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:
THU—FRI 12—6 PM
SAT 12—4 PM
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
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World Food Books Gift Voucher
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Animal Rights / Veganism
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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.
1986—1994, English
Softcover (12 issues), approx 50-80 pages ea., 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
International Synergy Institute / Los Angeles
$600.00 - In stock -
"A thrice yearly exploration of ambiguous borders and dynamic (intellectual/artistic) frontiers."
Exceptionally rare lot of 12 issues (1986—1994) of the trail-blazing subscription-only one-of-a-kind journal published by the International Synergy Institute, a intermedia think-tank active in Hollywood between 1986—1987. IS was founded by American actress and philanthropist Andra Akers (Charlie's Angels, Dallas, Dukes of Hazzard...), edited by experimental composer, researcher and Harry Partch Ensemble member David Dunn, with a cast of incredible contributors spanning these issues that includes media theorist Gene Youngblood (Expanded Cinema...), Australian composer, poet and performer Chris Mann, American ethnobotanist Terence McKenna, American artist Bill Viola, American landscape architect Bonnie Sherk, parapsychologist Rupert Sheldrake, mathematician Ralph Abrahams, composer Kenneth Gaburo, Australian experimental composer Warren Burt, early media artist visionaries Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image, the Electronic Café...), Science Fiction theorist, philosopher and writer for Marvel comics Allyn B. Brodsky, American composer and writer Elaine Barkin, visionary Czech author Lukáš Tomin, aeronautical engineer and astronaut Russell Schweickart, mathematician and polymath Tim Poston, climate crisis artists Newton and Helen Mayer Harrison, American composer John Bischoff, cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, ecological philosopher and author Boleslaw Rok, essayist and activist Tomaž Mastnak, Chilean biologist and philosopher Francisco Varela, artist Michael Kalil, systems theorist Will McWhinney, percussionist and composer Stuart Saunders Smith, mathematician Gottfried Mayer-Kress, alternative broadcaster Jay Levin, British-American futurist Hazel Henderson, actress Debra Clinger (The Love Boat, The Krofft Supershow, Midnight Madness, The Brady Bunch Variety Hour...), musician Mark Trayle, artist Sheila Pinkel, VFX pioneer Mimi Gramatky (LOST, Miami Vice, Star Trek, Tron, Damnation Alley...), sonic healer Jill Purce, robot dance choreographer Margo K. Apostolos, American psychedelic artist Alex Grey, social critic and historian Morris Berman, futurist Riane Eisler, poet James Bertolino, British zoologist, anthropologist and author John Heathorn Huxley, multi-media artist Todd Siler, American philosopher of science Ervin László, Budapest dissident magazine Magyar Narancs, and more.
Issues present: #0, #1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #9, #10, #11, #12, #13, #14 (12 issues total, not all pictured)
"INTERNATIONAL SYNERGY consists of a global network of vanguard artists, scientists, and meta-physicians who are united by a deep sense of commitment to crossing the boundaries of their individual disciplines. Integral to this awareness is a reconciliation between advanced technological resources and a sense of the planet's sanctity. INTERNATIONAL SYNERGY is dedicated to the premise that such an understanding can form the basis of a creative matrix for responsible action in the information age."
"At this hinge of history, it seems appropriate that we should publish a journal where the passion of the individual scientist/artist can meet in sovereign association with global concerns — spinning the wheel of knowledge so that each of us can create our own theoretical magic." [...] "I am deeply moved by the creative commonwealth in this community, filled with explorers of topology, morphology, chaos dynamics, cognition, mind video, the revisioning of nature and art, telecommunications, sonics, cybernetics, cultural history, fractal politics, and what it now means to be deeply human. The provocative interaction of these ideas cannot help but to create a new and uniquely meaningful story. Come with us."—Andra Akers
Most Good—Very Good, with a couple of issues Average (mostly due to cover rubbing or creasing), all with light wear/age.
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 180 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Herder and Herder / New York
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1971 hardcover edition of Rexroth's major study of modern American poetry. "An iconoclastic, gossipy, yet judicious book."—Library Journal
"Poetry has been both personally and professionally the central concern in Kenneth Rexroth's life and art. He is now recognized as one of America's leading poets and critics. A man of sharp and discriminating tastes, supported by keen sensibility and a wide erudition, he here offers a major interpretation of the poetry and poets of modern America, from the radical bohemians at the turn of the century through the leftist poets of the twenties, the reactionaries of the thirties and forties, the gradual emergence of the San Francisco school after the Second World War, to the more recent poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Philip Whalen, and Gary Snyder.
For Kenneth Rexroth, American Poetry in the Twentieth Century is a work of re-experiencing the poems themselves, and in the process he provides a controversial new look at a number of the more unimpeachable standard authors—Stevens, Sandburg, Frost, Williams, Jarrell—and boldly redefines the value of such poets as Levertov, Moore, and Robert Lowell.
Kenneth Rexroth was born in South Bend, Indiana, in 1905, and grew up in Chicago, New York, and various towns throughout the Midwest. His erudition and range of interests have marked him as both a uniquely individual yet universal man: poet, painter, critic, linguist, guru. Mr. Rexroth now lives in Santa Barbara, California."
Very Good copy in G—VG dust jacket with some light wear to extremities and price clip to inner flap. 1975 previous owner inscription to title page.
1980, English
Softcover, 33 leaves, 16 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Gregory Eiffe / Novar Gardens
$35.00 - In stock -
Rare Australian experimental phonetics typeface book self-published in 1980 by South Australian Interface Artist, writer and developer, Greg Eiffe. Hand-bound, this rather uncategorisable texual experiment/introductory educational study presents like a conceptual language artwork or concrete poetry book, the text reproduced photographically from computer video screen by the artist. "During the early days of personal computing, circa 1980, typing in programs was the main activity. I myself bought an Apple II in early 1979, carried a small U.S. television home from San Francisco, and, using a step-down transformer, was likely the first Apple Computer customer in my home state of South Australia." This book concerns the Soundex algorithm, which breaks down words (in English,) to their phonetic core in order to compare them, and more importantly, match them, with less specific criteria than perfect spelling, allowing for words to be compared phonetically.
Greg Eiffe's work as a writer/developer since the 1970's spans experimental poetry work and film/video foraying into an increasing engagement with language and computers. 'Interface Art', his chief concern, is the interface between the human mind and reality as mediated by language. He has published many books on such subjects.
Good copy, light general wear/age/light creasing to covers.
1986, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 52 pages, 28 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
International Synergy Institute / Los Angeles
$150.00 - In stock -
"A thrice yearly exploration of ambiguous borders and dynamic (intellectual/artistic) frontiers."
Exceptionally rare, issue #1 (after the inaugural #0) of the trail-blazing subscription-only journal published by the International Synergy Institute, a intermedia think-tank active in Hollywood between 1986—1987. IS was founded by American actress and philanthropist Andra Akers (Charlie's Angels, Dallas, Dukes of Hazzard...), edited by experimental composer, researcher and Harry Partch Ensemble member David Dunn, with a cast of contributors for this issue including early media artist visionaries Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Mobile Image, the Electronic Café...), media theorist Gene Youngblood (Expanded Cinema...), Science Fiction theorist, philosopher and writer for Marvel comics Allyn B. Brodsky, aeronautical engineer and astronaut Russell Schweickart, cultural historian William Irwin Thompson, systems theorist Will McWhinney, actress Debra Clinger (The Love Boat, The Krofft Supershow, Midnight Madness, The Brady Bunch Variety Hour...), VFX pioneer Mimi Gramatky (LOST, Miami Vice, Star Trek, Tron, Damnation Alley...), and more.
