Red Sun: Travels in naxalite country

Title: Red Sun: Travels in naxalite country
Author:Sudeep Chakravarti
ISBN:9780143066538
Binding: paper back
Date: 2008
Publisher: penguin books
Number of Pages: 411
Price: INR 350

‘The Maoists are patriots, by their own admission . . . India’s Maoists do not want a separate country. They already have one. It’s just not the way they would like it—yet.’

In 1967, Naxalbari, a village in West Bengal, became the centre of a Mao-inspired militant peasant uprising guided by firebrand intellectuals. Today, Naxalism is no longer the Che Guevara-style revolution that it was. Spread across 15 of India’s 28 states, it is one of the world’s biggest, most sophisticated extreme-Left movements, and feeds off the misery and anger of the dispossessed. Since the late 1990s, hardly a week has passed without people dying in strikes and counter-strikes by the Maoists—interchangeably known as the Naxalites—and police and paramilitary forces.

In this brilliant and disturbing examination of the ‘Other India’, Sudeep Chakravarti combines political history, extensive interviews and individual case histories as he travels to the heart of Maoist zones in the country: Chhattisgarh (home to the controversial state-sponsored Salwa Judum programme to contain Naxalism), Jharkhand, West Bengal, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh (where a serving chief minister was nearly killed in a landmine explosion triggered by the Naxalites). He meets Maoist leaders and sympathizers, policemen, bureaucrats, politicians, security analysts, development workers, farmers and tribals—people, big and small, who comprise the actors and the audience in this war being fought in jungles and impoverished villages across India. What emerges is a sobering picture of a deeply divided society, and the dangers that lie ahead for India.

The indivisible remainder , Slavoj Zizek

Title: The indivisible remainder
Author: Slavoj Zizek
ISBN:139781844675814
Binding: Paper back
Date: 2007
Publisher: Radical thinkers,London new york
Number of Pages: 248
Price: £ 6.99

The feature which distinguishes the great works of materialist thought, from Lucretius’ De rerum natura through Capital to the writings of Lacan, is their unfinished character: again and again they tackle their chosen problem. Schelling’s Weltalter drafts belong to this same series, with their repeated attempt at the formulation of the ‘beginning of the world,’ of the passage from the pre-symbolic pulsation of the Real to the universe of logos.

F.W.J. Schelling, the German idealist who for too long dwelled in the shadow of Kant and Hegel, was the first to formulate the post-idealist motifs of finitude, contingency and temporality. His unique work announces Marx's critique of speculative idealism, as well as the properly Freudian notion of drive, of a blind compulsion to repeat which can never be sublated in the ideal medium of language.

The Indivisible Remainder begins with a detailed examination of the two works in which Schelling's speculative audacity reached its peak: his essay on human freedom and his drafts on the “Ages of the World.” After reconstituting their line of argumentation, Slavoj Zizek confronts Schelling with Hegel, and concludes by throwing a Schellingian light on some “related matters”: the consequences of the computerization of daily life for sexual experience; cynicism as today's predominant form of ideology; the epistemological deadlocks of quantum physics.

Although the book is packed with examples from politics and popular culture — the unmistakable token of Zizek’s style — from Speed and Groundhog Day to Forrest Gump, it signals a major shift towards a systematic concern with the basic questions of philosophy and the roots of the crisis of our late-capitalist universe, centred around the enigma of modern subjectivity.

Doveglion:Collected poems by Jose Garcia Villa

Title: Doveglion:Collected poems
Author: Jose Garcia Villa
ISBN:9780143105350
Binding: paper back
Date: 2008
Publisher: penguin classics
Number of Pages: 260
Price: $ 11.00

Known as the “Pope of Greenwich Village,” José Garcia Villa had a special status as the only Asian poet among a group of modern literary giants in 1940s New York that included W. H. Auden, Tennessee Williams, and a young Gore Vidal. But beyond his exotic ethnicity, Villa was a global poet who was admired for “the reverence, the raptness, the depth of concentration in [his] bravely deep poems” (Marianne Moore). Doveglion (Villa’s pen name—for dove, eagle, and lion) contains Villa’s collected poetry, including rare and previously unpublished material.

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination

Title: The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
Author: Sandra M. Gilbert , Professor Susan Gubar
ISBN: 9788186423844
Binding: Paper
Date: 2007
Publisher: Worldview
Number of Pages: 718
Price: 395/-

Product Description

This pathbreaking book of feminist criticism is now reissued with a substantial new introduction by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar that reveals the origins of their revolutionary realization in the 1970s that "the personal was the political, the sexual was the textual.

