Fearless Speech- Michel Foucault

Title: Fearless Speech
Author: Michel Foucault
ISBN 10:1-58435-011-3 ISBN-13:978-1-58435-011-8
Binding: Paper
Date: 2001
Publisher: Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents
Number of Pages: 183
Price: $12.95

I would like to distinguish between the 'history of ideas' and the 'history of thought.' The history of ideas involves the analysis of a notion from its birth, through its development, and in the setting of other ideas, which constitute its context. The history of thought is the analysis of the way an unproblematic field of experience becomes a problem, raises discussions and debate, incites new reactions, and induces crisis in the previously silent behaviors, practices, and institutions. It is the history of the way people become anxious, for example, about madness, about crime, about themselves, or about truth.

Comprised of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault while teaching at Berkeley in the Fall of 1983, Fearless Speech was edited by Joseph Pearson and published in 2001. Reviewed by the author, it is the last book Foucault wrote before his death in 1984 and can be read as his last testament. Here, he positions the philosopher as the only person able to confront power with the truth, a stance that boldly sums up Foucault's project as a philosopher.

A Very nice blog on Foucault

A Grammar of the Multitude - Paolo Virno

Title: A Grammar of the Multitude
Author: Paolo Virno

Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito and Andrea Casson
ISBN -10:1-58435-021-0 ISBN-13:978-1-58435-021-7
Binding: Paper
Date: January 2004
Publisher: Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents
Number of Pages: 117
Price: $14.95

Description

Globalization is forcing us to rethink some of the categories—such as "the people"—that traditionally have been associated with the now eroding state. Italian political thinker Paolo Virno argues that the category of "multitude," elaborated by Spinoza and for the most part left fallow since the seventeenth century, is a far better tool to analyze contemporary issues than the Hobbesian concept of "people," favored by classical political philosophy. Hobbes, who detested the notion of multitude, defined it as shunning political unity, resisting authority, and never entering into lasting agreements. "When they rebel against the state," Hobbes wrote, "the citizens are the multitude against the people." But the multitude isn't just a negative notion, it is a rich concept that allows us to examine anew plural experiences and forms of nonrepresentative democracy. Drawing from philosophy of language, political economics, and ethics, Virno shows that being foreign, "not-feeling-at-home-anywhere," is a condition that forces the multitude to place its trust in the intellect. In conclusion, Virno suggests that the metamorphosis of the social systems in the West during the last twenty years is leading to a paradoxical "Communism of the Capital."

Multitude and Working class

The Republic of Multitude- Interview with Paolo Virno

Public Sphere, labour, multitude: Strategies of resistance in Empire with Tony Negri

Paolo Virno and Judith Revel revisit the Foucault/Chomsky debate

Archeology of Violence by Pierre Clastres

Title: Archeology of Violence
Author: Pierre Clastres
ISBN: ISBN-10:0-936756-95-0 ISBN-13:978-0-936-75695-0
Binding: Paperback
Date: December 1994
Publisher: MIT Press (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)
Number of Pages: 200
Price: $14.95

Pierre Clastres broke up with his mentor Claude Levi-Strauss to collaborate with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guttari on their Anti-Oedipus. He is the rare breed of political anthropologist—a Nietzschean—and his work presents us with a generalogy of power in a native state. For him, tribal societies are not Rousseauist in essence; to the contrary, they practice systematic violence in order to prevent the rise in their midst of this "cold monster": the state. Only by waging war with other tribes can they maintain the dispersion and autonomy of each group. In the same way, tribal chiefs are not all-powerful; to the contrary, they are rendered weak in order to remain dependent on the community. In a series of groundbreaking essays, Clastres turns around the analysis of power among South American Indians and rehabilitates violence as an affirmative act meant to protect the integrity of their societies. These "savages" are shrewd political minds who resist in advance any attempt at "globalization."

The porcelain workshop : For a New Grammar of Politics

Title: The porcelain workshop : For a New Grammar of Politics
Author: Antonio Negri, Translated by Noura Wedell
ISBN-10:1-58435-056-3 ISBN-13:978-1-58435-056-9
Binding: Paper
Date: June 2008
Publisher: MIT Press (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)
Number of Pages: 173
Price: $17.95

Description

In 2004 and 2005, Antonio Negri held ten workshops at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris to formulate a new political grammar of the postmodern. Biopolitics, biopowers, control, the multitude, people, war, borders, dependency and interdependency, state, nation, the common, difference, resistance, subjective rights, revolution, freedom, democracy: these are just a few of the themes Negri addressed in these experimental laboratories.Postmodernity, Negri suggests, can be described as a "porcelain workshop": a delicate and fragile construction that could be destroyed through one clumsy act. Looking across twentieth century history, Negri warns that our inability to anticipate future developments has already placed coming generations in serious jeopardy. Describing the years 1917-1968 as the "short century," Negri suggests that by the end of it, all of the familiar markers of modernity (including that of socialism) had lost their relevance.Confronted with an intolerable reality, indignation and the revolutionary will to transform the world have both taken new forms and must be understood anew, free of modernist assumptions. In the impassioned debates recounted in this book, Antonio Negri attempts to describe the formation of an alternative political horizon and looks for a way to define the practices and modes of expression that democracy could take.

