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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All prices in AUD (Australian dollars)
Pick-Ups
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after order date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 2 weeks of ordering as we have limited storage space. Orders will be released back into stock if not collected within this time. No refunds can be made for pick-ups left un-collected. If you cannot make it in to the bookshop in this time-frame, please choose postage option.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund or exchange) for items received in error. All our orders are packed with special care using heavy-duty padding and cardboard book-mailers or bubble mailers (for smaller books), using reinforcement where required. We cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels.
Insurance
Should you wish to insure your package, please email us directly after placing your order and we can organise this at a small extra expense. Although all standard/express tracked packages are very safe and dependable, we cannot take responsibility for any lost, stolen or damaged parcels. We recommend insurance on valuable orders.
Interested in selling your old books, catalogues, journals, magazines, comics, fanzines, ephemera? We are always looking for interesting, unusual and out-of-print books to buy. We only buy books in our fields of interest and specialty, and that we feel we can resell.
We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels. We offer cash, store credit, and can take stock on consignment. All
about 25% of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Sell your books any day of the week. You can drop them off and return later. If you have a lot of books, we can visit your Sydney home.
We buy books that we feel we can resell. We offer about 25 % of the price we expect to get when we sell them, or 30% in store credit. We base these prices on desirability, market value, in-print prices, condition and our current stock levels.
Philadelphia Wireman
03 August - 01 September, 2018
World Food Books is proud to announce our next Occasion, the first presentation of sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman in Australia.
The Philadelphia Wireman sculptures were found abandoned in an alley off Philadelphia’s South Street on trash night in 1982. Their discovery in a rapidly-changing neighbourhood undergoing extensive renovation, compounded with the failure of all attempts to locate the artist, suggests that the works may have been discarded after the maker’s death. Dubbed the "Philadelphia Wireman" during the first exhibition of this work, in 1985, the maker’s name, age, ethnicity, and even gender remain uncertain. The entire collection totals approximately 1200 pieces, all intricately bound together with tightly-wound heavy-gauge wire (along with a few small, abstract marker drawings, reminiscent both of Mark Tobey and J.B. Murry). The dense construction of the work, despite a modest range of scale and materials, is singularly obsessive and disciplined in design: a wire armature or exoskeleton firmly binds a bricolage of found objects including plastic, glass, food packaging, umbrella parts, tape, rubber, batteries, pens, leather, reflectors, nuts and bolts, nails, foil, coins, toys, watches, eyeglasses, tools, and jewellery.
Heavy with associations—anthropomorphic, zoomorphic, and socio-cultural responses to wrapped detritus—the totemic sculptures by Philadelphia Wireman have been discussed in the context of work created to fulfil the shamanistic needs of alternative religions in American culture. Curators, collectors, and critics have variously compared certain pieces to sculpture from Classical antiquity, Native American medicine bundles, African-American memory jugs, and African fetish objects. Reflecting the artist’s prolific and incredibly focused scavenging impulse, and despite—or perhaps enhanced by—their anonymity, these enigmatic objects function as urban artefacts and arbiters of power, though their origin and purpose is unknown. Philadelphia Wireman, whatever their identity, possessed an astonishing ability to isolate and communicate the concepts of power and energy through the selection and transformation of ordinary materials. Over the course of the past two decades, this collection has come to be regarded as an important discovery in the field of self-taught art and vernacular art.
Presented in collaboration with Fleisher-Ollman Gallery, Philadelphia, and Robert Heald, Wellington.
Susan Te Kahurangi King
02 February - 10 March, 2018
Susan Te Kahurangi King (24 February 1951 - ) has been a confident and prolific artist since she was a young child, drawing with readily available materials - pencils, ballpoint pens and felt-tip markers, on whatever paper is at hand. Between the ages of four and six Susan slowly ceased verbal communication. Her grandparents William and Myrtle Murphy had developed a special bond with Susan so they took on caring responsibilities for extended periods. Myrtle began informally archiving her work, carefully collecting and storing the drawings and compiling scrapbooks. No drawing was insignificant; every scrap of paper was kept. The King family are now the custodians of a vast collection containing over 7000 individual works, from tiny scraps of paper through to 5 meter long rolls.
The scrapbooks and diaries reveal Myrtle to be a woman of great patience and compassion, seeking to understand a child who was not always behaving as expected. She encouraged Susan to be observant, to explore her environment and absorb all the sights and sounds. Myrtle would show Susan’s drawings to friends and people in her community that she had dealings with, such as shopkeepers and postal workers, but this was not simply a case of a grandmother’s bias. She recognised that Susan had developed a sophisticated and unique visual language and sincerely believed that her art deserved serious attention.
This was an unorthodox attitude for the time. To provide some context, Jean Dubuffet coined the term Art Brut in 1945 to describe work created by self-taught artists – specifically residents of psychiatric institutions and those he considered to be visionaries or eccentrics. In 1972 Roger Cardinal extended this concept by adopting the term Outsider Art to describe work made by non-academically trained artists operating outside of mainstream art networks through choice or circumstance. Susan was born in Te Aroha, New Zealand in 1951, far from the artistic hubs of Paris and London that Dubuffet and Cardinal operated in. That Myrtle fêted Susan as a self-taught artist who deserved to be taken seriously shows how progressive her attitudes were.
Susan’s parents Doug and Dawn were also progressive. Over the years they had consulted numerous health practitioners about Susan’s condition, as the medical establishment could not provide an explanation as to why she had lapsed into silence. Dawn educated herself in the field of homeopathy and went on to treat all twelve of her children using these principles – basing prescriptions on her observations of their physical, mental and emotional state.
Doug was a linguist with an interest in philosophy who devoted what little spare time he had to studying Maori language and culture. To some extent their willingness to explore the fringes of the mainstream made them outsiders too but it was their commitment to living with integrity and their respect for individuality that ensured Susan’s creativity was always encouraged.
