Subjects of Desire: Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France

Title: Subjects of Desire : Hegelian Reflections in Twentieth-Century France
Author: Judith Butler
ISBN: 978-0231064514
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Number of Pages: 268
Price: $27.00

This now classic work by one of the most important philosophers and critics of our time charts the trajectory of desire and its genesis from Hegel's formulation in Phenomenology of Spirit through its appropriation by Kojève, Hyppolite, Sartre, Lacan, Deleuze, and Foucault, presenting how French reception of Hegel posed successive challenges to his metaphysics and view of the subject and revealed ambiguities within his position. Subjects of Desire provides a sophisticated account of the post-Hegelian tradition that has predominated in modern France and remains timely in thinking about contemporary debates concerning desire, the unconscious, subjection, and the subject.

Review

Robert B. Pippin, The Philosophical Review - "What her account suggests is that the most damaging aspect of contemporary French Hegel reception is that its highly critical emphasis on the metaphysical issues of identity, rationality, and historical closure have so obscured Hegel's original idealism, especially his theory of reflection, that the rejection of Hegel brings with it, with a kind of dialectical necessity, the return of the pre-Hegelian, even the pre-Kantian, a kind of naive hope for 'immediacy' and, paradoxically, a commitment to a realism that the idealist tradition was to have finished off." —

The Politics of Truth by Michel Foucault

Title: The Politics of Truth
Author: Michel Foucault
ISBN: 978-1-58435-039-2
Binding: Paper
Date: 2007
Publisher: MIT Press
Number of Pages: 195
Price: $14.95

In 1784, the German newspaper Berlinische Monatsschrift asked its audience to reply to the question "What is Enlightenment?" Immanuel Kant took the opportunity to investigate the purported truths and assumptions of his age. Two hundred years later, Michel Foucault wrote a response to Kant's initial essay, positioning Kant as the initiator of the discourse and critique of modernity. The Politics of Truth takes this initial encounter between Foucault and Kant, as a framework for its selection of unpublished essays and transcripts of lectures Foucault gave in America and France between 1978 and 1984, the year of his death. Ranging from reflections on the Enlightenment and revolution to a consideration of the Frankfurt School, this collection offers insight into the topics preoccupying Foucault as he worked on what would be his last body of published work, the three-volume History of Sexuality. It also offers what is in a sense the most "American" moment of Foucault's thinking, for it was in America that he realized the necessity of tying his own thought to that of the Frankfurt School.

Michel Foucault (1926–84) is widely considered to be one of the most influential academic voices of the twentieth century and has proven influential across disciplines.

Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left

Title: Contingency, Hegemony, Universality: Contemporary Dialogues on the Left
Author: Judith Butler , Ernesto Laclau, Slavoj Zizek
ISBN: 978-1859842782
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Verso
Number of Pages: 329
Price: £15.99

What is the contemporary legacy of Gramsci's notion of Hegemony? How can universality be reformulated now that its spurious versions have been so thoroughly criticized? In this ground-breaking project, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek engage in a dialogue on central questions of contemporary philosophy and politics. Their essays, organized as separate contributions that respond to one another, range over the Hegelian legacy in contemporary critical theory, the theoretical dilemmas of multiculturalism, the universalism- versus-particularism debate, the strategies of the Left in a globalized economy, and the relative merits of post-structumalism and Lacanian psychoanalysis for a critical social theory. While the rigour and intelligence with which these writers approach their work is formidable, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality benefits additionally from their clear sense of energy and enjoyment in a revealing and often unpredictable exchange.

