In Defense of Anarchism

Title: In Defense of Anarchism
Author: Robert Paul Wolff
ISBN: 978-0-520-21573-3
Binding: Paper
Publisher: University of California Press
Number of Pages: 86
Price: $8.95

"To entitle a book In Defense of Anarchism simply requires chutzpah. To do it well requires some intelligence. Professor Wolff has both. Anarchy, being generally relegated to the ideological dust-bin or drafted as fodder for editorializing blasts, has long been in need of an intelligent reassessment. Wolff's brief book attempts this by taking the reader along a political via dolorosa which begins with his own innocent belief in 'traditional democratic doctrines.'"—Lawrence S. Stepelevich, The New Scholasticism

"A deep and provocative discussion of some of the most fundamental issues in political philosophy, written crisply, with candor, in a style that I find very winning. It is a most useful book, and a very good one."—Carl Cohen, author of Communism, Fascism, and Democracy"

A provocative and engrossing introduction to current questions of political legitimacy, consent, deliberative democracy, the basis of majority rule, workers collectives, etc., that have been taken up by contemporary political theorists."—Georgia Warnke, author of Justice and Interpretation

Conversations with Cézanne

Title: Conversations with Cézanne
Edited by Michael Doran
ISBN: 978-0-520-22519-0
Binding: Paper
Publisher: University of California Press
Number of Pages: 278
Price: $19.95

Michael Doran has gathered texts by contemporaries of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906)—including artists, critics, and writers—that illuminate the influential painter's philosophy of art especially in his late years. The book includes historically important essays by a dozen different authors, including Emile Bernard, Joaquim Gasquet, Maurice Denis, and Ambroise Vollard, along with selections from Cézanne's own letters.

In addition to the material included in the original French edition of the book, which has also been published in German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese, this edition contains an introduction written especially for it by noted Cézanne scholar Richard Shiff. The book closes with Lawrence Gowing's magisterial essay, "The Logic of Organized Sensations," first published in 1977 and long out of print.

Cézanne's work, and the thinking that lay behind it, have been of inestimable importance to the artists who followed him. This gathering of writings will be of enormous interest to artists, writers, art historians—indeed to all students of modern art.

Hatred of Capitalism : A Semiotext(e) Reader

Title: Hatred of Capitalism : A Semiotext(e) Reader 

Editors: Chris Kraus and Sylvère Lotringer 

ISBN: 978-1-58435-012-5

Binding: Paper

Publisher: SEMIOTEXT(E)

Number of Pages:  430

Price: $19.95

Compiled in 2001 to commemorate the passing of an era, Hatred of Capitalism brings together highlights of Semiotext(e)'s most beloved and prescient works. Semiotext(e)'s three-decade history mirrors the history of American thought. Founded by French theorist and critic Sylvere Lotringer as a scholarly journal in 1974, Semiotext(e) quickly took on the mission of melding French theory with the American art world and punk underground. Its Foreign Agents, Native Agents, Active Agents and Double Agents imprints have brought together thinkers and writers as diverse as Gilles Deleuze, Assata Shakur, Bob Flanagan, Paul Virillio, Kate Millet, Jean Baudrillard, Michelle Tea, William S. Burroughs, Eileen Myles, Ulrike Meinhof, and Fanny Howe. In Hatred of Capitalism, editors Kraus and Lotringer bring these people together in the same volume for the first time.

About the Editors

Chris Kraus is a filmmaker and the author of I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia, and coeditor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Index called her "one of the most subversive voices in American fiction." Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed.

Sylvère Lotringer, general editor of Semiotext(e), lives in New York and Baja, California. He is the author of Overexposed: Perverting Perversions (Semiotext(e), 2007
 

Pornocracy

Title: Pornocracy

Author: Catherine Breillat 

ISBN: 978-1-58435-047-7

Binding: Paper 

Date: 2008

Publisher: SEMIOTEXT(E)

Number of Pages: 148

Price: $14.95

As celebrated as it is reviled, internationally acclaimed filmmaker Catherine Breillat's novel Pornocracy viscerally enacts the dramatic confluence of mystery, desire, and shame that lies at the heart of sexuality. In Pornocracy, a beautiful woman wanders through a gay disco and engages a man, confident that he will follow her. Perversely and dispassionately, she offers her body as the ground of a ritualistic game in which, over the course of three evenings, the two will explore the numbing mechanics of sexual brutality. What follows is an exchange between a man and a woman that is both frankly sexual and deeply philosophical.

Adapted and directed for film in France by Breillat as Anatomy of Hell (2004), Pornocracy leads the reader through an undulating and atmospheric exploration of the criminal and the erotic, finally climaxing in a place well beyond more familiar moral terrain. Although Breillat's films—most recently Fat Girl (2001) and Romance (1999)—are well known to international audiences, this publication marks her literary debut in America. It will demonstrate that Breillat's famous films are but one aspect of her strikingly original poetic and philosophical vision.

Includes an interview with Catherine Breillat by Dorna Khazeni.

About the Author

Catherine Breillat is a filmmaker and writer based in Paris. She is known not only for her films focusing on themes of sexuality, but also for her best-selling novels. Pornocracy is the first of her novels to be published in English.
 