Even though Susan’s family supported her artistic pursuits, some staff in schools and hospitals saw it as an impediment to her assimilation into the community and discouraged it in a variety of ways. Her family was not always aware of this and therefore did not fully understand why Susan stopped drawing in the early 1990s. However, rather than dwell on the challenges that Susan faced in pursuit of her artistic practice, they prefer to highlight her achievements. In 2008 Susan began drawing again in earnest, after an almost 20 year interruption, and her work is now shown in galleries around the world.
Susan grew up without television and has been heavily influenced by the comics she read as a child. She is absolutely fearless in the appropriation of recognizable characters, such as Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse, in her work. She twists their limbs, contorts their faces, compresses them together, blends them into complex patterned backgrounds - always imbuing them with an incredible energy. Although Susan often used pop culture characters in her work they are not naive or childlike. These are drawings by a brilliant self-taught artist who has been creating exceptional work for decades without an audience in mind.
Mladen Stilinović
"Various Works 1986 - 1999"
02 February 16 - September 10, 2016
Various works 1986 - 1999, from two houses, from the collections of John Nixon, Sue Cramer, Kerrie Poliness, Peter Haffenden and Phoebe Haffenden.
Including: Geometry of Cakes (various shelves), 1993; Poor People’s Law (black and white plate), 1993; White Absence (glasses, ruler, set square, silver spoon, silver ladel with skin photograph and wooden cubes), 1990-1996; Exploitation of the Dead (grey and red star painting, wooden painting, black spoon with red table, red plate), 1984-1990; Money and Zeros (zero tie, paintings made for friends in Australia (Sue, John, Kerrie), numbers painting), 1991-1992; Words - Slogans (various t-shirts) - “they talk about the death of art...help! someone is trying to kill me”, “my sweet little lamb”, “work is a disease - Karl Marx”; Various artist books, catalogues, monographs, videos; Poster from exhibition Insulting Anarchy; "Circular" Croatian - Australian edition; Artist book by Vlado Martek (Dostoyevsky); more.
Thanks to Mladen Stilinović and Branka Stipančić.
Jonathan Walker
Always Will Need To Wear Winter Shirt Blue + Ochre Small Check Pattern
21 August - 21 September, 2015
Untitled
I am not a great reader of poetry but I always return to the work of Melbourne poet, Vincent Buckley (1925- 1988). Perhaps I find his most tantalising piece to be not a finished poem but a fragment left on a scrap of paper discovered on his desk after the poet’s death.
The poetry gathers like oil
In the word-core, and spreads
It has its music meet,
Its music is in movement.
This fragment is more the shell left behind from a volatile thought than a finished poem. I find the last two lines honest but awkward whereas the first two lines work like an arrow. Most likely he could not find a resolution so it was left. Still, in its present form, it remains an eloquent testimony to the ultimate failure of a medium to express mobile thought and sensation, in Buckley’s case, through verbal language. It’s an important matter because this is something all artists have to deal with regardless of the medium.
I have never written a poem, however, I am forever copying fragments from books on paper scraps in a vain effort to fix certain notions in my head. At first, they function as bookmarks that are sometimes returned to when I open the book. But before long, as they accumulate, they fall out littering the table interspersed with A4 photocopies, bills, books and medications.
To return to Buckley’s fragment, the first two lines very much evoke how I paint nowadays. As you age, detail diminishes and patches of light become more luminous and float. I feel the most honest way of dealing with this is by smearing the oil paint on the canvas with the fingers and working close-up, blind. Only if the patches coalesce into an approaching image can the work gain a life.
-
Jonathan Walker was born in Melbourne, Australia and brought up on a dairy farm in Gippsland. In the 1970’s he studied painting at RMIT and won the Harold Wright Scholarship to the British Museum, London. During the 1980’s he exhibited at Pinacotheca Gallery, Richmond and had work shown at the NGV and Heidi City Art Gallery. Over the same period he designed the cover for the “Epigenesi” LP by Giancarlo Toniutti, Italy and conducted a mail exchange work with Achim Wollscheid, Germany. The work with artists through the post resulted in an article published in the bicentenary issue of Art and Australia 1988. He showed in artist run spaces such as WestSpace in the 90’s and 2000’s, and until 2012, taught painting at Victoria University, which is where we (Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford) as organisers of the exhibition, among many others, had the privilege of being his student.
Walker’s knowledge was imparted to students through the careful selection of music, literature, and artists found in books that he himself had ordered for the library. Walker’s strategy was the generosity of sharing his vast knowledge with references specific to each student and their context.
Walker’s paintings share a similar focus and intimacy.
This exhibition presents a small selection of recent paintings alongside a publication that includes Walker’s writing. Observational and analytical, Walker’s work is a type of material notation — the time of day, colour and how it is blended, the both specific and fleeting location of a reflection on lino or the question of whether a chair leg should be included in a painting.
Please join us on Friday August 21 between 6-8pm to celebrate the opening of the exhibition.
Curated by Colleen Ahern and Lisa Radford.
B. Wurtz
Curated by Nic Tammens
March 26 - April 4, 2015
B.Wurtz works from a basement studio in his home on Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
This local fact is attested to by the plastic shopping bags and newsprint circulars that appear in his work. As formal objects, they don’t make loud claims about their origins but nonetheless transmit street addresses and places of business from the bottom of this long thin island. Like plenty of artists, Wurtz is affected by what is local and what is consumed. His work is underpinned by this ethic. It often speaks from a neighborhood or reads like the contents of a hamper:
“BLACK PLUMS $1.29 lb.”
“Food Bazaar”
“USDA Whole Pork Shoulder Picnic 99c lb.”
“RITE AID Pharmacy, with us it’s personal.”
“H. Brickman & Sons.”
“Sweet Yams 59c lb."
Most of the work in this exhibition was made while the artist was in residence at Dieu Donne, a workshop dedicated to paper craft in Midtown. Here Wurtz fabricated assemblages with paper and objects that are relatively lightweight, with the intention that they would be easily transportable to Australia. This consideration isn’t absolute in Wurtz’s work, but was prescriptive for making the current exhibition light and cheap. Packed in two boxes, these works were sent from a USPS post office on the Lower East Side and delivered to North Melbourne by Australia Post.
Wurtz appears courtesy of Metro Pictures, New York.
