World Food Books' programme is largely produced on Kulin Nation land. We acknowledge the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the first and continuing custodians of this land, and pay respect to their Elders past, present, and emerging.
World Food Books is an arts and special interests bookshop in Naarm / Melbourne. Founded in 2010, World Food Books is devoted to the presentation of a rotating, hand-selection of international art, design, literary and counterculture publications with an emphasis on the anti-traditional, the experimental, the avant-garde, the heretic, the marginal.
Presenting new titles alongside rare and out-of-print books, catalogues and journals spanning the fields of modern and contemporary art, design, photography, illustration, film, literature, poetry, cultural theory, philosophy, sexuality, popular and underground culture in its many radical forms, World Food Books wishes to encourage adventurous, thoughtful and open-minded reading, looking, writing, and exchange of publishing and ideas, both current and historical.
As well as our bookshop, located in Melbourne's historical Nicholas Building, all of our inventory is available internationally via our online mail-order service.
World Food Books semi-regularly co-ordinates "Occasions", a programme of exhibits and events at the bookshop and in partnership with other hosts (such as museums and art galleries) that develop out of the activities, relationships and content of the bookshop itself.
World Food Books
The Nicholas Building
37 Swanston Street
Room 5, Level 6
Melbourne 3000
Australia
SHOP HOURS:
BOOKSHOP CLOSED FOR BREAK UNTIL NOV 10.
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7.
ORDERS CAN STILL BE PLACED AND WILL BE PROCESSED AFTER NOV 10.
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
2021, English
Hardcover (w. obi-strip), 292 pages, 28 x 22 cm
Published by
Walther König / Köln
Museum Folkwang / Essen
$160.00 - Out of stock
A detailed documentation of Kippenberger’s epic masterpiece. Kippenberger's largest and most complex work, The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s "Amerika" explores a utopia of universal employment, based on a section from Kafka’s titular novel in which the protagonist, Karl Rossmann, applies for a job at the “biggest theater in the world”: “whoever wants to become an artist should sign up!”.
Kippenberger spent several years preparing, researching and producing the epic installation, set out on a stylized football pitch, and made up of 50 table-and-chair ensembles. Alongside classic design icons and found objects, it also includes furniture especially produced by Kippenberger, as well as pieces by numerous artist friends, including Cosima von Bonin, Tony Oursler, Ulrich Strothjohann and Jason Rhodes. This profusely illustrated hardcover publication examines the work, and includes, for the first time, “biographies” of the individual objects, tracing the contexts of their creation, collection and integration into the installation.This volume therefore constitutes the definitive documentation of The Happy End of Franz Kafka’s "Amerika" and offers a new way to approach Martin Kippenberger’s life and oeuvre.
Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Museum Folkwang, Essen (2021).
2014, English
Softcover, 172 pages 24 x 32 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
MACK / London
$300.00 - In stock -
Veramente encompasses Italian photographer Guido Guidi’s entire oeuvre, bringing together excerpts of his series from 1959 to the present day to illuminate the distinctive photographic language he has forged over a 40-year career.
Guidi, a pioneer of new Italian landscape photography, was influenced by architectural history, neorealist Italian film, and conceptual art. Using photography as a process and an experience of understanding, Guidi’s body of work frames a visual discourse that revolves around what it means to see, or what it may mean to offer up an image.
Veramente is published to accompany a touring exhibition of the same name opening at the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson in January 2014, and then moving to Huis Marseille Museum voor Fotografie, Amsterdam in June and the Museo d’Arte della Città, Ravenna in October.
Guido Guidi was born in Cesena, Italy, in 1941. He studied in Venice at the University Institute of Architecture (now IUAV), where he followed the courses of Bruno Zevi, Carlo Scarpa and Mario De Luigi, and at the Advanced Course in Industrial Design with Italo Zannier and Luigi Veronesi.
Now out of print. New copy.
2018, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 255 x 192 mm
Published by
Surpllus / Melbourne
$40.00 - Out of stock
Comprehensive monograph on the work of Australian artist Damiano Bertoli.
