World Food Books

The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas
by Umberto Eco

1988, English
Softcover, 288 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Radius / UK

$90.00 - Out of stock

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Rare first 1988 English edition.

The well-known Italian semiotician and novelist Umberto Eco discloses for the first time to English-speaking readers the unsuspected richness, breadth, complexity, and originality of the aesthetic theories advanced by the influential medieval thinker Thomas Aquinas, heretofore known principally as a scholastic theologian. Inheriting his basic ideas and conceptions of art and beauty from the classical world, Aquinas transformed or modified these ideas in the light of Christian theology and of developments in metaphysics and optics during the thirteenth century.

Setting the stage with an account of the vivid aesthetic and artistic sensibility that flourished in medieval times, Eco examines Aquinas’s conception of transcendental beauty, his theory of aesthetic perception or visio, and his account of the three conditions of beauty—integrity, proportion, and clarity—that, centuries later, emerged again in the writings of the young James Joyce. He examines the concrete application of these theories in Aquinas’s reflections on God, mankind, music, poetry, and scripture. He discusses Aquinas’s views on art and compares his poetics with Dante’s. In a final chapter added to the second Italian edition, Eco examines how Aquinas’s aesthetics came to be absorbed and superseded in late medieval times and draws instructive parallels between Thomistic methodology and contemporary structuralism. As the only book-length treatment of Aquinas’s aesthetics available in English, this volume should interest philosophers, medievalists, historians, critics, and anyone involved in poetics, aesthetics, or the history of ideas.

VG copy, light cover/spine wear.

File under: Umberto Eco Dante Thomas Aquinas Radius / UK Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Philosophy Ancient / Medieval / Gothic

The Principle of Hope: Volume 3
by Ernst Bloch

1995, English
Softcover, 504 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by The MIT Press / Massachusetts

$50.00 - Out of stock

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The Principle of Hope is one of the great works of the human spirit. It is a critical history of the utopian vision and a profound exploration of the possible reality of utopia. Even as the world has rejected the doctrine on which Bloch sought to base his utopia, his work still challenges us to think more insightfully about our own visions of a better world.

The Principle of Hope is published in three volumes: Volume 1 lays the foundations of the philosophy of process and introduces the idea of the Not-Yet-Conscious--the anticipatory element that Bloch sees as central to human thought. It also contains a remarkable account of the aesthetic interpretations of utopian wishful images in fairy tales, popular fiction, travel, theater, dance, and the cinema. Volume 2 presents the outlines of a better world. It examines the utopian systems that progressive thinkers have developed in the fields of medicine, painting, opera, poetry, and ultimately, philosophy. It is nothing less than an encyclopedic account of utopian thought from the Greeks to the present. Volume 3 offers a prescription for ways in which humans can reach their proper homeland, where social justice is coupled with an openness to change and to the future.

Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice, Paul Knight

Ernst Simon Bloch (1885—1977) was a German Marxist philosopher. Bloch was influenced by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and Karl Marx, as well as by apocalyptic and religious thinkers such as Thomas Müntzer, Paracelsus, and Jacob Böhme. He established friendships with György Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor W. Adorno. Bloch's work focuses on an optimistic teleology of the history of mankind.

Fine copy of first 1995 edition. Long out-of-print.

File under: Ernst Bloch Neville Plaice Stephen Plaice Paul Knight The MIT Press / Massachusetts Theory / Essay Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare Socialism / Communism / Capitalism Sociology / Politics

The Spirit of Utopia
by Ernst Bloch

2000, English
Softcover, 316 pages, 15.24 x 22.86 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$65.00 - Out of stock

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I am. We are.

That is enough. Now we have to start.

These are the opening words of Ernst Bloch's first major work, The Spirit of Utopia, written mostly in 1915-16, published in its first version just after the First World War, republished five years later, 1923, in the version here presented for the first time in English translation.

The Spirit of Utopia is one of the great historic books from the beginning of the century, but it is not an obsolete one. In its style of thinking, a peculiar amalgam of biblical, Marxist, and Expressionist turns, in its analytical skills deeply informed by Simmel, taking its information from both Hegel and Schopenhauer for the groundwork of its metaphysics of music but consistently interpreting the cultural legacy in the light of a certain Marxism, Bloch's Spirit of Utopia is a unique attempt to rethink the history of Western civilizations as a process of revolutionary disruptions and to reread the artworks, religions, and philosophies of this tradition as incentives to continue disrupting.

The alliance between messianism and Marxism, which was proclaimed in this book for the first time with epic breadth, has met with more critique than acclaim. The expressive and baroque diction of the book was considered as offensive as its stubborn disregard for the limits of "disciplines." Yet there is hardly a "discipline" that didn't adopt, however unknowingly, some of Bloch's insights, and his provocative associations often proved more productive than the statistical account of social shifts.

The first part of this philosophical meditation-which is also a narrative, an analysis, a rhapsody, and a manifesto-concerns a mode of "self-encounter" that presents itself in the history of music from Mozart through Mahler as an encounter with the problem of a community to come. This "we-problem" is worked out by Bloch in terms of a philosophy of the history of music. The "self-encounter," however, has to be conceived as "self-invention," as the active, affirmative fight for freedom and social justice, under the sign of Marx. The second part of the book is entitled "Karl Marx, Death and the Apocalypse."

I am. We are. That's hardly anything.

But enough to start.