About the Author

Antonio Negri is a philosopher and essay writer. A political and social activist in the 1960s and 1970s in Italy, he taught political sciences for many years and has written numerous books on political philosophy including Marx beyond Marx (1979), The Savage Anomaly (1983), Insurgencies (1997); and in collaboration with Michael Hardt, Empire (2000) and Multitude (2004).

Introduction to Kant's Anthropology - Foucault

Title: Introduction to Kant's Anthropology
Author: Michel Foucault

Edited by Roberto Nigro

Translated by Roberto Nigro and Kate Briggs

ISBN-10:1-58435-054-7 ISBN-13:978-1-58435-054-5
Binding: Paper
Date: August 2008
Publisher: MIT Press
Number of Pages: 157
Price: $14.95

Description

This introduction and commentary to Kant's least discussed work, Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, is the dissertation that Michel Foucault presented in 1961 as his doctoral thesis. It has remained unpublished, in any language, until now. In his exegesis and critical interpretation of Kant's Anthropology, Foucault raises the question of the relation between psychology and anthropology, and how they are affected by time. Through a Kantian "critique of the anthropological slumber," Foucault warns against the dangers of treating psychology as a new metaphysics, explores the possibilities of studying man empirically, and reflects on the nature of time, art and technique, self-perception, and language. Extending Kant's suggestion that any empirical knowledge of man is inextricably tied up with language, Foucault asserts that man is a world citizen insofar as he speaks. For both Kant and Foucault, anthropology concerns not the human animal or self-consciousness but, rather, involves the questioning of the limits of human knowledge and concrete existence.This long-unknown text is a valuable contribution not only to a scholarly appreciation of Kant's work but as the first outline of what would later become Foucault's own frame of reference within the history of philosophy. It is thus a definitive statement of Foucault's relation to Kant as well as Foucault's relation to the critical tradition of philosophy. By going to the heart of the debate on structuralist anthropology and the status of the human sciences in relation to finitude, Foucault also creates something of a prologue to his foundational The Order of Things.

Introduction to Kant's Anthropology from a pragmatic point of view

Good Sex Illustrated - Tony Duvert

Title: Good Sex Illustrated
Author: Tony Duvert
ISBN-10: 1-58435-043-1 ISBN-13:978-1-58435-043-9
Binding: Paperback
Date: 2007
Publisher: MIT Press (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)
Number of Pages: 213
Price: $14.95

Desciption
Why is pleasure "doubled" when it's "shared"? ... Do you really have to cut pleasure in two so that it'll exist? I mean, if it's doubled when there are two of you, then it must be tripled when there are three, quadrupled when there are four, centupled when there are a hundred, right? Is it O.K. for a hundred to share? And if I get used to trying it all alone, why is it that I'll never love anyone again? Is it that good alone and that awful with others?
—from Good Sex Illustrated

First published in France in 1973, Good Sex Illustrated gleefully deciphers the subtext of a popular sex education manual for children produced during that period. In so doing, Duvert mounts a scabrous and scathing critique of how deftly the "sex-positive" ethos was harnessed to promote the ideal of the nuclear family. Like Michel Houllebecq, Duvert is highly attuned to all the hypocrisies of late twentieth century western "sexual liberation" mass movements. As Bruce Benderson notes in his introduction, Good Sex Illustrated shows that, "in our sexual order, orgasm follows the patterns of any other kind of capital ... 'good sex' is a voracious profit machine." But unlike Houllebecq, Duvert writes from a passionate belief in the integrity of unpoliced sex and of pleasure. Even more controversially now than when the book was first published, Duvert asserts the child's right to his or her own playful, unproductive sexuality. Bruce Benderson's translation will belatedly introduce English-speaking audiences to the most infamous gay French writer since Jean Gênet.

About the Author

Tony Duvert is a French writer born in 1945. Polemicist and champion of the rights of children to their own bodies and their own sexuality, he has published two controversial books of essays on these themes (Le bon sexe illustré and L'Enfant au masculin), which also shape his novels. His Prix Médicis-winning novel Paysage de fantaisie was published in America in 1976 as Strange Landscape. In 1978, he published two works of prose poetry and short texts, District and Les Petits Métiers. Semiotext(e) will be publishing Bruce Benderson's translation of Tony Duvert's novel Journal d'un innocent.

Tony Duvert (1945-2008) was found dead in his home on Wednesday, August 20, 2008. An investigation suggests he died from natural reasons.