"Melbourne artist Damiano Bertoli is best known for the ongoing series ‘Continuous moment’, a multidisciplinary practice that offers a paratactic investigation of artistic experiments, social projects and theoretical legacies that inform the history of modernism and contemporary art. At the centre of much of this thought and production is a delirious pragmatism that draws on material as diverse as Pablo Picasso’s 1941 surrealist play Le desire attrape par la queue (Desire caught by the tail), originally performed under the shadow of Nazi occupation, the aspirational practices of Superstudio (1966–78), which sought to live without architecture, and the occultism of the homicidal sect led by Charles ‘Willis’ Manson. What is decisive, in any case, is that for Bertoli the unity of this practice resides in a display methodology that echoes a number of avant-garde principles that question the backward looking gaze." - Nik Papas
Published by Surpllus. Designed by Ziga Testen, Edited by Brad Haylock.
Profusely illustrated throughout in colour and black and white, with accompanying essays by Justin Clemens, Helen Hughes, Helen Johnson, Nik Papas, Chris Sharp, Liza Vasiliou.
2017, English
Hardcover, 336 pages
Published by
Surpllus / Melbourne
Westspace / Melbourne
$30.00 - In stock -
For the past twenty years, Lisa Radford has written alongside (and sometimes about) contemporary art and artists in Melbourne. Along the way, her fictocriticism has captured many minor local histories that speak to politics, friendship, popular culture and a myriad of other subjectivities.
Aesthetic nonsense makes commonsense, thanks X brings together a selection of over fifty texts, including catalogue essays for Centre for Style, David Shrigley and Blair Trethowan, alongside other texts previously published in contemporary art journals including Art & Australia, Discipline and un Magazine.
Co-published by Surpllus and West Space, the publication includes contributions from Geoff Lowe & Jacqueline Riva (A Constructed World), Fiona Macdonald and Jarrod Rawlins. Designed and edited by Brad Haylock with editorial assistance by Robert Shumoail-Albazi.
2022, English
Hardcover, 240 pages, 30 x 30 cm
Published by
Fantagraphics / Seattle
$125.00 - Out of stock
Drawn from private collections around the world, this is the first comprehensive collection of the Saturn label’s printed record covers, along with hundreds of the best hand-designed, one-of-a-kind sleeves and disc labels decorated by Sun Ra and members of his Arkestra.
Considered the foremost exponent of Afrofuturism, Sun Ra mastered a wide array of styles that spanned jazz, R&B, exotica, Afro-hybrids, electronic, big band, solo piano, orchestral, experimental, and chamber works. In his 45-year recording career, he issued an epic number of albums and he was one of the first Black musicians to own an independent label, which he named Saturn, after the planet on which he claimed to have been born. The covers of Saturn LPs, issued from 1957 to 1988, are iconic—some rolled off commercial printing presses but many were hand-crafted. These records were sold at concerts, club dates, and by mail order. As collectibles, original handmade Saturn covers sell for hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars. More than just packaging for a slab of vinyl, they are works of art in their own right.
Sun Ra: Art on Saturn is the first comprehensive collection of all Saturn printed covers, along with hundreds of the best hand-designed, one-of-a-kind sleeves and disc labels, decorated by Ra himself and members of his Arkestra. Essays by Sun Ra catalog preservationist Irwin Chusid, noted Ra scholar John Corbett, and Glenn Jones, who in the 1970s signed Ra to a distribution deal that put countless homemade covers into circulation, add unique insights into the interplanetary life and work of Sun Ra and his Saturn partner Alton Abraham.
Historians have written extensively about Sun Ra and his music. This book is a tribute to the covers and to the uncredited visual artists and their rich imaginations. From the simple to the baroque to the absurd, the covers that sheathed Ra's discs reflect the tenaciousness of a genius who refused to compromise or relinquish control of his destiny.
2021, English
Softcover, 292 pages, 14 x 20 cm
Published by
Blank Forms / New York
$33.00 - In stock -
The life and work of American experimental musician/composer/intermedia artist Jerry Hunt.
