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The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher.

A consideration of blandness not as the absence of defining qualities but as the harmonious union of all potential values-an infinite opening into human experience.

Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself.

A new form of investigative practice that uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction.

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.

Examining Tony Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art.

Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) was already an established neuropsychologist when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1930s. This book, his magnum opus and widely regarded as a modern classic in psychology and biology, grew out of his dissatisfaction with traditional natural science techniques for analyzing living beings.

An exploration of the central role of indirect modes of expression in ancient China.

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

The maps in this book are drawn with satellites, assembled with pixels radioed from outer space, and constructed from statistics; they record situations of intense conflict and express fundamental transformations in our ways of seeing and of experiencing space. These maps are built with Global Positioning Systems (GPS), remote sensing satellites, or Geographic Information Systems (GIS): digital spatial hardware and software designed for such military and governmental uses as reconnaissance, secrecy, monitoring, ballistics, the census, and national security. Rather than shying away from the politics and complexities of their intended uses, in Close Up at a Distance Laura Kurgan attempts to illuminate them. Poised at the intersection of art, architecture, activism, and geography, her analysis uncovers the implicit biases of the new views, the means of recording information they present, and the new spaces they have opened up. Her presentation of these maps reclaims, repurposes, and discovers new and even inadvertent uses for them, including documentary, memorial, preservation, interpretation, political, or simply aesthetic. GPS has been available to both civilians and the military since 1991; the World Wide Web democratized the distribution of data in 1992; Google Earth has captured global bird’s-eye views since 2005. Technology has brought about a revolutionary shift in our ability to navigate, inhabit, and define the spatial realm. The traces of interactions, both physical and virtual, charted by the maps in Close Up at a Distance define this shift.

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.

Design objects, bachelor pads, and multimedia rotating beds as expressions of the relationships among architecture, gender, and sexuality.

Chantal Thomas presents the history of the mythification of one of the most infamous queens in all history, whose execution still fascinates us today.

Beginning with a definition of the pre-rational meaning of "truth" in archaic Greece, Detienne traces the lineage of the concept. Its distinct difference from the logic of the western philosophers is discussed and a movement from a religious to a secular thought about truth is identified.

An exploration of the roles of metamorphosis and hybridity in the establishment of personal identity, with particular emphasis on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

A history and theory of the powers, the failures, and even the pleasures of paperwork.

A reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance, examining the complex and layered temporalities of Renaissance images and artifacts.

The new form of "humanitarian government" emerging from natural disasters and military occupations that reduces people to mere lives to be rescued.

Women's bodies and the study of anatomy in Italy between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries.

An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into what it means to feel alive.

Why do nation-states wall themselves off despite widespread proclamations of global connectedness?

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