Philosophy and Social by Rorty

Title: Philosophy and Social Hope
Author: Richard Rorty
ISBN: 9780140262889
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Penguin
Number of Pages: 320
Price: £6.99

Since Plato most philosophy has aimed at true knowledge, penetrating beneath appearances to an underlying reality. Against this tradition, Richard Rorty convincingly argues, pragmatism offers a new philosophy of hope. One of the most controversial figures in recent philosophical and wider literary and cultural debate, Rorty brings together an original collection of his most recent philosophical and cultural writings. He explains in a fascinating memoir how he began to move away from Plato towards William James and Dewey, culminating in his own version of pragmatism. What ultimately matters, Rorty suggests, is not whether our ideas correspond to some fundamental reality but whether they help us carry out practical tasks and create a fairer and more democratic society.

Aimed at a general audience, this volume offers a stimulating summary of Rorty's central philosophical beliefs, as well as some challenging insights into contemporary culture, justice, education, and love.

Dog Heart by Breyten Breytenbach

Title: Dog Heart
Author: Breyten Breytenbach
ISBN: 9780571200665
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Number of Pages: 208
Original Price: £9.99
Our Price: £ 6.99

'What I want to write is the penetration, expansion, skirmishing, coupling, mixing, separation, regrouping of peoples and cultures - the glorious bastardization of men and women mutually shaped by sky and rain and wind and soil.'

The leading Afrikaaner poet and anti-apartheid campaigner, Breyten Breytenbach returns to South Africa from Parisian exile and finds himself excavating both his family's history and that of his nation, through a series of contemporary sketches and haunting reminiscences which are highly coloured, strongly poetic, and often unsettling. We encounter the 'New South Africa', where efforts at a formal process of Truth and Reconciliation teeter uneasily atop a legacy of terrible and enduring violence.

The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist

Title:The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist
Author: Breyten Breytenbach
ISBN: 9780571136162
Binding:Paperback
Publisher:Faber and faber
Number of Pages:416
Original price: £9.99
Our Price:£ 6.99

A memoir of Breytenbach’s seven years in South Africa’s prisons - two of them in solitary confinement - this book captures the full horror of life in one of the worst penal systems in the world.

About The Author

Breyten Breytenbach was born in South Africa in 1939. He left South Africa in 1959 to travel throughout Europe, settling in Paris in 1961. He rapidly established himself as a leading Afrikaner poet of his generation, as well as a painter of distinction. Whilst in Europe he became active in the anti-apartheid movement, and it was during a return visit to South Africa in 1975 that he was arrested. He was convicted of terrorism and sentenced to nine years imprisonment. He was eventually found not guilty of the charges, but remained a political prisoner until 1982. Following his release, he returned to Paris, where he still lives with his wife, and obtained French citizenship.

In 1992 he co-founded the Goree Institute in Senegal, and in 1995 he co-founded the Centre for Creative Arts at the University of Natal. He has been a Visiting Professor at the University of Natal, Princeton University, the University of Cape Town, and New York University.

Breyten Breytenbach has won numerous awards for his writing and his painting, and his books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.

The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology (Illustrated)

Title: The Art of Art History: A Critical Anthology
Author: Ed by Donald Preziosi
ISBN 10: 0192842420
ISBN-13: 978-0192842428
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Number of Pages: 608
Price: £16.99

The history of art has been written and rewritten since classical antiquity. Since the foundation of the modern discipline of art history in Germany in the late eighteenth century, debates about art and its histories have intensified. Historians, philosophers, psychologists, and anthropologists among others have changed our notions of what art history has been, is, and might be.

The Art of Art History is a unique guide to understanding art history through a critical reading of the field's most innovative and influential texts over the past two centuries. Each section focuses on a key issue: aesthetics, style, history as an art, iconography and semiology, gender, modernity and postmodernity, deconstruction and museology. More than thirty readings from writers as diverse as Winckelmann, Kant, Gombrich, Warburg, Panofsky, Heidegger, Lisa Tickner, Meyer Schapiro, Jacques Derrida, Mary Kelly, Michel Foucault, Rosalind Krauss, Louis Marin, Margaret Iversen, and Nestor Canclini are brought together, and Donald Preziosi's introductions to each topic provide background information, bibliographies, and critical elucidations of the issues at stake. His own concluding essay is an important and original contribution to scholarship in the field.

