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
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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.
1969, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 214 pages, 22 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Taihen Shuppan-Sha / Japan
$550.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first 1969 hardcover edition of Tadao Mitome's "Records of Revolts 60-70" (or "Documents of Rebellion 60-70"), a stunning collection of Mitome's provocative front-line photographic documentation of Japanese protests during the 1960's, published in 1969. Stunning richly gravure-printed imagery gives a confronting account of the post-war struggles of the "Zengakuren", Japan's radical student activists, including the ANPO protests, a series of massive citizen movement protests throughout Japan from 1959 to 1960 against the US–Japan Security Treaty, which allows the United States to maintain military bases on Japanese soil, the like-wise struggle against the US military presence since the end of World War II in Okinawa, and various other school campus protests, security protests, worker protests, all carefully selected from 150,000 negatives covering 10 years, accompanied by a complete chronological history of the Zengakuren struggle between the 1959—1969. Published at a time of great anti-imperialist government resistance in Japan, "Records of Revolts 60-70", like Kurihara's "Anger Is Our Daily Bread" of the same year, is one of the masterpieces of Japanese protest photo-books of the era. Designed by the legendary designer and activist Kiyoshi Awazu.
Very Good copy with some age/wear/tanning to extremities.
1971, Japanese
Hardcover (w. slip-case) 192 pages, 24 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Shinsensha / Tokyo
$480.00 - In stock -
Gorgeous first (boxed) hardcover edition of Tadao Mitome's "protest-book masterpiece" published in 1971, documenting the Sanrizuka resistance to the building of Tokyo's Narita Airport. Photographs follow the thousands of protestors into battle against riot police and record their construction of fortresses and underground tunnels.
“A superb document about the medieval fighting that took place over a period of some five years around Narita airport. Fuelled by the spirit of protest in the late 60s this constituted the first of many often violent anti-airport protests in the region.”
“Sanrizuka documents the intense civil unrest between residents of Sanrizuka, an agricultural area located on the east side of Narita airport, and government authorities, in the run up to the construction and later expansion of the airport. Under a 1966 plan, the airport would have been completed in 1971, but due to the ongoing resettlement disputes, not all of the land for the airport was available by then. Finally, in 1971, the Japanese government began forcibly expropriating land. 291 protesters were arrested and more than 1,000 police, villagers and student militants were injured in a series of riots.“
Editing and art direction by the legendary activist designer Kiyoshi Awazu (1929–2009) with stunning deep gravure printing. Included in “The Japanese Photobook, 1912–1990” by Kaneko Ryuichi and Manfred Heiting and "The Photobook: A History, Volume III" by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger, p. 57.
Very Good copy with some age/wear/light scratching to box.
1969, Japanese / English
Softcover (w. dust jacket), 166 pages, 26 x 19 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Tojusha / Tokyo
$380.00 - In stock -
Extremely rare first 1969 edition of Anger Is Our Daily Bread, Japanese photographer Tatsuo Kurihara's arresting book of front-line photographic student protest reportage published by Tojusha, Tokyo. The book of the "Zengakuren", Japan's radical student activists. With stunning, richly gravure-printed imagery, Anger Is Our Daily Bread is one of the most provocative and powerful photographic records of political unrest in Japan ever published. A desperate documentary and a master work from a Japanese photo-journalist at the forefront of bloodshed. Text in Japanese and English.
Anger Is Our Daily Bread concerns one of the most important political events in post-war Japan, The Anpo protests, also known as the Anpo struggle, a series of massive protests throughout Japan from 1959 to 1960 against the US–Japan Security Treaty, which allows the United States to maintain military bases on Japanese soil. Inspired by anti-imperialist left, these protests, the largest popular protests in Japan's history, were the coordinated actions of various citizen movements, from labor unions, student and women's organizations, mothers' groups, poetry circles, theatre troupes, groups affiliated with the Japan Socialist and Communist Parties, even conservative businessmen, who all wanted to prevent the ratification of the treaty and, as survivors of the unrivalled disasters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, end the trauma of American military presence in Japan. The planned visit of the US president Eisenhower escalated the protests, which gripped hundreds of thousands to protest daily for a year around the Japanese Parliament National Diet building. With an unparalleled police presence physically removing the Socialist Diet members' attempted opposition sit-in, Prime Minister Kishi undemocratically passed the treaty provoking nationwide outrage, strikes and actions. The Zengakuren were always on the front-line. Facing strong anti-government public opinion which had been enhanced by the death of a female Tokyo University student named Michiko Kanba during a demonstration, Eisenhower's visit was cancelled and Kishi resigned as Prime Minister, in order to quell the widespread popular anger at his extremist actions. Yet the treaty remained in effect and wide-spread Americanisation of Japan ensued.
