ZONE’s inaugural double issue examines the physical, political, and perceptual transformations redefining the contemporary city.

These transformations are explored through historical studies of transformations in the urban system, through theoretical essays which map out the evolution of related social and economic structures (such as, the state, the family, and the factory), and through experimental art projects and critical dossiers.

Some of the many contributors to this issue include: Christopher Alexander, John Baldessari, Gilles Deleuze, Peter Eisenman, Rem Koolhaas, William Labov, Michael Piore, and Paul Virilio.

Zone 1|2: The Contemporary City

Bernie Miller

In this book, one of the most esteemed contemporary historians of the Middle Ages presents a concise examination of the problem that usury posed for the medieval Church, which had long denounced the lending of money for interest. Jacques Le Goff describes how, as the structure of economic life inevitably began to include financial loans, the Church refashioned its ideology in order to condemn the usurer not to hell but merely to purgatory. Le Goff is in the forefront of a history that studies “the deeply rooted and the slowly changing.” As one keenly aware of the inertia of older societies, he is all the more able to delineate for us the disruptive forces of change.

Your Money or Your Life: Economy and Religion in the Middle Ages

Liz Magor

In these two essays, two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other’s work. In so doing, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present reflections on writing, language, and representation that question the status of the author/subject and explore the notion of a “neutral” voice that arises from the realm of the “outside.” This book is crucial not only to an understanding of these two thinkers, but also to any overview of recent French thought.

Foucault | Blanchot

In this seminal, founding work of political anthropology, Pierre Clastres takes on some of the most abiding and essential questions of human civilization: What is power? What is society? How, among all the possible modes of political organization, did we come to choose the monolithic State model and its accompanying regimes of coercion? As Clastres shows, other and different regimes do indeed exist, and they existed long before ours — regimes in which power, though it manifests itself everywhere, is nonetheless noncoercive. In such societies, political culture, and cultural practices generally, are not only not submissive to the State model, but they actively avert it, rendering impossible the very conditions in which coercive power and the State could arise. How then could our own “societies of the State” ever have arisen from these rich and complex stateless societies, and why?

Clastres brilliantly and imaginatively addresses these questions, meditating on the peculiar shape and dynamics of so-called “primitive societies,” and especially on the discourses with which “civilized” (i.e., political, economic, literate) peoples have not ceased to reduce and contain them. He refutes outright the idea that the State is the ultimate and logical density of all societies. On the contrary, Clastres develops a whole alternate and always affirmative political technology based on values such as leisure, prestige, and generosity. Through individual essays he explores and deftly situates the anarchistic political and social roles of storytelling, homosexuality, jokes, ruinous gift-giving, and the torturous ritual marking of the body, placing them within an economy of power and desire very different from our own, one whose most fundamental goal is to celebrate life while rendering the rise of despotic power impossible. Though power itself is shown to be inseparable from the richest and most complex forms of social life, the State is seen as a specific but grotesque aberration peculiar only to certain societies, not least of which is our own

Society Against The State

The Poetic Structure of the World is a major reconsideration of a crucial turning point in Western thought and culture: the heliocentric revolution of Copernicus and Kepler. Conceiving of their work not in terms of a history of science or astronomy, but as events embedded in a wider field of images, symbols, texts, and practices, Fernand Hallyn insists that these new representations of the universe cannot be explained by recourse to theories of “genius” and “intuition.” The scientific imagination is not fundamentally different from a mythic or poetic imagination, and the work of Copernicus and Kepler, Hallyn contends, must be examined on the level of rhetorical structure. Thus the new sun-centered universe is shown to be inseparable from the aesthetic, epistemological, theological, and social imperatives of both Neoplatonism and Mannerism in the sixteenth century.

The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler

Phenomena: Paintings 1971–1987

Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet are leaders in a contemporary French classical scholarship that has produced a stunning reconfiguration of Greek thought and literature. In this work, the authors present a disturbing and decidedly nonclassical reading of Greek tragedy that insists on its radical discontinuity with our own outlook and with our social, aesthetic, and psychological categories. Originally published in French in two volumes, this new single-volume edition includes revised essays from Volume I as well as the first English translation of Volume II.

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece

What is needed for something new to appear? According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the most brilliant of contemporary philosophers, this question of “novelty” is the major problem posed by Bergson’s work. In Bergsonism, Deleuze demonstrates both the development and the range of three fundamental Bergsonian concepts: duration, memory, and the élan vital. A perfect companion book to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Bergsonism is also of particular interest to students of Deleuze’s own work, influenced as it is by Bergson. Given his texts on Nietzsche, Kafka, and cinema, this book by Deleuze is essential to his English-reading audience. The paperback contains a new afterword prepared by the author especially for this English-language edition.

Bergsonism

“Since the end of the last century,” Walter Benjamin wrote, “philosophy has made a series of attempts to lay hold of the ‘true’ experience as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses. It is customary to classify these efforts under the heading of a philosophy of life. Towering above this literature is Henri Bergson’s early monumental work Matter and Memory.” Along with Husserl’s Ideas and Heidegger’s Being and Time, Bergson’s work represents one of the great twentieth-century investigations into perception and memory, movement and time, matter and mind. Arguably Bergson’s most significant book, Matter and Memory is essential to an understanding of his philosophy and its legacy.

Matter and Memory

Mitra-Varuna, perhaps the single most influential work by Georges Dumézil, has had a major impact on many disciplines. Now that it is available in English for the first time, American readers will discover here a seminal essay in the archaeology of social power. In his work at large, Dumézil has demonstrated how all the major Indo-European religions are articulated according to three hierarchical functions: sacred sovereignty, force, and fecundity. In Mitra-Varuna, he develops his general theory but concentrates on the most important of these functions: sovereignty. From India to Rome, from Iran to Scandinavia, sovereignty is conceived of as a dual category: on the one hand, the magician-king (raj, rex), and on the other, the jurist-priest (brahman, flamen). A founding work of comparative mythology, Mitra-Varuna combines extraordinary scholarship and theoretical discovery.

Mitra-Varuna

In this groundbreaking study, Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece takes us far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon to reveal a fundamentally other culture — one of slavery, of masks and death, of scapegoats, of ritual hunting, and of ecstasies.

Vernant’s provocative discussions of various institutions and practices (including war, marriage, and sacrifice) detail the complex intersection of the religious, social, and political structures of ancient Greece. The book concludes with Vernant’s authoritative genealogy of the study of myth from Antiquity to structuralism and beyond. “Myth,” he writes, “brings into operation a form of logic which we may describe, unlike the logic of noncontradiction of the philosophers, as a logic of the ambiguous and the equivocal.”

