World Food Books

Stories, Tales, and Fables
by Marquis de Sade

2025, English
Softcover, 656 pages, 20.3 x 12.7 cm
Published by Contra Mundum Press / New York

$68.00 - In stock -

“It is said I present vice as too odious. The reason: I do not want people to be attracted to vice. I am far more moral than those who make their villains attractive. I shall only ever depict crime in the most vivid colours of hell. I want readers to see crime in all its vile nakedness, to fear it and to hate it, and so I show it in all its horror. Woe to those who dress crime in roses! Their intentions are impure, and I will never imitate them.”—The Marquis de Sade

Written in his Bastille cell in the years between 120 Days of Sodom and Justine, this is the first English translation of Marquis de Sade’s collection of short works, Stories, Tales, and Fables.

Essential reading for all Sade devotees, Stories, Tales, and Fables is an introduction for those who are not yet familiar with the work of this controversial French literary innovator. The short works in this collection range from the dramatic novella, Dorci, to comic tales such as The Duped Judge. Whether he is writing bawdy, exuberant comedies, supernatural tales, or human tragedies, Sade is essentially a moralist, and his exploration of the darker side of human nature remains as relevant to our society as it was to his own.

Psychologically perceptive and defiantly unconventional, Stories, Tales, and Fables reveals the compelling force of Sade’s narrative powers. An accomplished and artful fiction writer, Sade, like all great writers, asks penetrating questions about society, life, and humanity. This collection also includes a selection of Sade’s non-fiction, ranging from his insightful survey of the novelist's art, Some Thoughts on the Novel, to his Last Will and Testament, as well as several essays about Sade’s work by renowned authors including Apollinaire, Heine, Masson, Anatole France and Paul Ėluard.

Translated by R.J. Dent

File under: Marquis de Sade The Marquis de Sade Guillaume Apollinaire Andre Breton André Breton Paul Eluard Heinrich Heine Anatole France R.J. Dent Contra Mundum Press / New York Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Sociology / Politics Eros Fetishism / BDSM Fiction / Poetry Theory / Essay Philosophy

Ghostly Apparitions: German Idealism, the Gothic Novel, and Optical Media
by Stefan Andriopoulos

2013, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 236 pages, 23 x 16.2 cm
Published by Zone Books / New York

$60.00 - In stock -

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Drawing together literature, media, and philosophy, Ghostly Apparitions provides a new model for media archaeology and its transformation of intellectual and literary history. Stefan Andriopoulos examines new media technologies and distinct cultural realms, tracing connections between Kant’s philosophy and the magic lantern’s phantasmagoria, the Gothic novel and print culture, and spiritualist research and the invention of television.

As Kant was writing about the possibility of spiritual apparitions, the emerging medium of the phantasmagoria used hidden magic lanterns to startle audiences with ghostly projections. Andriopoulos juxtaposes the philosophical arguments of German idealism with contemporaneous occultism and ghost shows. In close readings of Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, he traces the diverging modes in which these authors appropriated figures of optical media and spiritualist notions.

“Andriopoulos uncovers the phantasmagoria of images that haunt the formation of the modern imagination.” — Tom Gunning
The spectral apparitions from this period also intersect with the rise of popular print culture. Andriopoulos explores the circulation of ostensibly authentic ghost narratives and the Gothic novel, which was said to produce “reading addiction” and a loss of reality. Romantic representations of animal magnetism and clairvoyance similarly blurred the boundary between fiction and reality.

The final chapter of Ghostly Apparitions extends this archaeology of new media into the early twentieth century. Tracing a reciprocal interaction between occultism and engineering, Andriopoulos uncovers how theories and devices of psychical research enabled the emergence of television.

“Probing at the roots of modern thought and modern media with both scholarly rigor and originality, Andriopoulos uncovers the phantasmagoria of images that haunt the formation of the modern imagination. The ghostly reveals itself as less the realm of ancient superstition and folklore than the seedbed of a new intellectual, artistic, and technological world in which the visible and the material can diverge, and the power of ideas and visual media seem to mime the uncanny effects of apparitions. This is an exciting, and occasionally startling, work of cultural history.” — Tom Gunning, Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago

“Focusing on intersections of new media technologies, philosophy, and literature, this book throws an entirely new and utterly fascinating light on the emergence of German idealism. Lucidly and forcefully argued, it provides us with a media archeology that connects the cultural background of Kant’s, Hegel’s, and Schopenhauer’s thought with discussions of optical instruments and occultism as well as with Romanticism and the Gothic novel. Andriopoulos thereby changes the way in which we read the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, producing an intricate picture of material practices, new media, philosophical theory, and poetic styles.” — Niklaus Largier, Sidney and Margaret Ancker Chair in the Humanities, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, University of California, Berkeley

File under: Stefan Andriopoulos Zone Books / New York Ancient / Medieval / Gothic Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Theory / Essay Philosophy

An Archive
by Mathieu Lindon

2026, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 20.4 x 13.7 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$34.00 - In stock -

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Translated by Bruce Benderson

I wanted to tell the story of Les Éditions de Minuit as I saw them as a child. And also to tell the story of my father, Jérôme Lindon, as I saw him and loved him. Are there archives for that? And how to be an archive of the child that I once was?

An Archive tells the story of Les Éditions de Minuit, the legendary Parisian publisher of Samuel Beckett, Marguerite Duras, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Monique Wittig, Gilles Deleuze, Pierre Bourdieu, Marie NDiaye, and so many others. It is the tale of its editor, Jérôme Lindon, who directed the publishing house from 1948 until his death in 2001. It is also the chronicle of growing up in a family of writers who were, to the eyes of a young child, the temple of literature. Looking back on a childhood immersed in books, Mathieu Lindon draws a portrait of his father, narrating his use of power and his avarice, but also his generosity, his enthusiasm for literature and defense of authors, and his commitment to politics—during the German Occupation, through the Algerian War of Independence, and for the Palestinian cause after the Arab-Israeli War of 1967. Opening the archive of his own memory, Lindon gives a moving, ferocious, and often funny account of a defining period of twentieth-century French intellectual history.

"An Archive evades all generic definition. A singular text, captivating and infinitely poignant, it assembles and explores what has always been the strength of Mathieu Lindon's work: intimacy narrated with perfect pitch, openly stating what was without straying from a reserve which is also respect."–Christine Marcandier, Diacritik

"An exercise in a love that is not blind, a practice of boundless admiration, An Archive is a magnificent literary tombstone."–Nelly Kaprièlian, Les Inrockuptibles

Mathieu Lindon was born in 1955. He is a columnist for Liberation and the author of numerous books, including Learning What Love Means and Hervelino, both published in English by Semiotext(e).