On the eve of the 1970 treaty revision, Anger Is Our Daily Bread was published.
"Another revision term coming next year, the Zengakuren students started to resort to "Molotov cocktail" method. They are not only against the Japan—US Security Treaty, but also struggling to address those problems like university reform, the new international airport at Narita, Chiba, the U.S. bases in Japan, Okinawa's return to Japan, etc. Helmeted and armed with the so-called "Gewalt" clubs and sticks, those students of Zengakuren repeatedly clash with the armed police. Pictures shown here are the record of the Zengakuren movement for the past twelve months."—from Tatsuo Kurihara's introduction
Kurihara's extremely vivid first hand visual accounts of the immense student demonstrations, their meetings, their brutal conflict with the police, the molotov cocktails from stormed buildings, and constant armed street battles, make for one of the most moving protest books ever printed. His stark, heavy contrast images are so immersive they give the viewer the impression of themselves being in the violent clashes, a witness to people's lives thrown into turmoil, the urgency and desperation to be heard by the elite.
Tatsuo Kurihara was born in downtown Tokyo in 1937. Upon graduating from Waseda University's Faculty of Political Science and Economics in 1961, he began working at the Asahi Shimbun Tokyo Headquarters Publishing Photography Department. In 1962, he won the Japan Photographers Association Newcomer's Award. In 1967, he left Asahi Shimbun and became a freelancer and a member of the Japan Photographers Society (JPS).
Very Good copy in Good—VG dust jacket with some light wear to jacket extremities. Corner bump to front top first few pages.
1997, English
Softcover, 248 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$15.00 - In stock -
In a fascinating account of how technology is altering our consciousness, Celia Lury shows how the manipulation of photographic images and ways of seeing can so redefine the relation between consciousness, the body and memory as to create a 'prosthetic culture' whose capacities both extend and threaten our humanity.
We live in a society in which some memories can be falsely implanted in the individual while others are stored in video archives of images, in which the powers of cartoon superheroes break through the limitations of time and space. Using the examples of photo-therapy, family albums, Benetton advertising campaigns, the phenomenon of false memory syndrome and the 'lives' of cartoon characters this book argues that the 'eyes' made available by contemporary visual technologies involve not simply specific ways of seeing, but also ways of life.
Very Good copy.
2025, English
Softcover, 344 pages, 22.86 x 15.24 cm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$44.00 - In stock -
A personal and philosophical reflection on the question of old age as a limit concept of Western thought.
A few years ago, Didier Eribon's mother entered a retirement home. Over the course of several months, she lost her physical and cognitive autonomy, and despite his resistance, Eribon and his brothers were compelled to place her in a nursing home. The doctor had warned that she'd rapidly decline. And indeed, refusing the degradation and humiliation of her condition, Eribon's mother died just a few weeks later.
In The Life, Old Age, and Death of a Working-Class Woman, Eribon furthers the archeological, historical, sociological, political, and personal reflection he began with Returning to Reims, this time to look at the question of old age. How does our society treat the elderly, especially the very elderly? What are the daily humiliations the elderly are forced to suffer? What are the conditions at the end of life?
Threaded through an erudite engagement with the works of Simone de Beauvoir, Annie Ernaux, Albert Cohen, Michel Foucault, Norbert Elias, and many others, the question of old age is shown here as a limit concept of Western thought and political philosophy. What is the place of bodies that can no longer assemble, discuss freedom, or protest? How do we hear those who can no longer say “us”? What does it mean not to project into the future? Can the absolutely dependent speak for themselves—and if not, who can speak for them?
Eribon left behind his prejudiced working-class family to become an intellectual. Looking back on his relationship with his mother, he transmutes his rage, sadness, and shame over her death into a portrait of being reunited beyond unbridgeable difference.
Translated by Michael Lucey
Didier Eribon, Professor of Sociology at the University of Amiens, is well known for his groundbreaking biography, Michel Foucault, first published in 1989. He is also the author of Insult and the Making of the Gay Self, as well as numerous other books of critical theory.
2004, English
Softcover, 480 pages, 23.4 x 15.5 cm
Published by
Duke University Press / North Carolina
$62.00 - Out of stock
Published in English for the first time, Didier Eribon' s well-received and celebrated work on a philosophy of and examination of gay life.
