World Food Books

Semiotext(e) The German Issue
Edited by Sylvère Lotringer

1982, English
Softcover, 336 pages, 255.5 x 17.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$150.00 - In stock -

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Rare copy of one of the remarkable special book issues of the original Semiotext(e) journal — the Semiotext(e) The German Issue, published in 1982, edited by Sylvère Lotringer, featuring the work of Joseph Beuys, Michel Foucault, Christo, Christa Wolf, Walter Abish, Alexander Kluge, Paul Virilio, Ulrilke Meinhof, William Burroughs, Jean Baudrillard, Hans Magnus Enzenberger, Maurice Blanchot, Hans Jürgen Syberberg, Heidegger, Félix Guattari, Fritz Teufel, André Gorz, Helke Sander...

First edition. Not the 2009 reprint.

The German Issue (1982) was originally conceived as a follow-up to Semiotext(e)’s Autonomia/Italy issue, published two years earlier. Although ideological terrorism was still a major issue in Germany, what ultimately emerged from these pages was an investigation of two outlaw cities, Berlin and New York, which embodied all the tensions and contradictions of the world at the time. The German Issue is the Tale of Two Cities, then, with each city separated from its own country by an invisible wall of suspicion or even hatred. It is also the complex evocation of the rebelling youth—squatters, punks, artists and radicals, theorists and ex-terrorists—who gathered all their energy and creativity in order to outlive a hostile environment.

Like a time capsule, The German Issue brings together all the major "issues" that were being debated on both sides of the Atlantic—which eventually found their abrupt resolution in 1989 with the fall of the Berlin Wall. It involved the most important voices of the period—from writers and filmmakers to anthropologists, activists and poets, terrorists and philosophers. The book opens with Christo's “Wrapping Up of Germany” and the celebrated dialogue between East German dramaturge Heiner Müller and Sylvère Lotringer on the Wall (“Mauer”). Since it has been published in many languages, The German Issue offers a first-hand account of the Western world on the threshold of a major global mutation.

Founded in 1974, Semiotext(e) began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylvère Lotringer at the Columbia University philosophy department. Initially, the magazine was devoted to readings of thinkers like Nietzsche and Saussure. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he had organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. Schizo-Culture brought out connections between high theory and underground culture that had not yet been made, and forged the "high/low" aesthetic that remains central to the Semiotext(e) project.

Good—Very Good copy with general cover wear.

File under: Joseph Beuys Christo Joseph Beuys Michel Foucault Christo Christa Wolf Walter Abish Alexander Kluge Paul Virilio Ulrilke Meinhof William Burroughs Jean Baudrillard Hans Magnus Enzenberger Maurice Blanchot Hans Jürgen Syberberg André Gorz Helke Sander Martin Heidegger Félix Guattari Fritz Teufel SylveÌre Lotringer Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Sociology / Politics Socialism / Communism / Capitalism Out-of-print / Rare Anarchism Art Conceptual Art Fiction / Poetry Philosophy Psychoanalysis Crime / Violence Feminism Fluxus Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Performance / Dance / Theater Periodicals Theory / Essay Protest / Revolt

Readings... The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kakfa, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva
by Hélène Cixous

1991, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota

$45.00 - Out of stock

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First 1991 edition.

Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva offers striking and novel textual studies of major literary figures and emergent authors. Selected from Cixous’s seminars taught between 1980 and 1986 at the Universite de Paris VII (Saint-Denis) and at the College International de Philosophie, the texts chronicle the French intellectual scene with its shifting tastes over the decade following May 1986.

In their simple and accessible language, the texts can be read as inspiration for Cixous’s fictional and critical practices. They not only introduce readers to emergent texts from Brazil and Russia, such as Clarice Lispector’s “Foreign Legion” and Marina Tsvetayeva’s “Mother and Music,” but also give new, incisive insights into Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist and Kafka’s “Before the Law.” Drawing from philosophy and psychoanalysis, Readings: The Poetics of Blanchot, Joyce, Kafka, Kleist, Lispector, and Tsvetayeva can be read side-by-side with Reading with Clarice Lispector, as an ongoing meditation on ethics and poetics.

Hélène Cixous is a Jewish-French, Algerian-born feminist well-known as one of the founders of poststructuralist feminist theory along with Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. She is now a professor of English Literature at University of Paris VIII and chairs the Centre de Recherches en Etudes Féminines which she founded in 1974. She has published numerous essays, playwrights, novels, poems, and literary criticism. Her academic works concern subjects of feminism, the human body, history, death, and theatre.