Myth and Society in Ancient Greece

In this important work, Georges Bataille uses his novel economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. He introduces here his concept of the accursed share, the surplus energy that any system, natural or cultural, must expend; it is this expenditure, according to Bataille, that most clearly defines a society. His examples include sacrifice among the Aztecs, potlatch among the Northwest Coast Indians, military conquest in Islam, and Buddhist monasticism in Tibet. In this way, Bataille proposes a theory of a “general economy” based on excess and exuberance that radically revises conventional economic models of scarcity and utility. A brilliant blend of economics and aesthetics, ethics and anthropology, The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille’s philosophic work. It will be of particular interest not only to readers of his fiction and essays but also to cultural theorists, anthropologists, and economists of all schools.

The Accursed Share, Volume I

In this beautiful meditation on the art-historical problem of style, Henri Focillon (1881–1943) describes how art forms change over time. Although he argues that the development of art is irreducible to external political, social, or economic determinants, one of his great achievements was to lodge a concept of autonomous formal mutation within the shifting domain of materials and techniques. Focillon emphasizes the presence of nonsynchronous tendencies within styles that give artworks a manifold and stratified character.

The Life of Forms in Art remains one of the most brilliant and important reflections on the morphology of art. It has been superbly translated by Yale art historian George Kubler, whose book The Shape of Time was influenced by Focillon. The book also contains a critical introduction by Jean Molino.

The Life of Forms in Art

The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century. It takes as its starting point the sudden appearance of biology as a science in the nineteenth century and examines the conditions determining its particular makeup.

Canguilhem analyzes the radically new way in which health and disease were defined in the early nineteenth century, showing that the emerging categories of the normal and the pathological were far from objective scientific concepts. He demonstrates how the epistemological foundations of modern biology and medicine were intertwined with political, economic, and technological imperatives.

Canguilhem was an important influence on the thought of Michel Foucault and Louis Althusser, among others, in particular for the way in which he poses the problem of how new domains of knowledge come into being and how they are part of a discontinuous history of human thought.

The Normal and the Pathological

The Wicked Queen is not a biography of one of the most infamous queens in history. Rather, Chantal Thomas presents the history of the verbal and visual representations of Marie-Antoinette, the history of her mythification. Almost as soon as Marie-Antoinette, archduchess of Austria, was brought to France in 1771 as the bride of Louis XVI, she was smothered in images. In a monarchy increasingly under assault, the charm and horror of her feminine body and her destructive political power as a foreign intruder turned Marie-Antoinette into an alien other — the bestial “arch-tigress of Austria.” Working as a historian and writing like a novelist, Thomas reveals how Marie-Antoinette came to symbolize the marginalization and negation of women in French society before the French Revolution.

In a series of pamphlets written between the 1770s and her death in 1793, Marie-Antoinette was portrayed as a frivolous and extravagant spendthrift and lesbian, an incestuous and bloodthirsty libertine, a poisoner and infant murderess. “Through her wickedness,” writes Thomas, “she caused the Revolution.” In her analyses of these anonymous pamphlets, seven of which are included here in translation for the first time, Thomas reconstructs how the pamphleteers’ mounting hallucinatory and libelous discourse culminated in the inevitable and physical destruction of what had become the counterrevolutionary symbol par excellence. The Wicked Queen exposes the complex and complicated history and power of an image, the elaborate process by which the myth of Marie-Antoinette emerged as a crucial element in the successful staging of the French Revolution.

The Wicked Queen: The Origins of the Myth of Marie-Antoinette

Theory of Religion brings to philosophy what Georges Bataille’s earlier book The Accursed Share brought to anthropology and history, namely, an analysis based on notions of excess and expenditure. No other work of Bataille’s, and perhaps no other work anywhere since Weber’s Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, has managed to draw so incisively the links between man’s religious and economic activities. “Religion,” according to Bataille, “is the search for a lost intimacy.” In a brilliant and tightly reasoned argument, he proceeds to develop a “general economy” of man’s relation to this intimacy: from the seamless immanence of animality to the shattered world of objects and the partial, ritual recovery of the intimate order through the violence of the sacrifice. Bataille then reflects on the archaic festival, in which he sees not only the glorious affirmation of life through destructive consumption but also the seeds of another, more ominous order — war. Bataille then traces the rise of the modern military order, in which production ceases to be oriented toward the destruction of a surplus and violence is no longer deployed inwardly but is turned to the outside. In these twin developments one can see the origins of modern capitalism.

Theory of Religion

The forty-eight essays and photographic dossiers in these three volumes examine the history of the human body as a field where life and thought intersect. They show how different cultures at different times have entwined physical capacities and mental mechanisms in order to construct a body adapted to moral ideas or social circumstances — the body of a charismatic citizen or a visionary monk, a mirror image of the world or a reflection of the spirit.

Each volume emphasizes a particular perspective. Part 1 explores the human body’s relationship to the divine, to the bestial, and to the machines that imitate or simulate it. Part 2 covers the junctures between the body’s “outside” and “inside” by studying the manifestations — or production — of the soul and the expression of the emotions and, on another level, by examining the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain, and death. Part 3 brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how organs or bodily substances can be used to justify or challenge the way human societies function and, conversely, how political and social functions tend to make the bodies of the persons filling them the organs of a larger body — the social body or the universe as a whole.

Among the contributors to Fragments for a History of the Human Body are Mark Elvin, Catherine Gallagher, Françoise Héritier-Augé, Julia Kristeva, William R. LaFleur, Thomas W. Laqueur, Jacques Le Goff, Nicole Loraux, Mario Perniola, Hillel Schwartz, Jean Starobinski, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Caroline Walker Bynum.

Zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part One

Zone 4: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two

Zone 5: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Three

Art Gallery of Ontario: Selected Works

In this remarkable work, Gilles Deleuze, the renowned French philosopher, reflects on one of the thinkers of the past who most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration of the tasks of philosophy. For Deleuze, Spinoza, along with Nietzsche and Lucretius, conceived of philosophy as an enterprise of liberation and radical demystification. He locates in Spinoza “a set of affects, a kinetic determination, an impulse” and makes Spinoza into “an encounter, a passion.” Expressionism in Philosophy was the culmination of a series of monographic studies by Deleuze (on Hume, Bergson, Nietzsche, Proust, Kant, and Sacher-Masoch) and prepared the transition from these abstract treatments of historical schemes of experience to the nomadology of Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, co-authored with Félix Guattari). Thus, Expressionism in Philosophy is both a pivotal reading of Spinoza’s work and a crucial text within the development of Deleuze’s thought.

Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza

Fragmentation and Redemption is first of all about bodies and the relationship of part to whole in the high Middle Ages, a period in which the overcoming of partition and putrefaction was the very image of paradise. It is also a study of gender, that is, a study of how sex roles and possibilities are conceptualized by both men and women, even though asymmetric power relationships and men’s greater access to knowledge have informed the cultural construction of categories such as “male” and “female,” “heretic” and “saint.” Finally, these essays are about the creativity of women’s voices and women’s bodies. Bynum discusses how some women manipulated the dominant tradition to free themselves from the burden of fertility, yet made female fertility a powerful symbol; how some used Christian dichotomies of male / female and powerful / weak to facilitate their own imitatio Christi, yet undercut these dichotomies by subsuming them into humanitas. Medieval women spoke little of inequality and little of gender, yet there is a profound connection between their symbols and communities and the twentieth-century determination to speak of gender and “study women.” Fragmentation and Redemption was awarded the 1992 Lionel Trilling Award and an American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence in the Study of Religion.

Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion

The quality of blandness: no sooner do you identify it then it begins to appear at every turn. Blandness, by definition, pays little heed to the borders our various disciplines like to draw. As the embodiment of neutrality, the bland lies at the point of origin of all things possible and so links them. — François Jullien Already translated into six languages, François Jullien’s In Praise of Blandness has by now become a classic. Appearing for the first time in English, this groundbreaking work of philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, and sinology is certain to stir readers to think and experience what may at first seem impossible: the richness of a bland sound, a bland meaning, a bland painting, a bland poem. In presenting the value of blandness through as many concrete examples and original texts as possible, Jullien allows the undifferentiated foundation of all things — blandness itself — to appear. After completing this book, readers will reevaluate those familiar Western lines of thought where blandness is associated with lack — the undesirable absence of particular, defining qualities. Jullien’s In Praise of Blandness traces the elusive appearance and crucial value of blandness from its beginnings in the Daoist and Confucian traditions to its gradual integration into literary and visual aesthetics in the late medieval period and beyond. Slowly developing into a positive quality in the Chinese aesthetic and ethical traditions, the bland comprises the balanced and unnamable union of all potential values. It embodies a reality whose very essence is change, and provides an infinite opening onto the breadth of human expression and taste. Chosen as one of the best books of 2004 by the Village Voice. Finalist for the French–American Translation Prize.

In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics

Erwin Panofsky’s Perspective as Symbolic Form is one of the great works of modern intellectual history, the legendary text that has dominated all art-historical and philosophical discussions on the topic of perspective in this century. Finally available in English, this unrivaled example of Panofsky’s early method places him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change. Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over ancient philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky produces a type of “archaeology” of Western representation that far surpasses the usual scope of art historical studies.

Perspective in Panofsky’s hands becomes a central component of a Western “will to form,” the expression of a schema linking the social, cognitive, psychological, and especially technical practices of a given culture into harmonious and integrated wholes. He demonstrates how the perceptual schema of each historical culture or epoch is unique and how each gives rise to a different but equally full vision of the world. Panofsky articulates these distinct spatial systems, explicating their particular coherence and compatibility with the modes of knowledge, belief, and exchange that characterized the cultures in which they arose. Our own modernity, Panofsky shows, is inseparable from its peculiarly mathematical expression of the concept of the infinite, within a space that is both continuous and homogenous.

Perspective as Symbolic Form

Georges Bataille considered The Accursed Share, his radical critique of economic theories based on rational categories of need, scarcity, and utility, his most important project. In Volume I, he announced two further volumes, The History of Eroticism and Sovereignty, but he never published them in book form. This Zone edition includes in a single volume a reconstruction of completed versions of these texts as published in Bataille’s posthumous collected works.

Here, Bataille expands on the notion developed in Volume I of an economics based not on the management of scarce resources but on the exuberant consumption of excess production, the accursed share. In its first part, Bataille identifies eroticism as an ideal form of consumption, since in his view it is useless, purposeless. As this expenditure of excess energy demarcates the realm of human autonomy, the study of eroticism leads naturally to an examination of sovereignty, in which Bataille defines the sovereign individual as one who consumes and does not labor, creating a life beyond the realm of utility.

The Accursed Share, Volumes II & III

Carnegie International 1991 Vol. I and II

In the aftermath of the methodical destruction of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the power and efficiency of new computerized weapons and surveillance technology have become chillingly apparent. For Manuel De Landa, however, this new weaponry has a significance that goes far beyond military applications: he shows how it represents a profound historical shift in the relation of human beings both to machines and to information. The recent emergence of “intelligent” and autonomous bombs and missiles equipped with artificial perception and decision-making capabilities is, for De Landa, part of a much larger transfer of cognitive structures from humans to machines in the late twentieth century.

In this remarkable book, De Landa provides a rich panorama of these astonishing developments. He details the mutating history of information analysis and machinic organization from the mobile siege artillery of the Renaissance, the clockwork armies of the Thirty Years War, the Napoleonic campaigns, and the Nazi blitzkrieg up to present-day cybernetic battle-management systems and satellite reconnaissance networks. Much more than a history of warfare, De Landa provides an unprecedented philosophical and historical reflection on the changing forms through which human bodies and materials are combined, organized, deployed, and made effective.

War in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Los Angeles is a city on the Pacific Rim where things appear on edge, for they lack a permanent footing even while occupying a specific locale. The city's genius loci produces this dual vision of fixed place in a state of constant dislocation.

It is only appropriate for the edge-bound Getty Center to initiate a series of publications that aim to expose the historical study of artifacts to the oscillation of rigorous debate. Each of these books proceeds from a specific body of historical material, not because that material is in itself
inherently imbued with controversy but because its exposure to different disciplinary approaches raises new questions of interpretation. In the realm of historical studies, issues often emerge at the intersection of the various perspectives scholars have constructed for the examination of their subjects. As their debate refracts and refocuses the material under scrutiny, it also invites reflection upon itself and thereby exposes the assumptions and tendencies of scholarship to no less assiduous criticism than it does the underpinnings of its subjects.