"When this book was first published, it had a profound effect on major thinkers and artists in Weimar Germany. A poetical philosophical treatise with unusual insights into culture and political commentary, Bloch's book laid the groundwork for thinkers like Adorno and Benjamin."—Jack Zipes, University of Minnesota

Translated by Anthony A. Nassar.

Very Good copy.

File under: Ernst Bloch Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Sociology / Politics

Points... Interviews, 1974—1994
by Jacques Derrida

1995, English
Softcover,‎ 518 pages,‎ 13.97 x 21.59 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by State University of New York Press / New York

$45.00 - Out of stock

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This volume collects twenty-three interviews given over the course of the last two decades by Jacques Derrida. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of his concerns, touching upon such subjects as the teaching of philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, AIDS, language and translation, nationalism, politics, and Derrida's early life and the history of his writings. Often, as in the interview on Heidegger, or that on drugs, or on the nature of poetry, these interviews offer not only an introduction to other discussions, but something available nowhere else in his work. When did feminist discourse become an indispensable consideration for deconstruction? What was the impact on Derrida's work of his being an Algerian Jew growing up during World War II? Is there an ineradicable gap between language-based attitude such as those found in a deconstruction and subjectivity-oriented critical models such as those developed by Foucault and Lacan? Such questions as these are answered with great thoughtfulness and intensity. Derrida's oral style is patient, generous, and helpful. His tone varies with the questioners and the subject matter―militant, playful, strategic, impassioned, analytic: difference in modulation can sometimes be heard within the same dialogue. The informality of the interview process frequently leads to the most succinct and lucid explications to be found of many of the most important and influential aspects of Derrida's thought. Sixteen of the interviews appear here for the first time in English, including an interview, conducted especially for this volume, concerning the recent exchange of letters in the New York Review of Books.

Very Good copy.

File under: Jacques Derrida State University of New York Press / New York Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Sociology / Politics

The Recalcitrant Art: Diotima's Letters to Hölderlin and Related Missives
by David Farrell Krell

2000, English
Softcover, 271 pages, 15.24 x 22.86 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by State University of New York Press / New York

$55.00 - In stock -

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In this entirely unique approach to the life of Friedrich Hölderlin, The Recalcitrant Art combines the techniques of fiction and nonfiction as it examines the love between the poet and Susette Gontard ("Diotima").

On the left-hand or verso pages of the book appear Susette Gontard's letters, presented here in English translation for the first time, with an introduction and afterword by Douglas F. Kenney. On the right-hand or recto pages appear Sabine Menner-Bettscheid's scholarly responses to Kenney and fictional responses to Susette. Menner-Bettscheid gives life to an entire series of voices: Hölderlin's pious mother, Susette's calculating husband, Jacob, the Gontard's oldest child, Henry, the popular novelist Sophie LaRoche, and the Greek gardener and rabbit-keeper at the Gontard's summer home in Frankfurt all come to be heard. Douglas F. Kenney, by contrast, sticks to historical documentation and literary analysis.

"This is a highly original piece of work. At once novel, literary criticism, historical meditation, literary history and an ironization of all of the above, it shows the author's considerable erudition in an impressive number of fields alongside a wonderful gift for writing in the voices of others."—Carol Jacobs, author of In the Language of Walter Benjamin

David Farrell Krell is Professor of Philosophy at DePaul University. He has written many books, including the SUNY Press titles Archeticture: Ecstasies of Space, Time, and the Human Body; Nietzsche: A Novel; and Son of Spirit: A Novel.

Very Good copy. First ed.

File under: David Farrell Krell Friedrich Hölderlin State University of New York Press / New York Philosophy Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Fiction / Poetry

Writing Degree Zero
by Roland Barthes

1980, English
Softcover, 88 pages, 21 x 13.4 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Hill & Wang / New York

$30.00 - Out of stock

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Writing Degree Zero (French: Le degré zéro de l'écriture) is a book of literary criticism by Roland Barthes. First published in 1953, it was Barthes' first full-length book and was intended, as Barthes writes in the introduction, as "no more than an Introduction to what a History of Writing might be."

Preface by Susan Sontag.

Roland Gérard Barthes (1915—1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism. Barthes is perhaps best known for his 1957 essay collection Mythologies, which contained reflections on popular culture, and 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which critiqued traditional approaches in literary criticism. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Collège de France.

Very Good copy.

File under: Roland Barthes Susan Sontag Hill & Wang / New York Out-of-print / Rare Philosophy Theory / Essay Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language

The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies
by Roland Barthes

1979, English
Softcover, 152 pages, 21 x 13.4 cm
Out of print title / used / average
Published by Hill & Wang / New York

$25.00 - In stock -

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1979 edition of The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, a collection of essays by the French literary theorist Roland Barthes. It is a companion volume to his earlier book, Mythologies, and follows the same format of a series of short essays which explore a range of cultural phenomena, from the Tour de France to laundry detergents.

Roland Gérard Barthes (1915—1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism. Barthes is perhaps best known for his 1957 essay collection Mythologies, which contained reflections on popular culture, and 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which critiqued traditional approaches in literary criticism. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Collège de France.

Average copy due to feathering of cover edges reinforced by tape, light buckle to block.

File under: Roland Barthes Hill & Wang / New York Theory / Essay Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language

Elements of Semiology
by Roland Barthes

1977, English
Softcover, 111 pages, 21 x 13.4 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by Hill & Wang / New York

$30.00 - Out of stock

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1977 edition of Elements of Roland Barthes. Elements of Semiology is a compendium-like text by French semiotician Roland Barthes, originally published under the title of "Éléments de Sémiologie" in the French review Communications. The English translation by Annette Lavers and Colin Smith has been published independently as a short book. Roland Barthes's Elements of Semiology describes four pairs of organizing analytical concepts extracted from structural linguistics: language/speech; signified/signifier; syntagm/system; and denotation/connotation.