Edited, translated, and introduced by Verena Andermatt Conley

For Cixous, Lispector’s work represents one of the finest examples of ecriture feminine in that she practices, in writing, what Cixous is searching for in her theoretical practice: the giving, spending, and inscribing of pleasure; an apprenticeship in the lessons of life.

VG—NF copy.

File under: Hélène Cixous Verena Andermatt Conley James Joyce Franz Kafka Clarice Lispector Maurice Blanchot Marina Tsvetaeva Heinrich von Kleist University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Theory / Essay Fiction / Poetry Poetry Feminism

Such a Deathly Desire
by Pierre Klossowski

2007, English
Softcover, 150 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Published by State University of New York Press / New York

$70.00 - Out of stock

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Provocative essays on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment.

Shocking, brilliant, and eccentric, the French author, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905–2001) exerted a profound effect on French intellectual culture throughout the twentieth century. The older brother of the painter Balthus, secretary to the novelist André Gide, friend to Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot, and heralded as one of the most important voices in the French "return to Nietzsche" by Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze, Klossowski pursued his singular vision of mortal embodiment through a variety of scholarly manifestations. In Such a Deathly Desire (Un si funeste désir), Klossowski's original interpretation of Nietzsche's eternal return is developed around the enigmatic figure of the "demon," then deepened with provocative readings of Gide's correspondence; Barbey d'Aurevilly's novel A Married Priest; and the intertwining of language and death in the work of Bataille, Blanchot, and Brice Parain. The book concludes with the powerful essay "Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody," in which Klossowski articulates the consequences of the eternal return and the meaning of Nietzsche's genealogy of the fabulation of the world. Intersecting with and confounding a range of disciplines—including psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender studies, and philosophy—Klossowski's critical writings on language, literature, and the aesthetics of embodiment remain powerful and original contributions to contemporary concerns in the theoretical humanities.

Translated with afterword by Russell Ford. Russell Ford is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Elmhurst College.

"Pierre Klossowski was one of the most influential (albeit idiosyncratic) literary figures in France during the postwar years, yet his work remains strangely unknown in the English-speaking world. Such a Deathly Desire was one of the essential books of Klossowski's oeuvre, and it includes seminal articles on Gide, Bataille, and Blanchot, as well as his now-classic essay 'Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody. ' The appearance of the book in English has long been anticipated, and we owe an immense debt to Russell Ford for providing us with an accessible and accurate translation. "—Daniel W. Smith, Purdue University

File under: Pierre Klossowski Pierre Klossowski Maurice Blanchot Friedrich Nietzsche Georges Bataille State University of New York Press / New York Philosophy Theory / Essay Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language

The Madness of the Day
by Maurice Blanchot

1981/2000, English
Softcover, 34 pages, ‎15.3 x 23 cm
Published by Barrytown Ltd. / US Station Hill Press / Barrytown

$16.00 - Out of stock

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Jacques Derrida writes (in Deconstruction and Criticism) of The Madness of the Day, first published in English in 1981, that it is a story whose title runs wild and drives the reader mad.la folie du jour, the madness of today, of the day today, which leads to the madness that comes from the day, is born of it, as well as the madness of the day itself, itself mad..La folie du jour is a story of madness, of that madness that consists in seeing the light, vision or visibility, to see beyond what is visible, is not merely 'to have a vision' in the usual sense of the word, but to see-beyond-sight, to see-sight-beyond-sight..The story obscures the sun.with a blinding light.

Translated by Lydia Davis.

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.

File under: Maurice Blanchot Lydia Davis Jacques Derrida Barrytown Ltd. / US Station Hill Press / Barrytown Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Philosophy

Death Sentence
by Maurice Blanchot

1976 / 2000, English
Softcover, 92 pages, 15.3 x 23 cm
Published by Barrytown Ltd. / US Station Hill Press / Barrytown

$30.00 - Out of stock

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Death Sentence is a philosophical novel by Maurice Blanchot. First published in 1948, it is his second complete work of fiction. This long awaited reprint of a book about which John Hollander wrote: "A masterful version of one of the most remarkable novels in any language since World War II," is the story of the narrator's relations with two women, one terminally ill, the other found motionless by him in a darkened room after a bomb explosion has separated them. "Through more than 40 years, the French writer Maurice Blanchot has produced an astonishing body of fiction and criticism," writes Gilbert Sorrentino in the New York Review of Books, and John Updike in The New Yorker: "Blanchot's prose gives an impression, like Henry James, of carrying meanings so fragile they might crumble in transit."

