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
WEB-SHOP OPEN 24/7
World Food Books
Postal Address:
PO Box 435
Flinders Lane
Victoria 8009
Australia
Art
Theory / Essay
Architecture / Interior
Graphic Design / Typography
Photography
Fashion
Eros
LGBTQ+
Fiction / Poetry
Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction / Horror
Transgressive / Visceral / Abject
Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle
Film / Video
Painting
Sculpture / Installation
Performance / Dance / Theater
Drawing
Sound / Music
Curatorial
Group Shows / Collections
Periodicals
Out-of-print / Rare
Posters / Ephemera / Discs
Signed Books
World Food Books Gift Voucher
World Food Book Bag
Australian Art
Australian Photography
Japanese Photography
Conceptual Art
Minimal Art
Dada
'Pataphysics / Oulipo
Fluxus
Concrete Poetry
Pop Art
Surrealism
Arte Povera
Arte Informale / Haute Pâte / Tachism
Nouveau Réalisme / Zero / Kinetic
Situationism / Lettrism
Collage / Mail Art / Xerox Art
Art Brut / Folk / Visionary / Fantastic
Illustration / Graphic Art / Bandes Dessinées
Furniture
Italian Radical Design / Postmodernism
Textiles
Ceramics / Glass
Counterculture
Protest / Revolt
Anarchism
Socialism / Communism / Capitalism
Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language
Feminism
Fetishism / BDSM
Drugs / Psychedelia
Crime / Violence
Animal Rights / Veganism
Occult / Esoterica
Ecology / Earth / Alternative Living
Whole Earth / Crafts
All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 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. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or 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.
1980, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$35.00 - Out of stock
First English edition published in 1980 by Cornell.
"This collection of Kojeve's thoughts about Hegel constitutes one of the few important philosophical books of the twentieth century-a book, knowledge of which is requisite to the full awareness of our situation and to the grasp of the most modern perspective on the eternal questions of philosophy."—Allan Bloom (from the Introduction)
During the years 1933—1939, the Russian-born and German-educated Marxist political philosopher Alexandre Kojève (1902—1968) brilliantly explicated—through a series of lectures—the philosophy of Hegel as it was developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit. This collection of lectures—originally compiled by Raymond Queneau and edited for its English-language translation by Allan Bloom—shows the intensity of Kojeve's study and thought and the depth of his insight into Hegel's Phenomenology. More important—for Kojeve was above all a philosopher and not an ideologue—this profound and venturesome work on Hegel will expose the readers to the excitement of discovering a great mind in all its force and power.
Very Good copy.
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 214 pages, 22 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Harvard University Press / Cambridge
$45.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1991 hardcover English edition of "Coming to Writing" and Other Essays by Hélène Cixous, published by Harvard.
"Hélène Cixous is today, in my view, the greatest writer in what I will call my language, the French language if you like. And I am weighing my words as I say that. For a great writer must be a poet-thinker, very much a poet and a very thinking poet."—Jacques Derrida
This collection presents six essays by one of France’s most remarkable contemporary authors. A notoriously playful stylist, here Hélène Cixous explores how the problematics of the sexes—viewed as a paradigm for all difference, which is the organizing principle behind identity and meaning—manifest themselves, write themselves, in texts. These superb translations do full justice to Cixous’s prose, to its songlike flow and allusive brilliance.
Translated by Sarah Cornell, Ann Liddle, and Susan Sellers. Edited and translated by Deborah Jenson.
Very Good copy.
1992, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Indiana University Press / Indiana
$25.00 - Out of stock
January 1992 issue of Camera Obscura (No. 28), the Journal of Feminism and Film Theory published by Indiana University Press. This issue with the theme of "Imaging Technologies, Inscribing Science", with special issue editors Paula A. Treichler and Lisa Cartwright.