"INTERNATIONAL SYNERGY consists of a global network of vanguard artists, scientists, and meta-physicians who are united by a deep sense of commitment to crossing the boundaries of their individual disciplines. Integral to this awareness is a reconciliation between advanced technological resources and a sense of the planet's sanctity. INTERNATIONAL SYNERGY is dedicated to the premise that such an understanding can form the basis of a creative matrix for responsible action in the information age."
"At this hinge of history, it seems appropriate that we should publish a journal where the passion of the individual scientist/artist can meet in sovereign association with global concerns — spinning the wheel of knowledge so that each of us can create our own theoretical magic." [...] "I am deeply moved by the creative commonwealth in this community, filled with explorers of topology, morphology, chaos dynamics, cognition, mind video, the revisioning of nature and art, telecommunications, sonics, cybernetics, cultural history, fractal politics, and what it now means to be deeply human. The provocative interaction of these ideas cannot help but to create a new and uniquely meaningful story. Come with us."—Andra Akers
Very Good copy, light wear/age.
1999, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fringecore / Belgium
$70.00 - In stock -
First edition of Cinema Contra Cinema is a collection of essays and interviews by cult author Jack Sargeant on the vertiginous extremes of underground cinema. Published in 1999 in Belgium, the book includes underground filmmakers, Bruce La Bruce, Beth B, David Cronenberg, M. Henry Jones, Jeff Keen, Harry Smith, Marne Lucas, Raymond Pettibon, Eric Brummer, Boyd Rice, David Alan Clarke, Craig Baldwin, Vivien Dick, Jeff Krulik, Huck Botko, Beat Takashi, as well as newcomers such as Tyler Hubby, Modi and Peter Strickland. Plus essays on David Cronenberg's Crash, Bruce La Bruce's Hustler White, Mark Heynar's award-winning Affliction and Blunt Cut's De Leiber Rausch. Fully illustrated with many rare and previously unseen photographs.
"The subject matter is excremental, the approach obsessional and the result a kind of pervo-deviant tribute to the spirit of Georges Bataille...serious research activity."—Steve Beard, iD
"The complex critical apparatus of Foucault's Language, Counter-Memory, Practice with the sensibilities of a Todd Browning movie."—Ken Hollings, The Wire
"The post-punk Parker Tyler."—Michael Simmons, LA Weekly
VG copy with light wear to cpver/extremities.
2024, English
Hardcover, 480 pages, 29.7 x 20 cm
Published by
Korm Plastics / Netherlands
$89.00 - In stock -
Edited and assembled by Kristian Olsson. Almost an encyclopedia of esoteric knowledge, dark music and arts and much beyond! Book-format publication dealing with all kinds of apocalyptic culture, anarchic rants, archaic sorcery, damned poets, esoterrorist tactics, forbidden knowledge, libertine lusts, necromantic collages, oneiric musings, outlaw occultism, perversion, sinister arts and visual expansionism. Giftnålen is the foul arts journal for death-obsessed brutes and society’s outcasts. Revel in amoral excesses through 480 pages. Sit back and enjoy reading while this world burns. A total derangement of the senses. Heavily illustrated with tons of exclusive and rarely seen material.
Harking back to the days of the late 1980s-early 1990s in terms of diversity of content, drawing inspiration from underground books & publications such as Amok, Esoterra, Exit, Force Mental, Pandemonium, Rapid Eye Movement, Svarta Fanor and so on. Giftnålen takes it next level and further into unknown territory.
Including passages, large or brief, dealing with:
Sigvard Nilsson Thurneman & Den Magiska Cirkeln, ”Thurneman & Liemannen from the perspective of a LHP initiate” by Johannes Kvarnbrink, “The Vultures of Sala”, Georges Bataille & the Acephale society, ”Death and Night and Blood: Yukio Mishima & the Asceticism of Japanese Death-Aesthetics”, ”Hatets sånger” by Leon Larsson, ”Hyoscyamus Nigredo: From Silver Into Lead”, “Manhunter: Thurneman – Occultist & Serial Killer” by Wulvaricht, ”The Devil in Delgada: The Strange & Unusual Lives of Johnny Bode & Tom Zacharias”, ”11.000 Days in Säter: Från Dårhus till Bårhus”, ”The Sense of Bel-Longing” poem by Julian Theurgen, “The Thurneman improvisations” by Sten Röse, “Sigvards sterbthaler”, ”The Triumph of Death” by Alberto Caraco, SalaSatanskin, Judas Ekholm, ”The Poisonous Needle: Esoterrorist Credo of the Sinister Outlaw”, ”Salaligan: Tools of the Trade”, melancholia, Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan over a hundred years, De Strigmagarum Daemonique Mirandis, ”The Curse of the Third Eye”, ”Fem-femmornas fotbollsmatch: criminal all-stars Thurneman, Salaligan & Johnny Bode teaming up against the screws at the Långholmen prison”, Tillbergamördaren, Renzo Novatore, ”Teurgisk Terrortantra: Photos by MalFiore di Fiele & Frida Ghiozzi (Omega Kunst)”, ”The Poetic Tradition of Swedish Melancholia: A Portrayal of Dismal & Unfortunate Death-seekers in the ruinous Land of the Midnight Sun”, Nattmaran, ”Lasse Lucidor – the Unfortunate: Rusets och ruelsens skald”, Erik Johan Stagnelius – Dweller in the Arms of Putrefaction, Plato, Dante, ”Iatromantis: To Die Before You Die”, Meister Eckhart, Parmenides, the Upanishads, Djävulsbrand, Styggen, underworldly descent, Peter Kingsley, ”Avfyrning!”, Ecstasies, The Death Principle, ”Henbane: Saturnalia Poison” & ”A Woodland Sitting” by Sentinessence, ”The Linkola Legacy”, Apocalypse Culture, Deep Ecology, Oscar Wilde, Max Stirner, Ingmar Bergman, Albert Camus, ”Killing Cults & Their Slaves” reflections by Charles Manson (exclusive text submitted by ATWA/ATWAR), “Red & Blue”, ”Ashen Synchronicities”, haruspex of criminal gnosis, ”Meeting