Volumes in the series ISSUES &amp; DEBATES will result from symposia and lecture series, as well as from commissioned writings. Their scholarly editors are invited to frame highly focused essays with introductions, commentaries, and/or sources, documents, and illustrations that further contribute to their usefulness.

Art in History/History in Art: Studies in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Culture (Issues & Debates)

Looking for a City in America: Down These Mean Streets a Man Must Go...

The publication for the launch of the Andy Warhol Museum.

The Andy Warhol Museum

In this extraordinary study by philosopher of science François Dagognet, the intriguing figure of Etienne-Jules Marey (1830–1904) emerges afresh. Known best for his innovative and influential chronophotography, Marey is studied here in the context of the full range of his interests and obsessions — as physician, physiologist, aviation researcher, pioneer in time-motion studies, and prodigious inventor. The impact of Marey’s work was to stimulate a reconfiguration in many fields of the status of movement, time, consciousness, and the image. Thus Dagognet locates Marey at a crucial intersection of cultural, scientific, philosophical, and technological modernity. Marey’s photographic work, his increasingly sophisticated techniques for recording motion, coincided historically with the rise of new models of the relation between the human body and the machine. Marey’s achievement was to show that the living machine spawned by the forces of technological modernity must be thought of in terms of movement, as his influence on Bergson, Futurism, Duchamp, and the rise of Taylorist methods of production reflects. For Marey it was not just a question of understanding animal locomotion: with his constant fabrication of new recording devices, he studied a world that could no longer be grasped by merely looking and sought to trace the kinetics of flow, turbulence in the air, and dynamics of water and wave patterns.

Etienne-Jules Marey: A Passion for the Trace

La Jetée is the book version of the legendary 1964 science fiction film about time and memory after a nuclear apocalypse. Chris Marker, the undisputed master of the filmic essay, composed the film almost entirely of still photographs. It traces a desperate experiment by the few remaining survivors of World War III to recover and change the past, and gain access to the future, through the action of memory. A man is chosen for his unique quality of having retained a single clear image from prewar days: no more than an ambiguous memory fragment from childhood — a visit to the jetty at Orly airport, the troubling glance of an unknown woman, the crumpling body of a dying man. These elements become crucial hinge-points in the ensuing narrative, thickening and accumulating nuance with each successful expedition into the historical past. The image of the woman, increasingly suffused now with the time- and eros-bestowing capacities of a deep but impossible love, provides the kernel for the recovery of the dimension through which humankind and history will be saved, as well as the tragic abyss into which both the hero and the narrative inexorably fall. The story Marker tells — a stunning parable of our modern fate — is about the death of the world, about loss, memory, hope, and the indomitable power of love. This edition reproduces the original film’s images along with its accompanying text in both English and French.

La Jetée: ciné-roman

In this strikingly original contribution to our understanding of Chinese philosophy, François Jullien uses the Chinese concept of shi — disposition or circumstance, power or potential — as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture and to uncover the intricate and coherent structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking.

This term — whose very ambivalence and disconcerting polysemy, on the one hand, and simple efficacy, on the other, defy the order of a concept — insinuates itself into the ordering and conditioning of reality in all its manifold and complex representations. Jullien traces its appearance from military strategy to politics, from the aesthetics of calligraphy and painting to the theory of literature, and from reflection on history to “first philosophy.”

At the point where these various domains intersect, a fundamental intuition, assumed to be self-evident for centuries on end, emerges: namely, that reality — every kind of reality — may be perceived as a particular deployment or arrangement of things to be relied upon and worked to one’s advantage. Art or wisdom, as conceived by the Chinese, lies in strategically exploiting the propensity that emanates from this particular configuration of reality. Jullien’s analysis of shi and his excursion through Chinese culture ultimately deepen our own comprehension of the world of things and renew the impulse to discover the endless pleasures of inquiry.

The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China

Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late twentieth century. Now finally available in a superb English translation approved by the author, Debord’s text remains as crucial as ever for understanding the contemporary effects of power, which are increasingly inseparable from the new virtual worlds of our rapidly changing image / information culture.

The Society of the Spectacle

This volume of ZONE explores the ongoing convergence of what were once the distinct worlds of the machine and the organism. Incorporations, through essays, image-text projects, photographic dossiers, and philosophical and scientific articles, examines the increasing breakdown of the boundaries between biology and technology and the social, cultural, and political effects of this merging. Incorporations is about the diverse ways in which human beings are integrated into larger systems and processes of social and technological organization, and the many ways in which the very meaning of the word “life” has been reconfigured. In its heterogeneous approach, ZONE 6 provides a rich cartographic description of the particular capacities and trajectories of contemporary biotechnic arrangements — drawing on the work of neurologists, anthropologists, filmmakers, architects, philosophers, historians, biologists, dancers, novelists, and artists.

Zone 6: Incorporations

I.D. Magazine

Frank Gehry: New Bentwood Furniture Designs

American Icons: Transatlantic Perspectives on Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century American Art

A traditionalist designer with imperial ambitions or an avant-garde general leading the charge of a modernist assault, a Secessionist architect with a penchant for iconography or a materialist proponent of realist valuesâ??Otto Wagner can be portrayed in many ways. As the ten essays in this volume argue, however, a more complete portrait is achieved when variant and seemingly contradictory aspects of his rich architectural and literary oeuvre are allowed to coexist and find their own historical balance. This book is focused less on the visually seductive aspects of Wagner's creations than on the social, intellectual, and artistic framework within which the architect brought his works to fruition. The result is a broad but at the same time concentrated exploration of the parameters of Wagnerâ??s tectonic expressionâ??a canvas of a period in which the sensualist aesthetic tendencies of the late nineteenth century merged with the more sachliche vision of twentieth-century art.

Otto Wagner: Reflection on the Raiment of Modernity

In this groundbreaking collection of essays, historians and literary theorists examine how, between 1500 and 1800, pornography emerged as a literary practice and a category of knowledge intimately linked to the formative moments of Western modernity and the democratization of culture. The first modern writers and engravers of pornography were part of the demimonde of heretics, freethinkers, and libertines who constituted the dark underside of the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the French Revolution. From the start, early modern European pornography used the shock of sex to test the boundaries and regulation of obscene behavior and expression in the public and private sphere. As such, pornography criticized and even subverted political authorities as well as social and sexual relations.