Roland Gérard Barthes (1915—1980) was a French literary theorist, essayist, philosopher, critic, and semiotician. His work engaged in the analysis of a variety of sign systems, mainly derived from Western popular culture. His ideas explored a diverse range of fields and influenced the development of many schools of theory, including structuralism, anthropology, literary theory, and post-structuralism. Barthes is perhaps best known for his 1957 essay collection Mythologies, which contained reflections on popular culture, and 1967 essay "The Death of the Author," which critiqued traditional approaches in literary criticism. During his academic career he was primarily associated with the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and the Collège de France.

Very Good with light wear/age, light pencil underlining to only a few early pages.

File under: Roland Barthes Hill & Wang / New York Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language

Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism Summer 1989
Vol. 19, No. 2

1989, English
Softcover, 106 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by John Hopkins University Press / Baltimore

$25.00 - In stock -

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Summer 1989 issue of philosophy journal Diacritics, Vol. 19, No. 2, published by John Hopkins University, Baltimore. Contents include : Srinivas Aravamudan — "Being God's postman is no fun, yaar": reviewing Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses, Victoria Kahn — Rhetoric and the Law, Marc W. Redfield — Humanizing de Man, Norman Finkelstein — The Utopian Function and the reviewing Ernst Bloch, The Utopian Refunctioning of Marxism, George A. Trey — The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Habermas's Postmodern Adventure, John H. Smith — The Transcendance of the Individual, and more...

Founded in 1971 at Johns Hopkins University (later moving to Cornell), Diacritics is a journal focused on critical theory and contemporary continental philosophy — one of the major organs of “high theory,” especially as derived from French philosophy of language (Deleuze, Nancy, Derrida, and Badiou).

Good copy with wear.

File under: Srinivas Aravamudan Paul de Man Ernst Bloch Jürgen Habermas Victoria Kahn Marc W. Redfield Norman Finkelstein George A. Trey John H. Smith John Hopkins University Press / Baltimore Performance / Dance / Theater Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Philosophy

Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism Spring 1994
Vol. 24, No. 1

1994, English
Softcover, 104 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by John Hopkins University Press / Baltimore

$25.00 - In stock -

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Spring 1994 issue of philosophy journal Diacritics, Vol. 24, No. 1, published by John Hopkins University, Baltimore. Contents include : Michael Riffaterre — How Do Images Signify?, Daniel Boyarin — Epater l'embourgeoisement: Freud, Gender, and the (De)colonized Psyche, Anne Tomiche — Rephrasing the Freudian Unconscious: Lyotard's Affect-Phrase, Phil Cox — "Speech" and Some of Its Wounds, Karlis Racevskis — The Postmodern Outlook, Hayden White — The Image of Self-Presentation (with Hans Kellner and Ewa Domanska), and more...

Founded in 1971 at Johns Hopkins University (later moving to Cornell), Diacritics is a journal focused on critical theory and contemporary continental philosophy — one of the major organs of “high theory,” especially as derived from French philosophy of language (Deleuze, Nancy, Derrida, and Badiou).

Good copy but with ex-libris stamps and wear.

File under: Karl Marx Anette Freudenberger Claude Lévi-Strauss Jean-François Lyotard Karlis Racevskis Phil Cox Daniel Boyarin Anne Tomiche Hayden White Hans Kellner Ewa Domanska John Hopkins University Press / Baltimore Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare Periodicals Theory / Essay

Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism Winter 1993
Vol. 23, No. 4

1993, English
Softcover, 106 pages, 25 x 17.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by John Hopkins University Press / Baltimore

$25.00 - In stock -

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Winter 1993 issue of philosophy journal Diacritics, Vol. 23, No. 4, published by John Hopkins University, Baltimore. Contents includes: Judith Butler — Poststructuralism and Postmarxism, Robert Baker — Crossings of Levinas, Derrida, and Adorno: Horizons of Nonviolence, Rei Terada — The New Aestheticism, Sylvere Lotringer — Phantoms of the Opera (Michel Leiris), Marc Blanchard — Between Autobiography and Ethnography: The Journalist as Anthropologist (Michel Leiris), Patrick Colm Hogan — The Limits of Semiotics (Umberto Eco), and much more...

Founded in 1971 at Johns Hopkins University (later moving to Cornell), Diacritics is a journal focused on critical theory and contemporary continental philosophy — one of the major organs of “high theory,” especially as derived from French philosophy of language (Deleuze, Nancy, Derrida, and Badiou).

Good copy but with ex-libris stamps and wear.

File under: Michel Leiris SylveÌre Lotringer Emmanuel Levinas Jacques Derrida Theodor W. Adorno Drucilla Cornell Paul de Man John Hopkins University Press / Baltimore Theory / Essay Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare Periodicals

Learning to Live Finally : The Last Interview : Jacques Derrida
Jacques Derrida

2007, English
Softcover, 96 pages, 14 x 20.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by Allen & Unwin / NSW

$25.00 - In stock -

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First out-of-print English edition of Derrida's last interview.

A few weeks before his death, Derrida said: 'I am at war with myself, it's true, you couldn't possibly know to what extent . . . I know that it is what keeps me alive, and makes me ask precisely . . . how does one learn to live?'

