World Food Books

Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination
Edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber

1997, English
Softcover, 402 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$20.00 - In stock -

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With the collapse of the bipolar system of global rivalry that dominated world politics after the Second World War, and in an age that is seeing the return of "ethnic cleansing" and "identity politics," the question of violence, in all of its multiple ramifications, imposes itself with renewed urgency. Rather than concentrating on the socioeconomic or political backgrounds of these historical changes, the contributors to this volume rethink the concept of violence, both in itself and in relation to the formation and transformation of identities, whether individual or collective, political or cultural, religious or secular. In particular, they subject the notion of self-determination to stringent scrutiny: is it to be understood as a value that excludes violence, in principle if not always in practice? Or is its relation to violence more complex and, perhaps, more sinister?

Reconsideration of the concepts, the practice, and even the critique of violence requires an exploration of the implications and limitations of the more familiar interpretations of the terms that have dominated in the history of Western thought. To this end, the nineteen contributors address the concept of violence from a variety of perspectives in relation to different forms of cultural representation, and not in Western culture alone; in literature and the arts, as well as in society and politics; in philosophical discourse, psychoanalytic theory, and so-called juridical ideology, as well as in colonial and post-colonial practices and power relations.

The contributors are Giorgio Agamben, Ali Behdad, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Michael Dillon, Peter Fenves, Stathis Gourgouris, Werner Hamacher, Beatrice Hanssen, Anselm Haverkamp, Marian Hobson, Peggy Kamuf, M. B. Pranger, Susan M. Shell, Peter van der Veer, Hent de Vries, Cornelia Vismann, and Samuel Weber.

Very Good copy.

File under: Hent de Vries Samuel Weber Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Philosophy Sociology / Politics

Lautréamont and Sade
by Maurice Blanchot

2004, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$48.00 - In stock -

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In Lautréamont and Sade, originally published in 1949, Maurice Blanchot forcefully distinguishes his critical project from the major intellectual currents of his day, surrealism and existentialism. Today, Lautreamont and Sade, these unique figures in the histories of literature and thought, are as crucially relevant to theorists of language, reason, and cruelty as they were in post-war Paris.

"Sade's Reason," in part a review of Pierre Klossowski's Sade, My Neighbor, was first published in Les Temps modernes. Blanchot offers Sade's reason, a corrosive rational unreasoning, apathetic before the cruelty of the passions, as a response to Sartre's Hegelian politics of commitment.

"The Experience of Lautreamont," Blanchot's longest sustained essay, pursues the dark logic of Maldoror through the circular gravitation of its themes, the grinding of its images, its repetitive and transformative use of language, and the obsessive metamorphosis of its motifs. Blanchot's Lautreamont emerges through this search for experience in the relentless unfolding of language. This treatment of the experience of Lautreamont unmistakably alludes to Georges Bataille's "inner experience."

Republishing the work in 1963, Blanchot prefaced it with an essay distinguishing his critical practice from that of Heidegger.

Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003) was a French writer, philosopher, and literary theorist. His work had a strong influence on later post-structuralist theorists such as Jacques Derrida. He is one of the most enigmatic and influential figures in modern French writing yet no interview, no biographical sketch, and hardly any photographs have ever been published of him.

File under: Maurice Blanchot Georges Bataille Comte de Lautreamont The Marquis de Sade Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Theory / Essay Eros Art Surrealism Fiction / Poetry Weird / Speculative / Science Fiction

The Puppet of Desire: The Psychology of Hysteria, Possession, and Hypnosis
by Jean-Michel Oughourlian

1991, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 264 pages, 22.5 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$250.00 - In stock -

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Very rare, sought after first hardcover edition of Oughourlian's "The Puppet of Desire", published in 1991 by Stanford. Translated, with an introduction, by Eugene Webb.