The Invention of Pornography: Obscenity and the Origins of Modernity, 1500–1800

Robin Collyer: Idioms of Resistance and Canada XLV Biennale di Venezia

The Michael Snow Project: Music/Sound, 1948–1993

Georges Canguilhem is one of France’s leading philosophers and historians of science. Trained as both a medical doctor and a philosopher, Canguilhem overlapped these practices to demonstrate that there could be no epistemology without concrete study of the actual development of the sciences and no worthwhile history of science without a philosophical understanding of the conceptual basis of all knowledge.

A Vital Rationalist brings together for the first time some of Canguilhem’s most important writings, including excerpts from previously unpublished manuscripts. Organized around the major themes and problems that have preoccupied Canguilhem throughout his intellectual career, this collection allows readers both familiar and unfamiliar with Canguilhem’s work access to a vast array of conceptual and concrete meditations on epistemology, methodology, science, and history. Although Canguilhem is a demanding writer, Delaporte succeeds in identifying the main lines of his thought with unrivaled clarity and maps out the complex and crucial place this thinker holds in the history of twentieth-century French thought.

A Vital Rationalist

This book by the legendary Situationist activist and author of The Revolution of Everyday Life is a fiercely partisan historical reflection on the ways religious and economic forces have shaped Western culture. Within this broad frame, Raoul Vaneigem examines the heretical and millenarian movements that challenged social and ecclesiastical authority in Europe from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Although he discusses a number of different groups, such as the Cathars and the Joachimite millenarians, his main emphasis is on the various manifestations of the movement of the Free Spirit in northern Europe. At the core of these heresies, Vaneigem sees not only resistance to the power of state and church but also the immensely creative invention of new forms of love, sexuality, community, and exchange. Vaneigem vividly portrays the radical opposition presented by these movements to the imperatives of an emerging market-based economy, and he evokes crucial historical parallels with other anti-systemic rebellions throughout the history of the West. The book is especially valuable for its translations of original texts and source materials.

The Movement of the Free Spirit

Witte de With: Cahier #2 June 1994

Most modern discussions of the relationship of biological sex to gender presuppose that there are two genders, male and female, founded on the two biological sexes. But not all cultures share this essentialist assumption, and even Western societies have not always embraced it. Bringing together historical and anthropological studies, Third Sex, Third Gender challenges the usual emphasis on sexual dimorphism and reproduction, providing a unique perspective on the various forms of socialization of people who are neither “male” nor “female.” The existence of a third sex or gender enables us to understand how Byzantine palace eunuchs and Indian hijras met the criteria of special social roles that necessitated practices such as self-castration, and how intimate and forbidden desires were expressed among the Dutch Sodomites in the early modern period, the Sapphists of eighteenth-century England, or the so-called hermaphrodite-homosexuals of nineteenth-century Europe and America. By contextualizing these practices and by allowing these bodies, meanings, and desires to emerge, Third Sex, Third Gender provides a new way to think about sex and gender systems that is crucial to contemporary debates within the social sciences.

Third Sex, Third Gender: Beyond Sexual Dimorphism in Culture and History

In this remarkable work, anthropologist Françoise Héritier charts the incest prohibition throughout history, from the strict decrees of Leviticus to modern civil codes. Through close and subtle readings, Héritier exposes the frequent, but often overlooked, elaborations concerning what she calls a secondary type of incest, namely, the prohibition of two close blood relatives engaging in sexual intercourse with a third person. Héritier not only understands this phenomenon to be as universal as the more classical “first” type of incest banning sexual relations between certain blood relatives. She advances the controversial thesis that the first type may indeed be an outgrowth of the secondary type of incest, once it is understood properly as the transfer of bodily fluids in a love triangle of sexual partners, two of whom are related to each other.

Héritier pursues this analysis with erudition and brilliance, through the classical ethnographies as well as the classical civilizations and religions of Rome, Greece, Asia Minor, and Islam. Drawing on her own fieldwork in West African societies where the bans against two sisters are particularly stringent, Héritier fashions a complex “mechanics of fluids” in which blood, milk, and semen form the basis for kinship and prohibition. Her theories, based on the identity and opposition of fluids and essences, expose the connections between the social, the natural, and the bodily, shedding new light on the complexities of kinship theory.

Two Sisters and Their Mother: The Anthropology of Incest

The Michael Snow Project: Visual Art, 1951–1993

Building in France, Building in Iron, Building in Ferroconcrete

S,M,L,XL presents a selection of the remarkable visionary design work produced by the Dutch firm Office for Metropolitan Architecture (O.M.A.) and its acclaimed founder, Rem Koolhaas, in its first twenty years, along with a variety of insightful, often poetic writings. The inventive collaboration between Koolhaas and designer Bruce Mau is a graphic overture that weaves together architectural projects, photos and sketches, diary excerpts, personal travelogues, fairy tales, and fables, as well as critical essays on contemporary architecture and society.

S,M,L,XL

In Detour and Access, François Jullien investigates the subtlety, strategy, and production of meaning in ancient and modern Chinese aesthetic texts and political events. Moving between the rhetorical traditions of ancient Greece and China, Jullien attempts no simple comparison between these two civilizations. Rather, he uses the perspective provided by each to gain access to one culture considered all too strange — “It’s all Chinese to me” — and to another whose strangeness has been eclipsed by the assumption of its essential familiarity and originary position in Western civilization. In Detour and Access, Jullien rereads the major texts and authors of Chinese thought — The Book of Songs, Confucius’s Analects, Mencius, and Lao Tse. He addresses the question of oblique, indirect, and allusive meaning in order to explore how literary and political techniques of detour give access to a world of symbolization and truth not characterized by simple modes of mimetic representation and static essentialism. Working indirectly, favoring the allusive expression over the direct one, the Chinese art of meaning appears as a complex mode of indication, open to multiple perspectives and variations, infinitely adaptable to situations and contexts. Concentrating on what is not said, or what is only conveyed through other means — such as the distancing produced by allusive poetic and political motifs — Jullien traces the ideological and aesthetic benefits and costs of a rhetorical strategy that lacks a fixed ontological perspective and absolute truth. Illuminating in its close textual readings, provocative and sophisticated in its theoretical insights and political analyses, Detour and Access provides a necessary refinement of ways of thinking about Chinese strategies of meaning as yet unanalyzed in the Western world.

Detour and Access: Strategies of Meaning in China and Greece

Pure Immanence collects the essays of Gilles Deleuze on a complex theme at the heart of his philosophy. In his last piece of writing, included here, Deleuze gives a simple name to this problem: “a life.” Newly translated and gathered in one volume for the first time, the essays in Pure Immanence capture Deleuze’s persistent search throughout his philosophical work for a new and superior form of empiricism that rethinks the relation of thought to life. “I have always felt,” writes Deleuze, “that I am an empiricist, that is, a pluralist.”