Edited by Elisabeth Lyon, Constance Penley, Lynn Spigel, Sharon Willis, with advisory editors Bertrand Augst, Elizabeth Cowie, Mary Ann Doane, Laura Mulvey, Linda Orr, Susan Suleiman, and managing editor Gary Laderman.
camera obscura
A Journal of Feminism and Film Theory/28
Imaging Technologies, Inscribing Science
Special Issue Editors: Paula A. Treichler and Lisa Cartwright
5 Introduction by Paula A. Treichler and Lisa Cartwright
Beyond Cosmo: AIDS, Identity, and Inscriptions of Gender by Paula A. Treichler; Local and Global: AIDS Activism and Feminist Theory by Katie King; Gallo, Montagnier, and the Debate Over HIV: A Narrative Analysis by Jamie Feldman; WAVE in the Media Environment: Camcorder Activism and the Making of HIV TV by Alexandra Juhasz; WAVE in the Media Environment: Camcorder Activism in AIDS; Education by Juanita Mohammed; The Politics of Breast Cancer by Alisa Solomon; Shooting the Mother: Fetal Photography and the Politics of Disappearance by Carol Stabile; On the Cutting Edge: Cosmetic Surgery and the Technological Production of the Gendered Body by Anne Balsamo; Spectatorial Embodiments: Anatomies of the Visible and the Female Bodyscape by Giuliana Bruno; Those Who Squat and Those Who Sit: The Iconography of Race in the 1895 Films of Félix-Louis Regnault by Fatimah Tobing Rony; plus reviews and much more.
Very Good copy.
1995, English
Softcover, 396 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$70.00 - In stock -
First 1995 edition.
The realistic spirit, a nonmetaphysical approach to philosophical thought concerned with the character of philosophy itself, informs all of the discussions in these essays by philosopher Cora Diamond. Diamond explains Wittgenstein's notoriously elusive later writings, explores the background to his thought in the work of Frege, and discusses ethics in a way that reflects his influence. Diamond's new reading of Wittgenstein challenges currently accepted interpretations and shows what it means to look without mythology at the coherence, commitments, and connections that are distinctive of the mind.
"This is the most important book on Wittgenstein in over a decade, but it is also much more than that. These essays range widely over issues in the philosophy of language, ethics, and literature, and they illuminate everything they touch. They show the full range and power of one of the best philosophical minds I know."—Hillary Putnam, Harvard University
Cora Diamond is the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia.
NF—VG copy.
1978, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 192 pages, 22 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Vision / London
$35.00 - In stock -
First 1973 hardcover edition of WYNDHAM LEWIS : FICTIONS AND SATIRES by Robert T. Chapman.
Wyndham Lewis played a leading part in the cultural life of England at the beginning of this century. Setting himself up as 'The Enemy', he vociferously opposed Establishment art and received opinion, and for fifty years iconoclastically attacked modish dilettantism and falsity. Novelist, painter, editor, poet, dramatist, critic, philosopher — Lewis was the most versatile of the 'men of 1914', yet his reputation has long been overshadowed by Pound, Eliot and Joyce, and he is only just beginning to be accepted as one of the major figures in twentieth-century literature.
This study concentrates on Lewis as an imaginative writer, and, whilst his philosophy, polemics and paint ing are considered whenever relevant, the major novels are given central importance. The approach is chronological and aims to reveal the development of Lewis's art from the Bergsonian physical comedy of the early stories, through the Vorticist period, the social satires of the Thirties, to the late non-fiction stories and the new mythology of
The Human Age. Formerly a post-graduate assistant in the Department of English at the New University of Ulster, Robert Chapman is at present completing his doctoral thesis on aesthetics in the modern novel and working for the Open University.
VG copy in G dust jacket with closed tears and rubbing wear.
