, an interview for the English edition, a glossary of technical terms and an extensive bibliography.

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit


Alexandre Kojève - 1947
    This collection of lectures--originally compiled by Raymond Queneau and edited for its English-language translation by Allan Bloom--shows the intensity of Kojeve's study and thought and the depth of his insight into Hegel's Phenomenology. More important--for Kojeve was above all a philosopher and not an ideologue--this profound and venturesome work on Hegel will expose the readers to the excitement of discovering a great mind in all its force and power.

The Concept of the Political


Carl Schmitt - 1927
    This edition of the 1932 work includes the translator's introduction (by George Schwab) which highlights Schmitt's intellectual journey through the turbulent period of German history leading to the Hitlerian one-party state. It also includes Leo Strauss's analysis of Schmitt's thesis and a foreword by Tracy B. Strong placing Schmitt's work into contemporary context.

Theological-Political Treatise


Baruch Spinoza - 1670
    True religion consists in practice of simple piety, independent of philosophical speculation.

God and the State


Mikhail Bakunin - 1882
    Born into the Russian nobility, he renounced his hereditary rank in protest against Czarist oppression and fled to Western Europe. A colorful, charismatic personality, Bakunin quickly became central to the anarchism movement, and everyone involved either built upon or reacted to his ideas. Yet Bakunin, despite the power of his ideas, was primarily a man of action, and he wrote little. His only major work, God and the State, remained unfinished, although it is the torso of a giant.God and the State has been a basic anarchist and radical document for generations. It is one of the clearest statements of the anarchist philosophy of history: religion by its nature is an impoverishment, enslavement, and annihilation of humanity. It is the weapon of the state. It must be smashed, according to Bakunin, before the right of self-determination can be possible. As an introduction to anarchist thought, a manifesto of atheism, or as a summing-up of the thoughts of Bakunin, God and the State remains a mind-opening experience, even for those basically unsympathetic to its premise.