Translated from French by Lydia Davis

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.

File under: Maurice Blanchot Barrytown Ltd. / US Station Hill Press / Barrytown Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Philosophy

Thomas the Obscure
by Maurice Blanchot

1973/2000, English
Softcover, 132 pages, ‎15.3 x 23 cm
Published by Barrytown Ltd. / US Station Hill Press / Barrytown

$32.00 - In stock -

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Before Sartre, before Beckett, before Robbe-Grillet, Maurice Blanchot created the “new novel,” the ultimate post-modern fiction. Written between 1932 and 1940, Blanchot’s first novel, here brilliantly translated by Robert Lamberton, contains all the remarkable aspects of his famous and perplexing invention, “the ontological narrative”―a tale whose subject is the nature of being itself. This paradoxical work discovers being in the absence of being, mystery in the absence of mystery, both to be searched for limitlessly. As Blanchot launches this endless search in his own masterful way, he transforms the possibilities of the novel. First issued in English in 1973 in a limited edition, this re-issue includes an illuminating essay on translation by Lamberton.

"A novel of consciousness brought to a high point of perfection, Blanchot's masterpiece thus far , one of the major works of contemporary French literature: such is Thomas the Obscure"—Georges Poulet

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.

File under: Maurice Blanchot Robert Lamberton Barrytown Ltd. / US Station Hill Press / Barrytown Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction

Total Expansion of the Letter Avant-Garde Art and Language After Mallarmé
By Trevor Stark

2020, English
Hardcover, 440 pages, 17.8 x 22.9 cm
Published by The MIT Press / Massachusetts October Books / New York

$89.00 - In stock -

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How cubism and Dada radically reimagined the social nature of language, following the utopian poetic vision of Stéphane Mallarmé.

At the outset of the twentieth century, language became a visual medium and a philosophical problem for European avant-garde artists. In Total Expansion of the Letter, art historian Trevor Stark offers a provocative history of this “linguistic turn,” centered on the radical doubt about the social function of language that defined the avant-garde movements. Major cubists and Dadaists—including Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, and Tristan Tzara—appropriated bureaucratic paperwork, newspapers, popular songs, and advertisements, only to render them dysfunctional and incommunicative. In doing so, Stark argues, these figures contended with the utopian vision of the late nineteenth-century poet Stéphane Mallarmé, who promised a “total expansion of the letter.”

In his poems, Mallarmé claimed, “the act of writing was scrutinized down to its origins.” This scrutiny, however, delivered his work into an indeterminate zone between mediums, social practices, and temporalities—a paradox that reverberates through Stark's wide-ranging case studies in the history of the avant-garde. Stark examines Picasso's nearly abstract works of 1910, which promised to unite painting and writing at the brink of illegibility; the cubists' “hope of an anonymous art,” expressed in newspaper collages and industrial colors; the collaborative, cacophonous invention of “simultaneous poems” by the Dadaists in Zurich during World War I; and Duchamp's artistic exploration of chance in gambling and finance. Each of these cases reflected the avant-garde's transformative encounter with the premise of Mallarmé's poetics: that language—the very medium of human communication and community—is perpetually in flux and haunted by emptiness.

As certain artists experimenting in the postwar orbit of John Cage well knew, it was not he who introduced the conceptual scope of chance and musical metric into the language of art. In his brilliant book on Mallarmé's legacy—sure to correct the record—Trevor Stark positions the Coup de Dés as the first score of the twentieth century. Inhabiting industrialism's destruction of the subject, and an infinite abstraction—as chance gave way to indeterminism—Mallarmé encoded his best-known poem with score-like traits (time/realization) and ambiguity (language's readymade indeterminacy); thus he cast the death of the author like a bottle thrown at sea. Such stakes are clear because Stark makes them so. With not a word or a sentence wasted, he adroitly guides us through the Mallarméan dimensions of three pivotal experiments: Braque and Picasso's introduction of text into pictorial space (1910/1912); the temporal-auditory collage of Tzara's simultaneous poems honed in the collectivism of Zurich Dada; and Duchamp's ultimate transvaluation of art/work in Monte Carlo. The often-startling fruits of Stark's meticulous research are presented with a light touch, a space for realization; yet we sense the intellectual and “intermedial” virtuosity the author brings to the task—handling, deciphering, hearing, seeing, translating, across disciplines, languages, and time(s)—to convey his cases and insights to 21st-century readers with the force of contemporaneity. — Julia E. Robinson, Associate Professor in the Department of Art History at New York University; curator of the exhibition John Cage & Experimental Art: The Anarchy of Silence