Announced in his very first book on David Hume, then pursued in his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson and in his later “clinical” essays, the issue of an “empiricist conversion” was central to Deleuze’s thinking, in particular to his aesthetics and his conception of the art of cinema. For Deleuze, such a conversion, such an empiricism, such a new art and will-to-art were, in fact, what was most needed in the new regime of communication and information-machines. The last, seemingly minor question of “a life” is thus inseparable from Deleuze’s striking image of philosophy not as a wisdom we already possess, but as a pure immanence of what is yet to come. Pure Immanence exposes the new and urgent problems such a philosophy confronts today, one whose most difficult task, the invention of “a life,” has yet to be achieved.

Pure Immanence: Essays on A Life

In this remarkable book by one of the great psychologists and neurologists of the early twentieth century, Kurt Goldstein presents a summation of his “holistic” theory of the human organism. In the course of his studies on brain-damaged soldiers during the First World War, Goldstein became aware of the failure of contemporary biology and medicine to genuinely understand both the impact of such injuries and the astonishing adjustments that patients made to them. He challenged reductivist approaches that dealt with “localized” symptoms, insisting instead that an organism be analyzed in terms of the totality of its behavior and interaction with its surrounding milieu. He was especially concerned with the breakdown of organization and the failure of central cerebral controls that take place in catastrophic responses to situations such as physical or mental illness. But Goldstein was equally attuned to the amazing powers of the organism to readjust to such devastating losses, if only by withdrawal to a more limited range of activity that it could manage by a redistribution of its reduced energies, thus reclaiming as much wholeness as new circumstances allowed. Goldstein’s concepts in The Organism have had a major impact on philosophical and psychological thought throughout this century, as can be seen in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Georges Canguilhem, Ernst Cassirer, Ludwig Binswanger, and Roman Jakobson, not to mention the wide-ranging field of Gestalt psychology.

The Organism

Views from Abroad: European Perspectives on American Art 1

This volume introduces to an English-language audience the writings of the so-called new Vienna School of art history. In the 1930s, Hans Sedlmayr and Otto Pächt undertook an ambitious extension of the art historical project of Aloïs Riegl (1858–1905). Sedlmayr and Pächt began with an aestheticist conception of the autonomy and irreducibility of the artistic process. At the same time, they believed they could read entire cultures and worldviews in the work of art. The key to this contextualist alchemy was the concept of “structure,” a kind of deep formal property that the work of art shared with the world.

Sedlmayr and Pächt’s project immediately caught the attention of thinkers like Walter Benjamin who were similarly impatient with traditional, cautious empiricist scholarship. But the creativity of the new art history had its dark side. Sedlmayr used his art history as a vehicle for a sweeping critique of modernity that soon escalated into nationalist and outright fascist polemic. Sedlmayr, and by extension the whole scholarly project of Strukturanalyse, were sharply repudiated by Meyer Schapiro and later Ernst Gombrich.

The idea of this volume is to bring the drama of this methodological and political encounter to the attention of English-speaking art historians and reveal the analogies between the Vienna School project and the anti-empiricist cultural histories of our own time.

The Vienna School Reader: Politics and Art Historical Method in the 1930s

Catalog for the publications of Zone Books.

Zone Books Catalog 1995

The Michael Snow Project: Presence and Absence, The Films of Michael Snow 1956–1991

The Culture of the Copy is an unprecedented attempt to make sense of the Western fascination with replicas, duplicates, and twins. In a work that is breathtaking in its synthetic and critical achievements, Hillel Schwartz charts the repercussions of our entanglement with copies of all kinds, whose presence alternately sustains and overwhelms us. Through intriguing, and at times humorous, historical analysis and case studies in contemporary culture, Schwartz investigates a stunning array of simulacra—counterfeits, decoys, mannequins, and portraits; ditto marks, genetic cloning, war games, and camouflage; instant replays, digital imaging, parrots, and photocopies; wax museums, apes, and art forgeries, not to mention the very notion of the Real McCoy. Working through a range of theories on biological, mechanical, and electronic reproduction, Schwartz questions the modern esteem for authenticity and uniqueness. The Culture of the Copy shows how the ethical dilemmas central to so many fields of endeavor have become inseparable from our pursuit of copies—of the natural world, of our own creations, indeed of our very selves. 

The Culture of the Copy: Striking Likenesses, Unreasonable Facsimiles

Views from Abroad: European Perspectives on American Art 2

Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors

Russian Modernism

Incendiary Art: The Representation of Fireworks in Early Modern Europe

The Warhol Look: Glamour Style Fashion

Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari, while engaging — in an entirely unprecedented manner — the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages.

De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West’s history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself.

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History

In a work that will become indispensable to anyone seriously interested in modern art, Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind Krauss convincingly introduce a new constellation of concepts to our understanding of avant-garde and modernist art practices. Formless: A User’s Guide constitutes a decisive and dramatic transformation of the study of twentieth-century culture. Although it has been over sixty years since Georges Bataille undertook his philosophical development of the term informe, only in recent years has the idea of the “formless” been deployed in theorizing and reconfiguring the very field of twentieth-century art. This is partly because that field has most often been crudely set up as a battle between form and content, whereas “formless” constitutes a third term that stands outside the opposition of form and content, outside the binary thinking that is itself formal. In Formless: A User’s Guide, Bois and Krauss, two of the most influential and respected art historians of our time, present a rich and compelling panorama of the formless. They map out its persistence within a history of modernism that has always repressed it in the interest of privileging formal mastery, and they assess its destiny within current artistic production. In the domain of practice, they analyze it as an operational tool, the structural cunning of which has repeatedly been suppressed in the service of a thematics of art. Neither theme nor form, formless is, as Bataille himself expressed it, a “job.” The job of Formless: A User’s Guide is to explore the power of the informe. A stunning new map of twentieth-century art emerges from this innovative reconceptualization and from the brilliantly original analyses of the work of Jackson Pollock, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Lucio Fontana, Cindy Sherman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Smithson, and Gordon Matta-Clark, among others.