This study of the psychology of desire derives from a theory of imitative or 'mimetic' desire developed by the cultural critic and theorist René Girard. The theory is essentially that all human beings have an instinctive tendency, a kind of social and psychological gravitation, to imitate unwittingly not only the actions but also the attitudes and desires of others. The author, a practicing psychiatrist, extends and amplifies this theory from the viewpoint of psychopathology and applies it to the study of hysteria, possession, and hypothesis. He argues that these phenomena are best understood as expressions of mimetic behaviour, and he traces the history of the ideas concerning hysteria, possession, and hypnosis and relates them to the development of Freud's theory of neurosis. The author points out that mimetic desire is not an inherently pathological force. It may be normal and healthy, but in certain circumstances it can lead to relations of dependency and rivalry that can cause serious psychological problems. It can also take on extreme or bizarre forms without necessarily becoming unhealthy; an example of healthy but extreme unconscious identification with an other (who may be either a person or a cultural figure) is shamanistic possession. The author discusses this kind of phenomenon among African tribes and coins the term 'adorcism' (the opposite of exorcism) to refer to the process of invoking it. The theory of desire as presented in this book is other-oriented, as opposed to Freud's theory of desire, which istrictly object-oriented. The author sees Freud's theory as more in a long history of strategic misinterpretations of the psychology of desire, such as the classical theory of hysteria and the medieval theory of demonic possession. his critique of Freudian theory is radical, and in fact it would not be too much to say that he has moved toward the first new and well-developed theory of psychopathology since Freud.

Jean-Michel Oughourlian is an Armenian-French neuropsychiatrist and psychologist as well as a writer and philosopher recognized both in France and the United States for his collaboration with René Girard and his work on the mimetic theory of desire. Oughourlian is the former chief of psychiatry at the American Hospital of Paris and a former professor of clinical psychopathology at the Sorbonne. He collaborated with René Girard on Things Hidden since the Foundation of the World (1978) and has authored several books on psychiatry, neuroscience, and mimetic theory. He is a founding member of the Association Recherches Mimétiques, a French organization devoted to René Girard's thought.

Fine copy with Near Fine dust jacket preserved in archival mylar wrap.

File under: Sigmund Freud Eugene Webb Jean-Michel Oughourlian René Girard Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Psychoanalysis Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare Theory / Essay Occult / Esoterica Crime / Violence

Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory
Edited by Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser

1996, English
Softcover, 394 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
Out of print title / used / good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

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The articulation of the unsayable, of negativity—that which has been excluded by what is sayable—is one of the most important areas of contemporary humanistic study. This volume brings together fifteen outstanding literary theorists and philosophers to examine ways to make the unsayable tangible.

Good copy with darkened marking to top corner throughout first few pages. Light wear.

File under: Jacques Derrida Jonathan Culler Sanford Budick Wolfgang Iser Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare

Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination
Edited by Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber

1997, English
Softcover, 416 pages
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$30.00 - Out of stock

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First 1997 edition.

With the collapse of the bipolar system of global rivalry that dominated world politics after the Second World War, and in an age that is seeing the return of "ethnic cleansing" and "identity politics," the question of violence, in all of its multiple ramifications, imposes itself with renewed urgency. Rather than concentrating on the socioeconomic or political backgrounds of these historical changes, the contributors to this volume rethink the concept of violence, both in itself and in relation to the formation and transformation of identities, whether individual or collective, political or cultural, religious or secular. In particular, they subject the notion of self-determination to stringent scrutiny: is it to be understood as a value that excludes violence, in principle if not always in practice? Or is its relation to violence more complex and, perhaps, more sinister?

Reconsideration of the concepts, the practice, and even the critique of violence requires an exploration of the implications and limitations of the more familiar interpretations of the terms that have dominated in the history of Western thought. To this end, the nineteen contributors address the concept of violence from a variety of perspectives in relation to different forms of cultural representation, and not in Western culture alone; in literature and the arts, as well as in society and politics; in philosophical discourse, psychoanalytic theory, and so-called juridical ideology, as well as in colonial and post-colonial practices and power relations.

The contributors are Giorgio Agamben, Ali Behdad, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Michael Dillon, Peter Fenves, Stathis Gourgouris, Werner Hamacher, Beatrice Hanssen, Anselm Haverkamp, Marian Hobson, Peggy Kamuf, M. B. Pranger, Susan M. Shell, Peter van der Veer, Hent de Vries, Cornelia Vismann, and Samuel Weber.

VG copy.

File under: Hent de Vries Samuel Weber Giorgio Agamben Ali Behdad Cathy Caruth Jacques Derrida Michael Dillon Peter Fenves Stathis Gourgouris Werner Hamacher Beatrice Hanssen Anselm Haverkamp Marian Hobson Peggy Kamuf M. B. Pranger Susan M. Shell Peter van der Veer Cornelia Vismann Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Theory / Essay Crime / Violence Psychoanalysis Philosophy Out-of-print / Rare

Exotic Memories: Literature, Colonialism, and the Fin de siècle
by Chris Bongie

1991, English
Softcover, 162 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$35.00 - In stock -

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First 1991 edition.