A bestseller in France following its publication in 1999, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an extraordinary set of reflections on "the gay question" by Didier Eribon, one of France's foremost public intellectuals. Known internationally as the author of a path-breaking biography of Michel Foucault, Eribon is a leading voice in French gay studies. In explorations of gay subjectivity as it is lived now and as it has been expressed in literary history and in the life and work of Foucault, Eribon argues that gay male politics, social life, and culture are transformative responses to an oppressive social order. Bringing together the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler, and Erving Goffman, he contends that gay culture and political movements flow from the need to overcome a world of insult in the process of creating gay selves. Eribon describes the emergence of homosexual literature in Britain and France at the turn of the last century and traces this new gay discourse from Oscar Wilde and the literary circles of late-Victorian Oxford to Andre Gide and Marcel Proust.
He asserts that Foucault should be placed in a long line of authors—including Wilde, Gide, and Proust—who from the nineteenth century onward have tried to create spaces in which to resist subjection and reformulate oneself.
Drawing on his unrivaled knowledge of Foucault's oeuvre, Eribon presents a masterful new interpretation of Foucault. He calls attention to a particular passage from Madness and Civilization that has never been translated into English. Written some fifteen years before The History of Sexuality, this passage seems to contradict Foucault's famous idea that homosexuality was a late-nineteenth-century construction. Including an argument for the use of Hannah Arendt's thought in gay rights advocacy, Insult and the Making of the Gay Self is an impassioned call for critical, active engagement with the question of how gay life is shaped both from without and within.
Didier Eribon is a philosopher, historian, and journalist in France, where he writes frequently for the weekly news magazine Le Nouvel Observateur. In addition to his biography Michel Foucault, he is the author of books including Une morale du minoritaire: Variations sur un thème de Jean Genet and Hérésies: Essais sur la théorie de la sexualité.
Michael Lucey is Professor of French and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Misfit of the Family: Balzac and the Social Forms of Sexuality (published by Duke University Press) and Gide’s Bent: Sexuality, Politics, Writing.
2001, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 194 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$70.00 - In stock -
First 2001 hardcover edition.
This original and provocative 2001 study discusses the work of a number of authors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to argue that mainstream society was enabled to accept the non-normative sexuality of the Aesthetic Movement chiefly through parody and self-parody. Highlighting Victorian popular culture, Aestheticism and Sexual Parody adds an important dimension to the theorisations of parody as a combative strategy by which sexually marginalized groups undermine the status quo. From W. S. Gilbert's drama and Vernon Lee and Christopher Isherwood's prose to George du Maurier's cartoons and Max Beerbohm's caricatures, Dennis Denisoff explores the parodies' interactions with the personae and texts of canonical authors such as Alfred Tennyson, Walter Pater, Algernon Swinburne, and Oscar Wilde. In doing so, he considers the impact that these interactions had on modern ideas of gender, sexuality, taste and politics.
Dennis Denisoff is Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Ryerson University, Ontario. He is the author of Erin Mouré: Her Life and Works, the editor of Queeries: An Anthology of Gay Male Prose, and the co-editor of Perennial Decay: On the Aesthetics and Politics of Decadence.
VG copy in VG dust jacket.
1990, English
Softcover, 182 pages, 18 x 11.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$50.00 - In stock -
"The project: to rescue 'communism' from its own disrepute. Once invoked as the liberation of work through mankind's collective action, communism has instead stifled humanity. We who see in communism the liberation of both collective and individual possibilities must reverse that regimentation of thought and desire which terminates the individual."
Translated by Michael Ryan. Includes "Postscript, 1990" by Toni Negri.
Very Good copy.
1997, English
Softcover, 402 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Stanford University Press / Palo Alto
$20.00 - In stock -
With the collapse of the bipolar system of global rivalry that dominated world politics after the Second World War, and in an age that is seeing the return of "ethnic cleansing" and "identity politics," the question of violence, in all of its multiple ramifications, imposes itself with renewed urgency. Rather than concentrating on the socioeconomic or political backgrounds of these historical changes, the contributors to this volume rethink the concept of violence, both in itself and in relation to the formation and transformation of identities, whether individual or collective, political or cultural, religious or secular. In particular, they subject the notion of self-determination to stringent scrutiny: is it to be understood as a value that excludes violence, in principle if not always in practice? Or is its relation to violence more complex and, perhaps, more sinister?
Reconsideration of the concepts, the practice, and even the critique of violence requires an exploration of the implications and limitations of the more familiar interpretations of the terms that have dominated in the history of Western thought. To this end, the nineteen contributors address the concept of violence from a variety of perspectives in relation to different forms of cultural representation, and not in Western culture alone; in literature and the arts, as well as in society and politics; in philosophical discourse, psychoanalytic theory, and so-called juridical ideology, as well as in colonial and post-colonial practices and power relations.