Thanks to Rob Halverson, Joshua Petherick, Sari de Mallory, Matt Hinkley, Helen Johnson, Fayen d'Evie, Ask Kilmartin, Lisa Radon, Ellena Savage, Yale Union, and "Elizabeth".
John Nixon
"Archive"
December 15 - January 20, 2014
The presentation of John Nixon's archive offered a rare showcase of this extensive collection of the artist's own publications, catalogues, posters, ephemera, editions and more, from the mid 1980s onwards, alongside a selection of his artworks.
Organized by John Nixon, Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley.
"Habitat"
at Minerva, Sydney (organised by Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley)
November 15 - December 20, 2014
Lupo Borgonovo, Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley,
Lewis Fidock, HR Giger, Piero Gilardi, Veit Laurent Kurz,
Cinzia Ruggeri, Michael E. Smith, Lucie Stahl, Daniel Weil, Wols
Press Release:
“...It contained seven objects. The slender fluted bone, surely formed for flight, surely from the wing of some large bird. Three archaic circuitboards, faced with mazes of gold. A smooth white sphere of baked clay. An age-blackened fragment of lace. A fingerlength segment of what she assumed was bone from a human wrist, grayish white, inset smoothly with the silicon shaft of a small instrument that must once have ridden flush with the surface of the skin - but the thing’s face was seared and blackened.”
William Gibson, “Count Zero”, 1986
"Autumn Projects Archive"
Curated by Liza Vasiliou
March 6 - March 15, 2014
World Food Books, in conjunction with the Virgin Australia Melbourne Fashion Festival 2014, presented the Autumn Projects archive, consisting of a selection of early examples in Australian fashion with a particular interest in collecting designers and labels from the period beginning in the 1980’s, who significantly influenced the discourse of Australian Fashion.
Curated by Liza Vasiliou, the exhibition provided a unique opportunity to view pieces by designers Anthea Crawford, Barbara Vandenberg, Geoff Liddell and labels CR Australia, Covers, Jag along with early experimental collage pieces by Prue Acton and Sally Browne’s ‘Fragments’ collection, suspended throughout the functioning World Food Books shop in Melbourne.
H.B. Peace
presented by CENTRE FOR STYLE
November 14, 2013
"Hey Blinky, you say chic, I say same"
Anon 2013
H.B. Peace is a clothing collaboration between great friends Blake Barns and Hugh Egan Westland. Their pieces explore the divergences between 'character’ and ‘personality’ in garments....etc
Special Thanks to Joshua Petherick and Matt Hinkley of WFB and Gillian Mears
and a Very Special Thank you to Audrey Thomas Hayes for her shoe collaboration.
Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley
"Aesthetic Suicide"
May 10 - June 8, 2013
The first of our occasional exhibitions in the World Food Books office/shop space in Melbourne, "Aesthetic Suicide" presented a body of new and older works together by artists Janet Burchill & Jennifer McCamley, including videos, prints, a wall work, and publications.
During shop open hours videos played every hour, on the hour.
1982, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 194 pages, 24 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Carcanet New Press / Manchester
$45.00 - Out of stock
First UK hardcover edition of this incredible collection of Selected Stories by Robert Walser, published by Carcanet New Press, Manchester. Foreword by Susan Sontag. Translated by poet Christopher Middleton.
"The imp inside Kafka (the one that got out to ride coal scuttles or be Josephine the folksinger among the Mouse Folk) was Robert Walser's whole genius. Walser is a Kafka inside-out: his darkly prophetic vision remains inside a magically whimsical, brightly imaginative exterior. These fine translations, made or instigated by the poet Christopher Middleton, are a big step toward our as yet meager awareness of one of the most interesting writers of our time."—GUY DAVENPORT
One of the great writers of the twentieth century in the German language—and an important influence on Kafka—comes to light in this extraordinary, compact selection of the best of his short fiction pieces. Shining with brilliant intensity, Walser's stories range from a mere page to many pages, and hew to a haunting new voice. "For me," Walser writes, "the sketches I produce now and then are shortish or longish chapters of a novel. The novel I am constantly writing is always the same one, and it might be described as a variously sliced-up or torn-apart book of myself." Through his protagonists, be they young men of modest means, famous artists, upper-class women, workers, or animals endowed with the gift of speech, Walser's stories cohere into a fragmentary but powerful collage of life in the Europe of his time.
In a rare combination of lyricism and ruthlessness, philosophy and realism, Robert Walser—admired not only by Kafka but by such writers as Hesse and Benjamin—maps man's futility and isolation while rendering a moving account, at once personal and universal, of life's painful and yet mystically beautiful tenacity. As Susan Sontag writes in her foreword to the book, "He is a truly wonderful, heartbreaking writer."
Very Good copy in VG dust jacket with sunning to spine.
1974, Japanese
Softcover, 160 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Hayashi Bookstore / Tokyo
$45.00 - In stock -
Second issue of cult Japanese underground magazine, Heretical Literature, "A New Magazine Exploring The Unknown World of Aesthetics", published in August 1974. Edited by Munehiro Hayashi, with cover artwork by Pierre Molinier, this issue features colour galleries of Muzan-e (also known as "Bloody Prints", Japanese woodcut prints of violent nature published in the late Edo and Meiji periods), Viennese fantastic realist Rudolf Hausner, gallery of historical mistress illustrations, features/stories on Medieval subcontinental tales, the homo romantiscism of Rome, sadistic pornography, adult toys, rape, western astrology, and "miscellaneous notes on human waste and loincloths", with illustrations by Kaname Ozuma, Masao Koaku, Ran Akiyoshi, plus much more. Texts in Japanese.
VG copy, general light wear/tanning.
1998, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 168 pages, 13.6 cm x 19.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$60.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of "Vintage Erotica", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1998. An ardent collector of vintage erotica, Akita's knowledgable in-depth historical study covers the development of nude photography, curiosa, pornography and fetishism from around the world. From naturalism to glamour photography, dirty comics, girly mags, artistic nudes, classic bondage, to the protagonists of photographer/director Harrison Marks, model Betty Page, photographer E. J. Bellocq, Whitehouse magazine, under-the-counter publisher Alexandre Dupouy, photographer Peter Basch, and many more, all subjects illustrated in b/w with many photographic reproductions and magazine cover references. Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) Japanese audience. "Vintage Erotica" is one of these very books.
