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

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.

Rituals of war and images of violence in Mesopotamia ca. 3000-500 BCE examined as "magical technologies of warfare."

A far-reaching philosophical investigation into the persistence and disappearance of speech, in individuals and in linguistic communities.

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.

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.

A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact.

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

In this book, his first to appear in English, French sinologist Francois Jullien uses the Chinese concept of shi-meaning disposition or circumstance, power or potential-as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture and to uncover the intricate structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking.

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

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.

How the ear came to play a central role in modern culture and rationality.

A groundbreaking reassessment of Symbolist artists and writers that investigates the concerns they shared with scientists of the period--the problem of subjectivity in particular.

Essays that span the career of a prominent anthropologist and address the fundamental questions of the field.

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.

A novel attempt to make sense of our preoccupation with copies of all kinds--from counterfeits to instant replay, from parrots to photocopies.

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