Jerry Hunt was among the most eccentric figures in the world of new music. A frenetic orator, occultist and engineering consultant, his works from the 1970s through the early '90s made use of readymade sculptures, medical technology, arcane talismans and all manner of homemade electronic implements to form confrontational recordings and enigmatic, powerful performances. Tracing Hunt's life across his home state's major cities to a self-built house in rural Van Zandt County, this memoir-cum-biography by Stephen Housewright, Hunt's partner of 35 years, offers illuminating depictions of Hunt's important installations and performances across North America and Europe.
Housewright narrates a lifetime spent together, beginning in high school as a closeted couple in an East Texas and ending with Hunt's battle with cancer and his eventual suicide, the subject of one of his most harrowing works of video art. This highly readable narrative contains many private correspondences with, and thrilling anecdotes about, Hunt's friends, family, and collaborators, including Joseph Celli, Arnold Dreyblatt, Michael Galbreth, Karen Finley, James and Mary Fulkerson, Guy Klucevsek, Pauline Oliveros, Paul Panhuysen, Annea Lockwood, and the S.E.M. Ensemble.
Stephen Housewright is a writer, librarian, and teacher.
Jerry Hunt (1943–1993) is often described as a shamanic figure with the look of a Central Texas meat inspector. One of the most compelling composers in the world of late-twentieth-century new music, he made work that combined video synthesis, installation art, and early computers with rough-hewn sculptures, scores drawn from celestial alphabets, and homemade electronics activated by his signature wands and impassioned gestures. Hunt lived his entire life in Texas, eventually settling in a house ("an interactive environment") he built with his partner, Stephen Housewright, in a rural area outside Canton; but his pataphysical, abrasive, and humorous performances took him across North America and Europe, where he amassed a small but dedicated following.
2022, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 21 x 15 cm
$30.00 - Out of stock
This book is about working and not working, hating work and needing to work, intimacy and technology, money and love, labour and pleasure. Across a series of essays, Sally Olds probes the ambivalent utopias of polyamory, cryptocurrency, clubbing, communes, a secret fraternity, and the essay form itself. Curiosity drives each of these adventures into projected worlds, where Olds explores how living with precariousness changes expectations of how a life can be lived in this thrilling appraisal of the state of things.
Sally Olds is a writer from Queensland living in Naarm/Melbourne. Her work has been published by Sydney Review of Books, un Magazine, AQNB, the Institute of Modern Art, collected in anthologies, and shortlisted for the Griffith Review’s Emerging Voices Competition and the Sydney Review of Books/Copyright Agency’s Emerging Critics Fellowship. She has collaborated extensively with Precog, a club night held in Narrm, and taught writing workshops in and outside of university. This is her first book.
"This is an utterly riveting and original collection of essays – hard-thinking, formally innovative, dazzling intellectually and sentence by sentence out-of-this-world good." — Maria Tumarkin
Cover artwork: Tim Hardy, Idols, 2019. Digital c-print.
1972, Japanese
Softcover, 214 pages, 20.8 x 14.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Tokyo Sanseisha / Tokyo
$120.00 - Out of stock
"Sadistic Play of Bondage"
Very rare 1972 special photobook edition of legendary cult kinbaku magazine SM Select. A beautiful volume, packed cover to cover with full-bleed bondage photography in saturated 1970s colour and b/w, printed on textured stocks, showcasing the talents of famous Japanese actresses and models such as Reiko Ike, Yuri Izumi, Naomi Tani, Junko Miyashita, Nana Minami, and many more. Barely any text, just photos!
First published in 1970, SM Select fast become the leading magazine that sparked the SM magazine boom in the 70's and 80's in Japan. Nobuyuki Miyasaka, Hiroshi Senda, Toshiyuki Suma (Uramado, Kitan Club), etc. and others were all founding members of the magazine, but with the growing popularity of SM culture and magazines during this period, many contributors went on to establish other SM publishing ventures — Shin Miyasaka and Toshiyuki Suma established Sun Publishing and launched SM Collector, while Seiko Ishikawa and three others from Tokyo Sanseisha moved to Shishobo and launched SM Fan. SM Select run for 20 years, ending in 1990.