The contributors are Giorgio Agamben, Ali Behdad, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Michael Dillon, Peter Fenves, Stathis Gourgouris, Werner Hamacher, Beatrice Hanssen, Anselm Haverkamp, Marian Hobson, Peggy Kamuf, M. B. Pranger, Susan M. Shell, Peter van der Veer, Hent de Vries, Cornelia Vismann, and Samuel Weber.
Very Good copy.
2016, English
Softcover, 376 pages, 22 x 28.5 cm
Ed. of 1500,
Published by
Cultural Traffic / London
Dashwood Books / New York
$80.00 - Out of stock
Foreword by Toby Mott
Designed by Jamie Andrew Reid
Edition of 1,500
Showboat: Punk / Sex / Bodies delves into the intersection of sex and punk, exploring how each influences and is influenced by the other. As a radical subculture, punk enjoyed the freedom to address sex openly, unencumbered by mainstream censorship. This uninhibited expression of sexuality imbued punk with its rawness and immediacy.
Spanning from 1972 to the present day, Showboat offers a chronological exploration of the dynamic relationship between punk and sex. Drawing from The Mott Collection, the exhibition features original posters, flyers, record covers, photographs, and ephemera. Additionally, contributions from notable figures such as Julie Burchill, Paul Cook, Vivien Goldman, Eve Libertine, Bruce LaBruce, Amos Poe, Richard Prince, and Will Self provide further insight into this captivating intersection.
2014, English
Softcover, 72 pages
Ed. of 300 ,
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Anne Ferran / Sydney
$20.00 - In stock -
Self-published artist book by Sydney photographer Anne Ferran, issued in 2014 in an edition of 300 copies. "Prison Library is about a very particular place – a library that used to exist inside Fremantle Maximum Security Prison in WA. Talk to anyone who grew up in the town when Fremantle Prison was still a working gaol and they’ll have stories of its looming presence in their lives: the high stone walls, razor wire, the guard towers and massive gates that they drove or walked past every day. Yet twenty-plus years after Fremantle Prison ceased to operate, its library had become one of those subjects hardly anyone seems to know about. I set out to find all remaining shreds of evidence of the library and to make a photo book that would stand in for the 10,000 odd items that were in it when it closed.[..]"—Anne Ferran
Photomedia artist Anne Ferran investigates the margins, gaps and silences of colonial history, uncovering what scattered evidence there remains from structures of social control such as prisons, workhouses, women’s homes and ‘lunatic asylums’.
Very Good copy.
1998, English
Softcover, 240 pages, 23 x 15.24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$65.00 - In stock -
Scarce first paperback edition of Suzanne R. Stewart's Sublime Surrender : Male Masochism at the Fin-de-siècle, published in 1998.
When Heinrich Heine left his sick bed in 1848 and stumbled to the Louvre to fall before a statue of the goddess of beauty and lie in the pitying, cold glance she seemed to cast on his prostrate body, he defined a recurring motif of the second half of the nineteenth century, according to Suzanne R. Stewart. Directing her attention to the voice of the shriveled male body at beauty's feet, she investigates the discourse by and about men that took hold in the German-speaking world between 1870 and 1940 and that articulated masculinity as and through its own marginalization. Male masochism, she suggests, was a rhetorical strategy through which men asserted their cultural and political authority paradoxically by embracing the notion that they were (and always had been) wounded and suffering.
Stewart demonstrates and develops her contentions through close readings of the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Richard Wagner, and Sigmund Freud, in each case showing that the very act through which men sacrificed themselves to women comprised the essence of the new male subject "deeply penetrated by relations of political and sexual power." Masochistic scenarios, whether in literature, music, the visual arts, or medicalized diagnoses of the fin-de-siècle malaise, stage the male as one who submits, as Stewart explains, "to an aestheticized and eroticized gaze and voice."
Very Good copy with light general wear.
1971, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 104 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Secker & Warburg / London
$320.00 - In stock -
Rare first English hardcover edition of Yukio Mishima's Sun and Steel, a masterpiece of modern Japanese literature, translated by John Bester, and published by Secker & Warburg, London, in 1971. With the iconic book jacket designed by Yukio Mishima.
In this fascinating document, one of Japan's best known-and controversial-writers created what might be termed a new literary form. Sun and Steel: Art, Action and Ritual Death (Japanese: 太陽と鉄, Hepburn: Taiyō to Tetsu) is an autobiographical essay, a memoir of the author's relationship to his body. It is new because it combines elements of many existing types of writing, yet in the end fits into none of them.
At one level, it may be read as an account of how a puny, bookish boy discovered the importance of his own physical being; the "sun and steel" of the title are themselves symbols respectively of the cult of the open air and the weights used in bodybuilding. At another level, it is a discussion by a major novelist of the relation between action and art, and his own highly polished art in particular. More personally, it is an account of one individual's search for identity and self-integration. Or again, the work could be seen as a demonstration of how an intensely individual preoccupation can be developed into a profound philosophy of life.