with a Remarkable Man: An Interview with Nikolas Schreck”, Spiritual Warriorhood in the Age of Dissolution, Initiatory Mysteries in the Temples of Karnak, The Faustian Quest, Charlatans of Occulture, Vama Marg, Esoteric Tantric Buddhism, The Three Poisons, Solitude & Subtraction, The Process Church of Final Judgement, Scientology, ”Counter-Culture”: A Fly Entangled in the Webs of Maya, luddite poetry, The Manson-File: Myth and Reality of an Outlaw Shaman, Eros & Thanatos, Storms of Sethian Liberation, ”Abraxas & His Mysteries: The Forgotten God & the Hidden Nature of Reality”, Abraxas in Hesse’s ”Demian”, extract from ”Opposition is True Friendship” – Karl NE on Abrades, D.H. Lawrence ”Taos”, The Abraxas Foundation, Michael Moynihan, Boyd Rice, ”Monarchie Infernale: The Occult History of the Royal Court and the Aristocratic Elite in Sweden during the Gustavian Era”, ”Of Blind Men & Occult Forces”, Blutleuchte, “The Hearts of Kings” Ajna Offensive, Descent magazine, Lightbringers of the North, Gustav Biörnram – necromancer of the Swedish king Gustav III, The Kingdoms of Elgaland-Vargaland, ”Nekromantiens: Riter vid Sankt Johannes Kyrkogård”, Andrew Chumbley, Algolagonia, The Malleus Maleficarum: Europe Overshadowed by the Hammer of Witches, The Gates of Hell Opening in Copenhagen, La sorcière, ”Method for Achieving Communication with Spirits” translated notes from the necromantic conjurations of Gustaf Björnram, ”Carl August Ehrensvärd & Den Esoteriska Kretsen: Eleusinian Mysteries & Orphic Hymns in the Mythological Labyrinth”, Gottfried Benn, ”The Mystical Signatures of Adolph Falkenberg”, Gustaf Adolf Reutersholm, Den Esoteriska Kretsen, Sophia Perennis, René Guenon, J.W. von Goethe, Oswald Spengler, ”Death to those who seek false comforts” by Erica Frevel, ”In the Midst of Life, We are in Death”, ”Riddles of the Sevenfold Way”, Anton Long, Algernon Blackwood, ”The Man Whom the Trees Loved”, Richard Moult, Michael Morthwork,”The Ordeal of the Abyss: Interview with Christos Beest”, ”From Ancient Gods into New Devils”, Wotan, self-sacrificial offerings, burial traditions, black magic rites, C.S. Lewis, Guido Cernonetti, Man Ray, BDSM, Aldous Huxley, Octave Mirabeau, Ambrose Bierce, G.I. Gurdjieff, King Gustav III, ”Ernst Wagner against the degenerate world”, ”Liber Nigri Peregrinationis: The Black Pilgrimage to Chorazaim & the Crossing of the Abyss”, Jack Parsons, Marjorie Cameron, L. Ron Hubbard, Leonora Carrington, the scholia of Nicolas Gomez Davila, Arcana Europa, Ignus Fatuus: Irrlicht, The Lunar Accomplice”, Shintoism, ”Mount Analogue & the Dark Night of the Soul”, René Daumal, Roger Gilbert-Lecomte, G.I. Gurdjieff, Saint John of the Cross, ”Behold… the Blood of the Moon”, Mircea Eliade, ”Det Sjunde Inseglet: Procession Scene”, ”H.P. Lovecraft – A Comrade of the Wolves & Rider of Nightmares”, Alain Robbe-Grillet, ”Mysterium Tremendum: An interview with Carl Nordblom”, “Det skälvande mysteriet”, infernal pacts, criminal gangs of Sweden, secret brotherhoods, the UR Group, Ezra Pound, August Strindberg, from “On the Heights of Despair” by Emil Cioran, self-transformation, Hanon-Tramp, Henri Fuseli, ”The Dawning New Days of Defeat”, Hagakure, ”Mishima on Death in the Modern Age”, Ba Ra Ken: Ordeal of Roses, Eino Leino, Ulrike Meinhof, Holger Meins, “Bo Ignatius Cavefors landstigen på Dödens ö”, Alexandra David-Neel, Janne Bergquist: an open cancerous wound on the body of society, Autonomisk Manual, Kenneth Anger, Sir Augen Goosens, the Anarchs-Futurist Manifesto, Ernest Coeurderoy, the Kindred of the Kibbo Gift, Antonin Artaud, Marquis de Sade, Set Teitan, Paul Verlaine, Guido von List, The Rise and Fall of Hanussen – Occult superstar of the Interwar Period: Charlatan from the Finee Salons of Berlin to Feeding a Family of Badgers, Zos Kia, Paul Wegener, ritual bloodletting, Austin Osman Spare, Aleister Crowley, Christos Beest, Carl von Linné, Boyd Rice, Nikanor Teratologen, Melek Taus of Holland, Stanislaw Przybyszewski, Mensur scarification – A Rite of Passage in 20th century Europe, yoga practices with Che Guevara, ”Frank Braun: Devil hunter or doppelgänger?”, Blood mysticism & Teutonic Vampirism, Viktor Rydberg on the Mandragora, ”The Curse of Nosferatu: Fraternitas Saturni’s Master Pacitus & Prana Film”, Ernst Jünger ”Sicilian Letter to the Man in the Moon”, ”Female nomad decadents of the Ferkel Circle”, Frida Uhl, F.T. Marinetti, ”Blast of the Vortex Campaign: Ezra Pound, W.B. Yeats & Wyndham Lewis”, Vienna Actionism, Odd Nerdrum, Andreas Baader, Night of Death in Stammheim, Liesmac of the Deverills, Ola Hansson: Pariah among outcasts, Edward Munch, Martin Heidegger, Jean Genet, insurrection, suicide as an ultimate revolutionary act, Peryt Schou & the Awakening of the Logos, Arte de Maleficium: Works of Art as Regicide, Gustav Meyrink, Ilna Ewers-Wunderwald – Alraune des Jugendstils, Stefan Eggier, Mahlon Blair, Karl Hans Strobl, Degenerate Germany: Perversion for Profit in the Weimar Republic, Human Sacrifice at the Magic Island Haiti, ”William Buehler Seabrook: Transcending All Transgressions”, sadomasochism, tantric masters, ”Three Tongue-less Mouths” by C. Nordblom, Maya Deren, ”The Sacred as Transgression: Roger Callois”, ”Lupercalia to Liberalia: An Extract from The Antichrist Phallus” & ”The Rustic Rite of the Wolf-Owl” by Wyrd Isle Collective, ”Grave-robbing in the Towers of Silence with Sven Hedin”, “Disciples of ‘Bone: The Dispossessed Sons of Albion”, Citipati and Kangling, ”The Minstrels of Misrule”, the Green Man, ”Mythos of Masked Gods and Mummering Men”, Kenneth Grant, Styggelser: Black Metal Abominations, Externsteine, J.G. Ballard, The Panic Movement, the Promethean flame, gnosticism, Roland Topor, Fernando Arrabal, William Ouidhuis’ Katabol, Abefko Nord: the volcanic island Alnö, Saint