Building from the foundations of its predecessors Kitan Club and Uramado, SM Select contained a harder, non-conformist and fanatic edge, featuring writings with more lavish visual SM content — photographs and artworks in colour and black and white. The high quality of photography and artwork ushered in a new era of SM publishing, with SM Select featuring many now legendary artists, including Haruo Shinozaki, Jun Yoshida, Toshio Saeki, Kazuyuki Minori, Minoru Nagao, Ruyo Yo, Yasuharu Maeda, Mino Mura Akira, Hiro Kato, Nishimura Haruhi, Kozumi Yuko, Kito Akatsuki, Oshima Yukio, Kirigaoka Hiroyuki, Lin Moonlight, Maeda Yasunari, Yuya Nohira, Nakao Kaoru, etc. Major contributors were Dan Oniroku and Aotaro Aki. The principal rope master was Toshiyuki Suma. Rope master and writer Chimuo Nureki had several guest appearances in the magazine and took over as principal master when Mr. Suma fell ill. Photographer Norio Sugiura was the main photographer in the magazine from the 1980s.
Average—Good copy with some cover creases and spine crease, light wear, old fragile binding.
1974, Japanese
Softcover, 202 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kubo Shoten / Japan
$70.00 - Out of stock
February 1974, rare early issue of Suspense Magazine, the cult Japanese kinbaku magazine founded in 1965 and running for 15 years, edited by Haruo Shimamoto and Chimuo Nureki, packed with illustrated SM stories, lavish colour and b/w fetish artwork, sadistic cartoons, and gorgeous bondage photo spreads and vivid colour photographic fold-outs. This issue features bondage master Haruo Shimamoto, art feature by the legendary kinbaku/tattooed lady illustrator Kaname Ozuma, Akira Kito, Kazumu Kohinata, Toshiro Tama, stories by Aotaro Aki, Kaoru Fujimi, Higashiho Mitsuya, and many others.
Good—VG copy with light wear.
1998, Japanese
Softcover, 310 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
January 1998 issue of S&M Sniper, the cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979 - 2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM culture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, issues are packed from cover-to-cover with all manner of SM and fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as Masami Akita (Merzbow), Kazuo Kamimura, Domu Kitahara, Makoto Orui, Kinichi Tanaka, Nobuhiko Ansai, Masaaki Toyoura... Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more. This issue includes Nobuyoshi Araki, Takashi Homma, Ken-ichi Murata, Masami Akita, Toyoura Masaaki, Aki Tanaka, Koji Nakano, Junko Takahashi, Tetsuo Amano, Domu Kitahara, Mayumi Oda, Gaijin Tokuno, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Very Good copy.
1993, Japanese
Softcover, 300 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
March 1993 issue of S&M Sniper, the cutting-edge cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979—2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM counterculture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, each issue came wrapped in the iconic hyper-stylized airbrushed front covers of artist Yosuke Onishi, veiling the core content of non-fiction realist degradation and an eclectic, expressive editorial of kinbaku and all manner of SM, and extreme fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as SM archivist and noise musician Masami Akita (Merzbow), legendary SM writer and editor Dan Oniroku ("the most celebrated writer of popular SM novels in Japan"), features by legendary SM and seppuku performer, actress, and author Hiromi Saotome, features by contributing photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Masaaki Toyoura, Kenichi Murata, Nobuhiko Ansai, Kinichi Tanaka, Domu Kitahara, sadistic BDSM trainer Shima Shikou, and regular writings by convicted murderer and cannibal Issei Sagawa!! Including his translations of Guido Crepax comics from Italian to Japanese. This was not a magazine like the others. Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, dungeons, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more. This issue includes Nobuyoshi Araki, Kiyoshi Ikejiri, Yosuke Onishi, Domu Kitahara, Tadao Chigusa, Kenichi Yamakawa, Shima Shikou, Aki Ryo, Kinichi Tanaka, Wakao Takahashi, Chihiro Abe, Robert Mapplethorpe, Takashi Ishii, Hiroyuki Tanino, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Very Good copy.