1978, English
Softcover, 160 pages, 21.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$160.00 - Out of stock
"Not by wrath does one kill but by laughter. Come, let us kill the spirit of gravity!"―Friedrich Nietzsche
Rare copy of this remarkable issue of the original Semiotext(e) journal, published and edited by Sylvère Lotringer between 1974—1985, with later book-length issues appearing in the 1990s. This key issue, Nietzche's Return, "... Nietzsche, the thinker without disciples, par excellence", featuring major contributions by Georges Bataille, John Cage, Daniel Charles, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, François Fourquet, Lee Hildreth, Denis Hollier, Kenneth King, Pierre Klossowski, James Leigh, Sylvère Lotringer, Jean-François Lyotard, Roger McKeon, Daniel Moshenberg, John Rajchman, et al.
Founded in 1974, Semiotext(e) began as a journal that emerged from a semiotics reading group led by Sylvère Lotringer at the Columbia University philosophy department. Initially, the magazine was devoted to readings of thinkers like Nietzsche and Saussure. In 1978, Lotringer and his collaborators published a special issue, Schizo-Culture, in the wake of a conference of the same name he had organized two years before at Columbia University. The magazine brought together artists and thinkers such as Gilles Deleuze, Kathy Acker, John Cage, Michel Foucault, Jack Smith, Martine Barrat and Lee Breuer. Schizo-Culture brought out connections between high theory and underground culture that had not yet been made, and forged the "high/low" aesthetic that remains central to the Semiotext(e) project.
Very Good—Near Fine copy with tanning to the spine, raw paper stock edges. Well preserved copy.
2024, English
Softcover, 80 pages, 17.6 x 11.4 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$28.00 - In stock -
The stirring speech given by Peter Sloterdijk in Lucerne in October 2022.
From time immemorial, humanity has had to organize their "metabolism with nature." For Marx, the most important factor in this process was labor. When Prometheus, according to the myth, brought fire to earth, another crucial input was added. Fire has been used to cook food and harden tools for hundreds of thousands of years. In this sense, it can be said that all history implies the history of the uses of fire.
But whereas trees could only be burnt once, labor and fire shifted with the discovery of underground deposits of coal and oil. Modern humanity, according to Peter Sloterdijk, can be considered a collective of arsonists who set fire to the underground forests and moors. If Prometheus were to return to earth today, he might regret his gift; after all, what looms is nothing less than Ekpyrosis, the demise of the world in fire. And only a new, energetic pacifism can prevent this catastrophe.
2023, English
Softcover, 364 pages, 23 x 15.2 cm
Published by
West Martian / USA
$62.00 - Out of stock
Xenosystems: Fragments is a selection of recovered blog posts by Nick Land, following Xenosystems' dormancy and ultimate deletion. This second edition, with a "Gift from the Lemurs", contains additional works by Land added to the compilation.
First conceived in 2013 by British philosopher Nick Land, Xenosystems is the ur-text of neoreactionary thought. Pathbreaking, uncompromising, and, as its name suggests, utterly alien, Xenosystems’ cold, often “anti-human” analytical approach to the problems of the early 21st Century provides a clarifying, if equally horrifying lens through which to see our current and future realities.
Presented here in book form for the first time, these selected excerpts, organized around the blog’s main themes of fragmentation, entropy, techno-capital, and political and social disintegration, captures the spirit of neoreaction and the discursive battlefield over which these idea were originally forged.
1991, English
Softcover, 296 pages, 15.3 x 22.8 cm
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$44.00 - In stock -
In his stunning essay Coldness and Cruelty Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of late nineteenth-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity." He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain, that masochism has nothing to do with sadism: their worlds do not communicate, just as the genius of those who created them -- Masoch and Sade -- lie stylistically, philosophically, and politically poles apart.
Venus in Furs, the most famous of Masoch's novels, belongs to an unfinished cycle of works that Masoch entitled The Heritage of Cain. The cycle was to treat a series of themes, including love, war, and death. The present work is about love. Although the entire constellation of symbols that has come to characterize the masochistic syndrome can be found here -- fetishes, whips, disguises, fur-clad women, contracts, humiliations, punishment, and always the volatile presence of a terrible coldness -- these received associations do not eclipse the truly singular and surprising power of Masoch's eroticism.