Antonius, the werewolf in Scandinavian mythology, Perun, the Cult of Dionysos, ”Apocalyptic Collisions of Tradition & Modernity in a Perpetual Dark Age”, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s Psychomagic, Foucault, Fulcanelli & the Mystery of the Cathedrals, ”Play the King for a day…”, ”Rex Nemorensis: The Killing of the Divine King”, The Golden Bough, The Cultural Terrorist Manifesto, Sturm und Drang, tjyvheder, prison life, mythopoetic imagination, Carl Larsson’s “Midvinterblot”, Gösta Werner’s “Midvinterblot”, the cult of Frö, Nordic death cults, Lucia – Progenitress of Demonic Entities, álfar, ”Narcocultura Necromanteia: Criminal Devotees among the Cult of the Holy Death”, Liber Falxifer, Necrosophy, Santa Muerte / San La Muerte, Nyhamnskifte, In the Hoofprints of the Nordic Devil, The Thirteenth School and the Black Priests of Satan, Carl Gustav Jung & the Shadow, Herr Ola i Trång & Gammal-Sjul, Kyrkogrim, Kvick i jord, Created from the Shadow of God, Svartkonst: Nordic necromancy & nigromancy, Hultkläppen, the Hand of Glory, Tjuvljus, The Spiritus Familiaris & the Arcanum of Human Blood, do-it-yourself instructions for the making of ”bjäran”, Paracelsus, ”Den Ryktbara Trollpackan Kapten Elins förmenta resor till Blåkulla och Bekantskap med Djefwulen”, Hyltén-Cavallius ”Wärend och Wirdarne”, småfiffel, The Arcane and Forbidden Wisdom of Nordic Sorcery found in the Scandinavian books of the black arts, rare archive photographs of Nordic sorcerers and witches, Sanguine Vociferation, Ichor, Aztec blood rituals, Vampirism at the Execution site, Red & White: Shakti & Shiva, menstrual blood magic, Significance of “Red / Blue / Purple Wings” to the 1%er, Mandragora Officinarum, “Stä blod”, Aristocracy of the Soul: the warrior poet Gabrielle D’Annunzio, the anarchic republic of Fiume, Kapala & Damaru, ”Pierre Drieu la Rochelle: Drawn Towards Death Like a Moth Towards the Flame”, cyanide, Chhinnamasta: Acephalic Goddess of Paradoxes, Tantric graveyard meditations, ”Åderlåtning & blodmat”, Doktor Mabuse, Isidore Lucien Ducasse, Macabre Ritual Feasts of Freemasonry, Consanguinity, Offerings to the Dark Gods, the Necromancy of Erichto, Nikanor Teratologen: Dissekerande definitioner, Frithjof Schoun, female domination, Hermann Hesse, Dalai Lama, Miguel Serrano, Mithraic mysteries, Apolitea, ”Saint Sebastian: The Twice Martyred”, The Pagan Ways of emperor Diocletian, Aum: Suck on Sarin, The Electronic Revolution, Word Virus, cultural terrorism, artificial intelligence, psychoactive plants, Cimicidäemones: Bedbugs making your deathbed, ångerstål, vådastål, Nordic Sorcery, Demons of the Flesh, Gamen, opium dreams, godetia, demonomania, simulacra, Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, Ned Ludd, MK Ultra, Jünger’s “Psykonauterna” & “Visit to Godenholm”, Executioners swords towards Externsteine, Herman Wirth, Pervitin, perversion, murder weapons & tools of self-wasters as magic objects, borrowing bones from the dead, the Witch of Endor, “Omne malum ab Aquilone: All Malice travels with the North Wind”, The Wild Hunt, the Nine Galder songs, Gullveig / Heid, Canon episcopi, The Death-Horse of Horatius, Donar’s Oak, Ulvhednar, varg-i-veum, Vánagandr, LSD-25, Psilocybe Semilanceata, instruments made from human remains, Nattmannen, rackaren, The Corpse Hounds of Hel, Hector Meinhof, brewing beer on a severed human hand, the secret Vehmic courts, Barcode or Branding? Welcome idiot to the Grave New World!, Unfolding the Blood-Eagle, Metaphysics of Death, Mjältsjuka: The Black Bile, Descent into Hades, Ancient Greece, Man is a God in Ruins, leaderless resistance, Aghori devotees, Akeldama: Field of Blood, Pauper’s Graves Bonehouses as a Sanctum for Equality in Death, ”The Infernal Trinity: Reinterpreting the Sinister Imagery of the Prior Leschman Chapel” by Christopher Walton, ”Hornet och smörjan: Early Use of Psychedelic Drugs & Poisonous Plants among Witches & Sorcerers in Europe”, derangement of the senses, pitchfork-riders, fence-riders, Nordic shamanism, sabbatic craft, sublimation through filth, sacred prostitution, Jukka Siikala, dead rats, the path of Kaulamarga, ”Ecstatic Inferno Visions & Thanatomaniac Excesses: South-East Asia as seen through the feverish glass-eye of an exile-European death-seeker / The Documentary Photography of Stephen Bessac”, Hunting Asia, Deathlust, Maison Close, mondo movies, Pakito Bolino, Le Dernier Cri, Narok, Thai Buddhist hell theme parks, Asubha – meditations on the foulness of the human body, MS13, mortuary cults, Nicholas Roerich, Agni Yoga, Helena Petrovna Blavatsky, Tibet, Bodhisattva Maitreya, Bolshevik supersoldiers perfected through Kalachakra Tantra, ”Onwards to Shambhala: The Path towards merging with the divine fire”, the Occult Roots of Soviet, OGPU Special Department – Institute for Brain Studies & Psychic Activities, hypnosis, Barchenko, Gleb Bokii, Baron Ungern-Sternberg, the Bogd Khan, Kangchendzönga, Corto Maltese, Caucasian Ovcharkas feasting on corpses, Sven Hedin, ”Beast, Men & Gods” by Ferdinand Ossendowski, the Spear of Destiny, the Cult of the Leader & Soviet Godhood, Arctic Hysteria, pyramids near the Lake Seidozero, Yakov Blumkin, the Ancestral Research Bureau, Vril force, Odic Energy, Olaus Rudbeck & his Atlantean Uppsala, ”Among Fiddlers, Outcasts & Outlaws in Helsingia”, Karl-Max Fredrikson, the eternal return, Lim-Johan, horrid Hälsingland, Miguel Serrano, Nils-Fredrik Åkerberg & Delsboligan: ”an evil beast capable of the most heinous cruelty”, Kniven, ”Discovering a Runic Devil-Pact from the 19th Century”, the myth of Hårga, Raggare, ”Hultkläppen: A Menschenfeind in the Devil’s Service”, Pelle Schenell, Antinomian scatological tricksters – the two living legends known as ”Bajsmannen”, slagrutemän, Starsk-Pelle, Troll-Per och dömullen, det