My teaching by Jacques Lacan

Title: My teaching
Author: Jacques Lacan
ISBN: 978 1 84467 271 4
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 128
Price: £8.99

Bringing together three previously unpublished lectures presented to the public by Lacan at the height of his career, My Teaching is a clear, concise introduction to the thought of the influential psychoanalyst. Drawing on examples from popular culture and common sense, this lively book explores a range of Lacan’s most important ideas, including his debt to Freud, linguistic unconsciousness and sexuality in its relation to psychoanalytic truth. Engaging, witty and personal, My Teaching offers a rare opportunity to engage directly with Lacan's own general explanation of his teaching to a non-psychoanalytic audience.

The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry

Title: The Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry
Author: Ed By Lakshmi Holmstrom Edited By Subashree Krishnaswamy
ISBN: 9780670082810
Binding: Hard back
Publisher: Penguin/Wiking
Number of Pages: 260
Price: INR 499/-

The Rapids of a Great River begins with selections from the earliest known Tamil poetry dating from the second century CE. The writings of the Sangam period laid the foundation for the Tamil poetic tradition, and they continue to underlie and inform the works of Tamil poets even today. The first part of this anthology traverses the Sangam and bhakti periods and closes with pre-modern poems from the nineteenth century. The second part, a compilation of modern and contemporary poetry, opens with the work of the revolutionary poet Subramania Bharati. Breaking free from prescriptions, the new voices—which include Sri Lankan Tamils, women and dalits, among others—address the contemporary reader; the poems, underscored by a sharp rhetorical edge, grapple with the complexities of the modern political and social world.

The selection is wide-ranging and the translations admirably echo the music, pace and resonance of the poems. This anthology links the old with the new, cementing the continuity of a richly textured tradition. There is something in the collection for every reader and each will make his or her own connections—at times startling, at other times familiar.

Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory

Title: Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory
Author: Ed by Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, Sarah Stanbury
ISBN-10: 0231105452
ISBN-13: 978-0231105453
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Number of Pages: 384

Price: $29.00

In many fields, the body is the topic generating exciting new research and interdisciplinary inquiry. Feminist theorists, in particular, have focused on the female body as the site where representations of difference and identity are inscribed. Drawn from a broad range of disciplines, explores the tensions between women's lived bodily experiences and the cultural meanings inscribed on the female body. The volume includes classic and contemporary essays on rape, pornography, eroticism, anorexia, body building, menstruation, and maternity, and challenges racial, class, and sexual categories. Complemented by the editor's introduction, is a comprehensive sourcebook on the major theoretical positions and critical trends surrounding the female body.

The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century

Title: The Art of Reflection: Women Artists' Self-Portraiture in the Twentieth Century
Author: Marsha Meskimmon
ISBN10: 0231106874
ISBN-13: 978-0231106870
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Number of Pages: 224
Price: $30.50

Self-portraiture has long been a means for the male artist to assert an identity as masterful creator or tortured soul; women have overwhelmingly been presented as objects, and rarely as subjects of self-portraiture. In recent years, however, women artists have used their work to disrupt this tradition. With 43 illustrations of works by Louise Bourgeois, Frida Kahlo, Alice Neel, Cindy Sherman, and Jo Spence, among others, is the first sustained inquiry into the appropriation of self-portraiture by women. In suggestive critical meditations on paintings, photographic work, sculpture, performance art, and body art, Marsha Meskimmon shows how twentieth-century women artists have undermined male-centered definitions of how "the artist" depicts the self. Drawing upon feminist theory and philosophy from Simone de Beauvoir to Luce Irigaray, casts doubt on the idea of self-portrait as a mirror, in which the static self is rendered accurately and naturalistically. Meskimmon evokes a series of myths about what an artist is, how "he" should be represented, and how "his" work is to be read as autobiography. Through close readings of the imaginative self-representations of women artists -as male artist and god, as central player in the studio and in the Christian passion- she shatters these myths. In an absorbing assessment of the ways women artists have negotiated the complex group of roles ascribed to "woman," Meskimmon considers the partially nude painting by pregnant artist Paula Modersohn-Becker and performance artist Annie Sprinkle's confrontation of the thin line between celebration of female sexuality and objectification of the female body. As a nuanced appreciation of the interpretations of self-portraiture among women artists, will prove an invaluable resource on a subject that has received little attention from art criticism. Meskimmon's work also presents a bold challenge to critical tradition, compelling readers to rethink the meaning of the genre as a whole.