First edition, Japanese text, fine copy with dust jacket.
1994, Japanese
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 212 pages, 13.6 cm x 19.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Seikyūsha / Tokyo
$90.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover edition of "Modern Sexuality Bizarre", written by Merzbow's Masami Akita and published only in Japan in 1994, an in-depth study of Japanese "abnormality" and the sexual bizarre in modern society, from its origins through to the culture of 'Ero-Guro Nonsense' — a period ranging from the end of the Taisho era (1912—1926) to the beginning of the Showa era (1926—1989). Akita discuss' the history of sexual media and the modern era of the bizarre with emphasis on its influence on psychology and sexual customs. From "The Dawn of Metamorphosis Research" and "Grotesque Trends" of modern pioneers of eroticism in Japan, including the legendary ero-guro magazines "Hentai Documents" and "Grotesque", their editors and authors Kitaaki Umehara and Kiyoshi Sakai, to othe rearly examples of modern obscene publishing, books of Showa modern bizarre, the modern female body and the beauty era, publishing of criminal sciences and the study of sexual criminals, the torture arts and Seiu Ito "the father of modern kinbaku", hentai psychology and the female viewpoint in criminal psychoogy, postwar marital theory, and more, all subjects illustrated in b/w. Merzbow is a noise project created in Tokyo, Japan in 1979 under the direction of noise technician Masami Akita. As well as a legendary underground noise artist, Akita is a prolific writer in Japan and frequently writes on the arts, music, erotica, esoterica, modern architecture, and animal rights, with articles on emerging subcultures and underground extreme cultures appearing in publications like SM Sniper, Studio Voice and Fool's Mate. His development of the Merzbow aesthetic ran parallel with a series of investigative books in which he catalogued and introduced a vast amount of hermetic types of music, sexual practices and autonomous creativity from the fringes to a fairly conservative (but not close-minded) mainstream Japanese audience. "Modern Sexuality Bizarre" is one of these very books.
First edition, Japanese text, fine copy with fine "textured" and illustrated dust jacket.
1990, English
Softcover, 280 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Kahn & Averill / London
$120.00 - Out of stock
First 1990 softcover edition of this most important biography and study of a legendary composer who altered the course of post-war music. His fearsome talents, both as theoretician and artist enabled him to create an entirely revolutionary body of work through the development of new concepts - stochastic music, games theory, sieves, new forms of timbral composition, rhythms and scales - all of which are discussed in a clear and illuminating way, with reference to their scientific and philosophical underpinning. The fruit of ten years' study and close collaboration between Xenakis and Matossian, Xenakis authorised, for the first time, the publication of interviews, letters and documents of a highly personal and controversial nature, portraying vividly his relationships with his wife, novelist Françoise, Varèse, Messiaen, Le Corbusier, Boulez, Scherchen. The discussion of major works, both musical and architectural, is generously illustrated with musical examples, drawings, photographs and sketches, and appended by valuable lists of all Xenakis' compositions, architectural projects, discography and bibliographies.
Iannis Xenakis revolutionized post-war music more forcefully than any other 20th-century composer. A Resistance leader in World War II, he escaped from Greece to Paris under sentence of death. He became one of Le Corbusier's chief architects, and a pioneer of the computer age in music and the arts. Milan Kundera called him 'the prophet of insensibility'. Xenakis harnessed chaos theory and invented 'stochastic music'. He freed the sound spectrum from western scales and based music on natural principles. He combined architecture, light and sound in a radical new art form to create a boundless aesthetic in music. Shunned by contemporaries, this influential thinker created over 150 vast compositions imbued with elemental passion, and brilliantly reinvented the landscape of music forever. Since it was first published in 1981, Nouritza Matossian's perceptive book on Xenakis has helped students, musicians and audiences appreciate his music. She shares his Greek culture and interest in philosophy, and has chronicled vital discoveries in his work. A reserved man, he spoke frankly to her about his mysterious methods of composition, and his relationships with Varèse, Messiaen, Le Corbusier and Boulez. Xenakis' prophecy that computers, science and art would converge makes this book essential reading for understanding the digital revolution of our time. Matossian's well-researched biography is an unrivalled classic on modern music.
Nouritza Matossian, born in Cyprus of Armenian parents, was educated there and in England, graduating in philosophy at Bedford College, University of London. She has interviewed the foremost composers of new music and her articles have appeared in journals in England and abroad. She is married to the composer, Rolf Gehlhaar, and they live with their two sons in London.
Very Good copy with some light foxing, tanning and light creasing to cover.
1996, English
Softcover, 224 pages, 21.6 x 13.5 cm
Published by
Faber & Faber / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1996 softcover edition of Bálint András Varga's "Conversations with Iannis Xenakis", published by Faber and Faber. Later re-published as print on demand reprint.
Messiaen said that Xenakis was "one of the most extraordinary men that I know ... a hero, unlike any other". His music is elemental, primordial, yet it could not have existed at any other time. It comes out of the most personal experience of the horrors of the age, and from an intense engagement with the conceptual world of modern architecture and higher mathematics. His musical thinking from the start incorporated many of the preoccupations that have since become fashionable, such as chaos and game theory, fractals and probability, transformed into a music that has an energy and violence both disturbing and exhilarating. These conversations reveal a man of uncommon integrity, with a breadth of artistic empathy that is unique in the music of our time.
"Xenakis has developed a music of truly majestic otherness. It is an alien shard, glimmering in the heart of the West."—Ben Watson, The Wire
The music of the Greek-born composer, Iannis Xenakis, has been called brutal and violent. He first studied as an architect, but then turned to composition and put to musical use his knowledge of higher mathematics. In these conversations he talks about his life and music.
VG copy with some light general wear and tanning.