1989, Japanese
Softcover, 310 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
October 1989 issue of S&M Sniper, the cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979 - 2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM culture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, issues are packed from cover-to-cover with all manner of SM and fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as Masami Akita (Merzbow), Kazuo Kamimura, Domu Kitahara, Makoto Orui, Kinichi Tanaka, Nobuhiko Ansai, Masaaki Toyoura... Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more. This issue includes Tadao Chigusa, Nobuyoshi Araki, Tsuguya Inoue, Joel Peter-Witkin, Robert Mapplethorpe, Wilhelm von Gloeden, Keizo Miyanishi, Sayoko Nakajima, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Very Good copy.
1983, Japanese
Softcover, 250 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Million Publishing / Tokyo
$80.00 - Out of stock
November 1983 issue of S&M Sniper, the cult glossy fetish magazine published in Japan between 1979 - 2009 that, unlike previous SM magazines, didn't centre so much around professional kinbakushi, favouring instead the exploration of new innovations of fetish and underground sex culture and emphasising the work of the models, stylists, make-up artists, and fashions designers, as much as the writers or photographers. The "new wave" of SM culture, embedded in 1980s underground music, fashion and visual art culture in Japan. Explicitly and profusely illustrated, issues are packed from cover-to-cover with all manner of SM and fetish photoshoots, illustrations, comics, essays, diaries, reports, exhibitions, reviews, interviews, and included regular contributors such as Masami Akita (Merzbow), Kazuo Kamimura, Domu Kitahara, Makoto Orui, Kinichi Tanaka, Nobuhiko Ansai, Masaaki Toyoura... Each issue is also brimming with amazing Japanese advertisements and classifieds for the latest bondage clubs, boutiques, fashion, toys, video and publication catalogues, hook-ups, phone sex, and much more. This issue includes Nobuyoshi Araki, Oniroku Dan, Aki Uchiyama, Fumika Kitahara, all the usual and more... Not for the faint of heart.
Very Good copy.
2015, Japanese / English
Softcover (silkscreened cover), 40 pages, 21 x 30 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Akio Nagasawa Gallery / Tokyo
$240.00 - Out of stock
Signed limited edition of A Room by Daido Moriyama, published in 2015 by Akio Nagasawa Publishing. A very special photo book in variation. Created at a printing event at Akio Nagasawa Gallery in 2015, in homage to Moriyama's 1974 Printing Show performance, a selection of images were selected from a series of erotically charged photographs of female nudes and domestic items and assembled in various orders to create numerous page sequences for the print-runs. Features 2 different silkscreened covers that were available in a limited edition of 250 signed/numbered copies each. A lovely publication.
Daido Moriyama (Ikeda, Osaka, 1938) lives and works in Tokyo.He first trained in graphic design before taking up photography under Takeji Iwamiya and Eikoh Hosoe as an assistant.He became an independent photographer in 1964, publishing Nippon Gekijō Shashinchō (Japan Theater Photo Album) in 1968 and Shashin yo Sayounara (Farewell Photography) in 1972; the work showed the darker sides of urban life and the city.He has had a radical impact on the photographic and art world in both Japan and in the West, with his expressive style of 'are, bure, boke' (rough, blurred and out-of-focus) and of quick snapshots without looking in the viewfinder. Solo shows at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Fondation Cartier pour l'Art Contemporain in Paris solidified Moriyama's worldwide reputation, and in 2012, he became the first Japanese to be awarded in the category of Lifetime Achievement at the 28th Annual Infinity Awards hosted by the International Center of Photography (ICP) in New York.
Signed by Daido Moriyama.