All these elements are woven together by Mishima's complex yet polished and supple style. The confession and the self-analysis, the philosophy and the poetry combine in the end to create something that is in itself perfect and self-sufficient. It is a piece of literature that is as carefully fashioned as Mishima's novels, and at the same time provides an indispensable key to the understanding of them as art.
The road Mishima took to salvation is a highly personal one. Yet here, ultimately, one detects the unmistakable tones of a self transcending the particular and attaining to a poetic vision of the universal. The book is therefore a moving document, and is highly significant as a pointer to the future development of one of the most interesting novelists of modern times.
"One of the twentieth century's outstanding statements of literary and personal purpose."—Library Journal
"Had we [read this before his suicide], the extravagant events surrounding his death would have been more readily comprehensible."—Sunday Times
YUKIO MISHIMA, one of the most spectacularly gifted writers in modern Japan, was born into a samurai family in 1925. Yukio Mishima was a Japanese author, poet, playwright, actor, model, Shintoist, nationalist, and founder of the Tatenokai ("Shield Society"), an unarmed civilian militia. Mishima is considered one of the most important Japanese authors of the 20th century. He was considered for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1968. His works include the novels Confessions of a Mask and The Temple of the Golden Pavilion. Mishima's work is characterized by "its luxurious vocabulary and decadent metaphors, its fusion of traditional Japanese and modern Western literary styles, and its obsessive assertions of the unity of beauty, eroticism and death", according to author Andrew Rankin. In November 1970 he and his Tatenokai forced their way into a Self-Defense Force headquarters in Tokyo, where Mishima, after reading out a proclamation, committed ritual suicide with a young follower in the commanding officer's room. On the morning of his death, the last volume of Mishima's tetralogy, The Sea of Fertility (The Spring Snow, Runaway Horses, The Temple of Dawn, The Decay of the Angel) was delivered to his publisher.
The Translator, JOHN BESTER, born and educated in England, is one of the foremost translators of Japanese fiction. Among his translations are Masuji Ibuse's Black Rain, Kenzaburo Oe's The Silent Cry, Fumiko Enchi's The Waiting Years, and Junnosuke Yoshiyuki's The Dark Room. He received the 1990 Noma Award for the Translation.
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket. Light tanning, spots and edge wear. Well preserved copy.
1984, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$25.00 - In stock -
A foundational essay in twentieth-century critical thought, The Postmodern Condition argues that knowledge-science, technology, and the arts-has undergone a change of status since the nineteenth century and especially since the late 1950s.
"Lyotard's classic argues that postmodernism's 'legitimation crisis' has been precipitated by 'the collapse of meta- narrative'-that is, the supreme (and supremely unified and unifying) fictions we tell ourselves about ourselves."—Voice Literary Supplement
"Lyotard's essay is a welcome addition to the American Critical Scene."—Philosophy and Literature
"Lyotard's thought is as original and as important as those two influential maîtres penseurs of the new human sciences, Derrida and Foucault. Drawing on Freud, Marx, and Saussure, as well as various philosophers from the Greek Sophists to Nietzsche, Lyotard has established for himself an independent perspective as profoundly moral as it is political, philosophical, and literary.... Lyotard explores science and technology, makes connections between these and epistemic, cultural, and political trends, and develops profound insights into the nature of our postmodernity."—IHAB HASSAN, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
JEAN-FRANÇOIS LYOTARD is professor emeritus of philosophy at the University of Paris-Vincennes. He is the author of The Postmodern Explained, Heidegger and "the jews," Political Writings, and Just Gaming, all published by the University of Minnesota Press
VG copy.
2009, English
Softcover, 136 pages, 114 x 178 mm
Published by
Semiotext(e) / Los Angeles
$29.00 - In stock -
Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. . . . We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not enough work, it’s that there is too much of it.—from The Coming Insurrection
The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine to “spread anarchy and live communism.”
Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.”
Hot-wired to the movement of ’77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized forms-of-life. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.
2009, English
Softcover, 728 pages, 28 x 17.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Routledge / London
$45.00 - In stock -
First Routledge complete edition of Michel Foucault's classic History of Madness, translated from the original French texts by Jonathan Murphy, edited by Jean Khalfa and published in 2009.
When it was first published in France in 1961 as Folie et Deraison: Histoire de la Folie a l'âge Classique, few had heard of a thirty-four year old philosopher by the name of Michel Foucault. By the time an abridged English edition was published in 1967 as Madness and Civilization, Michel Foucault had shaken the intellectual world.