brutala Gnarp, the Nordic Yule Goat, ”Kali: The Black Mother” by Karl NE, The Art of David S. Herrerías, Karl Nachzehrer Eng – interview extract, Anckarström & the assassination of king Gustav III, freemasonry, spirit seers, Hertig Karl, Hypnosmord, ”Bones in the Wall: Enriqueta Martí – Vampire of Barcelona” by Martin Locker / Perennial Pyrenees, ”Hanns Heinz Ewers – Rider of the Germanic Nightside”, catacomb spectres, ”A Thousand Faces of Fear”, Psychonauts, smoking 77 cigarettes a day, ”The Conqueror Worm or Carrion for Worm?”, Intoxication and Art, Ewers & Alraune in Sundvall, Kristoffer Nilsson, Per Faxneld, Pan-Germanic Panic in India, Thugees, Left-Hand Path initiation, ”Bo Ignatius Cavefors – Landstigen på Dödens Ö”, Carsten Regild, Cavefors Förlag, Soma, Grymhetens Teater Dekadens, Arnold Böcklin, Infinity Land Press, Socialistische Patienten Kollektiv, Kommando Holger Meins, Odd Nerdrum, Caravaggio, the state-sanctioned murder of the Baader-Meinhof gang and their martyr hood, Christ in Gethsemane, J.H. Schönheit versus Karl XII, Oppressive Liberation Spirit – Rest in Power Sakevi Yokoyama, Self-Mortification, Ivan Agueli, Edward Munch, Arthur Moeller van der Bruck, Aleister Crowley, Thelema, Rites of the Dreamweapon: The Tremor Rite, Rangjung Rigpe Dorje, Spirit Catcher, Prussian anarchists, ”Plutarchs of the Pandemic: Lords of All Fevers & Plague”, Walpurgisnacht, Ira Cohen, Brain Damage: Sorcery as an Art, PH Kerin, Marcus Hinze, Gilles de Rats, human sacrifice, Robert Nicholas Taylor, Haiti: The Magic Island, ”Chat Control”, Quimbanda, Exu, Jesus Malverde, Svartkonstböcker, skaldic mead, the Cathars, ”The Troubadour Turned Traitor: Ezra Pound”, Bhagavata Purana, Water as a Passageway into the Underworld, Sejd Laughter, the End of the World in Nordic mythology, Nastrand – the Corpse-Shore, sacred fountains, the Great Reset, hematophilia, blood play, Günter Brus, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, guerilla tactics, The Key of Alocer, Rökkr, Cum Ingenti Priapo, pagan rites of fertility, ”The Descent of Odin” by Thomas Gray, The Galder of Death: Vallgalder, The Tree of Wyrd, ”The Nithing Pole”, land spirits, the sacrificial groves of the dead, George Sylvester Viereck, Nikola Tesla, Unamerican activities, European gothic horror literature, social credit, Daemonium Aeternus, Euronymous, Sepulchral Noise, Svarta Cirkeln, grave desecrations, death magick, Wandervögel, Emanuel Swedenborg, Julereien, De Dödas Julotta, ”Lycanthropia” by Adam Parfrey, the Equinox Event, ”On Sacrifice” by Tancredi Valeri, ”The Last Words of Louis Lingg”, Venus in Furs, Sumerian kingship, Against Control, Techniques for Cutting Up the Leviathan of Modernity, Reinventing Urban Sorcery, Subverting and Disrupting the NWO Control Mechanisms, heathen hit squads, mental illness, post-war eugenics in the Swedish demonocratic state, Trevor Brown’s Antichrist, Arturo Reghini, neo-Pythagoreanism, Bror Gadelius, complete disorientation of the senses, dissidents, heretics, deviated carnal encounters, Apotropeism, antinomianism, Guido Crepax, Alfred Kubin, Valerie der Phantasten, väggmadammer, European folklore, ”Living in the Reign of Phantoms… Saluting Death in a Rain of Bullets”, Iconoclasta, Nihilismo, Propagation by the Deed, Side Real Press, Black Widow’s Web Erotica, Michel Houllebecq, desert wanderers, Arthur Machen, Dragon Rouge, active imagination, the Revolutionary Cathechism, Devil Worship, necromantic rites, suicidal pacts, a world making its last death twitches….
SOUND:
Metgumbnerbone, The New Blockaders, Ward Phillips, Vivenza, G.I.S.M, Criminal Party, Grim, White Hospital, Basilisk, John Duncan, Paul Hurst, Beast 666 Tapes, Linekraft, LSD (Japan), John Murphy, Lily Vice & Lust Vessel, Nord, Ultra, Art Into Life, Ramleh, Sir Ashleigh Grove, Organum, Con-Dom, The Grey Wolves, Opera for Infantry, Death in June, Allerseelen, Zero Kama, Korpses Catatonic, Cthulhu Records, Masstishaddhu, SPK, Citipati, Peter Zincken, Sedayne, Nåstrond, Thurnemans, Salaligan, Klinik (the Swedish), Hyoscyamus Niger, Amebix, Hijokaidan, Irkallian Oracle, D-C Pöbeln, Brighter Death Now, Spacemen 3, Agitation Free, Mortuus, Genocide Organ, Johnny Bode, Lapp-Lisa, Tom Zacharias, Blood Axis, Blood Ov Thee Christ, Alfarmania, Masami Akita & ZSF Produkt, Tony Conrad, Tone Generator, RJF, Joy Division, Rune Lindblad, Åke Hodell, Geto Boys, Etat Brut, The Curfew Recordings, Tower Transmissions, Come Organisation, H.N.A.S, Mixed Band Philanthropist, Bladder Flask, Leif Thuresson, Galme, Asmus Tietchens, Noisextra radio show, Putrefier / Birthbiter, Die Form / Bain Total, Club Moral, Iannis Xenakis, Terry Riley, Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Dadarotator, Kickback, Survival Unit, Bizarre Uproar, Striktlickers, United Dairies, Brainticket, AQM, S.K.V. Null, Premature Ejaculation, Aghast, The Folding Staircase, Monte Cazazza, Aussaat, Totalitär, Beast 666 Tapes / Hate Song, Clandestine Blaze, Vice Squad, Night Wolf, O’Nancy in French, Blod (Gnarp), Lille Roger, Missbrukarna, Samla Mammas Manna, Cromagnon, Taj Mahal Travellers, CM von Hausswolff, Leif Elggren, Coil, Citipati, Martin Bladh, Perdition Hearse, the true Mayhem, Blue Öyster Cult, Blasphemy, Sodom, Treriksröset, Proiekt Hat, Taint, Slave State, Ernte, Psychic TV, Monte Cazazza, Angus MacLise: Dreamweapon - The Ascension of Saint Angus of Kathmandu, LaMonte Young , Marian Zazeela, John Cale, The Dream Synicate / The Theatre of Eternal Music, Tony Conrad, The Velvet Underground, Corpse Molestation, Bestial Warlust, Destroyer 666, Black Hole, Mortuary Drape, Paul Chain, the Sodality, The Third Ear Band, Fata Morgana, Master’s Hammer, Hiram Gordon Wells, Vagina Dentata Organ, Unkommuniti / Black Dwarf, R&D Group 28, Throbbing Gristle, Perdition Hearse and others.