1981/1995, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 24.6 x 17 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$98.00 - Out of stock
Originally conceived as a special Semiotext(e) issue on homosexuality at the end of the 70s, "Polysexuality" quickly evolved into a more complex and iconoclastic project whose intent was to do away with recognized genders altogether, considered far too limitative. The project landed somewhere between humor, anarchy, science-fiction, utopia and apocalypse. In the few years that it took to put it together, it also evolved from a joyous schizo concept to a darker, neo-Lacanian elaboration on the impossibility of sexuality. The tension between the two, occasionally perceptible, is the theoretical subtext of the issue. Upping the ante on gender distinctions, "Polysexuality" started by blowing wide open all sexual classifications, inventing unheard-of categories, regrouping singular features into often original configurations, like Corporate Sex, Alimentary Sex, Soft or Violent Sex, Discursive Sex, Self- Sex, Animal Sex, Child Sex, Morbid Sex, or Sex of the Gaze. Mixing documents, interviews, fiction, theory, poetry, psychiatry and anthropology, "Polysexuality" became the encyclopedia sexualis of a continent that is still emerging. What it displayed in all its forms could be called, broadly speaking, the Sexuality of Capital. (Actually the issue being rather hot, it was decided to cool it off somewhat by only using “capitals” throughout the issue. It was also the first issue for which we used the computer). It was first issued in 1981.—Semiotext(e)
The "Polysexuality" issue was attacked in Congress for its alleged advocation of animal sex.
Includes work by Pierre Klossowski, Pierre Guyotat, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jean-François Lyotard, William S. Burroughs, Paul Virilio, Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Peter Lamborn Wilson, Sylvère Lotringer, Bernard Noel, Terence Sellers, Guy Hocquenghem, Roger Caillois, Tony Duvert, together with an introduction written by Canadian editor and psychoanalyst François Peraldi.
1995 reprint edition.
2024, Englidh
Softcover, 532 pages, 20.5 x 13 cm
Published by
Contra Mundum Press / New York
$62.00 - In stock -
On 10 January 1936, the poet, actor, and dramatic theorist, Antonin Artaud departed Europe on a journey to Mexico that would take him from the streets, cafés, and lecture halls of Mexico City to the remote mountains of the Sierra Tarahumara. The journey would last only ten months, culminating in some six to eight weeks spent among the Tarahumara (Rarámuri), but it was a profound turning point in his life.
Artaud didn’t just leave Europe. He fled it. “I came to Mexico to escape European civilization … I hoped to find a vital form of culture.” The vital form of culture that he sought was one wherein individual and communal behaviors were rooted in the soil of a place, wherein the rituals of religion reinforced a connection in human lives between the earth and the sun.
But Artaud’s search for a vital form of culture would not be a simple one. His appeal to indigenous culture would first require an intense and intricate effort at aesthetic, religious, political, and philosophical decolonization. And this intellectual work would not be without a psychological cost.
Journey to Mexico collects very nearly all of Artaud’s writings related to his voyage to the land of the Tarahumara: the writings he prepared prior to this journey; the pieces he published in Mexico and the lectures he delivered there; the essays, letters, and poems that he wrote in the years after his journey, reflecting on and reframing his experiences. A selection of letters written before, during, and after the trip conveys the very personal — the physical, emotional, and financial — challenges of the journey.
Artaud’s Journey to Mexico takes us far from home to the limits of art and anthropology, myth and religion, to confront the legacies of colonial conquest and the possibility of decolonization in a desperate search for a “vital form of culture.”
1990, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 19.8 x 13 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Fontana / UK
$15.00 - In stock -
1990 Fontana edition.
Roland Barthes was the leading figure of French Structuralism, the theoretical movement of the 1960s which revolutionized the study of literature and culture, as well as history and psychoanalysis. But Barthes was a man who disliked orthodoxies. His shifting positions and theoretical interests make him hard to grasp and assess. This book surveys Barthes' work in clear, accessible prose, highlighting what is most interesting and important in his work today. In particular, the book describes the many projects, which Barthes explored and which helped to change the way we think about a range of cultural phenomena--from literature, fashion, wrestling, and advertising to notions of the self, of history, and of nature.