File under: Mathieu Lindon Bruce Benderson Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Theory / Essay Sociology / Politics Philosophy Psychoanalysis

Formless: A User's Guide
by Yve-Alain Bois and Rosalind E. Krauss

1997, English
Softcover, 306 pages, 28 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Zone Books / New York

$160.00 - Out of stock

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Long out–of–print.

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

Very Good copy. First 1997 Ed. 2nd 1999 print.

File under: Joseph Beuys Eli Lotar Robert Morris Mike Kelley Jean Fautrier Ed Ruscha Marcel Duchamp Bruce Nauman Jean Arp Jean Arp (Hans Arp) Richard Serra Jackson Pollock Andy Warhol Cy Twombly Lucio Fontana Cindy Sherman Claes Oldenburg Jean Dubuffet Robert Smithson Gordon Matta-Clark Lygia Clark Wols Georges Bataille Michel Leiris André Breton Rosalind E. Krauss Yve-Alain Bois Zone Books / New York Art Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Philosophy Theory / Essay Sculpture / Installation Arte Povera Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism Out-of-print / Rare Painting Photography Surrealism Pop Art Conceptual Art Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic

Laure : The Collected Writings
by Colette Peignot (Laure)

1995 / 2001, English
Softcover, 314 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by City Lights Books / San Francisco

$48.00 - In stock -

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This complete collection of writings published for the first time in English includes “Story of a Little Girl,” about the Catholic priest who sexually molested her sister; “The Sacred,” a collection of poems and fragments on mysticism and eroticism; notes on her association with contr-attaque and acephale, and her involvement with the Spanish civil war and the early years of the Soviet Union; a compendium of correspondence with her beloved sister-in-law and tortured love letters to Bataille; and an essay by Bataille about Laure’s death of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-five.

“People describe Laure as pure, dissolute, dark, luminous. ‘I drank, I bathed in her radiant purity’ Jean Bernier says. Leiris writes about her lyrically in fourbis and frêle bruit as ‘the saint of the chasm.’ Bataille calls her uncompromising, pure, and sovereign. It is tempting to romanticize Laure – in the most sublime and violent sense – as consumptive poet, a fervent revolutionary, Bataille’s great love. But if she is radiant and dirty, she is also insolent. That, it seems, is what saves her.”—Jeanine Herman

“Colette Peignot, a.k.a. Laure, is one of the more fascinating and intense women writers of the past century. Georges Bataille and Michel Leiris described her as “one of the most vehement existences [that] ever lived, one of the most conflicted.” They summarized her volatile personality as “[e]ager for affection and for disaster, oscillating between extreme audacity and the most dreadful anguish, as inconceivable on a scale of real beings as a mythical being, she tore herself on the thorns with which she surrounded herself until becoming nothing but a wound, never allowing herself to be confined by anything or anyone.” In other words, Laure was the epitome of what Bataille would dub the “sovereign” individual.”—Jason DeBoer, Absinthe Literary Review

“By the time one emerges from this compilation of autobiographical and biographical sketches by and about her, of poems, scattered notes and fevered letters, one can’t help feeling that her true masterwork was her ability to make others react to and remember her.”—Mark Polizzotti, London Review of Books

Laure (1903-1938) was a revolutionary poet, masochist Catholic rich girl, and world traveler. Toward the end of her life she became the lover of French writer Georges Bataille. Her writings and her real life story were remarkable in their violence and intensity, and her relationships with Bataille and Michel Leiris clearly influenced their works.

File under: Colette Peignot Laure City Lights Books / San Francisco Eros Surrealism Philosophy Theory / Essay

Iconophages: A History of Ingesting Images
by Jérémie Koering

2024, English
Softcover, 480 pages, 23 x 15.4 cm
Published by Zone Books / New York

$49.00 - In stock -

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Translated by Nicholas Huckle

Eating and drinking images may seem like an anomalous notion but, since antiquity, in the European and Mediterranean worlds, people have swallowed down frescoes, icons, engravings, eucharistic hosts stamped with images, heraldic wafers, marzipan figures, and other sculpted dishes. Either specifically made for human consumption or diverted from their original purpose so as to be ingested, these figured artifacts have been not only gazed upon but also incorporated—taken into the body—as solids or liquids.

How can we explain such behavior? Why take an image into one’s own body, devouring it at the risk of destroying it, consuming rather than contemplating it wisely from a distance? What structures of the imagination underlie and justify these desires for incorporation? What are the visual configurations offered up to the mouth, and what are their effects? What therapeutic, religious, symbolic, and social functions can we attribute to these forms of relations with icons? These are a few of the questions raised in this investigation into iconophagy.

Iconophages aims to retrace, for the first time, the history of iconophagy. Jérémie Koering examines this unexplored facet of the history of images through an interdisciplinary approach that ranges across art history, cultural and material history, anthropology, philosophy, and the history of the body and the senses. He analyzes the human investment, in terms of culture and imagination, at stake in this seemingly paradoxical way of experiencing images. Beyond the hidden knowledge unearthed here, these pages bring to light a new way of understanding images, just as they illuminate the occasionally outlandish relations we maintain with them.

“Brilliantly written, this groundbreaking study combines the vividness of historical case studies with the lucidity of philosophical reflection… Iconophages makes a fundamental contribution to a comprehensive anthropology of the image.” —Peter Geimer
“This long-awaited transhistorical study of iconophagy is remarkable for its scope. With eloquence and erudition, Koering marshals an astonishing array of materials often seen as archaic, marginal, or primitive to demonstrate the ubiquity of image ingestion within the western tradition. Taking us far beyond the default ocularcentrism of art history, Iconophages engages current concerns with embodiment and materiality in a study with significant implications for the consumption and conception of images in and before modernity.” — Finbarr Barry Flood, Director of Silsila: Center for Material Histories and William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of the Humanities, New York University

“Iconophages is a tremendously entertaining book, an exploration of a permeable boundary that has developed between recent art history, anthropology, and religious studies, permitting histories that can encompass living images: images that speak, ‘operate,’ kill, and eat. After an opening look at Egyptian and Greek practices, Koering goes on a tour of edible images in Europe. He considers representations of Saint Catherine drinking blood (‘the best of sauces’ according to a sixteenth-century source) directly from Christ’s wounds, the unappetizing Sicilian pastries called ossa dei morti (‘bones of the dead’), the idea of drinking the Virgin’s milk, and iron presses for figured Eucharistic wafers.” — James Elkins, Chair of the Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