1996, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 23 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Atlas Press / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition of the incredible and sadly long out-of-print Encyclopedia Acephalica, published by Atlas Press in 1996 as part of their mighty Atlas Arkhive : Documents of the Avant Garde series..
Bataille’s thought is complex, and his books make few concessions to the reader. The first series of texts here, however, were written for a wider audience by Bataille and his friends, in the form of a Critical Dictionary, and they provide a witty, poetic and concise introduction to his ideas. The Dictionary appeared in the magazine edited by Bataille, Documents, in the early 1930s, and includes entries from prominent ethnologists and cultural commentators of the day. The second series of texts here, the Da Costa Encyclopédique was published anonymously after the liberation of Paris in 1947 by members of the Acéphale group and writers associated with the Surrealists. Both cover the essential concepts of Bataille and his associates: sacred sociology; scatology, death and the erotic; base materialism; the aesthetics of the formless; sacrifice, the festival and the politics of the tumult etc: a new description of the limits of being human. Humour, albeit, sardonic, is not absent from these remarkable redefinitions of the most heterogeneous objects or ideas: Camel, Church, Dust, Museum, Spittle, Skyscraper, Threshold, Work – to name but a few.
While the Documents group was celebrated for joining together artists, authors, sociologists and ethnologists (among the most important of their time) in a literary and philosophical project, the Acéphale group was more mysterious. Until recently even its membership was only vaguely known, and its activities remained secret (these are explored in detail for the first time in English in The Sacred Conspiracy, published by Atlas Press, also available at World Food Books). The origins of the Da Costa only became known in 1993, the present volume revealed for the first time its principal compilers: Robert Lebel, Isabelle Waldberg and Marcel Duchamp, but the identity of the authors of a large part of it is still unknown.
Texts by Georges Bataille, Michel Leiris, Marcel Griaule, Carl Einstein, Robert Desnos and writers associated with the Acéphale and Surrealist groups.
Introduced by Alastair Brotchie. Translated by Iain White, Dominic Faccini, Annette Michelson, John Harman, Alexis Lykiard.
Very Good copy, with some light edge wear.
1989, English
3 Vols. softcovers, 500 + 560 + 584 pages, 23.5 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Zone Books / New York
$190.00 - Out of stock
Complete set (3 volumes) of ZONE : Fragments for a History of the Human Body, published in 1989 by Zone Books, and all long out-of-print. The forty-eight essays and photographic dossiers in these three volumes examine the history of the human body as a field where life and thought intersect. They show how different cultures at different times have entwined physical capacities and mental mechanisms in order to construct a body adapted to moral ideas or social circumstances — the body of a charismatic citizen or a visionary monk, a mirror image of the world or a reflection of the spirit.
Each volume emphasizes a particular perspective. Part 1 explores the human body’s relationship to the divine, to the bestial, and to the machines that imitate or simulate it. Part 2 covers the junctures between the body’s “outside” and “inside” by studying the manifestations — or production — of the soul and the expression of the emotions and, on another level, by examining the speculations inspired by cenesthesia, pain, and death. Part 3 brings into play the classical opposition between organ and function by showing how organs or bodily substances can be used to justify or challenge the way human societies function and, conversely, how political and social functions tend to make the bodies of the persons filling them the organs of a larger body — the social body or the universe as a whole.
Among the contributors to Fragments for a History of the Human Body are Mark Elvin, Catherine Gallagher, Françoise Héritier-Augé, Julia Kristeva, William R. LaFleur, Thomas W. Laqueur, Jacques Le Goff, Nicole Loraux, Mario Perniola, Hillel Schwartz, Jean Starobinski, Jean-Pierre Vernant, and Caroline Walker Bynum.
“ZONE is unequivocally the most innovative, informative, and intellectually stimulating journal I have ever encountered…It belongs in all but the smallest personal, public, and academic collections.” —Library Journal
Very Good copies all, only light wear, light page tanning. All first editions, second printings.
2017, English
Softcover, 343 pages, 19.5 x 12.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Serpent's Tail / London
$36.00 - Out of stock
Notes from the Sick Room takes place in an imaginary hospital that bends the rules of time and space.
Within its wards and departments we meet artists, musicians and writers who have suffered from various physical illnesses – cancer, tuberculosis, HIV/AIDS and physical trauma. Their lives and works are discussed in an attempt to diagnose how their complaints influenced their work or how their creativity affected their symptoms. We meet Virginia Woolf, Kathy Acker, Frida Kahlo, Katherine Mansfield, Bob Dylan Bruce Chatwin and many others as they struggle to produce works of art, literature and music while in denial, acceptance or flight and through periods of serious illness and convalescence. As we move through the hospital, specialists keep us informed of the history of creativity and illness and the author divulges his own medical history.
Fine copy, light pressure line on cover.
1969, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 288 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Leslie Frewin / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
First 1969 hardcover edition of this classic study of killers by Colin Wilson, issued in hardcover by Leslie Frewin in the UK. In A Casebook of Murder "(Wilson) discusses crimes in Britain and Europe, in America and Australia, and breaks down the motives of the killers in an attempt to isolate a common denominator. He draws strongly on psychological and psychiatric authorities and offers new hope for the future, particularly in connection with murders of a violent, sexual nature. He is of the opinion - alarming perhaps, but perceptive - that it is 'the ability to discount the victim that distinguishes the murderer from the rest of us', and he illustrates this vividly by discussing among many others, the cases of: Sawney Bean and his strange cannibalistic family, Thomas Arden of Faversham; Catherine Hayes; the rape of Sarah Woodcock; Andrew Bichel, the Bavarian ripper; Lacenaire, the notorious French murderer; Anna Zwanziger, whose creed was 'poison is my truest friend'; Thomas Cream; Jack the Ripper; 'The Red Spider'; Jesse Pomeroy; Hickock and Smith; The Cannock Chase and the Moor murders. (In) its scope, (this) is a finely-worked tapestry that records the struggle of centuries between the forces of good and evil and demonstrates how the comparative security of the citizen today has slowly been constructed."
Colin Wilson (1931—2013) was an English existentialist philosopher-novelist. He also wrote widely on true crime, mysticism and the paranormal, eventually writing more than a hundred books.