CINEMA:
Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, Invocation of My Demon-Brother, Alraune, The Student from Prague, The Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti, Blood On Satan’s Claw, The Wicker Man, Roger Corman’s E.A. Poe adaptions, Eyes of Fire / Cry Blue Sky, Born of Fire, Wickedness of the Wyrdful Ways: Obscure Treasures from the Catacombs of Occult & Otherworldly Cinema, ”The Devil’s Devilry” (Ken Russell’s the Devils), Le Feu Follet, ”Folk horror – a Eurocentric phenomena?”, ”This ain’t the summer of love” – Altamont & Performance, Incubus, Right Brain Video, Junk Films – the Collected Short Shockumentaries of Tsurisaki Kiyotaka, …hanno cambiato faccia, Baba Yaga, Don’t Deliver Us From Evil, Lost Paradise: Riding Habit Harakiri, Faccia di Spia, Sukkubus – the Devil in the Body, psycho-sexual arthouse cinema of oneiromantic libertines, La sorcière, Häxan – Witchcraft through the Ages, Trans-Europe-Express, Belladonna of Sadness, L’Eden et après, Glissements progresses du plaisir, Louis Mallet, Det Sjunde Inseglet, Ingmar Bergman, Survival Research Laboratories, The Other Side of Madness, Hagazussa, A Field in England, Kill List, High Rise, Åsa-Nisse, Viva La Muerte!, Cinema as Resistance in Fascist Spain, I will walk like a crazy horse, Tombs of the Blind Dead, Who Can Kill a Child?, Last House on Dead End Street, David Cronenberg, Brion Gysin, Bizarre / The Secrets of Sex, Anthony Balch, Red Baron Entertainment, Jack Smith, Stan Brakhage, Coto de Caza, Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs, Freaks, Towers Open Fire, The Bell from Hell, The Killer of Dolls, Murder in a Blue World, Eloy de la Iglesia, Cannibal Man, the Glass Ceiling, Animales Racionales, Themroc, Beast in the Heat, Leon Klimovsky, Paul Naschy, Night of the Walpurgis, The Werewolf & the Yeti, The People Who Own the Dark, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Rebellion of the Dead, Abefko Nord, Hunchback of the Morgue, Faust: eine Deutsche Volkssage, Night of the Sorcerers, ”Shape-shifters & the Silver Globe”, Lokis: A Manuscript of Professor Wittenbach, Andrzej Zulawski, Diabel, Possession, On the Silver Globe, The Tragedy of Macbeth, Black Sabbath, Viy, Tilbury, Rat Savior, Svesto Mesto, the New Wave of Czechoslovak Cinema, True Gore, The Cremator / Spalova mrtvol, Lars von Trier’s Riget, Valerie & Her Week of Wonders, Kurototage: Black Lizard, Afraid to Die, Móju: Blind Beast, Femina Ridens, The Rite of Love and Death, Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, The Annunciation, How to Become a God, Dark Shadows, Blade Runner, Night Tide, Invocation of My Demon’s Brother, In Satan’s Name, Konstantin Sergeyevich Lopushansky, Letters from a Dead Man, Visitor to a Museum, Andrej Tarkovskij, Stalker, History of the Arkanar Massacre, Satanico Pandemonium, Alucarda, The Mansion of Madness, Lunacy, El Topo, Fando y Lis, Legend of the Witches, The Judgement of Albion, Nosferatu – eine Symphonie des Grauens, ”Arcane Incantations: The Alchemic Cinema of Pupi Avati”, Zeder, The House with the Laughing Windows, Saló – The 120 Days of Sodom, L’arcano incantatore, Arcana, Luis Buñuel, Robin Redbreast, Whistle and I’ll Come to You, True Gore, Penda’s Fen, Scum, Made in Britain, Apocalypse Now, Gösta Werner’s Midvinterblot and more beyond what the eye perceives.
The overwhelming interest in the book has resulted in the first hundred copies selling out within less than a day.
1987, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ultima Thule / Leicester
$65.00 - In stock -
Long out-of-print issue no. 4 of the legendary Audion Magazine, April 1987, featuring cover articles: Bill Nelson, Aeoliah, plus: Shub Niggurath, Electronica 1986, Thunderbolt Records (InTeam reissues), Riccardo Sinigaglia, Muslimgauze, Made To Measure, Robert Fripp, O Yuki Conjugate, Recommended Records, ADN, Colors, Audion Recording Co., United Dairies, etc. (inc. Guru Guru/Uli Trepte), reviews: Nazca, Rufus Zuphall, Youth & Ben Watkins, Bruce Gilbert, etc.
"The Magazine for New Musics... Synthesizer, Experimental & Progressive Rock, Avant-Garde, Electronic, Fusion, etc.", Audion Magazine was founded in 1986 by Steven Freeman & Alan Freeman, owners of England's esteemed Ultima Thule shop and music label, and creators of the Krautrock reference bible "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg". Audion was an important and unique voice in the 1980's, committed to exploring adventurous music, ever willing to embrace the unusual, and seek-out those that were shaping the face of experimental contemporary music. Profusely illustrated with many rare photographs and graphics, each issue featured articles, interviews, profiles, reviews, essays, and comprehensive listings and discographies of artists and labels from around the world. It was an especially important conduit for the underground tape network that was immensely active throughout the 80's—90's in Europe, US, Japan, UK, etc. Like all of their books that came later, every issue is a vital document and valuable reference for anyone into avant-garde, progressive music.
VG copy with light tanning/age to edges.
1987, English
Softcover (staple-bound), 32 pages, 30.5 x 21.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Ultima Thule / Leicester
$65.00 - Out of stock
Long out-of-print issue no. 5 of the legendary Audion Magazine, July 1987, featuring over article: Ken Moore: Rock musician, avant-gardist, synthesist, plus: Steve Roach, ADN, Recommended Records, Asmus Tietchens, Behind The Iron Curtain: Hungarian Rock, Network 23, Hamster Records, Synergy, Nik Tyndall, Wolfgang Hertz, Celestial Harmonies, Tago Mogo, Made To Measure, Sky Records, Colors, Kuckuck, A letter from Thailand, Reviews: Can, Klaus Schulze, The Land Of Yrx, Steve Tibbetts, etc.
"The Magazine for New Musics... Synthesizer, Experimental & Progressive Rock, Avant-Garde, Electronic, Fusion, etc.", Audion Magazine was founded in 1986 by Steven Freeman & Alan Freeman, owners of England's esteemed Ultima Thule shop and music label, and creators of the Krautrock reference bible "The Crack in the Cosmic Egg". Audion was an important and unique voice in the 1980's, committed to exploring adventurous music, ever willing to embrace the unusual, and seek-out those that were shaping the face of experimental contemporary music. Profusely illustrated with many rare photographs and graphics, each issue featured articles, interviews, profiles, reviews, essays, and comprehensive listings and discographies of artists and labels from around the world. It was an especially important conduit for the underground tape network that was immensely active throughout the 80's—90's in Europe, US, Japan, UK, etc. Like all of their books that came later, every issue is a vital document and valuable reference for anyone into avant-garde, progressive music.
VG copy with light tanning/age to edges.
1979, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
John Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$65.00 - Out of stock
Violence and the Sacred is Girard's brilliant 1972 study of human evil and the ritual role of sacrifice. Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek tragedy and the lynchings and pogroms propagated by contemporary states illustrate his central argument that violence belongs to everyone and is at the heart of the sacred.
"His fascinating and ambitious book provides a fully developed theory of violence as the 'heart and secret soul' of the sacred. Girard's fertile, combative mind links myth to prophetic writing, primitive religions to classical tragedy."
René Noël Théophile Girard (1923—2015) was a French polymath, historian, literary critic, and philosopher of social science whose work belongs to the tradition of philosophical anthropology. Girard was the author of nearly thirty books, with his writings spanning many academic domains.
1986, English
Softcover, 182 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Croom Helm / London—Sydney
$20.00 - In stock -
It could be argued that the influence of Lacan on modern literary studies has been greater than anyone’s. Lacan has historicised the universal or mythic perceptions of Freud, and thus lent a new status to literature as a cultural artefact. This book, originally published in 1986, aims to delineate the trends in the uses made of Lacan today; to examine the theoretical substructure by which his work is accommodated to literature; and to analyse the way in which his work ‘models’ the formal relation of the literary text to other texts, to history and to politics.
Good copy with wear and age.
1998, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
State University of New York Press / New York
$20.00 - In stock -
Hegel's Transcendental Induction challenges the orthodox account of Hegelian phenomenology as a hyper-rationalism, arguing that Hegel's insistence on the primacy of experience in the development of scientific knowledge amounts to a kind of empiricism, or inductive epistemology. While the inductive element does not exclude an emphasis on deductive demonstration as well, Hegel's phenomenological description of knowledge demonstrates why knowing becomes scientific only to the extent that it recognizes its dependence on experience.