With death looming, Jacques Derrida, one of the most famous philosophers of the 20th century - known as the father of 'deconstruction' - sat down with Le Monde journalist Jean Birnbaum. They revisited his life's work and his impending death in a lyrical and moving final interview.

In this meditation upon life, love and politics, Derrida reveals what has motivated his writing. He speaks openly about the impact of being Jewish and an outsider in French society. He discusses the relationship between philosophy and society and explains his hopes for a revitalised international politics.

Derrida was the last of a generation of French philosophers who reshaped the humanities and philosophy itself. This interview is a touching final look at his long and distinguished career.

'Living like dying is not something one can learn. All one can really do is see it coming. Together.'

File under: Jacques Derrida Allen & Unwin / NSW Philosophy Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare

The Mottled Screen: Reading Proust
by Mieke Bal

1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 300 pages, 15.24 x 22.86 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$45.00 - Out of stock

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The clear-cut distinction between texts (literature) and images (art) has been challenged by a culture saturated with television and by an increased emphasis on interdisciplinary studies. From the viewpoint of our present culture, the author suggests, we can now see how some of the great writers and artists of the past overstepped the boundaries of the media in which they worked. The Mottled Screen studies as an example of this process a great literary work that cannot be confined to language alone, even though it consists exclusively of words: Proust's Remembrance of Things Past.

Maria Gertrudis "Mieke" Bal (b. 1946) is a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and Professor Emerita in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam.

Very Good—Fine copy in VG dj.

File under: Mieke Bal Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Feminism Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Painting Art

Death & Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges
by Mieke Bal

1988, English
Hardcover, 324 pages, 15.24 x 22.86 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by University of Chicago Press / Chicago

$30.00 - In stock -

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Combining literary criticism and feminist analysis, Death and Dissymmetry radically reinterprets not only the Book of Judges but also the tradition of its reception and understanding in the West. In Mieke Bal's account, Judges documents the Israelite culture learning to articulate itself in a decisive period of transition.

Counter to standard readings of Judges, Bal's interpretation demonstrates that the book has a political and ideological coherence in which the treatment of women plays a pivotal role. Bal concentrates here not on the assassinations and battles that rage through Judges but on the violence in the domestic lives of individual characters, particularly sexual violence directed at women. Her skillful reading reveals that murder, in this text, relates to gender and reflects a social structure that is inherently contradictory. By foregrounding the stories of women and subjecting them to subtle narrative analysis, she is able to expose a set of preoccupations that are essential to the sense of these stories but are not articulated in them. Bal thereby develops a "countercoherence" in conflict with the apparent emphases of Judges―the politics, wars, and historiography that have been the constant focus of commentators on the book.

Death and Dissymmetry makes an important contribution to the development of a feminist method of interpreting ancient texts, with consequences for religious studies, ancient history, literary theory, and gender studies.

Maria Gertrudis "Mieke" Bal (b. 1946) is a Dutch cultural theorist, video artist, and Professor Emerita in Literary Theory at the University of Amsterdam.

Very Good copy w/o dust jacket, therefore Good.

File under: Mieke Bal University of Chicago Press / Chicago Feminism Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Crime / Violence Sociology / Politics Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay

Minimalism:Origins
by Edward Strickland

1993, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 15.5 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Indiana University Press / Indiana Bloomsbury Academic / London

$85.00 - Out of stock

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Long out-of-print first hardcover edition of Minimalism:Origins by Edward Strickland, published in 1993 by Indiana University Press.

... a landmark work, the first attempt to write a pre-history of minimalism that embraces all the arts. Its importance cannot be overestimated." —K. Robert Schwarz, Institute for Studies in American Music

All told, this book is mandatory reading for anyone who wishes to understand the history and nature of minimalism." —i/e/ NINE

The death of Minimalism is announced regularly, which may be the surest testimonial to its staying power." This is the opening sentence of Edward Strickland's study, the first to examine in detail Minimalist tendencies in the plastic arts and music.

The term Minimalism appeared in the mid-1960s, primarily with reference to the stripped-down sculpture of artists like Robert Morris and Donald Judd, both of whom detested the word. In the late 1970s it gained currency when applied to the repetitive music popularized by Steve Reich and Philip Glass.

In the first part of the book, "Paint", Strickland shows how Minimalism offered a rethinking of the main schools of abstract art to mid-century. Within Abstract Expressionism Barnett Newman opposed the stylistic complexity of confessional action painting with non-gestural, color-field painting. Ad Reinhardt and Ellsworth Kelly reconceived the rhythmic construction of earlier Geometrical Abstraction in "invisible" and brilliant monochromes respectively; and Robert Rauschenberg created Dadaist anti-art in pure white panels. Next, Strickland surveys Minimal music from La Monte Young's long-tone compositions of the fifties to his drone works of the Theatre of Eternal Music. He examines the effect of foreign and nonclassical American musics on Terry Riley's motoric repetition developed from his tape experimentation, Steve Reich's formulation of phasing technique; and Philip Glass's unison modules. The third part of the book treats the development of Minimal sculpture and its critical reception. Strickland also discusses analogous Minimalist tendencies in dance, film, and literature as well as the incorporation of once-shocking Minimalist vocabulary into mass culture from fashion to advertising.

Investigating the origins of Minimalism in postwar American culture, Strickland redefines it as a movement the developed radically reductive stylistic innovations in numerous media over the third quarter of the twentieth century. A survey with wit.