VG copy in VG dust jacket with light wear/tanning to cover and pages.
1990, English
Softcover (staple bound), 36 pages, 21 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The FFM Association / Paris
$50.00 - Out of stock
Rare copy of Fantasy Film Memory Presents "Shockers" issue no. 1 of the FFM film digest / fanzine, published in France in July 1990, and devoted entirely to Cannibal Holocaust, the controversial cult 1980 Italian exploitation cannibal film directed by Ruggero Deodato and written by Gianfranco Clerici. This English text book is packed with glossy colour and b/w film stills, lobby cards, posters, and on-set photos and other visual documents, accompanying texts and production details. A must for any fan. The "Shockers" series was published in 4 issues between 1990—1991.
Very Good copy.
1990, German
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 128 pages, 31 x 22 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Westermann / Braunschweig
$60.00 - Out of stock
1990 German edition of this 1986 monograph on Antoni Tàpies by Victoria Combalia Dexeus, originally published by Ediciones Poligrafa S. A., Barcelona, this edition by Westermann, Braunschweig.
"This book by Victoria Combalia Dexeus strengthens our intrinsically artistic knowledge of the painter with a text supported by a lucid, well-documented cultural consciousness. The author analyses a good number of specific paintings, the reciprocal relationships and connections of which with other cultural facts or events are established with very sound arguments. Her intelligent exposition is of great assistance to us in our attempts to further our acquaintance with the work of this great Catalan artist - an 'oeuvre' capable of successive interpretations which gradually reveal to us, as in this case, its 'greatness and its profundity." The chapters are: abstract art; childhood, adolescence & the Surrealist period; the international context; a many-faceted realism; imitation through textures; transpoition of textures; objects; ambiguous perspectives, poetic geometriess, empty spaces; bodies; elusive presences; signs. Heavy illustrated throughout.
Antoni Tàpies (1923 – 2012) was a Spanish painter, sculptor and art theorist. At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis and spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art. After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting. At this time he also became increasingly interested in philosophy, especially that of Sartre as well as Eastern thought. In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set, alongside poet Joan Brossa, which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. In 1953 he began working in mixed media as a member of the Art Informal school; this is considered his most original contribution to art. Working in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into paintings (clay, marble dust, waste paper, string, and rags), he became known as one of Spain's most renowned artists in the second half of the 20th century. Social themes run throughout his highly textured and tactile paintings, which were influenced by his experience of the politics and environment of the wartime and the postwar state of the Spanish government. His abstract and avant-garde works were displayed in many major museums all over the world. “If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination,” he reflected.
1979, English
Softcover, 278 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Rizzoli / New York
$65.00 - Out of stock
First edition, first softcover printing of this 1978 English-language major monograph on Antoni Tàpies, authored by English artist, historian and poet, Roland Penrose (1900—1984) and published by Rizzoli. Profusely illustrated with 217 images, including 73 in colour, accompanied by Penrose's text, a chronology, checklist, bibliography, list of previous exhibitions, and list of museums and institutions with works by Tàpies.
Antoni Tàpies (1923 – 2012) was a Spanish painter, sculptor and art theorist. At 17, Tàpies suffered a near-fatal heart attack caused by tuberculosis and spent two years as a convalescent in the mountains, reading widely and pursuing an interest in art. After studying law for 3 years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting. At this time he also became increasingly interested in philosophy, especially that of Sartre as well as Eastern thought. In 1948, Tàpies helped co-found the first Post-War Movement in Spain known as Dau al Set, alongside poet Joan Brossa, which was connected to the Surrealist and Dadaist Movements. In 1953 he began working in mixed media as a member of the Art Informal school; this is considered his most original contribution to art. Working in a style known as pintura matèrica, in which non artistic materials are incorporated into paintings (clay, marble dust, waste paper, string, and rags), he became known as one of Spain's most renowned artists in the second half of the 20th century. Social themes run throughout his highly textured and tactile paintings, which were influenced by his experience of the politics and environment of the wartime and the postwar state of the Spanish government. His abstract and avant-garde works were displayed in many major museums all over the world. “If one draws things in a manner which provides only the barest clue to their meaning, the viewer is forced to fill in the gaps by using his own imagination,” he reflected.
Very Good copy, light wear to edges, small marker price cross-out to back cover.
1927 / 1994, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 28 x 18.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Black Sparrow Press / Santa Rosa
$60.00 - In stock -
Long out-of-print 1994 facsimile reprint by Black Sparrow Press of Wyndham Lewis' radical arts and literature journal of 1927, The Enemy. British writer, artist, critic, Vorticism co-founder and BLAST editor Wyndham Lewis (1882—1957) established The Arthur Press in 1926 specifically for the purpose of publishing The Enemy, outlining in the initial volume's Editorial his intention to use the 'Review of Art and Literature' as a "serious unpartisan criticism" of society, commencing with his essay 'The Revolutionary Simpleton' in which he savages a perceived romanticism in the works of Joyce, Pound, Stein, even Charlie Chaplin. Wyndham Lewis's contributions (many essays and illustrations) dominate this first amazing issue, with contributions also by T. S. Eliot, W. Gibson and J. W. N. Sullivan, and a painting by Giorgio de Chirico. This wonderful and absolutely complete reprint by contemporary editor David Peters Corbett features additional editor's note and biography / portrait of the iconoclastic Lewis.
Percy Wyndham Lewis (1882—1957) was a British writer, painter and critic. He was a co-founder of the Vorticist movement in art and edited BLAST, the literary magazine of the Vorticists. His novels include Tarr (1918) and The Human Age trilogy, composed of The Childermass (1928), Monstre Gai (1955) and Malign Fiesta (1955). A fourth volume, titled The Trial of Man, was unfinished at the time of his death. He also wrote two autobiographical volumes: Blasting and Bombardiering (1937) and Rude Assignment: A Narrative of my Career Up-to-Date (1950).
Very Good copy with tanning and bending to top back cover corner. Otherwise a tight, clean copy throughout.