This translation is the first English edition of the complete French texts of the first and second edition, including all prefaces and appendices, some of them unavailable in the existing French edition.
History of Madness begins in the Middle Ages with vivid descriptions of the exclusion and confinement of lepers. Why, Foucault asks, when the leper houses were emptied at the end of the Middle Ages, were they turned into places of confinement for the mad? Why, within the space of several months in 1656, was one out of every hundred people in Paris confined?
Shifting brilliantly from Descartes and early Enlightenment thought to the founding of the Hopital General in Paris and the work of early psychiatrists Philippe Pinel and Samuel Tuke, Foucault focuses throughout, not only on scientific and medical analyses of madness, but also on the philosophical and cultural values attached to the mad. He also urges us to recognize the creative and liberating forces that madness represents, brilliantly drawing on examples from Goya, Nietzsche, Van Gogh and Artaud.
The History of Madness is an inspiring and classic work that challenges us to understand madness, reason and power and the forces that shape them.
"Scarcely any philosopher working on the history of philosophy, or historian working on the history of institutions, social science or sexuality can avoid confronting the challenge of Foucault's books."—Michael Ignatieff, Times Literary Supplement
"Without a shadow of a doubt, the most original, influential and controversial text in this field during the last forty years. It remains as challenging now as on first publication. Its insights have still not been fully appreciated and absorbed."—Roy Porter
"Extraordinary!rich and insistent, and almost unreasonable in its necessary repetitions."—Maurice Blanchot
Very Good copy, light wear.
1983, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$35.00 - In stock -
This book, which Foucault himself has judged accurate, is the first to provide a sustained, coherent analysis of Foucault’s work as a whole. Published by University of Chicago Press in 1983, this 2nd edition with an afterword by and an Interview with Michel Foucault.
To demonstrate the sense in which Foucault’s work is beyond structuralism and hermeneutics, the authors unfold a careful, analytical exposition of his oeuvre. They argue that during the of Foucault’s work became a sustained and largely successful effort to develop a new method—“interpretative analytics”—capable oo explaining both the logic of structuralism’s claim to be an objective science and the apparent validity of the hermeneutical counterclaim that the human sciences can proceed only by understanding the deepest meaning of the subject and his tradition.
“There are many new secondary sources [on Foucault]. None surpass the book by Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow. . . . The American paperback edition contains Foucault’s ’On the Genealogy of Ethics,’ a lucid interview that is now our best source for seeing how he construed the whole project of the history of sexuality.”—David Hoy, London Review of Books
VG copy.
2025, English
Softcover, 122 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by
Routine Art Co. / London
$19.00 - In stock -
"This booklet fills a gap between my two previous books on working class culture and oppression. It looks a the first defences of popular culture by Herbert J. Gans and then Richard Shusterman. I looks for theorising about the aesthetics of working class cultures and finds some interesting ideas."
Born Hammersmith, London in 1948, of working-class parents displaced after the second world war, author Stefan Szczelkun "Lived an isolated life in a bedsit at the top of Regents street until we moved to Feltham when I was 3. Later I was a mod; then a reluctant architect; then a happy artist. Since then I've been in ten collectives of cultural producers from the Scratch Orchestra to Exploding Cinema. With one of these groups I built my own house in Kennington (finished in 1995)." In the 1970's he was the author of three Survival Scrapbooks: ‘Survival Scrapbook 1: Shelter’ (1972), ‘Survival Scrapbook 2: Food’ (1974), ‘Survival Scrapbook 2: Energy’ (1974), published in the UK and US. "My work is a sensible response to situations that I am in. This has led me to work in open artists collectives and to produce books."
1985 / 2001, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 11.4 x 17.2 cm
Published by
Autonomedia / New York
$29.00 - In stock -
"A Blake Angel on Bad Acid" — Robert Anton Wilson
"Fascinating..." — William Burroughs
"Who is Hakim Bey? I love him!" — Timothy Leary
Back in print — the underground cult bestseller and first book by anarchist writer and poet Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson) published in 1991 by Autonomedia. Originally published in 1985 and circulated in the underground via small private and pirate editions, these texts were an inspiration for a generation of troublemakers and idealists. Both celebrated in the punk underground (where the original book has become a seminal text) and denounced in some anarchist circles, the book has proved itself as both influential and relevant to multiple generations of dreamers, agitators, and activists.