Very Good—Fine copy w. VG dust jacket preserved under mylar.

File under: Barnett Newman Ellsworth Kelly Ad Reinhardt Robert Rauschenberg La Monte Young Terry Riley Donald Judd Steve Reich Philip Glass John Cage Robert Morris Edward Strickland Indiana University Press / Indiana Bloomsbury Academic / London Minimal Art Painting Art Sound / Music Sculpture / Installation Theory / Essay Architecture / Interior Out-of-print / Rare Philosophy

Six Years : The Dematerialization of the Art Object from 1966 to 1972
by Lucy Lippard

1973 / 1997, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 173 x 213 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by University of Chicago Press / Chicago

$70.00 - Out of stock

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“Conceptual art, for me, means work in which the idea is paramount and the material form is secondary, lightweight, ephemeral, cheap, unpretentious and/or 'dematerialized.'”—Lucy R. Lippard, Six Years

In 1973 the critic and curator Lucy R. Lippard published Six Years, a book with possibly the longest subtitle in the bibliography of art: The dematerialization of the art object from 1966 to 1972: a cross-reference book of information on some esthetic boundaries: consisting of a bibliography into which are inserted a fragmented text, art works, documents, interviews, and symposia, arranged chronologically and focused on so-called conceptual or information or idea art with mentions of such vaguely designated areas as minimal, anti-form, systems, earth, or process art, occurring now in the Americas, Europe, England, Australia, and Asia (with occasional political overtones) edited and annotated by Lucy R. Lippard. Six Years, sometimes referred to as a conceptual art object itself, not only described and embodied the new type of art-making that Lippard was intent on identifying and cataloging, it also exemplified a new way of criticizing and curating art. The result is a book with the character of a lively contemporary forum that offers an invaluable record of the thinking of the artists—a historical survey and essential reference book for the period. Lippard provides a new preface to this 1997 reprint edition.

Includes: Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Dennis Adrian, Carl Andre, Eleanor Antin, Keith Arnatt, Art-Language, Richard Artschwager, Michael Asher, David Askevold, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Frederick Barthelme, N.E. Thing Co., Joseph Beuys, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Donald Burgy, Ian Burn, Jack Burnham, James Lee Byars, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Jan Dibbets, Peter Downsbrough, Gerald Ferguson, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Guerrilla Art Action Group, Hans Haacke, Charles Harrison, Michael Heizer, Douglas Huebler, Peter Hutchinson, Stephen Kaltenbach, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, John Latham, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Lee Lozano, Bruce McLean, Walter de Maria, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sigmar Polke, Mel Ramsden, Allen Ruppersberg, Edward Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Gerry Schum, Richard Serra, Willoughby Sharp, Seth Siegelaub, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Athena Tacha Spear, Bernar Venet, Wolf Vostell, Franz Erhard Walther, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, William Wiley, Ian Wilson, La Monte Young

"Essential source book of documentation of the Conceptual Art, Land Art, Earth Art, Arte Povera, Minimal Art, Performance Art, Video Art movements. Documents the activities, day by day, month by month, year by year of artists including Vito Acconci, Bas Jan Ader, Dennis Adrian, Carl Andre, Eleanor Antin, Keith Arnatt, Art-Language, Richard Artschwager, Michael Asher, David Askevold, John Baldessari, Robert Barry, Frederick Barthelme, N.E. Thing Co., Josef Beuys, Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, Stanley Brouwn, Daniel Buren, Victor Burgin, Donald Burgy, Ian Burn, Jack Burnham, James Lee Byars, Hanne Darboven, Agnes Denes, Jan Dibbets, Peter Downsbrough, Gerald Ferguson, Rafael Ferrer, Barry Flanagan, Gilbert & George, Dan Graham, Guerrilla Art Action Group, Hans Haacke, Charles Harrison, Michael Heizer, Douglas Huebler, Peter Hutchinson, Stephen Kaltenbach, Allan Kaprow, On Kawara, Joseph Kosuth, Christine Kozlov, John Latham, Barry Le Va, Sol LeWitt, Richard Long, Lee Lozano, Bruce McLean, Walter de Maria, Robert Morris, Bruce Nauman, Claes Oldenburg, Yoko Ono, Dennis Oppenheim, Adrian Piper, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Sigmar Polke, Mel Ramsden, Allen Ruppersberg, Edward Ruscha, Robert Ryman, Gerry Schum, Richard Serra, Willoughby Sharp, Seth Siegelaub, Tony Smith, Robert Smithson, Michael Snow, Keith Sonnier, Athena Tacha Spear, Bernar Venet, Wolf Vostell, Franz Erhard Walther, William Wegman, Lawrence Weiner, William Wiley, Ian Wilson, La Monte Young and others. "The unusual form of this provocative book intentionally reflects the chaotic network of ideas connected with so-called conceptual art or information art or idea art, in America and abroad, from 1966 to 1972. Arranged as a continuous bibliographical chronology, into which is woven a rich collection of original documents - including texts by, and taped discussions with and among, the artists involved - and annotations by Lucy R. Lippard, the book has the informal quality of a lively contemporary forum. Only a minimum of order is imposed; for the most part the reader is left to confront the curious compendium of information on his or her own, to follow changing ideas and artistic developments over the six-year period, to witness the gradual (and controversial) "dematerialization" of the art object." -- publisher's statement."

Good—Very Good copy with general light shelf wear and tanning to spine.