The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 18801940

Title: The Heart of Whiteness: Normal Sexuality and Race in America, 18801940 Author: Julian Carter
ISBN: 978-0822339489
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Duke University Press
Number of Pages: Duke University Press
Price: £17.95

Whiteness still carries enormous weight, yet many whites express bafflement when accused of exercising racial power. For them, exercising public power is not racist, but natural. Unfortunately, its racial dimensions remain largely invisible to the people who wield it. In this slim but complex volume, Julian B. Carter explores how the power of whiteness was rendered invisible in the early twentieth century. White Americans shifted their rhetoric from talking about the superiority of white civilization to focusing on normality. "Normal" was, in essence, a distillation of white values, and the white origins of normality could go without saying. Making racial signifiers redundant and thus unnecessary made it possible for whites to forget the role of whiteness and white power in determining what "good Americans" accepted and advocated in social behavior. In the process, American culture linked appropriate (meaning white) private behavior with the good of the nation, thus perpetuating "white" civilization.

Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940

Title: Rethinking Working-Class History: Bengal 1890-1940
Author: Dipesh Chakrabarty
ISBN: 978-0-691-07030-8
Binding: Paper
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Number of Pages: 272
Price: $ 28.95

Dipesh Chakrabarty combines a history of the jute-mill workers of Calcutta with a fresh look at labor history in Marxist scholarship. Opposing a reductionist view of culture and consciousness, he examines the milieu of the jute-mill workers and the way it influenced their capacity for class solidarity and "revolutionary" action from 1890 to 1940. Around and within this empirical core is built his critique of emancipatory narratives and their relationship to such Marxian categories as "capital," "proletariat," or "class consciousness."

The book contributes to currently developing theories that connect Marxist historiography, post-structuralist thinking, and the traditions of hermeneutic analysis. Although Chakrabarty deploys Marxian arguments to explain the political practices of the workers he describes, he replaces universalizing Marxist explanations with a sensitive documentary method that stays close to the experience of workers and their European bosses. He finds in their relationship many elements of the landlord/tenant relationship from the rural past: the jute-mill workers of the period were preindividualist in consciousness and thus incapable of participating consistently in modern forms of politics and political organization.

Reena Spaulings by Bernadette Corporation

Title: Reena Spaulings
Author: Bernadette Corporation
ISBN: 978-1-58435-030-9
Binding: Paper
Publisher: SEMIOTEXT(E)
Number of Pages: 205
Price: $14.95

Set in post-9/11 New York City, Reena Spaulings was written by a large collective of writers and artists that bills itself as The Bernadette Corporation. Like most contemporary fiction, Reena Spaulings is about a female twenty-something. Reena is discovered while working as a museum guard and becomes a rich international supermodel. Meanwhile, a bout of terrible weather seizes New York, leaving in its wake a strange form of civil disobedience that stirs its citizens to mount a musical song-and-dance riot called "Battle on Broadway." Fashioned in the old Hollywood manner by a legion of professional and amateur writers striving to achieve the ultimate blockbuster, the musical ends up being about a nobody who could be anybody becoming a somebody for everybody. The result is generic and perfect—not unlike Reena Spaulings itself, whose many authors create a story in which New York itself strives to become the ultimate collective experiment in which the only thing shared is the lack of uniqueness.

About Bernadette Corporation

The artist-collective Bernadette Corporation was founded in a night club in 1994. In the beginning the group organized spontaneous, purposeless events in public space. In 1995 they morphed into a fashion label, then a self-publishing company that from 1999 to 2001 published an art magazine called Made in USA. Bernadette Corporation has also produced films, including Hell Frozen Over (2000), and Get Rid of Yourself (2003), as well as exhibits at art galleries and museums throughout the world.

Review from Frieze magazine

Postmodernism and the Other

Title: Postmodernism and the Other
Author: Ziauddin Sardar
ISBN: 978-0745307497
Binding: Paperback
Publisher: Pluto
Number of Pages: 344
Price: £ 19.95

This controversial work examines postmodernism from a non-Western perspective, and exposes its claims as a sham. Sardar makes a systematic assessment of the salient spheres of postmodernism - from philosophy and architecture, to film, music and new age religions - and reveals that, contrary to commonly-held notions, postmodernism operates to further marginalise the reality of the non-West and confound its aspirations.