2018, Japanese / English / Chinese
Softcover, 3 volumes plus supplement, printed plastic bag
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
NITESHA / Tokyo
$280.00 - In stock -
First, quickly out-of-print, complete limited-edition facsimile of all three issues the ground-breaking Japanese photography magazine Provoke. The short-lived Provoke, founded in 1968 by art critic Koji Taki (1928-2011), photographer Takuma Nakahira (1938-2015), poet Takahiko Okada (1939-1997), photographer Yutaka Takanashi, and later joined by Daido Moriyama, is nowadays recognized as a major contribution to postwar photography in Japan, featuring the country's finest representatives of protest photography, vanguard fine art and critical theory in only three issues ever published.
In 2018, marking the 50th year since Provoke had first appeared, this special edition was published by NITESHA, a secondhand bookshop in Tokyo who were fortunate to be able to purchase all three volumes of the original prints. Rather than merely putting them back on the market again for profit, they decided to make a reprint of these extremely rare and inaccessible issues that are currently only owned by a limited number of connoisseurs. Striving to stay as close to the original publications as possible, all three issues are accompanied by a supplementary volume containing all the original Japanese texts (essays, poetry, etc.) translated into both English and Chinese, including those by Takahiko Okada (excluded from Steidl's “The Japanese Box” reissue due to copyright issues). This facsimile reprint also maintains the original size of all of the images (unlike the cropped Steidl “The Japanese Box” reissue), making it the closest thing to the seldom seen originals.
Comes housed in the publisher's limited edition "Provoke" printed plastic bag, as first issued, making it a most complete copy of this book-set.
Provoke's goal was to mirror the complexities of Japanese society and its art world of the 1960s, a decade shaped by the country's first large-scale student protests. The subtitle for the magazine was “Provocative Materials for Thought,” and each self-published issue was composed of photographs, essays and poems. The movement yielded a wave of new books featuring innovative graphic design combined with photography: serialized imagery, gripping text-image combinations, dynamic cropping and the use of provocatively "poor" materials. The writings and images by Provoke's members - Taki, Nakahira, Okada, Takanashi and Moriyama - were suffused with the tactics developed by Japanese protest photographers such as Nobuyoshi Araki, Eikoh Hosoe and Shomei Tomatsu, who pointed at and criticized the mythologies of modern life. Provoke’s grainy, blurry, and out-of-focus photographs were initially ridiculed as are-bure-boke (a Japanese term meaning, literally, “rough, blurred and out-of-focus”) and stirred a great deal of controversy, yet it had created a strong impact inside and outside of the photography world during that time and its influence cannot be overstated.
PROVOKE 1: Softcover, 68 pages, 21 x 21 cm
PROVOKE 2: Softcover (w. printed wrap-around obi strip), 110 pages, 24.2 x 18 cm
PROVOKE 3: Softcover, 110 pages, 24 x 18.4 cm.
PROVOKE Textbook (English and Chinese translations), 24 x 18.4 cm
As New. This edition is now out-of-print, further re-prints have been made.
2022, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 2 colour Risoprint, 110 x 165 mm
Edition of 150,
Published by
Discipline / Melbourne
$30.00 - Out of stock
Two books of poetry by Melbourne artist Chunxiao Qu bound into one volume.
Co-edited by Helen Hughes and Amy Stuart, with contributing writers Autumn Royal and Juhani Yli-Vakkuri. Designed by Zenobia Ahmed.
2019, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 10.8 × 17.6 cm
Published by
Discipline / Melbourne
$15.00 - In stock -
Elizabeth Newman is best known as a visual artist whose practice encompasses a variety of media including painting, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Writing, too, is central to her art. As indicated by the twenty-five or so texts compiled in this book, all dating from the last fifteen years, Newman’s literary output extends beyond her studio practice. Many of these texts are about artworks and exhibitions—her own as well as those of other local artists: they serve a critical rather than an aesthetic function. As such, these writings offer valuable insight into Newman’s artistic intentions and motivations, and her commentaries on the art of her peers constitute a compelling partial survey of art produced in Melbourne over the last decade and a half.
Designed by Robert Milne.
2010, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 352 pages, 16.7 x 24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$45.00 - In stock -
First 2010 hardcover edition.