“Iconophages invites us to take a new and different look at the objects of art history. Far beyond our common understanding of images as primarily visual phenomena, Koering reveals a fascinating practice of touching, tasting, and ingesting images – from magical practices to modern art, from the sacred to the profane, from the natural to the supranatural world. Brilliantly written, this groundbreaking study combines the vividness of historical case studies with the lucidity of philosophical reflection. By opening up hitherto little-known aesthetic, religious, and cultural dimensions of visual artifacts, Iconophages makes a fundamental contribution to a comprehensive anthropology of the image.” — Peter Geimer, Director, German Center for Art History, Paris

File under: Jérémie Koering Zone Books / New York Art Theory / Essay Renaissance / Neoclassicism / Romanticism Ancient / Medieval / Gothic Occult / Esoterica Anthropology Philosophy

Powers of Reading: From Plato to Audiobooks
by Peter Szendy

2025, English
Softcover,‎ 208 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by Zone Books / New York

$45.00 - In stock -

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Translated by Olivia Custer

“Peter Szendy offers a subtle, persuasive, and unprecedented account of the time of reading and its scene of address, one that is as archaic as it is contemporary. When we read, are we listening to a voice or being read to? If it is not a private and monologic exercise, how do we understand the populated scene of reading? What reads when we read, and how does reading push and pull between temporalities and voices? Why do we keep leaving the text when we seek to obey the injunction to stay within its terms?

Questions such as these produce a fresh, even startling, consideration of a wide range of literary and popular texts, including Hobbes’ Leviathan, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Kant’s moral injunctions, Sade, Valéry, Blanchot, and de Certeau, but also modern fiction, film, audiobooks, and hypertext. The power of reading turns out to belong to its surprising engagement with time and direction: the deliberate reader stays close but strays, tries to fill in the gaps but gets pushed back by a countercurrent. The key to the text is sought ‘outside’ only to be led back to the text and its failure to deliver a final answer. Equally at odds with older versions of literary formalism that insist on the self-referentiality of the text as well as contextualists who scour an external social order to discover the truth of the text, Szendy approaches that very conflict as an oscillation constitutive of reading itself. Paradoxically, reading is sustained precisely by what interrupts its teleological flow.

The result is a comic, profound, and timely reconceptualization of reading which rushes forward only to find itself pushed back into the heart of the text, which discovers that this incessant breaking from the text, this headlong rushing ahead to the world outside the text is a sequence of overreach, delay, and return that forms the ragged rhythm of reading itself. Powers of Reading is a patient, brilliant, and illuminating inquiry into the crosscurrents of voice and address, one that speaks to the speed and complexity of our time, how we are upended by our forward propulsions, to consider how multiple voice, action, and passivity are all rearranged in the scene of reading.”— Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley

“Szendy offers us one of the most acute political philosophies of reading of our time.” —Catherine Malabou
“What was—and is—reading? Ranging from a playful analysis of what it feels like to be read to, to an erudite account of judicial systems that alternately censor books and condemn readers to read them, to a revelatory reconstruction of the role of the slave in Plato’s dialogues, this elegant series of essays uses a wide range of literary and philosophical texts to launch an inquiry into the philosophical stakes of an everyday practice.” — Leah Price, Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University

“Szendy offers us one of the most acute political philosophies of reading of our time. Reading inverts the Hegelian dialectical process of freedom, to the extent that there exists, in each reader, a slave who commands and a master who obeys. Literacy coincides with the birth of an inner voice that, even if whispering and always on the verge of disappearing, forces us to decipher, making it impossible to say what we didn’t know. From Plato to Sade, from neurology to hermeneutics, the law of reading appears as what it is: the inescapable burden of responsibility.” — Catherine Malabou, Professor of Comparative Literature and European Languages and Studies, University of California, Irvine

File under: Peter Szendy Zone Books / New York Theory / Essay Philosophy Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Sociology / Politics Renaissance / Neoclassicism / Romanticism

In Praise of Blandness: Proceeding from Chinese Thought and Aesthetics
by François Jullien

2007, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 22.86 x 15.2 cm
Published by Zone Books / New York

$45.00 - In stock -

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Translated by Paula M. Varsano

The quality of blandness: no sooner do you identify it then it begins to appear at every turn. Blandness, by definition, pays little heed to the borders our various disciplines like to draw. As the embodiment of neutrality, the bland lies at the point of origin of all things possible and so links them. — François Jullien

Already translated into six languages, François Jullien’s In Praise of Blandness has by now become a classic. Appearing for the first time in English, this groundbreaking work of philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, and sinology is certain to stir readers to think and experience what may at first seem impossible: the richness of a bland sound, a bland meaning, a bland painting, a bland poem. In presenting the value of blandness through as many concrete examples and original texts as possible, Jullien allows the undifferentiated foundation of all things — blandness itself — to appear. After completing this book, readers will reevaluate those familiar Western lines of thought where blandness is associated with lack — the undesirable absence of particular, defining qualities.

“A profoundly nuanced and sophisticated reading.” –Roger T. Ames

Jullien’s In Praise of Blandness traces the elusive appearance and crucial value of blandness from its beginnings in the Daoist and Confucian traditions to its gradual integration into literary and visual aesthetics in the late medieval period and beyond. Slowly developing into a positive quality in the Chinese aesthetic and ethical traditions, the bland comprises the balanced and unnamable union of all potential values. It embodies a reality whose very essence is change, and provides an infinite opening onto the breadth of human expression and taste.

Chosen as one of the best books of 2004 by the Village Voice. Finalist for the French–American Translation Prize.

“François Jullien is now a familiar voice. And in In Praise of Blandness he carries on philosophizing. In all his work, Jullien’s point of departure is that a worldview is sedimented into the syntax and semantics of our natural languages. Jullien uses a profoundly nuanced and sophisticated reading of Chinese texts to challenge our own common-sense cosmological assumptions. By following his complex arguments, readers will discover the very core of cultural difference. It is an awareness of this difference that provides the stock for creative advance.” — Roger T. Ames, University of Hawai’i

File under: François Jullien Zone Books / New York Theory / Essay Anthropology Philosophy

Atlas Anthology 3
Edited by Alastair Brotchie & Malcolm Green

1985, English
Softcover (w. paste-ins), 224 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Atlas Press / London

$100.00 - Out of stock

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"A chrestomathy of dicey enchantments.'—CITY LIMITS

Now rare, long out-of-print 1985 Atlas Anthology 3, edited by Alastair Brotchie & Malcolm Green. "Benign Pollution, Enthused Writing". The third production from the legendary Atlas Press, the third general anthology and the first book to be actually typeset (a very expensive business in those days).