File under: John Cage Marcel Broodthaers Pablo Picasso Tristan Tzara Marcel Duchamp Paul Cezanne Georges Braque Francis Picabia Hugo Ball F.T. Marinetti Trevor Stark Stéphane Mallarmé Tristan Tzara Martin Heidegger Theodor W. Adorno Maurice Blanchot Edmund Husserl Maurice Merleau-Ponty The MIT Press / Massachusetts October Books / New York Art Performance / Dance / Theater Fiction / Poetry Dada Fluxus

Nights as Day Days as Night
by Michel Leiris

1987, English
Softcover (French-fold), 169 pages, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Eridanos Press / Colorado

$60.00 - Out of stock

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Long out-of-print 1987 Eridanos Press edition, the first in English, of French surrealist writer and ethnographer Michel Leiris' Nights as Day Days as Night.

Nights as Day is a diary of over a hundred short dreams composed over the course of four decades. As the title implies (Nuits sans nuit, et quelques jours sans jour is literally "Nights without darkness, and a few days without light"), the texts in this volume pursue an extended pun on the porous demarcation between waking and dreaming. By transcribing the events of his daily life as if they were episodes in an ongoing dream, by recording his dreams as if they embodied the true narrative of his waking existence, Leiris in effect defuses the distinction between the two. "I have always behaved as if I were on stage," Leiris confesses in Manhood, and the roles he executes in these texts are various: he is a hero of Greek or Racinian tragedy, martyr of the French Resistance, matador, bantamweight champion of the world, Chaplinesque victim of the Eternal Feminine, Ben Turpin, Gary Cooper, but most frequently he simply plays a mild-mannered minor functionary and author beset by the usual anxieties and fantasies of the average homme moyen sensuel. One of the most striking aspects of these texts is their ordinariness, their deliberate dailiness, their eschewal of lyricism in favor of the unprepossessing prose of the world. Whatever the setting (music halls, fairgrounds, circus shows, boxing matches, museum exhibitions, exotic lands, brothels, streets of Paris or Hollywood movies), Leiris concentrates on estranging the familiar, on unsettling the commonplace, on eliciting the foreignness of the most domestic, local detail. And it is thus that Nights as Days, Days as Night rejoins Leiris's autobiographical and ethnographic enterprises: all it takes is a minor adjustment of lighting or a slight troping of rhetoric for daily life to take on the uncertain distance of dreams, and conversely, for dream to be de-mystified into the quotidian.—R.S.

Michel Leiris (1901—1990) grew up in comfortable Parisian bourgeois surroundings. The earnest student of chemistry was soon seduced by the exciting world of cafés and cabarets, and particularly by the heady stimulus of Dada and Surrealism. Introduced to surrealist circles by his lifelong friend André Masson, Leiris by the late 1920s had become one of the earlier defectors from the movement. Subsequently, he co-founded, with George Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Pierre Klossowski and Roger Caillois the College de Sociologie. His continuing ethnographic fascination with the cultures of Africa, the Caribbean, and Central America, as well as his extensive fieldwork in Sudan and Ethiopia, have produced such literary fruits as his unique travel account L'Afrique Fantôme (1933). He is also author of a four-volume autobiography, La Règle du Jeu, of which the first volume was published in English as Manhood. Michel Leiris lived in Paris with his wife, owner of the Galérie Louise Leiris, a major art institution in the post-war period. Leiris has written extensively on major modern artists-among them Miró, Giacometti, Duchamp, Lam, and Bacon.

Richard Sieburth has translated Hölderlin's Hymns and Fragments and Benjamin's Moscow Diary, as well as works by Michaux and Guillevic. He is also the author of a study of Ezra Pound and Remy de Gourmont. He teaches French and Comparative Literature at New York University.