Essays that redefine the psychogeographical nooks of autonomy. Recipes for poetic terror, anarcho-black magic, post-situ psychotropic surgery, denunciations of spiritual addictions to vapid infotainment cults — this is the bastard classic, the watermark impressed upon our minds. Where conscience informs praxis, and action infects consciousness, T.A.Z. is beginning to worm its way into above-ground culture. This book offers inspired blasts of writing, from slogans to historical essays, on the need to insert revolutionary happiness into everyday life through poetic action, and celebrating the radical optimism present in outlaw cultures. It should appeal to alternative thinkers and punks everywhere, as it celebrates liberation, love and poetic living.
This new edition contains the full text of "Chaos: The Broadsheets of Ontological Anarchism", the complete "Communiques of the Association for Ontological Anarchy", and the new long essay "The Temporary Autonomous Zone", and a new preface by the author.
Very Good copy with some light wear.
1975 / 1995, English
Softcover, 320 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pimlico Books / London
$30.00 - In stock -
1995 UK second edition of Australian philosopher Peter Singer's groundbreaking book, Animal Liberation, first published in 1975. Considered to be the founding philosophical statement of the ideas behind the animal liberation movement, Animal Liberation exposed the realities of life for animals in factory farms and testing laboratories and provided a powerful moral basis for rethinking our relationship to them.
"An extraordinary book which has had extraordinary effects. It galvanised a generation to action. Groups sprang up around the world, equipped with a new vocabulary, a new set of ethics and a new sense of mission...Singer's book is widely known as the bible of the animal liberation movement."—Independent on Sunday
Immensely influential and powerful, Animal Liberation is also highly unusual. A comprehensive analysis of conditions in factory farms and animal laboratories, it compellingly argues that we should stop eating meat. A work of philosophy, it includes recipes for vegetarian food. In this revised edition, Peter Singer discusses the evolution of the animal rights movement and the extent to which his own views have changed since first publication. He also graphically updates his account of what is being done to animals in the name of scientific, military and commercial research.
"A reasoned plea for the humane treatment of animals that galvanised the animal-rights movement the way Rachel Carson's Silent Spring drew activists to environmentalism."—New York Times
"Important and responsible...Everyone ought to read it."—Richard Adams, English novelist and writer of the books Watership Down, Maia, Shardik and The Plague Dogs
Good—VG copy with tanned pages (usual with this edition).
1978, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 434 pages, 22.5 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Clarendon Press / Oxford
$55.00 - In stock -
First 1978 hardcover edition.
The commanding study of Marxism, now in one masterful volume with a new preface and epilogue by the author.
From philosopher Leszek Kolakowski, one of the giants of twentieth-century intellectual history, comes this highly influential study of Marxism. Written in exile, this "prophetic work" presents, according to the Library of Congress, "the most lucid and comprehensive history of the origins, structure, and posthumous development of the system of thought that had the greatest impact on the twentieth century." In this Volume One, The Founders, Professor Kolakowski examines the origins of Marxism. The author traces the philosophical tradition, through Hegel and the Enlightenment, back to the Neo-Platonists. Professor Kolakowski both examines the development of Marx's thought and draws attention to its divergence from other forms of socialism. He reveals Marxism to be "the greatest fantasy of our century... an idea that began in Promethean humanism and culminated in the monstrous tyranny of Stalinism." In a brilliant coda, he examines the collapse of international Communism in light of the last tumultuous decades. Main Currents of Marxism remains the indispensable book in its field.
In Volume One, The Founders, Professor Kolakowski examines the origins of Marxism. The author traces the philosophical tradition, through Hegel and the Enlightenment, back to the Neo-Platonists. Professor Kolakowski both examines the development of Marx's thought and draws attention to its divergence from other forms of socialism.
Professor Leszek Kolakowski was for many years, until March 1968 when he was expelled for political reasons, Professor of the History of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. He is now a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford, and has been a visiting Professor at the universities of Montreal, Yale, and California, Berkeley.
VG copy in VG dj.
1972, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 82 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Swallow Press / Chicago
$20.00 - In stock -
First hardcover 1972 edition.
"For most Americans, the study and the understanding of Marxism present for- midable hurdles. It is shot through with emotions, polemics, and dogmatisms; there are competing schools and a dozen languages to contend with; Marxism roots in a philosophical tradition not al- ways familiar to us; and, finally, the sheer glut of writings is enough to discourage anyone. Where to begin and how to pro- ceed?
This book answers that question. Here is a guide, for English language readers, to the literature of Marxist philosophy. It was conceived as an introduction, pri- marily for those beginning their study of Marxism. It deals almost exclusively with Marxist philosophy: with the theories of nature, of knowledge, of man, of society which underlie the more oft-seen Marxist expressions in political and economic tracts and treatises. It limits itself to those writings available in English. Finally, the book's chief virtue is that it is indeed a guide."