File under: Vito Acconci Bas Jan Ader Dennis Adrian Carl Andre Eleanor Antin Keith Arnatt Art-Language Richard Artschwager Michael Asher David Askevold John Baldessari Robert Barry Frederick Barthelme N.E. Thing Co. Joseph Beuys Mel Bochner Alighiero Boetti Stanley Brouwn Daniel Buren Victor Burgin Donald Burgy Ian Burn Jack Burnham James Lee Byars Hanne Darboven Agnes Denes Jan Dibbets Peter Downsbrough Gerald Ferguson Rafael Ferrer Barry Flanagan Gilbert & George Dan Graham Guerrilla Art Action Group Hans Haacke Charles Harrison Michael Heizer Douglas Huebler Peter Hutchinson Stephen Kaltenbach Allan Kaprow On Kawara Joseph Kosuth Christine Kozlov John Latham Barry Le Va Sol LeWitt Richard Long Lee Lozano Bruce McLean Walter de Maria Robert Morris Bruce Nauman Claes Oldenburg Yoko Ono Dennis Oppenheim Adrian Piper Michelangelo Pistoletto Sigmar Polke Mel Ramsden Allen Ruppersberg Edward Ruscha Robert Ryman Gerry Schum Richard Serra Willoughby Sharp Seth Siegelaub Tony Smith Robert Smithson Michael Snow Keith Sonnier Athena Tacha Spear Bernar Venet Wolf Vostell Franz Erhard Walther William Wegman Lawrence Weiner William Wiley Ian Wilson La Monte Young Lucy R. Lippard University of Chicago Press / Chicago Conceptual Art Arte Povera Minimal Art Performance / Dance / Theater Feminism Curatorial Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Art Photography Film / Video Ecology / Earth Fluxus Group Shows / Collections Sculpture / Installation

Aesthetics of Pop Music
by Diedrich Diederichsen

2023, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 20.67 x 12.69 cm
Published by Polity / US

$29.00 - Out of stock

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In this short book, the leading German cultural critic Diedrich Diederichsen puts forward a fresh and original account of pop music. He argues that pop music is not so much a form of music but rather a constellation of different media channels, social spaces and behavoural systems, of which music is only part. As a constellation, pop music relates to other forms of music – popular, classical or folk – in the way that photography relates to painting, or cinema to theatre. Its own logic of attraction is based less on compositions and the expression of subjectivity and more on indexicality, real or pseudo-involuntary effects as recorded by sound technologies, and on studio discipline and staging, and hence on performance. Pop music came into existence when recipients became involved via a range of diverse and decentralized outlets like TV, transistor radio, 7"" singles, glossy magazines and jukeboxes in public spaces. They had to create a virtual unity out of these heterogeneous outputs in a process of active reception. Experiencing pop music is more than an act of listening: it is immersing oneself in an alternative ontological regime.

By elaborating his innovative account of pop music as a constellation, Diederichsen develops a theory of pop music that distinguishes itself from sociology, cultural studies, media studies and ethnography while at the same time drawing on and encompassing them all.

Diedrich Diederichsen is Professor of Theory, Practice and Communication of Contemporary Art at the Vienna Academy for Fine Arts.

‘Diedrich Diederichsen’s book presents itself as a rigorous study of pop music considered as a thing in itself. That it is. But then you turn what seems to be a predictable corner and find yourself ambushed by sly humour, playfulness, a willingness to place large analytical bets on what seem to be slim chances. The book is filled with trap doors which open up again and again.’—Greil Marcus, author of Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century

‘Diedrich Diederichsen is an always compelling analyst of pop and rock music across all its many genres, and Aesthetics of Pop Music sheds new light on the capacities, identities and meanings of the form.’—Michael Bracewell, author of England is Mine: Pop Life in Albion from Wilde to Goldie

File under: Diedrich Diederichsen Polity / US Sound / Music Theory / Essay

On the Universal : The Uniform, the Common and Dialogue between Cultures
by François Jullien

2014, English
Softcover, 228 pages, 22.9 x 15.1 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by Polity / US

$25.00 - Out of stock

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François Jullien, the leading philosopher and specialist in Chinese thought, has always aimed at building on inter-cultural relations between China and the West. In this new book he focuses on the following questions: Do universal values exist? Is dialogue between cultures possible?

To answer these questions, he retraces the history of the concept of the universal from its invention as an aspect of Roman citizenship, through its neutralization in the Christian idea of salvation, to its present day manifestations. This raises the question of whether the search for the universal is a uniquely Western preoccupation: do other cultures, like China, even have a notion of the universal, and if so, how does it differ from ours? Having considered the meaning of the concept in the East and West, Jullien argues that, if communication between cultures is to be meaningful, facile assumptions of universal values and complacent relativism need to be examined. It follows, therefore, that dialogue between cultures should not begin with issues of identity and difference, but rather by considering divergence and profusion. By no longer simply assuming universality, we allow for greater self-reflection.

This wide-ranging and engaging study will be of particular interest to students and scholars of philosophy and of Chinese culture and society. It will also appeal to a wider readership interested in contemporary thought and the challenges of communication between East and West.