Good—VG copy.
1993, English
Softcover, 632 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$40.00 - In stock -
First 1994 edition.
Long considered "the noblest of the senses," vision has increasingly come under critical scrutiny by a wide range of thinkers who question its dominance in Western culture. These critics of vision, especially prominent in twentieth-century France, have challenged its allegedly superior capacity to provide access to the world. They have also criticized its supposed complicity with political and social oppression through the promulgation of spectacle and surveillance.
Martin Jay turns to this discourse surrounding vision and explores its often contradictory implications in the work of such influential figures as Jean-Paul Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, Louis Althusser, Guy Debord, Luce Irigaray, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida. Jay begins with a discussion of the theory of vision from Plato to Descartes, then considers its role in the French Enlightenment before turning to its status in the culture of modernity. From consideration of French Impressionism to analysis of Georges Bataille and the Surrealists, Roland Barthes's writings on photography, and the film theory of Christian Metz, Jay provides lucid and fair-minded accounts of thinkers and ideas widely known for their difficulty.
His book examines the myriad links between the interrogation of vision and the pervasive antihumanist, antimodernist, and counter-enlightenment tenor of much recent French thought. Refusing, however, to defend the dominant visual order, he calls instead for a plurality of "scopic regimes." Certain to generate controversy and discussion throughout the humanities and social sciences, Downcast Eyes will consolidate Jay's reputation as one of today's premier cultural and intellectual historians.
Martin Jay is Sidney Hellman Ehrman Professor Emeritus of History at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Force Fields (1992), Marxism and Totality (California, 1984), Adorno (1984), and The Dialectical Imagination (1973).
Good copy due to contact laminating, otherwise VG.
1992, English
Softcover, 172 pages, 23 x 17 cm
Reprint,
Published by
October Books / New York
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$59.00 - In stock -
Jonathan Crary's Techniques of the Observer provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity. This analysis of the historical formation of the observer is a compelling account of the prehistory of the society of the spectacle.
In Techniques of the Observer Jonathan Crary provides a dramatically new perspective on the visual culture of the nineteenth century, reassessing problems of both visual modernism and social modernity.
Inverting conventional approaches, Crary considers the problem of visuality not through the study of art works and images, but by analyzing the historical construction of the observer. He insists that the problems of vision are inseparable from the operation of social power and examines how, beginning in the 1820s, the observer became the site of new discourses and practices that situated vision within the body as a physiological event. Alongside the sudden appearance of physiological optics, Crary points out, theories and models of "subjective vision" were developed that gave the observer a new autonomy and productivity while simultaneously allowing new forms of control and standardization of vision.
Crary examines a range of diverse work in philosophy, in the empirical sciences, and in the elements of an emerging mass visual culture. He discusses at length the significance of optical apparatuses such as the stereoscope and of precinematic devices, detailing how they were the product of new physiological knowledge. He also shows how these forms of mass culture, usually labeled as "realist," were in fact based on abstract models of vision, and he suggests that mimetic or perspectival notions of vision and representation were initially abandoned in the first half of the nineteenth century within a variety of powerful institutions and discourses, well before the modernist painting of the 1870s and 1880s.
Jonathan Crary is Meyer Schapiro Professor of Modern Art and Theory at Columbia University. A founding editor of Zone Books, he is the author of Techniques of the Observer (MIT Press, 1990) and coeditor of Incorporations (Zone Books, 1992). He has been the recipient of Guggenheim, Getty, Mellon, and National Endowment for the Arts fellowships and was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
"Nimbly interweaving the histories of science, technology, philosophy, popular culture, and the visual arts, Jonathan Crary provides a stunning challenge to conventional wisdom about the epochal transformation of visual culture in the nineteenth century. Techniques of the Observer will be a vital resource for anyone concerned with the complex interaction of technological modernization and aesthetic modernism."—Martin Jay, University of California at Berkeley
1985, English
Softcover, 385 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Oxford University Press / New York
$18.00 - Out of stock
First 1985 Oxford edition.