Simpson's argument closely parallels Hegel's own in the Phenomenology of Spirit, highlighting those sections, like Hegel's analysis of mastery and slavery, that contribute to the argument that knowing is both vulnerable and responsive to the way in which experience resists our attempts to make sense of things. Simpson's argument connects his account of Hegelian phenomenology with traditional accounts of induction, and with a number of other commentators.
VG copy.
2003, English
Softcover, 362 pages, 21 x 14 cm
Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Ballantine Books / New York
$110.00 - In stock -
2003 paperback edition of Masson's controversial exposé on Freud's Seduction Theory of child sexual abuse — "A watergate of the psyche"-New York Times. Very rare in all editions.
In 1896, Sigmund Freud presented his revolutionary "seduction theory," arguing that acts of sexual abuse and violence inflicted on children are the direct cause of adult mental illness. Nine years later, Freud completely reversed his position, insisting that these sexual memories were actually fantasies that never happened. Why did Freud retract the seduction theory? And why has the psychoanalytic community gone to such lengths to conceal that retraction? In this landmark book, drawing on his unique access to formerly sealed and hidden papers, Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson dares to uncover the truth about this critical turning point in Freud's career and its enduring impact on the theory and practice of psychoanalysis.
The Assault on Truth reveals a reality that neither Freud nor his followers could bear to face. Bracing in its honesty, gripping its revelations, this is the book that prompted Masson's break with the psychoanalytic community—and launched his subsequent brilliant career as an independent thinker and writer.
Very Good —NF copy.
1999, English
Softcover, 243 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
First 1999 edition.
One of the best-known continental theorists writing today, Gérard Genette here explores our aesthetic relation to works of art. Through an analysis of the views of thinkers ranging from David Hume and Immanuel Kant to Monroe C. Beardsley, Arthur Danto, and Nelson Goodman, Genette seeks to identify the place of the aesthetic in a theory of artistic appreciation. His discussion is rich in detailed examples drawn from all of the arts. The Aesthetic Relation is a companion volume to The Work of Art: Immanence and Transcendence, published by Cornell in 1997. Taken together, the two books offer a comprehensive theory of art which addresses the work of art as at once object and action. Genette maintains that our aesthetic relation to all types of objects presupposes that special attention is paid to their outward aspect (rather than to their usefulness) when appraising them. Such appraisals, while wholly subjective and temporary, are expressed as objective and universal judgments about the items in question. Further, he asserts that our aesthetic relation to works of art in particular is based on an awareness of an aesthetic intention that defines an object as a work of art, as well as on an awareness of a work's position in its historical and generic field.
Translated by Geoffrey M. Goshgarian
Near Fine copy.
1996, English
Softcover, 394 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Stanford University Press / Palo Alto
$20.00 - In stock -
The articulation of the unsayable, of negativity—that which has been excluded by what is sayable—is one of the most important areas of contemporary humanistic study. This volume brings together fifteen outstanding literary theorists and philosophers to examine ways to make the unsayable tangible.
Good copy with darkened marking to top corner throughout first few pages. Light wear.
1992, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 208 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Johns Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$45.00 - In stock -
First 1992 edition.
To some, René Girard is best known for his views on sacred myth and ritual. To others, he is the eminent structuralist critic who offers challenging readings of major literary works. Still others know him for his analyses of the Bible.
Central to all aspects of Girard's work is his theory of mimesis, a basic hypothesis about the structures of human motivation, Yet nowhere in his writings does Girard offer a systematic presentation of the mimetic theory. In fact, key terminology shifts from work to work, resulting in considerable ambiguity in both basic concepts and explanatory claims.
In Models of Desire Paisley Livingston provides the first rigorous critical reconstruction of Girard's theory of mimesis. Drawing a careful distinction between the theory itself and Girard's often ambitious claims about it, Livingston provides a systematic presentation of Girard's ideas about the role of imitation in human motivation. He surveys responses to Girard's work and compares his theory of mimetic desire with recent work in cognitive psychology and philosophy.
The result is a salient theoretical alternative to the false choice—between psychoanalysis and anti-psychological doctrines—that currently dominates literary theory.
Fine copy.
1990, English
Softcover, 242 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Johns Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$20.00 - In stock -
First 1990 edition.
By the end of the nineteenth century, women had become an undeniable force both in the public discussion of social life and in politics itself. Yet in art and literature women's bodies continued to be represented—and domesticated—by men. They were still more often the object of the artist's or writer's gaze than they were the subject of their own representing processes. The erotic potential of women's bodies, however, was far from a marginal concern in the elaboration of modern forms of politics, art, literature, and psychology.
In Eroticism and the Body Politic, scholars from art history, history, and literature examine the frequent intersections between the body erotic and the body politic. Focusing on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France, they show how eroticized representations of bodies had a multitude of political and cultural meanings. The authors consider the eroticized body in a wide variety of media: from Fragonard's paintings of "erotic mothers," to political pornography attacking Marie Antoinette, to the "new woman" of fin de siècle decorative arts.
Exploring the possibilities of a multidisiplinary approach, the volume shows that eroticism had an impact far beyond the usual confines of libertine or pornographic literature—and that politics included much more than voting, meeting, or demonstrating. At a time of general methodological ferment in the "human sciences," Eroticism and the Body Politic brings fresh approaches to the developing field of cultural studies.
Good copy, knock to top of front cover edge, otherwise a VG copy throughout.
1987, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$50.00 - Out of stock
First 1987 edition.
Freud and Oedipus reassesses Freud’s central concept of the Oedipus complex from the interlocking perceptives of biography, intellectual history, and Greek tragedy. Drawing on a wealth of primary and secondary materials, Peter Rudnytsky establishes how Freud reached his epochal formulation through his own self-analysis and clinical work. He then places Freud’s discoveries in the context of nineteenth-century German intellectual and literary history. Finally, he demonstrates how many of Freud’s insights are foreshadowed in Sophocles’ Oedipus the King and discusses the psychoanalytic and structuralist interpretation of Sophocles’ Oedipus cycle as a whole.
Very Good copy.
1991, English
Softcover, 162 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Stanford University Press / Palo Alto
$35.00 - In stock -
First 1991 edition.
"A challenging study that will be welcomed by scholars in the fields of French, English, Italian, and comparative literature, as well as by his- torians of anthropology and colonialism, and readers interested in theories of postmodernism. This is a book whose time is exactly right: a fin-de-siècle meditation on the end of modernity, marked by a keen nostalgia for a past (and an elsewhere) that it knows to be already lost."—Richard Sieburth, New York University
"It brings together, as few works do, literature with history, criticism of aesthetic production with a subtle political consciousness. It makes one understand the colonial implications of modernity as nothing else does. It is essential for the re-evaluation of anthropology and is a powerful addition to the crucial philosophical issue of Alterity."—Michael Taussig, New York University
"This book focuses on the literature of exoticism at the turn of the last century and how it foreshadows our own fin de siècle. Earlier writers of exoticism had turned away from the West and its modernity, rejecting the social changes caused by industrialization and displacing onto "savage" or "primitive" cultures their aspirations for political freedom. By the turn of the century, however, European nations had reduced vast areas of the globe to colonial status: this global exportation of Western cultural norms and economic systems had a critical effect on the literature of exoticism.