About the Author

Sandra M. Gilbert is professor of English at the University of California at Davis. Susan Gubar is professor of English and women's studies at Indiana University. They are the co-authors of the three-volume No Man's Land, also published by Yale University Press

Global Sex

Title: Global Sex

Author: Dennis Altman
ISBN: 978-0226016054
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: University Of Chicago Press

Number of Pages: 216 pages
Price: $15

From Publishers WeeklyTracing the combined impact of telecommunications, faster air-travel and the Internet on sexual expression the world over, Altman (Homosexual: Oppression and Liberation) historicizes sexual activity while exploring specific changes resulting from advances in technology. Covering such issues as the impact of prostitution and pornography on global economics, and how AIDS affects sexual practices, legislation and the commercialization of sex, he presents a gripping portrait of a world barely able to keep pace psychologically, sociologically and theologically with enormous, rapid-fire changes. An AIDS/HIV activist as well as a professor in the School of Politics, Sociology and Anthropology at La Trobe University, Australia, Altman is best when he's most specific for example, when he compares Bangkok's current reputation with Vienna's as "the global brothel" circa 1900; when he traces the dissemination of U.S. gay culture around the world; or when he discusses how Reagan and Thatcher used traditional "moral panics" to promote their agendas. Drawing upon a wide range of sources and cultural artifacts including Playboy, U.N. Development Programme reports, Sharon Stone's famous leg crossing in Basic Instinct, and La Cage aux Folles, as well as the theories of Freud, Herbert Marcuse, William Reich and Franz Fanon Altman ranges outside the usual boundaries of academic research. Offering neither a dire warning nor a reason to rejoice (he sees "the interconnectedness of the world [as] both a threat and an opportunity) his savvy, energetic book truly maintains a global perspective.

The Agamben Effect (South Atlantic Quarterly)

Title: The Agamben Effect (South Atlantic Quarterly)
Author: Alison Ross (Editor)
ISBN: 10: 0822366843 ISBN-13: 978-0822366843
Binding: Paper
Date: 2008
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: 216 pages
Price: £ 10.99

Product DescriptionItalian philosopher Giorgio Agamben--whose work has influenced intellectuals in political theory, political philosophy, legal theory, literature, and art--stands among the foremost intellectual figures of the modern era. Engaging with a range of thinkers from Carl Schmitt and Martin Heidegger to Jacques Rancière and Alain Badiou, Agamben considers some of the most pressing issues in recent history and politics. His work explores the relationship between the sovereign state and the politically marginalized Homo Sacer--exiles, refugees, prisoners of war, and others whom the state actively excludes from political participation and full humanity. Further, his critique of the increasing deployment of a "state of exception"--the declaration of a state of emergency that legitimizes the sovereign state's suspension of law for the public good--as a dominant paradigm for governing has particular power in today's global political climate.

Infused with the spirit of Agamben's critical self-reflection, this special issue of SAQ examines his seminal works Homo Sacer (1995), The Open (2002), and State of Exception (2003). Some contributors use Agamben's work to examine the history of abortion law in the West, the history of slavery, and women's rights. Others analyze the connections between Agamben's work and that of his contemporaries, including Jacques Derrida, Slavoj Zizek, and Jean-Luc Nancy. Still other essays identify new points of interdisciplinary communication between some of Agamben's most provocative ideas and popular twentieth-century writing.

Contributors. Andrew Benjamin, Claire Colebrook, Jean-Philippe Deranty, Penelope Deutscher, Eleanor Kaufman, Adrian Mackenzie, Catherine Mills, Alison Ross, Lee Spinks, Ewa Płonowska Ziarek, Krzysztof Ziarek

State of Exception

Title: State of Exception
Author: Giorgio Agamben
ISBN 0226009254 , ISBN-13: 978-0226009254
Binding: Paper
Date: 2005
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Number of Pages: 104 pages
Price: $15

"State of Exception is an impressive and disquieting meditation on the state of the democratic institutions by which political power is organised in the West. Written in a simple and lucid language, this is an erudite, meticulous, and precise examination of the long and complex history of the ideological framework underpinning the present obsession with the state of exception as the ''new form-of-state'' as it obtains at least in the USA and UK." (Tony Simoes da Silva International Journal of Baudrillard Studies )

"For Agamben, fingerprinting is not just a matter of civil liberties: it is symptomatic of an alarming shift in political geography. We have moved from Athens to Auschwitz: the West''s political model is now the concentration camp rather than the city state; we are no longer citizens but detainees, distinguishable from the inmates of Guantanamo not by any difference in legal status, but only by the fact that we have not yet had the misfortune to be incarcerated--or unexpectedly executed by a missile from an unmanned aircraft. . . . But although his recent examples come from the war on terror, the political development they represent is not, according to Agamben, peculiar to the United States under the Bush presidency. It is part of a wider range in governance in which the rule of law is routinely displaced by the state of exception, or emergency, and people are increasingly subject to extra-judicial state violence."--Malcolm Bull, London Review of Books (Malcolm Bull London Review of Books )