Formless: A User's Guide

Irresistibly charming or shamelessly deceitful, remarkably persuasive or uselessly verbose, everything one loves to hate — or hates to love — about “French lovers” and their self-styled reputation can be traced to eighteenth-century libertine novels. Obsessed with strategies of seduction, endlessly speculating about the motives and goals of lovers, the idle aristocrats who populate these novels are exclusively preoccupied with their erotic lives. Deprived of other battlefields in which to fulfill their thirst for glory, libertine noblemen seek to conquer the women of their class without falling into the trap of love, while their female prey attempt to enjoy the pleasures of love without sacrificing their honor. Yet, in spite of the licentious mores of the declining Old Regime, men and women are still expected to pay lip service to an austere code of morals. Asked to constantly denounce their own practices, they find that their erotic war games are thus governed by a double constraint: whatever they feel or intend, the heroes of libertine literature can neither say what they mean nor mean what they say.

The Libertine Reader includes all the varieties of libertine strategies: from the successful cunning of Mme de T— in Denon’s No Tomorrow to the ill-fated genius of Mme Merteuil in Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons; from the laborious sentimental education of Meilcour in Crébillon fils’s Wayward Head and Heart to the hazardous master plan of the French ambassador in Prévost’s The Story of a Modern Greek Woman. The discrepancies between the characters’ words and their true intentions — the libertine double entendre — are exposed through the speaking vaginas in Diderot’s Indiscreet Jewels and the wandering soul of Amanzei in Crébillon fils’s Sofa, while the contrasts between natural and civilized — or degenerate — erotics are the subjects of both Diderot’s Supplement to Bougainville’s Voyage and Laclos’s On the Education of Women. Finally, Sade’s Florville and Courval shows that destiny itself is on the side of libertinism.

The Libertine Reader: Eroticism and Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France

In the wide-ranging contemporary debates about visuality and the emergence of the modern spectator, the significance of panorama painting in the nineteenth century is frequently cited. Stephan Oettermann’s book The Panorama provides the first major historical study of the rich phenomenon of the panorama in English, offering a valuable and much-needed source of historical details and ideas about one of the most influential forms of visual entertainment in the nineteenth century. In this richly illustrated book, Oettermann gives readers a concrete sense of the structural and experiential reality of the panorama and the many forms it took throughout Europe and North America — a crucial task, since very few of the original nineteenth-century panoramas survive. At the same time, he outlines the many ways in which these remarkable and often immense 360-degree images were part of a larger transformation of the status of the observer and of popular culture. Thus, the panorama is treated not only as a new kind of image but also as an architectural and informational component of the new urban spaces and media networks. For anyone interested in the origins of contemporary visual culture, this book will be indispensable.

The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium

In fin-de-siècle France, progress and material prosperity coincided with widespread alarm about disease and decay. The obsessions of our own culture at the end of the millennium resonated in a striking manner with those of the last fin de siècle: crime, pollution, sexually transmitted disease, gender confusion, moral depravity, alcoholism, and tobacco and drug use were topics of constant popular discussion in both epochs. <em>The Decadent Reader</em> is a collection of novels and stories from fin-de-siècle France that celebrate decline, aestheticize decay, and take pleasure in perversity. By embracing the marginal, the unhealthy, and the deviant, these writers attacked bourgeois life, which they perceived as the chief enemy of art. Barbey d’Aurevilly, J.K. Huysmans, Jean Lorrain, Guy de Maupassant, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Catulle Mendès, Rachilde, Jean Moréas, Octave Mirbeau, Joséphin Peladan, and Remy de Gourmont looted the riches of their culture for their own purposes. From an age of medicine they borrowed its occult mysteries rather than its positivism. In its social Darwinism, they found their monsters: sadists, murderers, transvestites, fetishists, prostitutes, nymphomaniacs, and hysterics. And they reveled in them, completely upending the conventions of romance and sentimentality. <em>The Decadent Reader,</em> which includes novels and stories that have never before appeared in English, as well as reappraisals of work that the reader may already be familiar with, offers a compelling portrait of fin-de-siècle France.

The Decadent Reader

Frank O. Gehry: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao

Censorship and Silencing: Practices of Cultural Regulation

Aby Warburg (1866–1929) is best known as the originator of the discipline of iconology and as the founder of the institute that bears his name. His followers included some of the celebrated art historians of the twentieth century such as Erwin Panofsky, Edgar Wind, and Fritz Saxl. But his heirs developed, for the most part, a domesticated iconology based on the decipherment and interpretation of symbolic material. As Philippe-Alain Michaud demonstrates in this important book, Warburg’s project was remote from any positivist or neo-Kantian ambitions. Nourished on the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Jacob Burckhardt, Warburg fashioned a “critical iconology” to reveal the irrationality of the image in Western culture.

Opposing the grand teleological narratives of art inaugurated by Giorgio Vasari, Warburg’s method operated through historical anachronisms and discontinuities. Using procedures of “montage-collision” he brought together pagan artifacts with masterpieces of Florentine Renaissance art, the astrology of the ancient Near East with the Lutheran Reformation, Mannerist festivals with the sacred dances of Native Americans. Michaud insists that for Warburg, the practice of art history was not only the recognition of the radical heterogeneity of objects but the discovery within the art work itself of lines of fracture, contradictions, tensions, and the energies of magic, empathy, totemism, and animism.

Michaud provides us with a book that not only is about Warburg but also extends his intuitions and discoveries into analyses of other categories of imagery like the daguerreotype, the chronophotography of Etienne-Jules Marey, early cinema, and the dances of Loïe Fuller. This edition also includes a foreword by Georges Didi-Huberman and texts by Warburg not previously translated into English.

Chosen as one of the best art books of 2004 by the Washington Post and Bookforum.

Aby Warburg and the Image in Motion

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians is Pierre Clastres’s account of his 1963–64 encounter with this small Paraguayan tribe, a precise and detailed recording of the history, ritual, myths, and culture of this remarkably unique, and now vanished, people. “Determined not to let the slightest detail” escape him or to leave unanswered the many questions prompted by his personal experiences, Clastres follows the Guayaki in their everyday lives. Now available for the first time in a stunningly beautiful translation by Paul Auster, Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians radically alters not only the Western academic conventions in which other cultures are thought but also the discipline of political anthropology itself. Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians was awarded the Alta Prize in nonfiction by the American Literary Translators Association.

Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians

During the last half century, Albert O. Hirschman has redefined the scope and limits of political economy. His contributions, as both a scholar and an economic advisor, have definitively shaped an innovative program for social change and economic development. Crossing Boundaries, a collection of Hirschman’s most recent writings, forges new and unforeseen connections between the past and the present, between intellectual life and lived experience. With astonishing frankness and humor, Hirschman recounts some of the most compelling and formative moments of his life that have influenced his thinking about economic and social development, democracy and capitalism. He also reconsiders the key terms of his scholarship — concepts he is constantly rethinking, subverting, and reinventing.