Features: Hans Carl Artmann, Pierre Albert-Birot, Wolfgang Bauer, Konrad Bayer, Pierre Bettencourt, Peter Blegvad, Andre Breton, Jean-Pierre Brisset, Günter Brus, René Crevel, David Gascoyne, Alfred Jarry, James Kirkup, Karl Kraus, Jean Lorrain, Harry Mathews, Gustave Meyrink, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Georges Perec, Benjamin Peret, Oskar Panizza, Raymond Queneau, Jacques Rigaut, Herbert Rosendorfer, Raymond Roussel, Paul Scheerbart, Mathew Phipps Shiel, Kurt Schwitters, Boris Vian, Austryn Wainhouse, Robert Walser, Unica Zürn, Etcetera Etc.

"Here is a prose based on Romanticism, in this century focused around the early Expressionism and the Surrealist movement. It is a literature of unusual beauty and bitter humour, political (in the widest sense), it asserts a complete freedom of form and content. Neither 'cool', restrained nor boring! An important collection of unjustly neglected authors, past and present, which includes many who are seldom translated into English."

Highest recommendation.
Good—Very Good copy complete with all the paste-ins. General wear and tanning.

File under: Peter Blegvad Kurt Schwitters Günter Brus Pier Paolo Pasolini Unica Zürn Alastair Brotchie Malcolm Green Hans Carl Artmann Pierre Albert-Birot Wolfgang Bauer Konrad Bayer Andre Breton André Breton Unica Zürn Pierre Bettencourt Peter Blegvad Günter Brus René Crevel Jean-Pierre Brisset David Gascoyne Alfred Jarry James Kirkup Karl Kraus Jean Lorrain Robert Walser Georges Perec Benjamin Péret Gustave Meyrink Harry Mathews Raymond Queneau Jacques Rigaut Raymond Roussel Paul Scheerbart Boris Vian Oskar Panizza Herbert Rosendorfer Mathew Phipps Shiel Kurt Schwitters Austryn Wainhouse Atlas Press / London Dada Renaissance / Neoclassicism / Romanticism Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle Surrealism Out-of-print / Rare Fiction / Poetry Art Concrete Poetry Poetry Philosophy Situationism / Lettrism Sociology / Politics Theory / Essay Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction

On Painting
By Gilles Deleuze

2025, English
Softcover, 360 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
Published by University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota Univocal Publishing / Minneapolis

$62.00 - In stock -

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From 1970 until 1987, Gilles Deleuze held a weekly seminar at the Experimental University of Vincennes and, starting in 1980, at Saint-Denis. In the spring of 1981, he began a series of eight seminars on painting and its intersections with philosophy. The recorded sessions, newly transcribed and translated into English, are now available in their entirety for the first time. Extensively annotated by philosopher David Lapoujade, On Painting illuminates Deleuze's thinking on artistic creation, significantly extending the lines of thought in his book Francis Bacon.

Through paintings and writing by Rembrandt, Delacroix, Turner, Cezanne, Van Gogh, Klee, Pollock, and Bacon, Deleuze explores the creative process, from chaos to the pictorial fact. The introduction and use of color feature prominently as Deleuze elaborates on artistic and philosophical concepts such as the diagram, modulation, code, and the digital and the analogical. Through this scrutiny, he raises a series of profound and stimulating questions for his students: How does a painter ward off greyness and attain color? What is a line without contour? Why paint at all?

Written and thought in a rhizomatic manner that is thoroughly Deleuzian-strange, powerful, and novel-On Painting traverses both the conception of art history and the possibility of color as a philosophical concept.

Edited by David Lapoujade, translated by Charles J. Stivale.

File under: Francis Bacon Eugène Delacroix Rembrandt J. M. W. Turner Paul Cézanne Jackson Pollock Paul Klee Vincent van Gogh Gilles Deleuze David Lapoujade Charles J. Stivale University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota Univocal Publishing / Minneapolis Philosophy Art Painting Theory / Essay Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism

Sade My Neighbor
by Pierre Klossowski

1991, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 20.5 x 14 cm
Published by Northwestern University Press / Evanston

$62.00 - In stock -

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1991 edition. Translated by Alphonso Lingis.

Enlightenment ideals of a society rooted in liberationist reason and morality were trampled in the wake of the savagery of the Second World War. That era's union of cold technology and ancient hatreds gave rise to a dark, alternative reason--an ethic that was value-free and indifferent with regard to virtue and vice, freedom, and slavery. In a world where "the unthinkable" had become reality, it is small wonder that theorists would turn to the writings of a man whose eighteenth-century imagination preceded twentieth-century history in its unbridled exploration of viciousness, perversion, and monstrosity: the Marquis de Sade.

Klossowski was one of the first philosophers in postwar Europe to ask whether Sade's reason, although aberrant and perverted to evil passions, could be taken seriously. Klossowski's seminal work inspired virtually all subsequent study of Sadean thought, including that of de Beauvoir, Deleuze, Derrida, Bataille, Blanchot, Paulhan, and Lacan.

File under: Pierre Klossowski Alphonso Lingis Pierre Klossowski Northwestern University Press / Evanston Theory / Essay Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Eros Philosophy Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language

Writing on Drugs
by Sadie Plant

1999, English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 21.5 x 13.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Faber & Faber / London

$50.00 - Out of stock

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First edition of CCRU founder Sadie Plant's end-of-the-millennium classic, Writing on Drugs, published by Faber and Faber in 1999.

"All writers on drugs become ghost writers for drugs. Or perhaps their drugs are ghost writing them"—Sadie Plant

Narcotics, stimulants and hallucinogens — these drugs have always affected far more than the perceptions, minds and moods of their users. Writing on Drugs explores the profound and pervasive nature of their influence on contemporary culture. It reads Coleridge on opium, Freud on cocaine, Michaux on mescaline and Burroughs on them all, and with such writers it begins to understand the many ways in which the modern world has found itself on drugs. Psychoactive substances have been integral to its economic history, its politics, media and technologies. They have influenced its poetry and stories, and shaped some if its most fundamental philosophies. They have even exposed the neurochemistry of a human brain which, like its cultures, has never been drug-free.