"Elaine Scarry has written an extraordinary book: large-spirited, heroically truthful. A necessary book."—Susan Sontag
"No one, with the exception of Freud, more persistently brings one back to the reality of the body.... a richly original, provocative book which makes one reconsider torture, war, and creativity from a new perspective."—Anthony Storr, Washington Post Book World
"Brilliant, ambitious and controversial... an all-encompassing discourse on creativity, imagination and the distribution of power."—Gwen Yourgrau, Los Angeles Times Book Review
The Body in Pain is a profoundly original meditation on the vulnerability of the human body and the literary, political, philosophical, medical, and religious vocabularies used to describe it. Elaine Scarry bases her analysis on a wide array of sources, including literature and art, medical case histories, documents on torture compiled by Amnesty International, and the writings of such figures as Clausewitz, Churchill, and Kissinger. The author begins with the fact of pain's inexpressibility, noting not only the difficulty of describing pain, but its ability to destroy a sufferer's language. She then analyzes the political consequences of deliberately inflicted pain, particularly in cases of war and torture, showing how regimes "unmake" an individual's world in their exercise of power. From the actions that "unmake" the world Scarry turns to a discussion of actions that "make" the world-the acts of creativity that produce language and cultural artifacts.
Elaine Scarry is William T. Fitts, Jr., Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania.
"In its breadth and humaneness of vision, in the density and richness of its prose, above all in the compelling nature of its argument, this is indeed an extraordinary book."—Susan Rubin Suleiman, The New York Times Book Review
"A brilliant and difficult book... Scarry's compassionate linguistics docu- ments how [the] bridge between torturer and victim is cut."—Michael Ignatieff, The New Republic
Very Good copy, light wear/tanning.
2000, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 190 pages, 19.6 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$100.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition of the first English translation of the essential work on Proust.
In a remarkable instance of literary and philosophical interpretation, the incomparable Gilles Deleuze reads Proust’s work as a narrative of an apprenticeship of a man of letters. Deleuze traces the network of signs laid by Proust (those of love, art, or worldliness) and moves toward an aesthetics that culminates in a meditation on the literary work as a sign-producing “machine”—an operation that reveals the superiority of “signs of art” in a world of signs.
"Deleuze conducts readers on a corollary search that leads to a new and deeper understanding of the network of signs laid down by Proust."—Translation Review
Translated by Richard Howard
Fine copy in Fine dust jacket.
2024, English
Softcover, 264 pages, 17.5 x 11.5 cm
Published by
Urbanomic / Cornwall
$35.00 - Out of stock
‘[A] series of overwhelmingly intense, captivating and often horrifying snapshots of Amazonian life, human and non-human.[……] Rangel’s […] sense of the seething beauty and violent horror of Amazonia is riveting, full of haunting images […]. Beneath its several authors, its multiple timeframes, its blurring of many genres, is the turbulence of Brazilian Amazonia itself […] Amazonia is presented as a world that thwarts any attempt at categorisation, any decision as to what is single and what is multiple; this bamboozling and hearteningly ambitious volume is a parallel challenge to our pre-existing categories, not least the category of the book itself.’—Joe Moshenska, The Observer
A classic of Brazilian literature is twinned with an overheated tract in which tropical delirium swallows up Western philosophy.
Both attack the decolonial question with poetic ferocity, ignited by the moment when colonialist rationality meets its limits in the ‘magnificent disorder’ of the Amazon jungle.