1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 184 pages, 22.23 x 14.61 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Penn State University / Pennsylvania
$50.00 - Out of stock
“In many ways, like its subject, marvelously idiosyncratic and playful, this book will make an important contribution to our understanding of the rhetoric of mannerism.”—Ernest B. Gilman New York University
First 1991 hardcover edition of Giancarlo Maiorino's The Portrait of Eccentricity : Arcimboldo and the Mannerist Grotesque. In this companion to his The Cornucopian Mind and the Baroque Unity of the Arts, Maiorino examines the links between Renaissance and the modern versions of the Groteseque.
In this interdisciplinary study, the term "eccentricity" refers to styles of playful extravagance. Maiorino focuses on the rhetorical figures of excess employed by a critic-historian (Giorgio Vasari), on the willful artificiality of a painter (Giuseppe Arcimboldo), and on the programmatic and interpretive commentary of a theorist (Gregorio Comanini).
Maiorino draws subtle and persuasive connections between the images he discusses and the grotesque "face" of sixteenth-century poetics and rhetoric. He sets the mannerist and the grotesque against the philosophical seriousness of Renaissance humanism, interpreting them as a celebration of the ludic and fantastic possibilities of art itself. Aiming at pleasure rather than instruction, this art plays on the boundaries of the natural and the artificial, the credible and the impossible, taking delight in parody, excess, disjunction, and exaggeration.
Fine copy in Near Fine dust jacket.
1970, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 320 pages, 20 x 14.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Jonathan Cape / London
$80.00 - Out of stock
First 1970 hardcover Jonathan Cape English edition of Michel Butor's Inventory, a selection from Butor's writings, edited and with a foreword by Richard Howard.
"Michel Butor, author of three celebrated novels - A Change of Heart, Passing Time and Degrees - is, with Alain Robbe-Grillet and Nathalie Sarraute, a leader of the revolutionary literary movement, the French 'new novel'. He is also, as he displayed in Histoire Extraordinaire: Essays on a Dream of Baudelaire's, a brilliant and original critic and essayist. Richard Howard, critic, poet and the outstanding translator of modern French writers, has made a selection from Butor's writings that reveals the uncommon depth and scope of his critical accomplishment. An important group of theoretical essays on the aesthetics of the novel is followed by essays on classic French writers such as Balzac, Chateaubriand, Verne, Proust and Apollinaire. A discussion of fairy tales and science fiction as literary genres meriting serious critical thought precedes essays on modern art - the work of Mondrian, Pollock and Rothko - and on modern music as created by Stravinsky, Schönberg and Boulez. In every essay, Butor writes with an intensity, intellect and imagination that make Inventory one of the most valuable collections of critical writings to appear in this country in recent years."—Jacket
Michel Butor (1926—2016) was a French poet, novelist, teacher, essayist, art critic and translator, and one of the leading exponents of the nouveau roman (“new novel”) alongside Alain Robbe-Grillet, Claude Simon, Nathalie Sarraute, an avant-garde literary movement that emerged in France in the 1950s.
Very Good copy, light wear and tear to VG dust jacket.
1962, English
Softcover, 78 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Henmar Press Inc. / New York
Edition Peters / New York
$70.00 - Out of stock
Rare 1962 artist catalogue of works by American Experimental composer John Cage. With foreword by Cage, this publication features a comprehensive index of Cage's compositions, illustrations, interview between Cage and Roger Reynolds, biography, excerpts from reviews and critical articles, bibliography of reviews and critical articles, index of persons, portrait of Cage by Lutfi Özkök, and catalogue organised by Robert Dunn. A remarkable resource for Cagians. Published by Edition Peters and Henmar Press Inc., New York.
Very Good copy with light cover wear.
1961 / 1967, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 276 pages, 24 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Wesleyan University Press / US
$150.00 - Out of stock
Rare first 1961 edition, second 1967 printing of Silence: Lectures and Writings, a book by American experimental composer John Cage (1912–1992), first published in 1961 by Wesleyan University Press. Silence is Cage's classic collection of essays and lectures written during the period from 1939 to 1961. Silence, A Year from Monday, M, Empty Words and X (in this order) form the five parts of a series of books in which Cage tries, as he says, "to find a way of writing which comes from ideas, is not about them, but which produces them." Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching (what Cage called "writing through").
"There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot. Sounds occur whether intended or not; the psychological turning in direction of those not intended seems at first to be a giving up of everything that belongs to humanity. But one must see that humanity and nature, not separate, are in this world together, that nothing was lost when everything was given away."—J.C.
Very Good copy of the first edition, second print from 1967. VG book in VG dust jacket with light rubbing to the black print.
2002, German / English
Softcover, 280 pages, 22.2 x 27.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Schirmer & Mosel / Munich
$45.00 - In stock -
Published to accompany a 2002 exhibition of Mark Tobey / Morris Graves / John Cage appearing at the Kunsthalle Bremen (Bremen, Germany) and the Museum of Glass (Tacoma, Washington), this catalog is profusely illustrated throughout with many of the artists' works as well as interpretive and biographical essays and a chronology. The three artists were friends and collaborators linked by their connections with the Pacific Northwest, their appellation as Northwest Mystics, and, more deeply, by their shared artistic concerns. John Cage composer, philosopher, writer, and visual artist wrote extensively about Tobey and Graves, and his writings are included here as well.
Original German edition with many texts also in English, in particular Cage's.
Near Fine copy.
1975 / 1983, English
Softcover, 135 pages, 20.5 x 20.5 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Thames and Hudson / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
Design and Form is the most complete document of one of the landmarks of modern education in art — the famous Basic Course at the Bauhaus in Weimar, Germany. Itten was the teacher who organized it at the invitation of Walter Gropius. First published in 1963 when Itten was still alive, the book has been revised and updated by Itten's widow, Anneliese Itten, and includes new material fro the basic course at the Bauhaus, as well as visual examples and descriptions of the refinements made by Itten in later courses in Berlin (1926—1932), Krefeld (1932—1938), and Zurich (1938—1960)."—publisher
Revised 1975 edition, 1983 printing.
Very Good copy. Small bump to back cover lower corner.