"A valuable contribution to the field. The controversies he identifies are only going to become more deep-set in our increasingly multi-polar world, and given the current geo-political climate we need more than ever to agree on the role that universal Human Rights may play in an increasingly globalised world."—LSE Review of Books

"François Jullien poses the question of dialogue between cultures in a way altogether different from the loose talk that tends to surround this topic, re-examining, in an insightful and rigorous fashion, the problem of the universal ? an ambition hardly surprising in an author who is both a philosopher and a sinologist. If there is a problem, explains Jullien, it is because the universal ? that emblematic category of Western civilization, the source of its vitality for centuries ? continues to be challenged and to find itself in opposition to the rights linked to the irreducible singularity of cultures ... Here we find a rich and agile thought, harvesting new ideas from philosophical tradition, drawing on a detailed knowledge of cultures and clearly interrogating the founding ideological moments of European civilization."—Etudes: Revue de culture contemporaine

File under: François Jullien Polity / US Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Sociology / Politics

The Elgin Affair
by Theodore Vrettos

1997, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 238 pages, 23.62 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Secker & Warburg / London

$25.00 - In stock -

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Almost two hundred years after they were "purchased" from Greece, the finest and most famous marbles of antiquity still remain a burning issue. This compelling, controversial story of the Elgin marbles re-creates in full and colourful detail "the greatest art theft in history," a steamy tale of obsession, intrigue, adultery, and ruin. As the British ambassador to the Sublime Porte in Constantinople, Lord Elgin encountered in his endeavors some of the most famous names of nineteenth-century history: Napoleon, Sultan Selim III, Lord Nelson, Lord Byron, and Keats. Drawing on original source material-letters, diaries, official government reports, and memoranda, Vrettos brilliantly brings to life these fascinating stories.

First hardcover edition.
Very Good copy.

File under: Theodore Vrettos Secker & Warburg / London Theory / Essay Sculpture / Installation Art Out-of-print / Rare Ancient / Medieval / Gothic

Anachronic Renaissance
By Alexander Nagel, Christopher S. Wood

2020, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 456 pages, 27.9 x 18.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Zone Books / New York

$80.00 - Out of stock

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Out-of-print first hardcover edition.

In this widely anticipated book, two leading contemporary art historians present a stunning reconsideration of the problem of time in the Renaissance. With intellectual brilliance, Alexander Nagel and Christopher S. Wood reexamine the meanings, uses, and effects of chronologies, models of temporality, and notions of originality and repetition in Renaissance images and artifacts.

Anachronic Renaissance reveals a web of paths traveled by works and artists, a landscape obscured by art history's disciplinary compulsion to anchor its data securely in time. The buildings, paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and medals addressed in this book were shaped by concerns about authenticity, about reference to prestigious origins and precedents, and about the implications of transposition from one medium to another. Byzantine icons taken to be early Christian antiquities, the acheiropoeton or image made without hands, the activities of spoliation and citation, differing approaches to art restoration, legends about movable buildings, and forgeries and pastiches: all of these emerge as basic conceptual structures of Renaissance art. The authors show how the complex and layered temporalities of images offered a counterpoint to the linear chronologies that increasingly structured commerce, politics, travel, and everyday life in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

While a work of art does bear witness to the moment of its fabrication, Nagel and Wood argue that it is equally important to understand its temporal instability: how it points away from that moment, backward to a remote ancestral origin, to a prior artifact or image, even to an origin outside of time, in divinity. The authors conclude with an analysis of Roman episodes and projects of the decades around 1500, culminating in Raphael's Stanza della Segnatura. This book is not the story about the Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the infrastructure of many possible stories. Clearly, Anachronic Renaissance will be essential reading for historians of Western art and all those concerned with the historiography of material culture.

"Anachronic Renaissance is a book so rich, challenging, and stimulating that every critique runs the risk of appearing as nitpicking.... In its intellectual ambitions...[it] seeks to reconceptualize nothing less than the idea of Renaissance art, north and south of the Alps. It is a fascinating, learned, and honest invitation to discussion, a must not only for Renaissance scholars."—CAA Reviews

Very Good copy with light edge wear to DJ.

File under: Alexander Nagel Christopher S. Wood Zone Books / New York Architecture / Interior Art Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Renaissance / Neoclassicism / Romanticism Sociology / Politics

The Fifth Hammer : Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World
by Daniel Heller-Roazen

2011, English
Hardcpver (w. dust jacket), 192 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Zone Books / New York

$50.00 - Out of stock

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An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras invented harmony. It is said that one day, he wandered by a forge and, hearing a wondrous sound come from within, ventured in to investigate. He found five men hammering with five hammers. To his astonishment, he discovered that four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, which, when combined, allowed him to reconstruct the laws of music. But there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he reason its discordant sound. He therefore discarded it.

What was this hammer, such that Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? In The Fifth Hammer, Daniel Heller-Roazen lucidly shows how that fabled gesture offers a key for understanding ideas of harmony in the broadest sense of the term. Since antiquity, "harmony" has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds; it has constituted a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the sensible world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal elements of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resists being written down in a set of ideal units. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound.

In eight chapters, linked together like the tones of a single scale, The Fifth Hammer explores the sounds and echoes of that percussion, as they have made themselves felt on the most varied of attempts to understand the natural world. In vastly different and yet complementary ways, ancient thought and early modern science and philosophy, before and after Galileo, encountered a troubling dimension of nature, which they sought to interpret and resolve.

Confronting disproportion, they revealed their fundamental aims and limits. From music to metaphysics, from aesthetics to astronomy, and from Plato and Boethius to Kepler, Leibniz and Kant, The Fifth Hammer explores the ways in which orderings of the sensible world have continued to suggest a reality that neither notes nor letters can fully transcribe.

Heller-Roazen brings remarkable gifts and skills to his inquiry. Formidably learned and versed in many languages, he has also steeped himself in the original texts and in the manifold and difficult interpretative directions that have struggled with this archetypal narrative....I thoroughly admired Heller-Roazen's thoughtful and beautiful writing in The Fifth Hammer.