Described in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s foreword as ‘no longer an interpretation of Brazil but an interpenetration with Brazil’, Jean-Christophe Goddard’s strange theory-fiction plunges Western philosophy into the great American schizophrenia, where its ordered categories are devoured by uncontainable contaminations—first and foremost the rainforest itself, a ‘monstrosity unapproachable by the cogito’.
In 1664, the Portuguese Bento de Espinosa wrote of his terrifying hallucination of ‘a scabby black Brazilian’. But rather than a vision of ‘the Other’, the dream figure was a frightful glimpse of Bento’s own duplicity. Upon adopting the ‘clean white nickname’ of Benedict de Spinoza, the philosopher cut ties with his homeland and its colonial misadventures, repudiating this spectre that flees along the lines of migration: ‘Spinoza is American…the journey is intensive’.
And in his wake, a cannibalized cast of conceptual personae are sucked into Goddard’s Pernambucan delirium: Franny Deleuze, Dina Levi-Strauss, Chaya Ohloclitorispector, Galli Mathias…
The rainforest also precipitates a deregulation of the senses in Verdant Inferno, Alberto Rangel’s classic 1904 work of Brazilian literature. In Rangel’s astonishing tales, this ‘poet-engineer’ sent into the dark interior as a state representative records his encounters in a style that shimmers between objective documentary and visionary limit experience.
An Urbanomic K-Pulp Switch: singular texts by two different authors in a classic pulp format.
2023, English
Softcover, 146 pages, 20.32 x 12.7 cm
Published by
Contra Mundum Press / New York
$34.00 - Out of stock
It is sometimes proclaimed that crises generate creative powers. An idea to consider, beyond the banal advertising or entrepreneurial statements about the fruitful nature of crises (political, social, economic, or personal). It is the psychic, literary, and philosophical aspect of the notion of crisis that is explored here in its relationship to creation. The crisis of creativity: silence, withdrawal, sterility. Everyone knows these periods of emptiness, of depressive obstruction. Is the creativity of the crisis the simple reversal of it?
As Deleuze or Beckett, Nietzsche or Foucault knew, but also many modern artists and creators, it is not easy to endure the instability required by all creation, the forces of bewilderment that it unleashes, everything like its undeniable ecstasy. Creation is undoubtedly an apprenticeship in insecurity.
Professor at the University of Paris, former president of the International College of Philosophy, editor at Gallimard of Antonin Artaud’s works, Évelyne Grossman is a specialist in literary theory. She situates her work at the crossroads of literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis.
Translated by Rainer J. Hanshe
1986, English
Hardcover (clothbound w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 26 x 26 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Nebraska Press / Lincoln
$140.00 - In stock -
First, long out-of-print and sought after deluxe hardcover 1986 edition of Glassary by John P. Leavey, the ulimate English companion volume to Derrida's masterwork, Glas. Glas is a 1974 book by the French philosopher Jacques Derrida. It combines a reading of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's philosophical works and of Jean Genet's autobiographical writing. "One of Derrida's more inscrutable books," its form and content invite a reflection on the nature of literary genre and of writing.
Glassary is a companion volume to Glas. It offers English readers fuller access to the masterwork of Jacques Derrida, the leading philosopher in France. Derrida is important for his investigations of language, philosophy, and writing. He has perforated the boundaries between academic disciplines, has demonstrated the theological underpinnings of apparently atheological philosophies, and has thrown into question traditional notions about the "ownership" of ideas. Glas exemplifies Derrida's methodology of reading and his central philosophical and literary concerns. The reader fascinated by its complexities will appreciate the assistance of Glassary.
Written by the chief translator of Glas, John P. Leavey, Jr., it includes an essay by Gregory Ulmer and a foreword by Jacques Derrida. The book provides all of the apparatus a reader of Glas might immediately desire, including notes on difficult or ambiguous passages, identifications of allusions and puns, locations of citations, and translations of passages in languages other than French. But Leavey does not stop there. He includes a glossary of use to readers of Glas in any language and essays that relate it to Derrida's texts and to the modern French critical enterprise as a whole. Leavey's essay focuses on Glas and literature and philosophy; Ulmer's on Glas and psychoanalysis.