There should no longer be any doubt: global capitalism is fast approaching its terminal crisis. Slavoj Žižek has identified the four horsemen of this coming apocalypse: the worldwide ecological crisis; imbalances within the economic system; the biogenetic revolution; and, exploding social divisions and ruptures. But, he asks, if the end of capitalism seems to many like the end of the world, how is it possible for Western society to face up to the end times? In a major new analysis of our global situation, Slavok Žižek argues that our collective responses to economic Armageddon correspond to the stages of grief: ideological denial, explosions of anger and attempts at bargaining, followed by depression and withdrawal. After passing through this zero-point, we can begin to perceive the crisis as a chance for a new beginning. Or, as Mao Zedong puts it, there is great disorder under heaven, the situation is excellent.
Very Good copy, VG dust jacket.
2006, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 448 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$65.00 - In stock -
First 2006 hardcover edition.
In Zizek's long-awaited magnum opus, he theorizes the parallax gap in the ontological, the scientific, and the political--and rehabilitates dialectical materialism.
The Parallax View is Slavoj Zizek's most substantial theoretical work to appear in many years; Zizek himself describes it as his magnum opus. Parallax can be defined as the apparent displacement of an object, caused by a change in observational position. Zizek is interested in the parallax gap separating two points between which no synthesis or mediation is possible, linked by an impossible short circuit of levels that can never meet. From this consideration of parallax, Zizek begins a rehabilitation of dialectical materialism.
Modes of parallax can be seen in different domains of today's theory, from the wave-particle duality in quantum physics to the parallax of the unconscious in Freudian psychoanalysis between interpretations of the formation of the unconscious and theories of drives. In The Parallax View, Zizek, with his usual astonishing erudition, focuses on three main modes of parallax: the ontological difference, the ultimate parallax that conditions our very access to reality; the scientific parallax, the irreducible gap between the phenomenal experience of reality and its scientific explanation, which reaches its apogee in today's brain sciences (according to which nobody is home in the skull, just stacks of brain meat--a condition Zizek calls the unbearable lightness of being no one); and the political parallax, the social antagonism that allows for no common ground. Between his discussions of these three modes, Zizek offers interludes that deal with more specific topics--including an ethical act in a novel by Henry James and anti-anti-Semitism.
The Parallax View not only expands Zizek's Lacanian-Hegelian approach to new domains (notably cognitive brain sciences) but also provides the systematic exposition of the conceptual framework that underlies his entire work. Philosophical and theological analysis, detailed readings of literature, cinema, and music coexist with lively anecdotes and obscene jokes.
Very Good copy, VG dust jacket.
1993, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 15.2 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$45.00 - Out of stock
In the space of barely more than five years, with the publication of four pathbreaking books, Slavoj Zizek has earned the reputation of being one of the most arresting, insightful, and scandalous thinkers in recent memory. Perhaps more than any other single author, his writings have constituted the most compelling evidence available for recognizing Jacques Lacan as the preemient philosopher of our time.
In Tarrying with the Negative, Zizek challenges the contemporary critique of ideology, and in doing so opens the way for a new understanding of social conflict, particularly the recent outbursts of nationalism and ethnic struggle. Are we, Zizek asks, confined to a postmodern universe in which truth is reduced to the contingent effect of various discursive practices and where our subjectivity is dispersed through a multitude of ideological positions? No is his answer, and the way out is a return to philosophy. This revisit to German Idealism allows Zizek to recast the critique of ideology as a tool for disclosing the dynamic of our society, a crucial aspect of which is the debate over nationalism, particularly as it has developed in the Balkans-Zizek's home. He brings the debate over nationalism into the sphere of contemporary cultural politics, breaking the impasse centered on nationalisms simultaneously fascistic and anticolonial aspirations. Provocatively, Zizek argues that what drives nationalistic and ethnic antagonism is a collectively driven refusal of our own enjoyment.
Using examples from popular culture and high theory to illuminate each other-opera, film noir, capitalist universalism, religious and ethnic fundamentalism-this work testifies to the fact that, far more radically than the postmodern sophists, Kant and Hegel are our contemporaries.
Very Good copy.
1989, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 13.2 x 19.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$55.00 - Out of stock
First 1989 edition.