"A challenging study that will be welcomed by scholars in the fields of French, English, Italian, and comparative literature, as well as by his- torians of anthropology and colonialism, and readers interested in theories of postmodernism. This is a book whose time is exactly right: a fin-de-siècle meditation on the end of modernity, marked by a keen nostalgia for a past (and an elsewhere) that it knows to be already lost."—Richard Sieburth, New York University

"It brings together, as few works do, literature with history, criticism of aesthetic production with a subtle political consciousness. It makes one understand the colonial implications of modernity as nothing else does. It is essential for the re-evaluation of anthropology and is a powerful addition to the crucial philosophical issue of Alterity."—Michael Taussig, New York University

"This book focuses on the literature of exoticism at the turn of the last century and how it foreshadows our own fin de siècle. Earlier writers of exoticism had turned away from the West and its modernity, rejecting the social changes caused by industrialization and displacing onto "savage" or "primitive" cultures their aspirations for political freedom. By the turn of the century, however, European nations had reduced vast areas of the globe to colonial status: this global exportation of Western cultural norms and economic systems had a critical effect on the literature of exoticism.

The author concentrates on four writers-Jules Verne, Pierre Loti, Victor Segalen, and Joseph Conrad-although he touches on a number of other writers, and even painters, like Paul Gauguin. Making an explicit link between turn-of-the-century exoticism and the present day, the book concludes with a critical assessment of Pier Paolo Pasolini's neo-exoticist attachment to a supposedly revolutionary Third World in his poetry and literary criticism. The book's critical stance is noteworthy, drawing its basic assumptions from pensiero debole, the "weak thought" of the contemporary Italian philosopher Gianni Vattimo."

NF copy.

File under: Pier Paolo Pasolini Paul Gauguin Chris Bongie Jules Verne Pierre Loti Victor Segalen Joseph Conrad Pier Paolo Pasolini Gianni Vattimo Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Theory / Essay Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Symbolism / Decadence / Fin de siècle Out-of-print / Rare Art Fiction / Poetry

The Birth to Presence
by Jean-Luc Nancy

1994, English
Softcover, 423 pages, 23 x 15.24 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$40.00 - In stock -

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The epoch of representation is as old as the West. Indeed, representation is the West, understood as what at once designates and expands its own limits. But what comes after the West? What comes after representation's disclosure of its own limit?

The central problem posed in these essays, collected from over a decade of work, is how in the wake of Western ontologies to conceive the coming, the birth that characterizes being. We are now at the limit of representation, where objects as we experience them have been show to be merely objects of representation—or rather, of presentation, since there is nothing to (re)present. The first part of this book, "Existence," asks how, today, one can give sense of meaning to existence as such, arguing that existence itself, as it comes nude into the world, must now be our "sense."

In examining what this birth to presence might be, we should not ask what presence "is"; rather we should conceive presence as presence to someone, including to presence itself. This birth is not the constitution of an identity, but the endless departure of an identity from, and from within, its other, or others. Its coming is not desire but jouissance, the joy of averring oneself to be continually in the state of being born—a rejoicing of birth, a birth of rejoicing.

The second section, "Poetry," asks: What art exposes this? In writing, in the voice, in painting? And what if art is exposed to it? How does it inscribe (or rather, "exscribe," in a term the book develops) the coming existence as such? The author's trajectory in this book crosses those of Hegel, Schlegel, Baudelaire, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, in their comments on art and politics, existence and corporeality, everyday life and its modes of existence and ecstasy. An analysis that dares this crossing involves all the varied accounts of existence, political as well as philosophical, and all the realms of poverty.

Jean-Luc Nancy (b. 1940) is one of France’s foremost living philosophers. His work spans several decades, from the 1970s through to the present day. Closely associated with Jacques Derrida, his close friend and major influence, Nancy’s key philosophical engagements are with the legacy of speculative idealism, Romanticism, and existential phenomenology, taking in key figures such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, Martin Heidegger, and, less explicitly perhaps, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. He also engages very closely with immediate predecessors and contemporaries such as Georges Bataille, Maurice Blanchot, Jacques Derrida, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

VG copy.