1996, English
Softcover (stiff french-folds), 280 pages, 30 x 21 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Academy Editions / London
$140.00 - Out of stock
"It was Joseph Beuys who made us think of thinking as sculpture. It was Robert Filliou who said that invention replaced composition and that this broke down the barriers between the arts. I found working with metal unique, I loved the materials and the tools. But vast sculpture that worked with the mental ability of living people seemed much more of a timely thing to me. That was 1977. I changed from metal sculpture to mental sculpture."—Louwrien Wijers
Rare first 1996 edition of this unique publication by Dutch Fluxus artist and writer Louwrien Wijers, published in London by Academy Editions.
Inspired by artists Joseph Beuys and Robert Filliou, this collection of interviews grew from the author's passionate belief that a meeting and cross-fertilisation of some of the world's greatest minds could help break down barriers between the different disciplines - art, science, spirituality and economics - leading to an increased global tolerance and understanding. This book contains ground-breaking interviews with some of the most significant thinkers of the late twentieth century including Dalai Lama, Joseph Beuys, Andy Warhol, Robert Filliou, David Bohm, Fritjof Capra, Sogyal Rinpoche, Rupert Sheldrake, Francisco Varela and Harish Johari. These previously unpublished documents date from the period 1978-1987. With the addition of a large number of rare archive photographs, this book constitutes a unique part of the history of the avant-garde as well as proposing a new holistic way of looking at the world.
Writing As Sculpture contains the longest interview ever given by Andy Warhol.
"This publication 'Writing as Sculpture' shows how Joseph Beuys sent me to Andy Warhol with the same questions I had put to him, and how Andy Warhol sent me on to the Dalai Lama of Tibet, again with the same questions. When the answers of the Dalai Lama were so very similar to the answers Joseph Beuys had given, I wrote him a postcard from Dharamsala, India, as soon as I let the Dalai Lama's abode. On the card - it was an Indian colourprint of the Tibetan flag - I said: 'Dear Joseph, you have a brother here in the Himalayas, who thinks exactly the same way about the problems of today as you do.' Back in Europe, talking to Joseph Beuys on the phone, he told me: 'Louwrien, I want to meet the Dalai Lama and I want to make a permanent co-operation with him. This way we will make Eurasia happen.'[...]"—Louwrien Wijers
1991, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Columbia University Press / New York
$30.00 - Out of stock
First 1991 Columbia edition.
Published in France in 1980, Marine Lover is the first in a trilogy in which Luce Irigaray links the interrogation of the feminine in post-Hegelian philosophy with a pre-Socratic investigation of the elements. Irigaray undertakes to interrogate Nietzche, the grandfather of poststructuralist philosophy, from the point of view of water.
According to Irigaray, water is the element Nietzsche fears most. She uses this element in her narrative because for her there is a complex relationship between the feminine and the fluid. Irigaray's method is to engage in an amorous dialogue with the male philosopher. In this dialogue, she ruptures conventional discourse and writes in a lyrical style that defies distinction between theory, fiction, and philosophy.
Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women.
Very Good copy.
1993, English
Softcover, 216 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$35.00 - In stock -
First 1993 Cornell edition.
"Who or what the other is, I never know. But the other who is forever unknowable is the one who differs from me sexually. This feeling of surprise, astonishment, and wonder in the face of the unknowable ought to be returned to its locus: that of sexual difference." Thus Luce Irigaray undertakes a searching inquiry into what may be the philosophical problem of our age.
Irigaray approaches the question of sexual difference by looking at the ways in which thought and language--whether in philosophy, science, or psychoanalysis--are gendered. She juxtaposes evocative readings of classic texts, including Plato's Symposium, Aristotle's Physics, Descartes's "On Wonder" in The Passions of the Soul, Spinoza's Ethics, Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, and Levinas's Totality and Infinity, with meditations on experiences of love: between fetus and mother, between heterosexual lovers, between women, and between women and their own bodies.
Exploding traditional dualities such as inside/outside, form/content, subject/object, and self/other, Irigaray shows how an understanding of such experiences points to gender blindness in both classic and contemporary theory. Asserting that women have never known a love of self out of which a non-dominated love of the other is possible, Irigaray argues that only when women insist on the integrity of their own spaces of embodiment can love become the basis of a revolution in ethics.
Published in French in 1984, An Ethics of Sexual Difference is now available in English in a superb translation by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill. Readers interested in feminist theory, literary theory, and philosophy--indeed anyone deeply concerned with gender relations--will be challenged by the brilliance and boldness of Irigaray's analyses.
Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women.
Very Good copy. Light (erasable) pencil marginalia.
1985 / 1988, English
Softcover, 222 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
First 1985 Cornell edition, 1988 printing.
In This Sex Which Is Not One, Luce Irigaray elaborates on some of the major themes of Speculum of the Other Woman, her landmark work on the status of woman in Western philosophical discourse and in psychoanalytic theory. In eleven acute and widely ranging essays, Irigaray reconsiders the question of female sexuality in a variety of contexts that are relevant to current discussion of feminist theory and practice.
Among the topics she treats are the implications of the thought of Freud and Lacan for understanding womanhood and articulating a feminine discourse; classic views on the significance of the difference between male and female sex organs; and the experience of erotic pleasure in men and in women. She also takes up explicitly the question of economic exploitation of women; in an astute reading of Marx she shows that the subjection of woman has been institutionalized by her reduction to an object of economic exchange. Throughout Irigaray seeks to dispute and displace male-centered structures of language and thought through a challenging writing practice that takes a first step toward a woman's discourse, a discourse that would put an end to Western culture's enduring phallocentrism.
Making more direct and accessible the subversive challenge of Speculum of the Other Woman, this volume—skillfully translated by Catherine Porter (with Carolyn Burke)—will be essential reading for anyone seriously concerned with contemporary feminist issues.
Luce Irigaray (b. 1930) is a Belgian-born French feminist, philosopher, linguist, psycholinguist, psychoanalyst, and cultural theorist who examined the uses and misuses of language in relation to women.
Very Good—Fine copy. Light (erasable) pencil marginalia.