Crossing Boundaries: Selected Writings

Why has affirmative action become the lightning rod for conflicts over racial inequality in the United States? Have color-blind legal and political doctrines intensified or ameliorated America’s racial divisions? Race and Representation: Affirmative Action invites readers to enter a debate on a matter of the greatest moment for American universities, politics, and public life. Focusing on the politically driven decision of California’s governor and Board of Regents to end affirmative action at the University of California, as well as on the subsequent enactment of an amendment to the California Constitution prohibiting the state from engaging in affirmative action, and on court decisions in Texas using the federal Constitution to prohibit affirmative action at universities, contributors to this volume incisively assess the current state of the tumultuous affirmative action controversy.

Race and Representation: Affirmative Action

The Visual and the Visionary puts the study of female spirituality on a new footing and provides a nuanced account of the changing role of images in medieval monasticism from the twelfth century to the Reformation. In ten essays embracing the history of art, religion, and literature, Jeffrey Hamburger explores the interrelationships between the visual arts and female spirituality in the context of the cura monialium, the pastoral care of nuns. Used as instruments of instruction and inspiration, images occupied a central, if controversial, place in debates over devotional practice, monastic reform, and mystical expression. Far from supplementing a history of art from which they have been excluded, the images made by and for women shaped that history decisively by defining novel modes of religious expression, especially the relationship between sight and subjectivity. With this book, the study of female piety and artistic patronage becomes an integral part of a general history of medieval art and spirituality.

The Visual and the Visionary was awarded the 1999 Charles Rufus Prize by the College Art Association and the 1999 Roland H. Bainton Prize for Art and Music History by the Sixteenth Century Conference.

The Visual and the Visionary: Art and Female Spirituality in Late Medieval Germany

Wonders and the Order of Nature is about the ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, petrifying springs, celestial apparitions — these were the marvels that adorned romances, puzzled philosophers, lured collectors, and frightened the devout. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park explore and explain how wonder and wonders fortified princely power, rewove the texture of scientific experience, and shaped the sensibility of intellectuals. This is a history of the passions of inquiry, of how wonder sometimes inflamed, sometimes dampened curiosity about nature’s best-kept secrets. Refracted through the prism of wonders, the order of nature splinters into a spectrum of orders, a tour of possible worlds. 

Wonders and the Order of Nature was awarded the 1999 Pfizer Prize by the History of Science Society and the 1999 Roland H. Bainton Prize for History and Theology by the Sixteenth Century Conference.

Wonders and the Order of Nature

Douglas Gordon: Words and Pictures

Art catalog published on the occasion of the exhibition Three by Glen Seator

Glen Seator: Three

The Group Portraiture of Holland

Maiolica in the Making: The Gentili/Barnabei Archive

What is meant by reactionary politics? What do biologists mean when they speak of the interaction between life and its surroundings? Why was the term “abreaction” invented and later abandoned by the first generation of psychoanalysts? These are but a few of the questions the internationally renowned scholar Jean Starobinski answers in his latest work on the conceptual history of the words “action” and “reaction.”

Not just a history of ideas, Action and Reaction is also a semantic and philological history, a literary history, a history of medicine, and a history of the biological sciences. Concentrating especially on the moment when scientific language and ordinary language diverge, the author offers a genealogy of the human and natural sciences through their usage of the metaphors action and reaction. Newton’s theorem “To every action an equal action is always opposed” stands as a point of departure for Starobinski’s exploration of the lexical and metaphorical traces this proposition left in its wake. With stunning clarity, the author analyzes the scientific, literary, and political effects of the terms action / reaction in describing and explaining the material universe, the living body, the events of history, and psychological behavior.

Ultimately, the pair action and reaction becomes the site where the author explores the power and danger of metaphorical language and questions the convergence and collapse of scientific and moral explanations of the universe.

Action and Reaction: The Life and  Adventures of a Couple

Douglas Gordon: Through a Looking Glass

This book brings together prominent scholars and political activists to assess the evolution of the international human rights agenda since the end of the Cold War. It argues for a major reorientation of the strategies and objectives of the human rights community. Although the possibilities for global democratization are greater now than they have been in over half a century, the collapse of the Cold War international order has nevertheless led to renewed and more virulent forms of political tyranny and civil conflict. For many years, the primary objective of human rights proponents has been to advocate for the adoption, monitoring, and enforcement of international human rights agreements. But today the hardest cases of human rights abuse confronting the world — Rwanda, Bosnia, Haiti, Cambodia — involve societies undergoing dramatic political transitions. In these countries, violent conflict can be ended only by the establishment of new democratic regimes. But in the post–Cold War era it has become increasingly clear that full protection of human rights depends on the creation of such regimes even in less extreme circumstances. Organized around the themes of punishment, reconciliation, and law, the essays in this book argue that human-rights activism must accordingly expand its scope to find ways to successfully assist transitional societies in the reconstitution of civic and political order.

Human Rights in Political Transitions: Gettysburg to Bosnia

In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors’ testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it. Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made it necessary to clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, have been advanced in the name of ethics. For my own part, I will consider myself content with my work if, in attempting to locate the place and theme of testimony, I have erected some signposts allowing future cartographers of the new ethical territory to orient themselves. Indeed, I will be satisfied if Remnants of Auschwitz succeeds only in correcting some of the terms with which we register the decisive lesson of the century and if this book makes it possible for certain words to be left behind and others to be understood in a different sense. This is also a way — perhaps the only way — to listen to what is unsaid.
— Giorgio Agamben

Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive

The true structure and workings of the human body are, we casually assume, everywhere the same, a universal reality. But when we look into the past, our sense of reality wavers: accounts of the body in diverse medical traditions often seem to describe mutually alien, almost unrelated worlds. How can perceptions of something as basic and intimate as the body differ so? In this book, Shigehisa Kuriyama explores this fundamental question, elucidating the fascinating contrasts between the human body described in classical Greek medicine and the body as envisaged by physicians in ancient China. Revealing how perceptions of the body and conceptions of personhood are intimately linked, his comparative inquiry invites us, indeed compels us, to reassess our own habits of feeling and perceiving.

The Expressiveness of the Body was awarded the 2001 Welch Medal by the American Association for the History of Medicine.

SORT