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

Premises: Essays on Philosophy from Kant to Celan
by Werner Hamacher

1999, English
Softcover, 406 pages, 21.6 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$25.00 - In stock -

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"Poetry does not impose, it exposes itself," wrote Paul Celan. Werner Hamacher's investigations into crucial texts of philosophical and literary modernity show that Celan's apothegm is also valid for the structure of understanding and for language in general. In Premises Hamacher demonstrates that the promise of a subject position is not only unavoidable—and thus operates as a structural imperative—but is also unattainable and therefore by necessity open to possibilities other than that defined as "position," to redefinitions and unexpected transformations of the merely theoretical act.

Proceeding along the lines of both philosophical argument and critical reading, Hamacher presents the fullest account of the vast disruption in the theories and ethics of positional and propositional acts—a disruption first exposed by Kant's analysis of the minimal requirements for linguistic and practical action. Focusing on the double trait of every premise—that it is promised but never attained—Hamacher analyzes nine decisive themes, topics, and texts of modernity: the hermeneutic circle in Schleiermacher and Heidegger, the structure of ethical commands in Kant, Nietzsche's genealogy of moral terms and his exploration of the aporias of singularity, the irony of reading in de Man, the parabasis of positing acts in Fichte and Schlegel, Kleist's disruption of narrative representation, the gesture of naming in Benjamin and Kafka, and the incisive caesura that Paul Celan inserts into temporal and linguistic reversals. There is no book that so fully brings the issues of both critical philosophy and critical literature into reach.

"Werner Hamacher's Premises is the heir and successor to the most important theoretical and critical work done in American departments of comparative literature from the 1960s through the 1980s. Yet, Premises is no more a work of literary scholarship than one of philosophical submission to philosophy. With the gesture that is genuinely called post-structural, which is the suspicion and suspension of every code, the book's act of freedom is freedom to read and write language tout court."—Timothy Bahti, University of Michigan

"Hamacher's project can be described as the retracing of the epistemological ground upon which the modern conception of the literary was erected. It is quite clear to me that there is nothing presently available to rival this book."—Wlad Godzich, University of Geneva

Werner Hamacher, who taught for many years at the Johns Hopkins University, is Professor of General and Comparative Literature at the Goethe-Universität, Frankfurt am Main. He is the author of pleroma—Reading in Hegel (Stanford, 1998).

File under: Werner Hamacher Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare Fiction / Poetry

On Representation
by Louis Marin

2002, English
Softcover, 464 pages, 23 x 15 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$35.00 - Out of stock

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At his death in 1992, the eminent philosopher, critic, and theorist Louis Marin left, in addition to a dozen influential books (including Sublime Poussin, Stanford, 1999), a corpus of some three hundred articles and essays published in journals and anthologies. A collection of twenty-two essays that appeared between 1971 and 1992, this book interrogates the theory and practice of representation as it is carried out by both linguistic and graphic signs, and thus the complex relation between language and image, between perception and conception.

The essays are grouped in four parts that reflect the continuity and coherence of Marin's interests in semiology, narrative, visuality, and painting. The interdisciplinary horizon of the book draws on multiple scholarly resources—the cultural history of the seventeenth century, the philosophy of language, the tools of discourse analysis, the history of art and aesthetics, the analysis of reception—to address a stunning diversity of subjects ranging from historical painting through cartography to the processes of deciphering texts, interpreting stories, and reading images.

Throughout the essays, Marin's reflection on representation is supported and deepened by his brilliant exegesis of graphic art. His analysis of works by Caravaggio, Philippe de Champaigne, Le Brun, and Poussin, among others, provides the armature that allows him to describe both the structural logic of representation and the intricate processes of production and reception that make it dynamic and unstable. Marin demonstrates with consummate rigor why the pursuit of a general theory of representation is experienced by artists and critics alike as an inevitable, yet unattainable objective.

Very Good copy, light wear.

File under: Caravaggio Nicolas Poussin Charles Le Brun Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Theory / Essay Art Painting Out-of-print / Rare Philosophy

Prosthesis
by David Wills

1995, English
Softcover, 370 pages, 15.6 x 22.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$65.00 - In stock -

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An examination of the presumed opposition between the natural human body and artificial inanimate objects.

"Many of you, many of us know [David Wills's] work and, like me, have admired it for a long time. It is work that I not only admire, but to which I owe a great deal. . . . [Prosthesis] is in my estimation a great book, a magnificent book."—Jacques Derrida

Prosthesis is a landmark work in posthuman thought that analyzes and explores the human body as a technology, seamlessly integrated (both physically and psychologically) with prosthetics. Here David Wills lays the groundwork for ideas he develops in two of his other books, Dorsality, exploring how technology functions behind or before the human, and Inanimation, giving perspective on what it means to be “alive.”