Sadie Plant was born in Birmingham and studied at the University of Manchester, where she gained her PhD in Philosophy in 1989. She has been a Lecturer in Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham and a Research Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, where, in 1995, she formed The Cybernetic Culture Research Unit (CCRU) with Mark Fisher and Nick Land, an experimental cultural theorist collective celebrated for its idiosyncratic and surreal "theory-fiction" which incorporated cyberpunk and Gothic horror, gaining an online cult following related to the rise in popularity of accelerationism. She published The Most Radical Gesture: The Situationist International in a Postmodern Age in 1992, and Zeros and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture in 1997. Having spent much of the 1990s in the academic world, she now works independently and writes full-time.

G—VG in VG dust jacket. Normal page tanning, tanning to dust jacket edge and spine. Not necessarily copy pictured.

File under: Sadie Plant Charles Baudelaire Edgar Allan Poe Henri Michaux William S. Burroughs Sigmund Freud Samuel Taylor Coleridge Herbert Marcuse Thomas De Quincey Faber & Faber / London Theory / Essay Drugs / Psychedelia Psychoanalysis Counterculture Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare

The Tears of Eros
by Georges Bataille

1989, English
Softcover, 213 pages, 20.5 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by City Lights Books / San Francisco

$120.00 - Out of stock

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First 1989 City Lights English translation, long out-of-print.

Tears of Eros is the culmination of Georges Bataille's inquiries into the relationship between violence and the sacred. Taking up such figures as Giles de Rais, Erzebet Bathory, the Marquis de Sade, El Greco, Gustave Moreau, Andre Breton, Voodoo practitioners, and Chinese torture victims, Bataille reveals their common death. This essay, illustrated with artwork from every era, was developed out of ideas explored in Death and Sexuality and Prehistoric Lascaux or the Birth of Art . In it Bataille examines death—the "little death" that follows sexual climax, the proximate death in sadomasochistic practices, and death as part of religious ritual and sacrifice. "Bataille is one of the most important writers of the century."— Michel Foucault Georges Bataille was born in Billom, France, in 1897. He was a librarian by profession. Also a philosopher, novelist, and critic he was founder of the College of Sociology. In 1959, Bataille began Tears of Eros , and it was completed in 1961, his final work. City Lights published two of his other Story of the Eye and The Impossible . Bataille died in 1962.

French essayist, philosophical theorist, and novelist, often called the "metaphysician of evil." Bataille was interested in sex, death, degradation, and the power and potential of the obscene. He rejected traditional literature and considered that the ultimate aim of all intellectual, artistic, or religious activity should be the annihilation of the rational individual in a violent, transcendental act of communion. Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, and Philippe Sollers have all written enthusiastically about his work.

Very Good copy, light wear to extremities/corners.

File under: Georges Bataille City Lights Books / San Francisco Surrealism Occult / Esoterica Eros Fetishism / BDSM Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Theory / Essay Philosophy Sociology / Politics Out-of-print / Rare Art

Le Sang et La Rose No. 2, 1969

1969, Japanese / French
Softcover, 228 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo

$110.00 - Out of stock

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Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose is a masterpiece of the Japanese underground. A groundbreaking, powerful, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.

Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force. 

Issue no. 2 includes photographic features by Yasuhiro Yoshioka and Yoshihiro Tatsuki, the artwork of French decorator of department store mannequins and surrealist Sunday painter Clovis Trouille, Venus in Furs erotic photo shoot by Yasuhiro Ishimoto, Yokoo Tadanori, Hans Bellmer, Leonor Fini, Alberto Martini, Félicien Rops, Rene Magritte, an incredible feature "Machine for Murder" with art by Hiroshi Nakamura, Tomi Ungerer, Koichi Tanigawa, Osamu Tsukasa, Tatsuo Ikeda, Marcel Duchamp, Seiichi Horiuchi, and others, an article on the erotica of Ukiyo-e with a fold-out colour three panel poster, the fully illustrated museum supplement on Demonology by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa with artworks throughout history, texts by Apollinaire, Burroughs, Mutsuo Takahashi, articles on laws pertaining to homosexuality, Kama Sutra, shoe fetishism, and much more.

Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.

Good-Very Good copy. Light general tanning/wear. Some rippling to back cover.

File under: Yoshihiro Tatsuki Clovis Trouille Tadanori Yokoo Yasuhiro Yoshioka Yokoo Tadanori Hans Bellmer Leonor Fini Alberto Martini Félicien Rops Rene Magritte Hiroshi Nakamura Tomi Ungerer Koichi Tanigawa Osamu Tsukasa Tatsuo Ikeda Marcel Duchamp Seiichi Horiuchi Yasuhiro Ishimoto Guillaume Apollinaire William S. Burroughs Georges Bataille Mutsuo Takahashi Tatsuhiko Shibusawa Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo Periodicals Eros LGBTQ+ Art Surrealism Counterculture Japanese Photography Photography Out-of-print / Rare Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées Theory / Essay Occult / Esoterica Fetishism / BDSM Ero Guro / Erotic / Grotesque Philosophy Fiction / Poetry Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle Ancient / Medieval / Gothic

Le Sang et La Rose No. 3, 1969

1969, Japanese / French
Softcover, 232 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo

$110.00 - In stock -

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Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose is a masterpiece of the Japanese underground. A groundbreaking, powerful, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.

Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force. 

Issue no. 3 (with cover by Bronzino, 1554) includes full-colour photographic feature by Kishin Shinoyama ("Virgin In Uniform" featuring models/artists Angela Asaoka, Akaji Maro, Yoko Ashikawa) and beautiful Shomei Tomatsu photo feature ("Scoptophilia"), the artwork of the great French cross-dressing painter-photographer Pierre Molinier, texts by Jirō Kawamura, Yumiko Kurahashi, Taruho Inagaki ("Memories of Hemorrhoids or "New Tsurezuregusa"), Akiyuki Nosaka ("Dear Penis, Goodbye"), Minoru Minamihara ("The Mystic Thought of Love in the Case of Jakob Böhme"), Takiji Kobayashi, The Fictitious Garden of Babylon by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, Tsunekazu Murata ("Witch's Ax : Concerning Heresy in Medieval Europe"), translation of Franz Kafka "Metamorphosis" illustrated by Franco Gentilini, recent research on homosexuality by film critic Jin'ichi Uekusa, Kama Sutra, more Gay (Danshoku) Japanese Theater history, Marquise de Blancvilliers by Koji Nakata, and much more.

Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.

Very Good copy. Light general tanning/wear.