Józef Maria Bocheński (born 30 august 1902 in Czuszw, Poland - 1995) was a Polish dominican, logician and philosopher. After taking part in the 1920 campaign against Bolshevik Russia, he took up legal studies in Lww, then he studied economy in Poznań. Having received his doctorate in philosophy (studied in Freiburg, 1928-1931) and theology (Rome, 1931-1934), he lectured in logic at the Collegium Angelicum in Rome (until 1940). During World War II he served as a chaplain for Polish forces fighting in the September campaign (1939) taken prisoner of war, he escaped the Germans and reached Rome. He joined the Polish army and served as chaplain first in France, and then in England. Fought as a soldier in 1944, in the Italian campaign of the II Corps at Monte Cassino. In 1945 he received the chair of history of twentieth-century philosophy at the Freiburg University (of which he was Rector in 1964-1966); he founded and ran the Institute of Eastern Europe in Freiburg, published the journal Studies in Soviet Thought and a book series concerned with the foundations of the Marxists philosophy (Sovietica). Bocheski served as consultant to several governments: West Germany (under K. Adenauer), South Africa, USA, Argentina, and Switzerland. Before 1989 none of his works had been published officially in Poland.
Very Good copy in Good dust jacket with light general wear and tear to edges and some discolouration to back cover.
2001, English
Softcover, 252 pages, 22.4 x 15.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
$45.00 - In stock -
These essays by eminent European intellectual and cultural historian Anson Rabinbach address the writings of key figures in twentieth-century German philosophy. Rabinbach explores their ideas in relation to the two world wars and the horrors facing Europe at that time.
Analyzing the work of Benjamin and Bloch, he suggests their indebtedness to the traditions of Jewish messianism. In a discussion of Hugo Ball's little-known Critique of the German Intelligentsia, Rabinbach reveals the curious intellectual career of the Dadaist and antiwar activist turned-nationalist and anti-Semite. His examination of Heidegger's "Letter on Humanism" and Jaspers's The Question of German Guilt illuminates the complex and often obscure political referents of these texts. Turning to Horkheimer and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Rabinbach offers an arresting new interpretation of this central text of the critical theory of the Frankfurt School. Subtly and persuasively argued, his book will become an indispensable reference point for all concerned with twentieth-century German history and thought.
"We are largely in the dark about the connections between revolutionary visions and reactionary brutality, but Rabinbach invites us to confront these matters more candidly in relation to texts from the fascist era that are rarely considered together."—David S. Luft, "Central European History
"The quality of Rabinbach's intellectual history and his ability to write about highly complex texts in an accessible way are unassailable. His conviction that this German tradition of thought still exerts a strong intellectual and even political influence today makes In the Shadow of Catastrophe a direct and powerful intervention in current debates. This book is a gem!"—Andreas Huyssen, author of Twilight Memories
Anson Rabinbach is Professor of History at Princeton University. He is author of The Crisis of Austrian Socialism: From Red Vienna to Civil War, 1927-1934 (1983) and The Human Motor: Energy, Fatigue and the Origins of Modernity (California, 1992).
As New copy.
1972, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 96 pages, 22 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Vision Press / London
$55.00 - In stock -
First 1971 hardcover edition of QUE VIVA MEXICO! by Sergei Eisenstein, with an Introduction by Ernest Lindgren and an Afterword by Ivor Montagu, published by Vision Press, London.
"The scenario of Eisenstein's unfinished masterpiece Que Viva Mexico!, together with Ernest Lindgren's enthralling account of the background to the film and its making, was first published in 1951. Sadly, the blocks of the illustrations to the first edition were lost at the printers and the book went quickly out of print. Now, twenty-one years later, the publishers have reprinted the scenario and Lindgren's introduction, both without alteration, and have added thereto twenty freshly lithographed stills from the film, many of which did not appear in the 1951 edition, and an analysis by Ivor Montagu of subsequent events and find- ings relating to the film. Sergei Eisenstein, world-famous creator of the films Battleship Potemkin, Alexander Nevsky and Ivan the Terrible, believed that Que Viva Mexico!, had he been allowed to complete it, would have been his greatest work. The reappearance in print, therefore, of the scenario is, as Ivor Montagu puts it, 'a blessing because it gives the most clear and authentic picture of this remarkable film as Eisenstein sought to make it, while the admirably compact introduction by Lindgren puts the director squarely in his place in film history and the "Mexican project" squarely in its place in his life and work'.
Ernest Lindgren is Curator of the National Film Archive and a Director of the British Film Institute.
Ivor Montagu is the author of With Eisenstein in Hollywood and an acknowledged British authority on the Russian cinema.
Fine copy in VG dust jacket with light wear, preserved in mylar wrap.