Good—Very Good copy with some light buggery (insect nibbles to cover edge and spine), light foxing to block edge, clean interior, uncreased spine. Stiff French-fold covers.

File under: Michel Leiris Maurice Blanchot Richard Sieburth Eridanos Press / Colorado Surrealism Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Fiction / Poetry

Lautréamont and Sade
by Maurice Blanchot

2004, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$48.00 - Out of stock

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In Lautréamont and Sade, originally published in 1949, Maurice Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism. Today, Lautreamont and Sade, these unique figures in the histories of literature and thought, are as crucially relevant to theorists of language, reason, and cruelty as they were in post-war Paris.

"Sade's Reason," in part a review of Pierre Klossowski's Sade, My Neighbor, was first published in Les Temps modernes. Blanchot offers Sade's reason, a corrosive rational unreasoning, apathetic before the cruelty of the passions, as a response to Sartre's Hegelian politics of commitment.

"The Experience of Lautreamont," Blanchot's longest sustained essay, pursues the dark logic of Maldoror through the circular gravitation of its themes, the grinding of its images, its repetitive and transformative use of language, and the obsessive metamorphosis of its motifs. Blanchot's Lautreamont emerges through this search for experience in the relentless unfolding of language. This treatment of the experience of Lautreamont unmistakably alludes to Georges Bataille's "inner experience."

Republishing the work in 1963, Blanchot prefaced it with an essay distinguishing his critical practice from that of Heidegger.

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.

File under: Maurice Blanchot Georges Bataille Comte de Lautreamont The Marquis de Sade Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Theory / Essay Eros Art Surrealism Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction

Politics, Writings, Mutilation
by Allan Stoekl

1985, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota

$45.00 - Out of stock

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First edition of Allan Stoekl's Politics, Writing, Mutilation, published in 1985 by Minnesota Press.

Five twentieth-century French writers played, and continue to play, a pivotal role in the development of literary-philosophical thinking that has come to be known in the United States as post-structuralism. The work of Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Raymond Roussel, Michel Leiris, and Francis Ponge in the 1930s and 1940s amounts to a prehistory of today's theoretical debates; the writings of Foucault and Derrida in particular would have been unthinkable outside the context provided by these writers. In Politics, Writing, Mutilation, Allan Stoekl emphasizes their role as precursors, but he also makes clear that they created a distinctive body of work that must be read and evaluated on its own terms.

Stoekl's critical readings of their work-selected novels, poems, and autobiographical fragments-reveal them to be battlegrounds not only of disruptive language practices, but of conflicting political drives as well. These irreconcilable tendencies can be defined as progressive political revolution, on the one hand with its emphasis on utility, conservation, and labor; and, on the other hand, a notion of dangerous and sinister production that stresses orgiastic sexuality and delirious expenditure. Caught between these forces is the intellectual of Bataille's time (and indeed of ours), locked in impotence, self-betrayal, and automutilation.

Stoekl develops his critique through dual readings of each writer's central work-the first reading deconstructive, the second a search for the political meaning excluded by a deconstructive approach. Repeating this process on a larger scale, he shows how Derrida and Foucault are indebted to their precursors even while they have betrayed them by stripping their work of political conflict and historical specificity. And he acknowledges that one of the most painful questions faced in prewar and Occupied France-that of the unthinkable guilt and duplicity of the intellectual-may not be as remote from contemporary theoretical concerns as some would have us believe.

"Allan Stoekl teaches french and comparative literature at Yale University. He edited and translated Vision of Excess: Selected Writings of Georges Bataille, 1997-1939, also published by Minnesota. "

VG copy.

File under: Francis Bacon Allan Stoekl Francis Ponge Georges Bataille Raymond Roussel Maurice Blanchot Michel Leiris University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota Philosophy Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Surrealism Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay

Who Comes After The Subject?
Edited by Jean-Luc Nancy, Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor

1991, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by Routledge / London

$65.00 - In stock -

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First 1991 Routledge edition of "Who Comes After the Subject?". Edited by Jean-Luc Nancy, Eduardo Cadava, and Peter Connor, this collectible volume offers an overview of contemporary French thought on the question of the "subject", as it is viewed in philosophy, politics, history and psychoanalysis. It represents the most recent research from a host of the foremost contemporary French figures in philosophy and theory, including essays by Deleuze, Derrida, Lyotard, Blanchot, Lacoue-Labarthe, Nancy, Descombes, Kofman, Irigaray, Badiou, Ranciere, and Balibar.