-Isis
This tightly reasoned book rewards close study, and will be of interest to astronomers, mathematicians, and students of musical history.

-The Sun News

File under: Daniel Heller-Roazen Plato Immanuel Kant Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Boethius Johannes Kepler Zone Books / New York Theory / Essay Philosophy Art Out-of-print / Rare Sound / Music

The Form of Becoming : Embryology and the Epistemology of Rhythm, 1760–1830
by Janina Wellmann

2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 424 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by Zone Books / New York

$60.00 - Out of stock

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First edition HC, out-of-print.

The Form of Becoming offers an innovative understanding of the emergence around 1800 of the science of embryology and a new notion of development, one based on the epistemology of rhythm. It argues that between 1760 and 1830, the concept of rhythm became crucial to many fields of knowledge, including the study of life and living processes.

The book juxtaposes the history of rhythm in music theory, literary theory, and philosophy with the concurrent turn in biology to understanding the living world in terms of rhythmic patterns, rhythmic movement, and rhythmic representations. Common to all these fields was their view of rhythm as a means of organizing time — and of ordering the development of organisms.

Janina Wellmann, a historian of science, has written the first systematic study of visualization in embryology. Embryological development circa 1800 was imagined through the pictorial technique of the series, still prevalent in the field today. Tracing the origins of the developmental series back to seventeenth-century instructional graphics for military maneuvers, dance, and craft work, The Form of Becoming reveals the constitutive role of rhythm and movement in the visualization of developing life.

Translated by Kate Sturge

As New copy.

File under: Janina Wellmann Zone Books / New York Ecology / Earth Sound / Music Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay

No One's Ways : An Essay on Infinite Naming
by Daniel Heller-Roazen

2017, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 336 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Zone Books / New York

$50.00 - In stock -

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From Homer's Outis-"No One," or "Non-One," "No Man," or "Non-Man"-to "soul," "spirit," and the unnamable. Homer recounts how, trapped inside a monster's cave, with nothing but his wits to call upon, Ulysses once saved himself by twisting his name. He called himself Outis: "No One," or "Non-One," "No Man," or "Non-Man." The ploy was a success. He blinded his barbaric host and eluded him, becoming anonymous, for a while, even as he bore a name. Philosophers never forgot the lesson that the ancient hero taught. From Aristotle and his commentators in Greek, Arabic, Latin, and more modern languages, from the masters of the medieval schools to Kant and his many successors, thinkers have exploited the possibilities of adding "non-" to the names of man. Aristotle is the first to write of "indefinite" or "infinite" names, his example being "non-man." Kant turns to such terms in his theory of the infinite judgment, illustrated by the sentence, "The soul is non-mortal." Such statements play major roles in the philosophies of Maimon, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Hermann Cohen. They are profoundly reinterpreted in the twentieth century by thinkers as diverse as Carnap and Heidegger. Reconstructing the adventures of a particle in philosophy, Daniel Heller-Roazen seeks to show how a grammatical possibility can be an incitement for thought. Yet he also draws a lesson from persistent examples. The philosophers' infinite names all point to one subject: us. "Non-man" or "soul," "Spirit" or "the unconditioned," we are beings who name and name ourselves, bearing witness to the fact that we are, in every sense, unnamable.

"No One's Ways is a continuation of the series of works of intellectual history Heller-Roazen has produced for the publisher Zone Books-his sixth to date.... Though each books takes up a different subject, there are clear commonalities between them, as well as a discernible set of long-term research interests involving speech and language, the limits of consciousness, and the writing of philosophical and literary histories themselves. No One's Ways, then, is both a journey and a preamble, a case study ahead of a fuller investigation, to be undertaken by-who knows?"—Los Angeles Review of Books

Very Good HC edition.

File under: Daniel Heller-Roazen Zone Books / New York Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay

Slime Dynamics
by Ben Woodard

2012, English
Softcover, 84 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by Zero Books / UK

$34.00 - Out of stock

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Through speculative philosophy and lurid cultural objects, Slime Dynamics explores the muck of life as a darkly vitalistic substance.

Despite humanity's gradual ascent from clustered pools of it, slime is more often than not relegated to a mere residue—the trail of a verminous life form, the trace of decomposition, or an entertaining synthetic material—thereby leaving its generative and mutative associations with life neatly removed from the human sphere of thought and existence. Arguing that slime is a viable physical and metaphysical object necessary to produce a realist bio-philosophy void of anthrocentricity, this text explores naturephilosophie, speculative realism, and contemporary science; hyperbolic representations of slime found in the weird texts of HP Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; as well as survival horror films, video games, and graphic novels, in order to present the dynamics of slime not only as the trace of life but as the darkly vitalistic substance of life.

Ben Woodard received his PhD in Theory and Criticism from Western University in 2016. From 2017–20 he was a postdoctoral researcher at the IPK (Institute of Philosophy and Sciences of Art) at Leuphana University where he completed a habilitation on the analytic/continental divide in philosophy through the work of F.H. Bradley. Since 2020 Ben has lectured at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy mostly on the history, philosophy, and politics of the life sciences. In broad terms, his work focuses on the relationship between naturalism and idealism in the long 19th century. Ben also writes on science fiction and horror film and literature.

File under: Ben Woodard Zero Books / UK Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction Theory / Essay Philosophy Film / Video Fiction / Poetry