TonyDuvert Tribute

Trying to Grow

Title: Trying to Grow
Author: Firdaus Kanga
ISBN: 9780143100782
Binding: Paper Back
Date: November 2008
Publisher: Penguin
Number of Pages: 280 pp
Price: 250 Rs

Description

Brit Kotwal breaks his legs eleven times before he is five years old. His teeth crumble and chip if he tries to bite into anything. It was his sister Dolly’s idea to call him Brit, short for brittle, because of his bones. Besides, Parsees don’t really like long first-names, and it pleased his mother Sera because it sounded so English.It was fun sometimes, being different. None of the other children drank powdered pearls in their milk, or had almond oil rubbed into their legs until it gleamed like Bangalore silk. And Brit knew he could always get his own way with Dolly—even if it took a little blackmail. But when you reach eighteen and are still the size of an eight year old, it is not much fun, and Brit has to begin to try and grow in his own way…Trying to Grow is a many-splendoured work built around the experiences of a physically handicapped boy turning into manhood, a deeply moving story told with a remarkable blend of directness, humour and irreverence.

Broken bones and a broken heart : An Article by Firdaus Kanga

Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen, Vol I & II

Title: Arguments for a Better World: Essays in Honor of Amartya Sen
Volume I: Ethics, Welfare, and Measurement and Volume II: Development, Society, and Institutions

Author: Edited by Kaushik Basu and Ravi Kanbur

ISBN13: 9780199239993, ISBN10: 0199239991

Binding: Hard Back

Date: 2008

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Number of Pages: 1312

Price: 3500/-

Product Description:

Amartya Sen has made deep and lasting contributions to the academic disciplines of economics, philosophy, and the social sciences more broadly. He has engaged in policy dialogue and public debate, advancing the cause of a human development focused policy agenda, and a tolerant and democratic polity. This argumentative Indian has made the case for the poorest of the poor, and for plurality in cultural perspective. It is not surprising that he has won the highest awards, ranging from the Nobel Prize in Economics to the Bharat Ratna, India's highest civilian honor. This public recognition has gone hand in hand with the affection and admiration that Amartya's friends and students hold for him.

This volume of essays, written in honor of his 75th birthday by his students and peers, covers the range of contributions that Sen has made to knowledge. They are written by some of the world's leading economists, philosophers and social scientists, and address topics such as ethics, welfare economics, poverty, gender, human development, society and politics.

Contributors include: Bina Agarwal, Isher Ahluwalia, Montek S Ahluwalia, Ingela Alger, Sabina Alkire, Paul Anand, Sudhir Anand, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Muhammad Asali, Department of Economics, A. B. Atkinson, Amiya Kumar Bagchi, Pranab Bardhan, Lourdes Beneria, Francois Bourguignon, Sugata Bose, Walter Bossert, John Broome, Satya R. Chakravarty, Lincoln C. Chen, Martha Alter Chen, Kanchan Chopra, Rajat Deb, Simon Dietz, Bhaskar Dutta, James E. Foster, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, Wulf Gaertner, Indranil K. Ghosh, Jonathan Glover, Peter Hammond, Christopher Handy, Christopher Harris, Cameron Hepburn, Jane Humphries, Rizwanul Islam, Satish K. Jain, Ayesha Jalal, Mary Kaldor, Sunil Khilnani, Stephan Klasen, Jocelyn Kynch, Isaac Levi, Oliver Linton, Enrica Chiappero Martinetti, Kirsty McNay, Martha C. Nussbaum, Siddiqur R. Osmani, Elinor Ostrom, Prasanta K. Pattanaik, Edmund S. Phelps, Mozaffar Qizilbash, Gustav Ranis, Martin Ravallion, Sanjay G. Reddy, Kevin Roberts, Ingrid Robeyns, Maurice Salles, Emma Samman, Cristina Santos, Thomas. M. Scanlon, Arjun Sengupta, Tae Kun Seo, Anthony Shorrocks, Ronald Smith, Rehman Sobhan, Robert M. Solow, Nicholas Stern, Frances Stewart, Joseph E. Stiglitz, S. Subramanian, Kotaro Suzumura, Alain Trannoy, Ashutosh Varshney, Sujata Visaria, Guanghua Wan, Jorgen W. Weibull, John A. Weymark, and Yongsheng Xu. Product Details

Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila

Title: Creating Masculinity in Los Angeles's Little Manila: Working-Class Filipinos and Popular Culture, 1920s-1950s

Author: Linda Espana-Maram

ISBN: ISBN: 978-0-231-11593-3

Binding: Paperback

Date: 2006

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Number of Pages: 252

Price: $26.50

Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life

Title: Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life
Author: Gerald Martin
ISBN 10: 0747594767 ISBN-13: 978-0747594765
Binding: Hard Back
Date: October 2008
Publisher: Bloomsburry
Number of Pages: 688
Price: 1395
Reviews
Hilary Spurling , Telegraph
Tom Gaisford, Independent Books
Singular storyteller's triumphs and travails