Very Good copy.

File under: Jacques Derrida Gilles Deleuze Jean-François Lyotard Étienne Balibar Jean-Luc Nancy Luce Irigaray Eduardo Cadava Peter Connor Vincent Descombes Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe Sarah Kofman Alain Badiou Maurice Blanchot Jacques Rancière Routledge / London Philosophy Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare Psychoanalysis

documenta X
The Book: Politics Poetics

1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 830 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by documenta / Kassel

$80.00 - Out of stock

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First English edition of this monumental 830 page book for documenta X, the last documenta of the twentieth century and the first directed by a woman, the French curator Catherine David, brings together the work of more than 100 of the world's foremost thinkers, writers, and artists in an extraordinary anthology of seminal texts and images of, on, and about the development of Western cultural and critical theory since 1945.

The book "seeks to indicate a political context for the interpretation of artistic activities at the close of the twentieth century, through a montage of images and documents from the immediate post-war period to the present. The range of material treated here is not encyclopaedic; it represents a polemical attempt to isolate specific strands of artistic production and political endeavour which can be taken as references in the contemporary debate over the evolution of our societies. Drawing from distinct yet interrelated territorial and linguistic domains, the book singles out complex cultural responses to the unifying processes of global modernity."—from the book jacket.

A comprehensive work in itself, rich with enmeshed texts and illustrations of artworks, film stills, historical documents throughout in colour and in black and white.

Writers include: Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Blanchot, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Paul Celan, Amílcar Cabral, Masao Miyoshi, Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Jacques Rancière, Tadao Sato, Youssef Ishaghpour, Josef Beuys, Samuel Beckett, Albert Camus, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Rem Koolhaas, Sandra Álvarez de Toledo, Witold Gombrowicz, Herve Joubert-Laurencin, Jean-François Chevrier, Marguerite Duras, Edward Said, Henri Alleg, Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Uwe Johnson, Jerzy Grotowski, James Clifford, Primo Levi, Pierre Clastres, Andrea Branzi, Fabrizio Gallanti, Gérard Chaliand, Stig Björkman, Daniel Defert, Saskia Sassen, Catherine David, Benjamin Buchloh, Paul Virilio, Serge Daney, Étienne Balibar, Nadia Tazi, and many others.....

Artists include : Archigram, Martin Kippenberger, Archizoom Associati, Art & Language, Hans Haacke, Oyvind Fahlström, Samuel Beckett, Franz West, Andrea Zittel, Heimo Zobernig, Nancy Spero, Jean-Luc Godard, Marcel Broodthaers, Lygia Clark, Jörg Herold, Fischli & Weiss, Dan Graham, Robert Adams, Peter Friedl, Paweł Althamer, Liam Gillick, Mike Kelley & Tony Oursler & Diedrich Diederichsen, Stan Douglas, Harun Farocki, Ed van der Elsken, Walker Evans, Aldo van Eyck, Heiner Goebbels, William Kentridge, Ulrike Grossarth, Richard Hamilton, Vito Acconci, Raymond Hains, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Siobhán Hapaska, Ecke Bonk, Carsten Höller & Rosemarie Trockel, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Lois Weinberger, Hélio Oiticica, Gabriel Orozco, Olaf Nicolai, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Gerhard Richter, Thomas Schütte, Marc Pataut, Gordon Matta-Clark, Christian Philipp Müller, Matt Mullican, Antoni Muntadas, Jean-Luc Moulène, Reinhard Mucha, Álvaro Siza, Toyo Ito, John C. Portman Jr., Paulo Mendes da Rocha, Mariella Mosler, Josef Beuys, Steve McQueen, Chris Marker, Lothar Baumgarten, Jean Dubuffet, Kerry James Marshall, Maria Lassnig, Rem Koolhaas, Joachim Koester, Suzanne Lafont, Sigalit Landau, Helen Levitt, Garry Winogrand, Brassaï, Le Corbusier, Antonin Artaud, and so many more...

Very Good coy, light wear. Good dust jacket with some creasing and edge wear.