In this provocative and original work, Slavoj Zizek takes a look at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock's Rear Window, from the operas of Wagner to science fiction, from Alien to the Jewish Joke, the author's acute analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.
Zizek takes issue with analysts of the postmodern condition from Habermas to Sloterdijk, showing that the idea of a 'post-ideological' world ignores the fact that 'even if we do not take things seriously, we are still doing them'. Rejecting postmodernism's unified world of surfaces, he traces a line of thought from Hegel to Althusser and Lacan, in which the human subject is split, divided by a deep antagonism which determines social reality and through which ideology operates.
Linking key psychoanalytical and philosophical concepts to social phenomena such as totalitarianism and racism, the book explores the political significance of these fantasies of control. In so doing, The Sublime Object of Ideology represents a powerful contribution to a psychoanalytical theory of ideology, as well as offering persuasive interpretations of a number of contemporary cultural formations.
Very Good copy.
1997, English
Softcover, 254 pages, 13 x 19.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$55.00 - Out of stock
First 1997 edition.
Slavoj Zizek is, without doubt, one of the most stimulating and vibrant thinkers of our time, and his idiosyncratic blend of Lacan and Hegel is always sparkling with insight and studded with amusing stories, anecdotes and jokes. In The Plague of Fantasies Zizek approaches another enormous subject with characteristic brio and provocativeness. The current epoch is plagued by fantasms: there is an ever intensifying antagonism between the process of ever greater abstraction of our lives-whether in the form of digitalization or market relations-and the deluge of pseudo-concrete images which surround us. Traditional critical thought would have sought to trace the roots of abstract notions in concrete social reality; but today, the correct procedure is the inverse-from pseudo-concrete imagery to the abstract process which structures our lives.
Ranging in his examples from national differences in toilet design to cybersex, and from intellectuals' responses to the Bosnian war to Robert Schumann's music, Zizek explores the relations between fantasy and ideology, the way in which fantasy animates enjoy-ment while protecting against its excesses, the associations of the notion of fetishism with fantasized seduction, and the ways in which digitalization and cyberspace affect the status of subjectivity. To the already initiated, The Plague of Fantasies will be a welcome reminder of why they enjoy Zizek's writing so much. For new readers, it will be the beginning of a long and meaningful relationship.
Very Good copy.
2002, English
Softcover, 288 pages. 15.5 x 23.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 2002 edition.
With the disintegration of state socialism, we are witnessing this eruption of enjoymnet in the re-emergence of aggressive nationalism and racism. With the lid of repression lifted, the desires that have emerged are from from democratic. To explain this apparent paradox, says Slavoj Zizek, socialist critical thought must turn to psychoanalysis.
For They Know Not What They Do seeks to understand the status of enjoyment within ideological discourse, from Hegel through Lacan to these political and ideological deadlocks. The author's own enjoyment of "popular culture" makes this an engaging and lucid exposition, in which Hegel joins hands with Rossellini, Marx with Hitchcock, Lacan with Frankenstein, high theory with Hollywood melodrama.
Very Good copy.
2015, English
Softcover, 1056 pages, 15.2 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$70.00 - In stock -
For the last two centuries, Western philosophy has developed in the shadow of Hegel, an influence each new thinker struggles to escape. As a consequence, Hegel's absolute idealism has become the bogeyman of philosophy, obscuring the fact that he is the defining philosopher of the historical transition to modernity, a period with which our own times share startling similarities.
Today, as global capitalism comes apart at the seams, we are entering a new period of transition. In Less Than Nothing, the product of a career-long focus on the part of its author, Slavoj Zizek argues it is imperative we not simply return to Hegel but that we repeat and exceed his triumphs, overcoming his limitations by being even more Hegelian than the master himself. Such an approach not only enables Zizek to diagnose our present condition, but also to engage in a critical dialogue with the key strands of contemporary thought-Heidegger, Badiou, speculative realism, quantum physics, and cognitive sciences. Modernity will begin and end with Hegel.
Very Good copy. First edition.