John P. Leavey, Jr., who with Richard Rand translated Glas into English, has translated two other books by Derrida. He teaches at the University of Florida. His colleague, Gregory L. Ulmer, is the author of Applied Grammatology: Post(e)-Pedagogy from Jacques Derrida to Joseph Beuys (1985).
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with a few chips/tears to edges/tanning, now preserved under mylar wrap. Book in excellent condition.Clothbound HC book in excellent condition.
2023, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 12 x 19 cm
Published by
Uh Books / Amsterdam
$25.00 - In stock -
F.R.DAVID was concerned with the organisation of reading and writing in contemporary art practice. Following and open call, this is - the very last issue - a collectively-compiled "Erratum", or addendum [if you will] to the twenty-three issues from 2007 until now.
Edited with Paul Abbott, After 8, Alma Sarif, Phil Baber, Daniel Blumberg, Thomas Boutoux, Kristien Van den Brande, Chloe Chignell, Martina Copley, Anthony Elms, Chris Evans, Carolina Festa, Kasper Feyrer, Richard Finlay Fletcher, Ben Green, Mariëtte Groot, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Léa Guillon, Sarah Handley, Gloria Hasnay, Loes Jacobs, Michel Khleifi, Willis Kingery, gerlach en koop, James Goggin, Keira Greene, Léa Guillon, Jacob Lindgren, Kobe Matthijs, Martino Morandi, Zen Nguyen, Alice Notley, Robert M. Ochshorn, Oscar the dog, Willem Oorebeek, David Reinfurt, Scott Rogers, Andrés de Santiago Areizaga, Rosa Sarholz, Clara Schulmann, Andrea di Serego Alighieri, Sabrina Tarasoff, Kristy Trinier, Seymour Wright and Unknown.
2002, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 22.9 x 11.5 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$30.00 - Out of stock
May '68 in France expressed a fundamental version of freedom: not freedom to succeed, but freedom to revolt. Political revolutions ultimately betray revolt because they cease to question themselves. Revolt, as I understand it—psychic revolt, analytic revolt, artistic revolt--refers to a permanent state of questioning, of transformations, an endless probing of appearances. In this book, Julia Kristeva extends the definition of revolt beyond politics per se. Kristeva sees revolt as a state of permanent questioning and transformation, of change that characterizes psychic life and, in the best cases, art. For her, revolt is not simply about rejection and destruction—it is a necessary process of renewal and regeneration.
Julia Kristeva is a professor of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. She is the author of many highly respected books and a practicing psychoanalyst.
1969, English
Softcover, 125 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
University of London / London
$20.00 - In stock -
A 1969 University of London reprint of the 1967 Little, Brown book, Professor Bachrach considers the age-old question of the role of elites in a democracy. He argues that the present influence of elites in the U.S. can be offset only by the revitalization of political participation. The book also provides a historical and analytical examination of the theory of democratic elitism, as well as its soundness both as empirical and as normative theory.
Peter Bachrach was prominent political theorist and professor emeritus of political science at Temple University.
Good copy with previous owner's (artist Bernard Sachs) name to first first, tape markings from age.
1996, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 17.7 x 11.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$35.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first 1996 edition of Soft Subversions by Félix Guattari, published by Semiotext(e) in their Native Agents book series. Edited by Sylvère Lotringer, this collection of Felix Guattari's essays, lectures, and interviews traces the militant anti-psychiatrist and theorist's thought and activity throughout the 1980s ("the winter years"). Concepts such as "micropolitics," "schizoanalysis," and "becoming-woman" open up new horizons for political and creative resistance in the "postmedia era." Guattari's energetic analyses of art, cinema, youth culture, economics, and power formations introduce a radically inventive thought process engaged in liberating subjectivity from the standardizing and homogenizing processes of global capitalism.
Very Good copy.
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
$55.00 - Out of stock
Scarce 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.