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Tracing neoliberalism's devastating erosions of democratic principles, practices, and cultures.

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

Listening across millennia, a cultural historian explores the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical--and intriguing--as the original Babel.

In this landmark text in anthropology and political science, Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, though without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex.

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.

The philosophical genealogy of a remarkable antagonist: the pirate, the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe.

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.

A radically interdisciplinary inquiry into the origins of human consciousness, community, and potential.

Understanding late medieval pictorial representations of violence.

A fascinating account of the Na society, which functions without the institution of marriage.

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.

The first English-language publication of a major history of the Great Lakes region of Africa.

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

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

The past, present, and future prospects of nongovernmental politics--political activism that withdraws from traditional government but not from the politics associated with governing.

An exploration of the roles of conflict and forgetting in ancient Athens.

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