File under: Kishin Shinoyama Shomei Tomatsu Pierre Molinier Franco Gentilini Yokoo Tadanori Angela Asaoka Akaji Maro Yoko Ashikawa Tatsuhiko Shibusawa Franz Kafka Yukio Mishima Taruho Inagaki Jun’nosuke Yoshiyuki Kôichi Iijima Jûrô Kara Ikuya Kato Minoru Yoshioka Ryûichi Tamura The Marquis de Sade Georges Bataille Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues Jirō Kawamura Yumiko Kurahashi Akiyuki Nosaka Minoru Minamihara Jakob Böhme Takiji Kobayashi Tsunekazu Murata Jin'ichi Uekusa Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo Ero Guro / Erotic / Grotesque Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Eros Fetishism / BDSM Out-of-print / Rare Periodicals Japanese Photography Surrealism Philosophy Theory / Essay Fiction / Poetry Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle Ancient / Medieval / Gothic Art Counterculture Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées LGBTQ+ Occult / Esoterica Photography Sociology / Politics

Le Sang et La Rose No. 1, 1968

1968, Japanese / French
Softcover, 228 pages, 23 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo

$110.00 - Out of stock

(more...)

(...less)

Revue de Érotologie, Homosexualité, Sadisme, Masochisme, Fétischisme, Narcissime, Infantilisme, Magie, Occultisme, Humour Noir, Complexe Psychisme. What more could you ask for? Le Sang Et La Rose is a masterpiece of the Japanese underground. A groundbreaking, powerful, yet short-lived Japanese arts and literary journal published in Tokyo from late 1968—mid 1969, published in a total of four luxurious, now collectible, volumes. The first three issues were edited by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), a legendary, controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade, and specialist in medieval demonology. The importance of this magazine to the Japanese avant-garde and radical culture cannot be overstated.

Born from a period of political, social and economical turmoil in Japan, Le Sang Et La Rose may be understood as a emblematic distillation and product of the late ‘60s student rebellion and anti-authoritarian underground culture. Wilfully politically subversive, the publication drew upon a vast range of perspectives - from criticism, literature, obscure esoteric sciences, art, eroticism, radical avant-garde and a historical-rooted Japanese counterculture; featuring literature, theory, art, photography, illustration and graphic design from the most innovative and subversive Japanese and international (predominately French) artists, authors and critics, spanning the themes above. As instigator, Tatsuhiko Shibusawa in effect formulated the magazine’s design to be a spiritual and political operative that would weaponize its readers minds. This stance was made clear in the 1969 manifesto text — "My 1969" — in which Shibusawa discuss' how he perceived the ‘60s as being the age of ideas, ideas as weapons, and outlined a distain towards systems of power, moralism, State oppression, sanitised and harmless liberalism, dogmatic academic sciences and an outright distrust for ideological, progressive literary scholars who advocate "freedom of expression", but have never caused friction with the judicial power. The magazine sketched out an aim to push towards a new kind of personal freedom, intellect, autonomy and moral compass. Here, the concept of ‘erotism’ — as discussed by Georges Bataille in his highly influential 1957 book "Erotism: Death and Sensuality" — acts as a critical force. 

Issue no. 1 (1968) sets the scene perfectly, opening with Japanese author Yukio Mishima depicted as Saint Sebastian by photographer Kishin Shinoyama in a pictorial feature "Les Morts Masculines", a photographic homage to Georges Bataille that also features the photography of Eikoh Hosoe, Ikkō Narahara, Masahisa Fukase, and Osamu Hayasaki, with models including Butoh founder Tatsumi Hijikata, actor Akira Mita, author Tatsuhiko Shibusawa, actor Jin Nakayama, playwright Jūrō Kara, and others. Other features include " All Japanese are Perverse" — stories by Japanese writers including Yukio Mishima, Taruho Inagaki, Yutaka Haniya, Shinji Sōya; Henry Miller's letters to Anais Nin; a colour gallery of artwork by Belgian painter Paul Delvaux; articles on Vampire fantasy in the arts (including many original illustrations; Witches (illustrated by James Ensor); Oriental Eros, Ancient Indian poetry; Kama Sutra; female bi-sexuality; the history of gay (Danshoku) theatre in Japan; the full-colour art gallery "Masturbation Machine", featuring avant-garde artists Natsuyuki Nakanishi, Masuo Ikeda, Setsu Nagasawa, Carlos Marchioli, Kuniyoshi Kaneko, Masakazu Horiuchi, Tadanori Yokoo, Koji Suzuki, Tommy Ungerer; the fully illustrated museum supplement "Pain and Pleasure : On Torture" by Tatsuhiko Shibusawa with artworks throughout history; pornographic stories by Guillaume Apollinaire and Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne (who coined the term "Pornographer"); fiction by Pierre Morion (pseudo. André Pieyre de Mandiargues); critic Jin'ichi Uekusa on the controversial writings of Roger Peyrefitte, illustrations by Ernst, Bellmer, Labisse, Fini, Lam, and much more.

Tatsuhiko Shibusawa (1928—1987), was a well-known and controversial Japanese novelist, art critic, and translator of French writers such as Jean Cocteau, Georges Bataille and Marquis de Sade. In 1960 he and his publisher, Kyōji Ishii, were trialled for public obscenity over the publishing of Shibusawa's translation of de Sade's Juliette into the Japanese language. What was to be known as the "Sade Trial" took 9 years and although many of Japan's leading authors testified for the defense, in 1969 the Japanese Supreme Court ruled them guilty and charged. This did not deter Shibusawa, whose essays on black magic, demonology and eroticism were popular reading in Japan, and in 1981 he was awarded the 9th Izumi Kyoka Literature Prize.

Good copy with some spine damage and tanning/wear.

File under: Max Ernst Léonor Fini Felix Labisse Wilfredo Lam Hans Bellmer Paul Delvaux Natsuyuki Nakanishi Masuo Ikeda Setsu Nagasawa Carlos Marchioli Kuniyoshi Kaneko Masakazu Horiuchi Tadanori Yokoo Koji Suzuki Tommy Ungerer Tatsumi Hijikata Tatsuhiko Shibusawa Eikoh Hosoe Ikkō Narahara Masahisa Fukase Osamu Hayasaki Kishin Shinoyama James Ensor Tatsuhiko Shibusawa Jin'ichi Uekusa Roger Peyrefitte Yukio Mishima Taruho Inagaki Yutaka Haniya Shinji Sōya Henry Miller Suehiro Tanemura Guillaume Apollinaire Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues Nicolas Restif de la Bretonne Jūrō Kara Tensei Shuppan / Tokyo Fiction / Poetry Japanese Photography Occult / Esoterica Philosophy Photography Art Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées Fetishism / BDSM LGBTQ+ Eros Ero Guro / Erotic / Grotesque Out-of-print / Rare Periodicals Counterculture Surrealism Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle Transgressive / Visceral / Abject Ancient / Medieval / Gothic