Video Green : Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Chris Kraus

Title: Video Green : Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness 

Author: Chris Kraus 

ISBN: 978-1-58435-022-4

Binding: Paper  

Publisher: SEMIOTEXT(E)

Number of Pages:  220

Price: $14.95

Video Green examines the explosion of late 1990s Los Angeles art driven by high-profile graduate programs. Probing the surface of art-critical buzzwords, Chris Kraus brilliantly chronicles how the City of Angels has suddenly become the epicenter of the international art world and a microcosm of the larger culture. Why is Los Angeles so completely divorced from other realities of the city? Shrewd, analytic and witty, Video Green is to the Los Angeles art world what Roland Barthes' Mythologies were to the society of the spectacle: the live autopsy of a ghost city.

About the Author

Chris Kraus is a filmmaker and the author of I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia, and coeditor of Hatred of Capitalism: A Semiotext(e) Reader. Index called her "one of the most subversive voices in American fiction." Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability and dazzling speed

Ghalib:Epistemologies of Elegance

Title: Ghalib:Epistemologies of Elegance

Author: Sara Suleri Goodyear, Azra Raza  

ISBN:  9780670081950 

Binding: Hardback

Date: 2009 

Publisher: Viking/Penguin 

Number of Pages: 183

Price: Rs 325/-

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797–1869) lived at a time of historic change in India—a period when the British conquest of India was in its ascendancy and the Mughal Empire was coming to an end. He was witness to the ravagement of Delhi and its courtly culture, culminating in the catastrophe of the uprising of 1857. This trauma, accompanied by his personal losses, informs his poetry, evidenced in Divan-e-Ghalib containing 235 ghazals in Urdu, ghazals redolent with a sense of loss, grief and a plangent longing for a vanished way of life. Yet, what sets his poetry apart is an irrepressible sense of humour, energy and linguistic delight that drive his darkest lamentations.

In Ghalib: Epistemologies of Elegance, Sara Suleri Goodyear and Azra Raza select twenty-one ghazals that illustrate the astonishing range of Ghalib’s many voices and the ideas that populate his poetry. Every ghazal is accompanied by an introduction, a literal translation and a detailed commentary that elucidate the complexities of the individual sher and the ghazal as a whole. The result is an erudite introduction to the work of the greatest Urdu poet of all time, which will be invaluable not only to the Ghalib aficionado but also the lay reader spellbound by the intricate imagery and the dazzling scope of this extraordinary poet.

 

The Present as History : Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Global Power

Title: The Present as History : Critical Perspectives on Contemporary Global Power
Author: Nermeen Shaikh
ISBN: 978-81-89632-17-5
Binding: Hardback
Date: 2008 
Publisher: Stanza 
Number of Pages: 276  
Price:  RS 495/-

Contents:

Acknowledgements.

Introduction.

I. The global economy: 1. Amartya Sen. 2. Helena Norberg-Hodge. 3. Sanjay Reddy. 4. Joseph Stiglitz.

II. Post colonialism and the new imperialism: 5. Partha Chatterjee. 6. Mahmood Mamdani. 7. Anatol Lieven.

III. Feminism and human rights: 8. Shirin Ebadi. 9. Lila Abu-Lughod. 10. Saba Mahmood. 11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

IV. Secularism and Islam: 12. Talal Asad. 13. Gil Anidjar.

Notes.

Index.

The Present as History is a rare opportunity to hear world-renowned scholars speak on the new imperialism, feminism and human rights, secularism and Islam, post-colonialism, and the global economy. They treat the United States as an object to be historically and politically interrogated rather than as the norm from which all else is to be evaluated and assess the Third World through its history of colonialism and neocolonialism rather than focusing on issues of culture and morality. Amartya Sen discusses the shortcomings of the development agenda as it was conceived at the close of the Second World War, while Joseph Stiglitz explains economic globalization and the power of the International Monetary Fund in guiding its trajectory. Sanjay Reddy argues that global poverty estimates are flawed, and Helena Norberg-Hodge uses her experience in Tibet to lay bare the problems with development practice. Political scientists Partha Chatterjee, Mahmood Mamdani, and Anatol Lieven chart the growth of hegemonic power from the colonial to the postcolonial period.Chatterjee examines the enduring effects of colonial administrative and governing practices, while Mamdani, focusing on the present global dispensation, explains the growth of terrorist movements around the world in the context of the Cold War. Lieven looks at the different strains of American nationalism and the continuities and ruptures between nineteenth-century empires and the present one. Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi elaborates the relationship between Islam, democracy, and human rights while anthropologists Lila Abu-Lughod and Saba Mahmood respectively trace the historical use of women as an excuse for imperial intervention and discuss the relationship between liberalism, Islam, and secularism. Literary theorist and cultural critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak looks at the legacy of colonialism in the domain of language and education, and isolates the problems associated with human rights discourse and practice.In conclusion, Talal Asad traces the genealogy of the term secularism, the special place of Islam within it, and its relationship to modernity.Gil Anidjar considers the distinction between religion and politics and elaborates the historical links between secularism and Christianity. Taken together, these interviews offer a valuable understanding of world history and a corrective to predominant conventional discourses on global power and justice.