Adding insult to injury

Title: Adding insult to injury

Author: Nancy Fraser

ISBN: 9781859842232

Binding: Paper

Date: 2008

Publisher: Verso

Number of Pages: 360

Price: £16.99

Historically, leftwing accounts of injustice focussed primarily on economic harms, such as poverty, exploitation, and inequality. Recently, however, with the collapse of Communism and the rise of identity politics, attention has turned toward cultural harms, such as cultural imperialism, 'misrecognition,' and disrespect. New challenges for the left are raised: How to do justice to the legitimate claims of multiculturalism without abandoning the left's historic-and still indispensable-commitment to economic equality? How to broaden the understanding of injustice by adding (cultural) insult to (economic) injury? Adding Insult to Injury traces the debate sparked by Nancy Fraser's controversial effort to combine the social politics of equality and the cultural politics of difference, while probing the tensions between them. Introduced by Richard Rorty, the volume contains Fraser's influential essay 'From Redistribution to Recognition?'; critical responses by Judith Butler, Joseph Heath, Kevin Olson, Anne Phillips, and Iris Marion Young; and Fraser's rejoinders to them. The result is a wide-ranging and at times contentious exploration of alternative approaches to rebuilding the left.

Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market

Title: Firing Back: Against the Tyranny of the Market
Author: Pierre Bourdieu
ISBN: 9781859846582
Binding: Paper
Date: 2003
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 96
Price: £9.00

Globalization's threat to artists and intellectuals, and how they can rebut it. Pierre Bourdieu, described by The Nation as "worthy of the militant mantle of Sartre and Foucault," here continues the themes advanced so successfully in his previous book Acts of Resistance. Firing Back is an eloquent dissection of globalization's intellectual and cultural role throughout the world, and a discussion of the ways in which effective opposition to it can be mounted. Bourdieu examines Europe's potential as a counterweight to America's globalizing policy and discusses how intellectuals and those working in the cultural sphere can create meaningful alternatives. He also raises challenging questions about the depoliticization of the academic world, arguing that scholars can no longer maintain that their research is objective or value-free. In a preface written for this edition, Bourdieu directly addresses American readers about the role they can play in the burgeoning anti-globalization movement.

Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange

Title: Redistribution or Recognition?: A Political-Philosophical Exchange

Author: Nancy Fraser , Axel Honneth

ISBN: 978-1859844922

Binding: Paper

Date: 2003

Publisher: Verso

Number of Pages: 273

Price: £16.00

"Recognition" has become a keyword of our time, but its relation to economic "redistribution" remains unclear. This volume stages a debate between two philosophers, one North American, the other German, who hold different views of the relation of redistribution to recognition. Axel Honneth conceives recognition as the fundamental, over-arching moral category, potentially encompassing redistribution, while Nancy Fraser argues that the two categories are both fundamental and mutually irreducible. In alternating chapters the authors respond to each other's criticisms, and offer a lively dialogue on identity politics, capitalism and social justice. The volume is a dramatic riposte to those who proclaim the death of "grand theory".

Metapolitics- Alain Badiou

Title: Metapolitics

Author: Alain Badiou

ISBN: 978-1844675678

Binding: Paper

Date: 2006

Publisher: Verso

Number of Pages: 159

Price: £11.99

Metapolitics argues that one of the main tasks of contemporary thought is to abolish the idea that politics is merely an object for philosophical reflection. Badiou indicts this approach, which reduces politics to a matter of opinion, thus eliminating any of its truly radical and emancipatory possibilities.

Against this intellectual tradition, Badiou proposes instead the consideration of politics in terms of the production of truth and the affirmation of equality. He demands that the question of a possible "political truth" be separated from any notion of consensus or public opinion, and that political action be rethought in terms of the complex process that binds discussion to decision.

Starting from this analysis, Badiou critically examines the thought of anthropologist and political theorist Sylvain Lazarus, Jacques Rancière's writings on workers' history and democratic dissensus, the role of the subject in Althusser, as well as the concept of democracy and the link between truth and justice.

The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism

Title: The Absence of Myth: Writings on Surrealism
Author: Georges Bataille
ISBN: 9781844675609
Binding: Paper
Date: 2006
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 211
Price: £12.99

A veritable cult figure for postmodernism, Bataille (1897-1962) formulated what is now vanguard received wisdom, and he did so long before Derrida proposed differance in 1967, giving Bataille's pronouncements the additional authority of duration. Furthermore, while eschewing the Orphic, he typically encapsulates his ideas with a near-eminently quotable-paradox (e.g., "The sacred demands the violation of what is normally the object of terrified respect"). These pieces, dating mostly from 1945 to 1951, when surrealism was attempting a second wave, are documents of Parisian intellectual life, discussing such issues as the distinctions between existentialism and surrealism and the Camus/Sartre quarrel following The Rebel (1951). Bataille sees successful surrealism as the destruction of self, the individualism that must be sacrificed before liberty can be achieved for the community. Richardson's accurate and readable translations are carefully annotated, making this a useful collection for English readers.
Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY-Binghamton
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