Plexus 30
December 1969

1969, French
Softcover, 130 pages, 20 x 17.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Planète / Paris

$40.00 - In stock -

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Issue 30 of Plexus, an avant-garde French magazine published in Paris from 1966-1970, created as the companion publication to fantastical realist magazine Planète by prominent figures French journalist and author Louis Pauwels and fantastique fiction author Jacques Sternberg. Born from the ashes of surrealism into it's cultivated counterculture and subtitled "the uninhibited magazine", Plexus blended a psychedelic mix of erotica, fantasy, philosophy, psychedelia, literature, esoterica, filmmaking, science fiction, satirical cartoons and more. Only 37 issues total were published during its short four year run, but it made a big splash, even being prohibited to minors in 1967 after just one year of publication for its “pornographic content.” Each issue featured striking cover artwork by some of the most prominent artists of the period, along with galleries of erotic artworks, historical and contemporary – often seen only in the pages of Plexus.

Plexus, issue 30, December 1969. Cover by Bonneville. Features a gallery of art by Max Savy, the first ever pornography fair in Copenhagen, Contemporary art and the sexual revolution (Niki de Saint Phalle, Mel Ramos, Alina Szapocznikow, Martial Raysse, Roy Lichtenstein, Christo, Tom Wesselmann, Yves Klein, David Hockney, Richard Lindner, Bernard Rancillac, James Rosenquist, Larry Rivers, etc. by Pierre Restany, French author Catherine de Prémonville, Edgar Morin, and so much more.

VG copy, light wear/age.

File under: Catherine de Prémonville Edgar Morin Max Savy Alina Szapocznikow Niki de Saint Phalle Martial Raysse Christo Yves Klein David Hockney Richard Lindner James Rosenquist Larry Rivers Roy Lichtenstein Tom Wesselmann Pierre Restany Jacques Sternberg Catherine de Prémonville Edgar Morin Planète / Paris Periodicals Out-of-print / Rare Eros Counterculture Drugs / Psychedelia Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic Art Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées Film / Video Photography Occult / Esoterica Philosophy Sociology / Politics Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic Pop Art

Thinking Gaza: An Essay on Ferocity
by Franco Bifo Berardi

2026, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 17.7 x 11.6 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$35.00 - In stock -

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A call to imagine a less deadly future, written in the shadow of genocide and "ferocious optimism."

After Gaza, it is time to recognize that the attempt to humanize history has failed, and that there will not be a second try. It is time to recognize that the experiment called "civilization" has failed... The abyss is wide open and we cannot help but see it. We must gaze into the abyss, we must gauge the breadth and depth of the abyss. We must draw a map of the abyss, while precipitously falling into it.

"Thinking after Gaza" means recognizing the collapse of universal reason and democracy, the humanistic values that were the famed—and fragile—promise of modernity. But it also means searching for ways to escape the grim future awaiting those born in this disenchanted century: this century that promises to be the last, in which thought has lost all political power and the survival instinct struggles to withstand the ferocity of techno-military extermination machines. To the generation born in the twilight of Western civilization, we owe this last act of thinking, so as to imagine the desertion of our barbaric present, along pathways that have yet to be illuminated.

The latest essay by renowned Italian autonomist theorist Franco "Bifo" Berardi, Thinking After Gaza is a reflection on the multivalent consequences—political, philosophical, civilizational—of the current genocide in Gaza and the West Bank. Bearing sober witness to the conditions on the ground in the Occupied Territories, while tracking the "ferocious optimism" that has replaced Enlightenment ideals, this book is addressed not only to activists but also to pacifist philosophers, historians, and theologians.

File under: Franco 'Bifo' Berardi Franco Berardi Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Sociology / Politics Theory / Essay Protest / Revolt Crime / Violence Philosophy

Nietzsche & the Vicious Circle
by Pierre Klossowski

1998, English
Softcover, 302 pages, 21.8 x 14.1 cm
Published by University of Chicago Press / Chicago

$89.00 - In stock -

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Translated by Daniel W. Smith

A landmark explication of Nietzsche’s work from one of the most prominent experts on the philosopher’s thought

Long recognized as a masterpiece of Nietzsche scholarship, Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle is made available here for the first time in English. Taking a structuralist approach to the relation between Nietzsche’s thought and his life, Klossowski emphasizes the centrality of the notion of Eternal Return (a cyclical notion of time and history) for understanding Nietzsche’s propensities for self-denial, self-reputation, and self-consumption.

Nietzsche’s ideas did not stem from personal pathology, according to Klossowski. Rather, he made a pathological use of his best ideas, anchoring them in his own fluctuating bodily and mental conditions. Thus Nietzsche’s belief that questions of truth and morality are at base questions of power and fitness resonates dynamically and intellectually with his alternating lucidity and delirium.

Klossowski, brother of the painter Balthus, is widely rcognized as a central figure in the contemporary French avant-garde.^Daniel W. Smith is an associate professor in philosophy at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. He specializes in contemporary 19th and 20th century philosophy from Europe, particularly the thought of Gilles Deleuze on whom he has published his renowned Essays on Deleuze, and translation of Essays , Clinical and Critical and Logic of Sensation. His essays are also published in numerous academic journals such as Continental Philosophy Review and Deleuze Studies.

File under: Pierre Klossowski Friedrich Nietzsche Pierre Klossowski Daniel W. Smith University of Chicago Press / Chicago Philosophy Theory / Essay Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language

The Revenge of Reason
by Peter Wolfendale; Foreword by Ray Brassier

2026, English
Softcover, 308 pages, 20.96 x 15 cm
Published by Urbanomic / Cornwall

$60.00 - In stock -

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Neorationalism as a distinctive philosophical trajectory, exploring the outermost possibilities of Prometheanism, Inhumanism, and Enlightenment.

What is the fate of Reason in the twenty-first century? Today more than ever, in the face of disinformation, memetic plagues, and neuroactive media, if we are to resist not just the continual solicitation of our cognitive reflexes, but also the unearned authority of endless everyman rationalists and self-appointed secular priests of rationality, then we have no choice but to mobilize Reason to continually dissect the responsibilities they shirk, and to embrace the future demands of thought. Peter Wolfendale has long been dedicated to this philosophical task, and The Revenge of Reason lays out his vision for Neorationalism as a distinctive philosophical trajectory, exploring the outermost possibilities of Prometheanism, Inhumanism, and Enlightenment.