The author concentrates on four writers-Jules Verne, Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, and Joseph Conrad-although he touches on a number of other writers, and even painters, like Paul Gauguin. Making an explicit link between turn-of-the-century exoticism and the present day, the book concludes with a critical assessment of Pier Paolo Pasolini's neo-exoticist attachment to a supposedly revolutionary Third World in his poetry and literary criticism. The book's critical stance is noteworthy, drawing its basic assumptions from pensiero debole, the "weak thought" of the contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo."
NF copy.
1981, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$30.00 - In stock -
First 1981 edition. Illustrated.
Ranging from the English metaphysical poets to our contemporaries, Mary Ann Caws presents a new way of thinking about poetry and its relation to other forms of art, such as painting and film. She studies the poetic text conceived of as a threshold, as a boundary or crossing where the reader faces another consciousness staring back from the depths of the text.
"What is intended," the author writes, "is a study both textural and thematic, of an outer object and an inner seen. The question is, how to look from the inside at what we perceive outwardly, how to include ourselves in a writing which we, after all, only read. My topic, then, is the inclusion of the 'I' within the text.. I mean the eye in the text, and the reflexivity between text and reading, as mirror and mirrored object, in an extensive interchange of function, action, and glance."
Discussed against a background of mannerism, baroque, rococo, Dada, surrealism, and symbolism, are figures such as Crashaw, Rilke, Brancusi, Mallarmé, Duchamp, Reverdy, Char, Malraux, Bonnefoy, and Jabès.
Mary Ann Caws is Professor of Comparative Literature and French at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is the author of The Presence of René Char, The Poetry of Dada and Surrealism, and The Inner Theatre of Recent French Poetry (all Princeton books).
Very Good copy.
1989, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 21 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$45.00 - Out of stock
In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, as well as psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment lies at the very core of depression's dark heart.
In her discussion she analyzes Holbein's controversial 1522 painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb," and has revealing comments on the works of Marguerite Duras, Dostoyevsky and Nerval. Black Sun takes the view that depression is a discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be treated.
Translated by Leon S. Roudiez
Julia Kristeva is a professor of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. She is the author of many highly respected books (most published in English by Columbia University Press) and a practicing psychoanalyst.
Good copy with some wear and (erasable) pencil marginalia from previous owner.
1984 / 1987, English
Softcover, 306 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / average
Published by
Basil Blackwell / Oxford
$35.00 - In stock -
First 1984 UK Basil Blackwell edition, 1987 print.
Desire in Language traces the path of an investigation, extending over a period of ten years, into the semiotics of literature and the arts. But the essays of Julia Kristeva in this volume, though they often deal with literature and art, do not amount to either "literary criticism" or "art criticism." Their concern, writes Kristeva, "remains intratheoretical: they are based on art and literature in order to subvert the very theoretical, philosophical, or semiological apparatus."
Probing beyond the discoveries of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan, Roman Jakobson and others, Julia Kristeva proposes and tests theories centered on the nature and development of the novel, and on what she has defined as a signifying practice in poetic language and pictural works. Desire in Language fully shows what Roman Jakobson has called Kristeva's "genuine gift of questioning generally adopted 'axioms,' and her contrary gift of releasing various 'damned questions' from their traditional question marks."
Average—Good copy. Heavy tanning to page block edges, general wear to covers with knocking to spine.
1982, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 328 pages, 22.5 x 14 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
MacMillan / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
First 1982 HC edition.
Since the publications of his first essays in the early 1960s Christian Metz has produced a body of work that has established him as the most influential contemporary theorist of cinema and as a leading contributor to the development of semiotics generally.
Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier is in many ways a culmination of this work. In the first half of the book Metz explores a number of aspects of the psychological anchoring of cinema as a social institution, using Freudian psychoanalysis to examine the nature of cinematic spectatorship, the relations of cinema and voyeurism, fetishism and so on. In the second half, he shifts his approach a little to look at the operations of meaning in the film text, at the figures of image and sound concatenation. Thus he is led to consideration of metaphor and metonymy in film, this involving a detailed account of these two figures as they appear in psychoanalysis and linguistics - an account which brilliantly disentangles the various analogies that have been proposed between metaphor and metonymy, condensation and displacement, paradigm and syntagm, and makes an important contribution to our general understanding of these issues as well as to our particular understanding of cinema.
Throughout, the book is an argument with and recasting of initial semiotic thinking dependent on reference to fixed linguistics models; it offers something of a 'second semiotics', concerned now with the institution of modes of subjectivity, cinema as imaginary signifier, and with the movement and effects of meaning, film as text.
CHRISTIAN METZ teaches at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. His published works include two volumes of Essais sur la signification au cinema, Langage et cinema and Essais semiotiques. The Translators CELIA BRITTON and ANNWYL WILLIAMS are with the Department of French Studies at the University of Reading. BEN BREWSTER is at the University of Kent at Canterbury. ALFRED GUZZETTI is at the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard University.
G—VG copy, discolouration to dj spine edge, light age/wear.
1992, English
Softcover, 386 pages, 21.5 x 13.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Princeton University Press / New York
$25.00 - In stock -
1992 Princeton edition.
Among the most influential books on tragedy written in the past half-century, Walter Kaufmann's Tragedy and Philosophy develops a bold poetics based on the author's critical reexamination of the views of Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Not only does this book reveal ancient Greek tragedy as surprisingly modern and experimental, but it also recasts such concepts as mimesis and catharsis, "pity and fear," hubris, the tragic collision, and the "death of tragedy."
"Walter Kaufmann . . . is a philosopher with a penchant for the kind of fresh thinking that philosophers rarely do. Here he has attempted a searching analysis of the essence of tragedy. He offers a new definition and, without raising his voice, his version of poetics as against that of Aristotle." —The New York Times
"The book as a whole is a tribute to the author's impressive scholarly and critical virtuosity." —Classical Philology
Walter Kaufmann (1921-1980) was Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University. This book is the third in a trilogy that includes his Critique of Religion and Philosophy and From Shakespeare to Existentialism. Kaufmann is also the author of Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist.
Very Good copy with corner crease to back cover corner top.
1982, English
Softcover, 218 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
1982 Columbia classics re-print of Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection (French: Pouvoirs de l'horreur. Essai sur l'abjection), a 1980 book by Julia Kristeva. The work is an extensive treatise on the subject of abjection, in which Kristeva draws on the theories of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan to examine horror, marginalization, castration, the phallic signifier, the "I/Not I" dichotomy, the Oedipal complex, exile, and other concepts appropriate to feminist criticism and queer theory.
According to Kristeva, the abject marks a "primal order" that escapes signification in the symbolic order; the term is used to refer to the human reaction (horror, vomit) to a threatened breakdown in meaning caused by the loss of the distinction between subject and object, or between the self and the other.
Powers of Horror is an excellent introduction to an aspect of contemporary French literature which has been allowed to become somewhat neglected in the current emphasis on para-philosophical modes of discourse. Kristeva is one of the leading voices in contemporary French criticism, on a par with such names as Genette, Foucault, Greimas and others...—Paul de Man
1982 English translation by Leon S. Roudiez.