In Prosthesis, Wills promotes the idea that the human body is open to supplementation by artificial addenda that operate both internally or externally and engage it in an unceasing arbitration with the environment. Questioning the opposition between animate and inanimate along with the logic of the automatic prioritization of living flesh, Prosthesis undertakes these assumptions by studying thematics of artificiality through the writings of Freud, Derrida, William Gibson, Peter Greenaway, and others. In the twenty-five years since its first publication, Prosthesis has been a point of reference in the field of disability studies. It has also been recognized for its “prosthetic” writing, consisting of academic and autobiographical voices and styles that are artificially attached to one another.

Very Good—Near Fine copy.

File under: David Wills Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Theory / Essay Health Out-of-print / Rare Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language

Oedipus, Philosopher Jean-Joseph Goux Translated by Catherine Porter
by Jean-Joseph Goux

1994, English
Softcover, 246 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$20.00 - In stock -

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If the logic of the Oedipus myth were subjected to rigorous and thoroughgoing analysis with the tools of anthropology, comparative mythology, and narratology, might it invalidate the approach to the 'Oedipus complex' that Freud derived from his psychoanalytic experience? This book answers 'yes', arguing that instead of the Oedipus complex explaining the myth, the Oedipus myth explains the complex. The author argues that the Oedipus myth is an historical anomaly, a myth of failed royal investiture or of avoided masculine initiation. Does this mean that we must return to the wisdom of tradition and strike out twenty-five centuries of Oedipal history? The author knows very well that such a solution would be fantasy, and he concludes by speculating on how his analysis might contribute to a vision that has eluded Freudian psychoanalysis: how to surpass the Oedipus complex, with all the ethical consequences this would entail.

Near Fine, light wear.

File under: Jean-Joseph Goux Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Philosophy Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare Psychoanalysis Literary Theory / Semiotics / Language Renaissance / Neoclassicism / Romanticism

Resistances of Psychoanalysis
by Jacques Derrida

1998, English
Softcover, 132 pages, 22 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$35.00 - In stock -

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First 1998 edition.

In the three essays that make up this stimulating and often startling book, Jacques Derrida argues against the notion that the basic ideas of psychoanalysis have been thoroughly worked through, argued, and assimilated. The continuing interest in psychoanalysis is here examined in the various "resistances" to analysis—conceived not only as a phenomenon theorized at the heart of psychoanalysis, but as psychoanalysis's resistance to itself, an insusceptibility to analysis that has to do with the structure of analysis itself.

Derrida not only shows how the interest of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic writing can be renewed today, but these essays afford him the opportunity to revisit and reassess a subject he first confronted (in an essay on Freud) in 1966. They also serve to clarify Derrida's thinking about the subjects of the essays—Freud, Lacan, and Foucault—a thinking that, especially with regard to the last two, has been greatly distorted and misunderstood.

The first essay, on Freud, is a tour de force of close reading of Freud's texts as philosophical reflection. By means of the fine distinctions Derrida makes in this analytical reading, particularly of The Interpretation of Dreams, he opens up the realm of analysis into new and unpredictable forms—such as meeting with an interdiction (when taking an analysis further is "forbidden" by a structural limit).

Following the essay that might be dubbed Derrida's "return to Freud," the next is devoted to Lacan, the figure for whom that phrase was something of a slogan. In this essay and the next, on Foucault, Derrida reencounters two thinkers to whom he had earlier devoted important essays, which precipitated stormy discussions and numerous divisions within the intellectual milieus influenced by their writings. In this essay, which skillfully integrates the concept of resistance into larger questions, Derrida asks in effect: What is the origin and nature of the text that constitutes Lacanian psychoanalysis, considering its existence as an archive, as teachings, as seminars, transcripts, quotations, etc.?

Derrida's third essay may be called not simply a criticism but an appreciation of Foucault's work: an appreciation not only in the psychological and rhetorical sense, but also in the sense that it elevates Foucault's thought by giving back to it ranges and nuances lost through its reduction by his readers, his own texts, and its formulaic packaging.

Near Fine w. light lead pencil notation (erasable)

File under: Jacques Derrida Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Philosophy Theory / Essay Psychoanalysis Out-of-print / Rare

The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection
by Judith Butler

1998, English
Softcover, ‎ 232 pages, 21 x‎ 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$50.00 - In stock -

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First 1997 edition. Out-of-print.