This volume collects interviews and writings on various philosophical figures and topics, addressing the deepest questions of Physis, Logos, and Ethos-all with exemplary clarity and pedagogical generosity. Against those who would chain the fate of humanity to its animal nature, Wolfendale's work makes the case for unbinding our rationality from every petty naturalism and every fixed image of thought, heralding an inhuman destiny unleashed by the revenge of Reason.

File under: Peter Wolfendale Ray Brassier Urbanomic / Cornwall Theory / Essay Philosophy

The Conspiracy of Art: Manifestos, Interviews, Essays
by Jean Baudrillard

2005, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 22.86 x 15.2 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$36.00 - In stock -

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Cutting-edge theorist Jean Baudrillard on the complicitous dance of art, politics, economics, and media; includes "War Porn," on Abu Ghraib as a new genre of reality TV.

The images from Abu Ghraib are as murderous for America as those of the World Trade Center in flames. The whole West is contained in the burst of sadistic laughter of the American soldiers, as it is behind the construction of the Israeli wall. This is where the truth of these images lies. Truth, but not veracity. As virtual as the war itself, their specific violence adds to the specific violence of the war. In The Conspiracy of Art, Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion- feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the "end of art," Baudrillard celebrates art's new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiraling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like society as a whole.

Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvère Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents Baudrillard's writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economics, and media. Culminating with "War Porn," a scathing analysis of the spectacular images from Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought.

File under: Jean Baudrillard Jean Baudrillard Sylvère Lotringer Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Theory / Essay Philosophy Art Sociology / Politics

The Impossible
by Georges Bataille

2001, English
Softcover, 188 pages, 20.4 x 13.97 cm
Published by City Lights Books / San Francisco

$36.00 - In stock -

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Translations by Robert Hurley.

In a philosophical erotic narrative, an essay on poetry, and in poems Georges Bataille pursues his guiding concept, the impossible. The narrator engages in a journey, one reminiscent of the Grail quest; failing, he experiences truth. He describes a movement toward a disappearing object, the same elusive object that moved Theresa of Avila and Catherine of Siena to ecstasy.

"Humanity is faced with a double perspective: in one direction, violent pleasure, horror and death – precisely the perspective of poetry – and in the opposite direction, that of science or the real world of utility. Only the useful, the real, have a serious character. We are never within our rights in preferring seduction to it: truth has rights over us. Indeed it has every right. And yet we can, and indeed we must respond to something which, not being God, is stronger than every right, that impossible to which we accede only by forgetting the truth of all these rights." —Georges Bataille

Georges Bataille (1897-1962) was a French intellectual and literary icon who wrote essays, novels, and poems exploring philosophical and sociological subjects such as eroticism and surrealism. City Lights published more of Bataille's works including Erotism, The Tears of Eros, and Story of the Eye.

File under: Georges Bataille Robert Hurley City Lights Books / San Francisco Surrealism Eros Out-of-print / Rare Philosophy Theory / Essay Fiction / Poetry

Visions of Excess : Selected Writings 1927-1939
by Georges Bataille

1985, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 23 x 15.2 cm
Published by University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota

$68.00 - In stock -

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Since the publication of Visions of Excess in 1985, there has been an explosion of interest in the work of Georges Bataille. The French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume in which Bataille’s positions are most clearly, forcefully, and obsessively put forward.

This book challenges the notion of a “closed economy” predicated on utility, production, and rational consumption, and develops an alternative theory that takes into account the human tendency to lose, destroy, and waste. This collection is indispensable for an understanding of the future as well as the past of current critical theory.

Edited by Allan Stoekl
Translated by Allan Stoekl, Carl R. Lovitt, and Donald M. Leslie Jr.
Introduction by Allan Stoekl

Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a librarian by profession, was founder of the French review Critique. He is the author of several books, including Story of the Eye, The Accused Share, Erotism, and The Absence of Myth.

Allan Stoekl is professor of French and comparative literature at Pennsylvania State University and author of Agonies of the Intellectual.

File under: Georges Bataille Allan Stoekl University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota Surrealism Theory / Essay Eros Art Philosophy

Overexposed: Perverting Perversions
by Sylvère Lotringer

2007, English
Softcover, 213 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Published by Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles

$44.00 - Out of stock

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A report on the administration of deviant desire in specialized clinics that documents the way our postmodern society exposes sexuality to the point of overexposure.

Do you ever get aroused by your patient's fantasies? Do you discover through them something about your own sexuality?
–About my sexuality?
You are exposed to a lot of fantasies.
–Oh yes. Quite frankly, I think it has a satiation effect on me. I've been a sex researcher for ten years, and sometimes I get fed up with it, you know. I talk to people about sex all day long, and it does get to be a drag.
–from Overexposed

The most perverse perversions are not always those one would expect. Originally conceived as an American update to Foucault's History of Sexuality, Overexposed is even more outrageous and thought-provoking today than it was twenty years ago when first published by a commercial publisher. By a strange reversal, rather than being punished, deviant desire now is administrated in specialized clinics under medical supervision. Sexual excess is being turned into a "boredom therapy" claiming to rid patients of their own desires by forcing them to indulge them past the point of satiety. But are perversions still perverse when they are vindicated unconditionally? At once clinical, bewildering, and deeply poignant, Overexposed shows how science can pervert itself by identifying too closely with its object. This insider's exposition of controversial cognitive behavioral methods (carried out with instruments straight out of A Clockwork Orange–penile transducer? pupillometer?) is a hallucinatory document on the manner in which our postmodern society exposes sexuality to the point of overexposure–in order to exterminate it.

"Overexposed is a most remarkable work... A brilliant piece of undercover reporting, from the strangest of strange lands."–J.G. Ballard

"Overexposed is a voyage through hell. A gleaming, air-conditioned, sanitary, and polite hell where a triumphant psychotechnology replaces the old-fashioned shackles of the Law and 'cures' the sex-offender by boring to death his desire. Sylvère Lotringer's account of this charnel house of behaviorisim is deft, witty, and precise."–Joel Kovel

"The sexualization of postwar American culture has produced results that would astonish Freud, Reich, or even Kinsey. Modern techniques of behavior modification now cast doubt on the sources of individual eroticism. Overexposed is an engrossing description of sexual conditioning condoned by the state. A fascinating book."–William Burroughs

File under: SylveÌre Lotringer Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles Theory / Essay Gender Studies / Sexuality Eros Philosophy Psychoanalysis Philosophy / Psychoanalysis LGBTQ+