File under: Mike Kelley Tony Oursler Carsten Höller Rosemarie Trockel Archigram Martin Kippenberger Archizoom Associati Art & Language Hans Haacke Samuel Beckett Franz West Andrea Zittel Heimo Zobernig Jean-Luc Godard Marcel Broodthaers Lygia Clark Jörg Herold Fischli & Weiss Dan Graham Robert Adams Peter Friedl Öyvind Fahlström Paweł Althamer Liam Gillick Stan Douglas Harun Farocki Ed van der Elsken Walker Evans Aldo van Eyck Siobhán Hapaska Reinhard Mucha Mariella Mosler Steve McQueen Chris Marker Lothar Baumgarten Kerry James Marshall Maria Lassnig Rem Koolhaas Joachim Koester Suzanne Lafont Sigalit Landau Helen Levitt Garry Winogrand Jean-Luc Moulène Hélio Oiticica Thomas Schütte Christian Philip Muller Gabriel Orozco Olaf Nicolai Michelangelo Pistoletto Gerhard Richter Marc Pataut Gordon Matta-Clark Matt Mullican Antoni Muntadas Heiner Goebbels William Kentridge Ulrike Grossarth Richard Hamilton Vito Acconci Raymond Hains Ecke Bonk Carl Michael von Hausswolff Lois Weinberger Carsten Höller Pier Paolo Pasolini Joseph Beuys Nancy Spero Le Corbusier Brassaï Jean Dubuffet Alvaro Siza Toyo Ito Rainer Werner Fassbinder Paulo Mendes Da Rocha John C. Portman Jr. Antonin Artaud Diedrich Diederichsen Catherine David Yana Milev Klaus Biesenbach Nancy Spector Hans-Ulrich Obrist Theodor W. Adorno Maurice Blanchot Pier Paolo Pasolini Paul Celan Amílcar Cabral Masao Miyoshi Hannah Arendt Michel Foucault Gilles Deleuze Félix Guattari Jacques Rancière Tadao Sato Youssef Ishaghpour Josef Beuys Samuel Beckett Albert Camus Rainer Werner Fassbinder Rem Koolhaas Sandra Álvarez de Toledo Witold Gombrowicz Herve Joubert-Laurencin Jean-François Chevrier Marguerite Duras Edward Said Henri Alleg Pierre Vidal-Naquet Uwe Johnson Jerzy Grotowski James Clifford Primo Levi Pierre Clastres Andrea Branzi Fabrizio Gallanti Gérard Chaliand Stig Björkman Daniel Defert Saskia Sassen Benjamin Buchloh Paul Virilio Serge Daney Étienne Balibar Nadia Tazi and many others documenta / Kassel Art Group Shows / Collections Curatorial Out-of-print / Rare Sculpture / Installation Australian Photography Performance / Dance / Theater Protest / Revolt Theory / Essay Architecture / Interior Conceptual Art Film / Video Sound / Music Painting Photography Ecology

Dénes Farkas
Evident in Advance

2013, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 196 pages (144 b/w ills.), 15.5 x 25.5 cm
Published by Center for Contemporary Arts / Estonia Sternberg Press / Berlin

$32.00 - Out of stock

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With texts by Adriana Cavarero, Maurice Blanchot, Bruce Duffy, Markus Miessen, Daniele Monticelli
Edited by Adam Budak

“If I don’t trust this evidence why should I trust any evidence?," Wittgenstein asked himself in "On Certainty." Dénes Farkas’s work is haunted by a drama of not delivering a trust to a singular evidence of this world: a world as he found it. Hysterically reproduced paper maquettes of choreographed architecture, imprisoned within a clumsy, photographic frame, are abstract shelters for imagined and unspoken texts. Words are characters in performance of a world as a text.

As a proposition, Farkas’s exhibition and publication for the Estonian Pavilion of the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013 is "an absent book" and yet "the book to come." The installation is a piece of spatial, rhythmical writing; a quintet of interiors woven of autonomous though intertwined, poetic fragments of quasi-domestic setting: a library, a garden, an absent cinema, a spatial book, an obsession chamber (a locus of deranged architect and non-writer). "A story? No. No stories, never again," Farkas repeats after Maurice Blanchot, while rehearsing his art of ultimate denial and rejection.

Copublished with the Center for Contemporary Arts, Estonia
Design by Zak Group

File under: Dénes Farkas Adriana Cavarero Bruce Duffy Daniele Monticelli Markus Miessen Maurice Blanchot Center for Contemporary Arts / Estonia Sternberg Press / Berlin Art