As a form of power, subjection is paradoxical. To be dominated by a power external to oneself is a familiar and agonizing form power takes. To find, however, that what one is, one's very formation as a subject, is dependent upon that very power is quite another. If, following Foucault, we understand power as forming the subject as well, it provides the very condition of its existence and the trajectory of its desire. Power is not simply what we depend on for our existence but that which forms reflexivity as well. Drawing upon Hegel, Nietzsche, Freud, Foucault, and Althusser, this challenging and lucid work offers a theory of subject formation that illuminates as ambivalent the psychic effects of social power.

If we take Hegel and Nietzsche seriously, then the inner life of consciousness and, indeed, of conscience, not only is fabricated by power, but becomes one of the ways in which power is anchored in subjectivity. The author considers the way in which psychic life is generated by the social operation of power, and how that social operation of power is concealed and fortified by the psyche that it produces. Power is no longer understood to be internalized by an existing subject, but the subject is spawned as an ambivalent effect of power, one that is staged through the operation of conscience.

To claim that power fabricates the psyche is also to claim that there is a fictional and fabricated quality to the psyche. The figure of a psyche that turns against itself is crucial to this study, and offers an alternative to describing power as internalized. Although most readers of Foucault eschew psychoanalytic theory, and most thinkers of the psyche eschew Foucault, the author seeks to theorize this ambivalent relation between the social and the psychic as one of the most dynamic and difficult effects of power.

This work combines social theory, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in novel ways, offering a more sustained analysis of the theory of subject formation implicit in such other works of the author as Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex and Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.

Good copy with some light marginal notes in erasable pencil, light wear.

File under: Judith Butler Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Drugs / Psychedelia Feminism Philosophy Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare

The Burnout Society
by Byung-Chul Han

2015, English
Softcover, 72 pafes, 20.5 x 13 cm
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$29.00 - In stock -

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Our competitive, service-oriented societies are taking a toll on the late-modern individual. Rather than improving life, multitasking, "user-friendly" technology, and the culture of convenience are producing disorders that range from depression to attention deficit disorder to borderline personality disorder. Byung-Chul Han interprets the spreading malaise as an inability to manage negative experiences in an age characterized by excessive positivity and the universal availability of people and goods. Stress and exhaustion are not just personal experiences, but social and historical phenomena as well. Denouncing a world in which every against-the-grain response can lead to further disempowerment, he draws on literature, philosophy, and the social and natural sciences to explore the stakes of sacrificing intermittent intellectual reflection for constant neural connection.

File under: Byung-Chul Han Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Philosophy Sociology / Politics Theory / Essay

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

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

Borders, Exiles, Diasporas
Edited by Elazar Barkan and Marie-Denise Shelton

1998, English
Softcover, 360 pages, 15.3 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by Stanford University Press / Palo Alto

$25.00 - In stock -

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How do the concepts border, exile, and diaspora shape individual and group identities across cultures? Taking this question as a point of departure, this wide-ranging volume explores the ways that people create and represent a home away from home. Throughout, the authors emphasize the multiple subjectivities, cultural displacements, and identity politics that have characterized the postcolonial and post-World War II eras. They simultaneously affirm and challenge previous understandings of these three terms, and they investigate their malleability the extent to which they apply to diverse communities. Once the idea of diaspora is dissociated from the historical experiences of a particular group of people, it becomes a universal designation, applicable to all displaced groups. This understanding of diaspora also allows for the creation of a nonnormative intellectual community, one experienced by many contemporary critics and with which they identify. In the postcolonial context, a global middle voice emerges that incorporates the critic and his or her identity as the participant-observer of the discourses on identity.

As personal narratives transcend the autobiographical, they become indispensable guarantors of a free theoretical field, without a priori boundaries. The diaspora s voice is thus national and cultural, but it lacks the nation or the geographical definition that would constrain its subject.

This book has 18 papers including: writing Germanness after the holocauust: a Jewish hermaphrodite & cross Dresser in Wilhelmine Germany; central Europeans in Hollywood in the 1940s; African style in Los Angeles; coming of age in Zambesia: Artaud's itinerary through exile & insanity; poster art & transgressive citizenship in France 1968-1988.

Very Good copy. First edition 1998, out-of-print.

File under: Elazar Barkan Marie-Denise Shelton Stanford University Press / Palo Alto Theory / Essay Out-of-print / Rare Sociology / Politics