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:
OPEN 12—5 THU—FRI
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
Please note: The bookshop is closed until February 1, 2024.
Pick-up orders can be collected in our bookshop during opening hours after this date. Please collect any Pick-up orders within 3 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.
Return Policy
All sales are final. We do accept returns (for refund, 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.
2022, English
Hardcover, 284 pages, 22.9 × 30.5 cm
Published by
Gagosian / New York
$160.00 - In stock -
Poetic Practical is the first examination of Chris Burden’s unrealized work, featuring sixty-seven projects of varying scope and ambition that the artist was unable to complete during his lifetime. The book is divided into sections devoted to energy, systems, architecture, and power, and to Xanadu, a monumental unrealized installation of a cityscape.
This extensively illustrated publication includes 435 images, incorporating never-before-seen archival materials and newly commissioned photography of the artist’s studio and property. Burden’s work, whether realized or unrealized, was fundamentally driven by a speculative approach to artistic production, one that compelled him to interrogate the limits of his own body, social mores, institutional capabilities, and scientific forces. Above all, his art repeatedly sought to test the thresholds of presumed impossibility, making his unrealized works the ultimate example of such measures.
The book’s organizational structure illuminates recurring themes and relationships among seemingly unrelated artworks. An epilogue explores the contents of Burden’s last notebook, while “Anatomy of the Artist,” an essay by critic and scholar Donatien Grau, recounts the wider history of the unrealized projects. The publication also features a foreword by Yayoi Shionoiri, executive director of the Chris Burden Estate; an introduction by Burden scholar Sydney Stutterheim; and entries on each of the unrealized projects by book editors Stutterheim and Andie Trainer.
1994, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
John Wiley and Sons / London
$.00 - In stock -
Philosopher-general of the generation of May 1968, Louis Althusser was one of the most complex - and certainly the most controversial intellectuals - to emerge from Paris in the 1960s. His work remains a vital element in the still shifting map of contemporary philosophical and cultural critique. This volume, following the English-language publication of Althusser's autobiography, The Future Lasts a Long Time, assesses the enduring importance and influence of "Althusserianism", both in relation to, and far beyond, the controversies of his political career and the traumatic events of his personal biography. This book situates Althusser and his texts within the wider histories and cultures to which they belong, drawing on contributors from a wide range of backgrounds and geographical locations.
Contributors include E. J. Hobsbawn Pierre Vilar, Paul Ricoeur, Axel Honneth, Peter Dews, David Macey, Francis Mulhern and Gregory Elliott.
Very Good copy.
1989, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$40.00 - In stock -
Construction of the Aesthetic intends to recuperate the sphere of the aesthetic from the dialectic of existence: 'not to forget in dreams the present world, but to change it by the strength of an image.' Editorial Reviews Philosopher, sociologist, and musicologist, Adorno (1903-1969) published this as his first major work in 1933. By then he had been studying Kierkegaard for nearly 20 years and would continue to refer to the life and work of the 19th-century Dane throughout his own intellectual career. For Kierkegaard, the aesthetic is the first of three stages in one's interior development, and Adorno concerns himself with revealing the not-always-conscious course by which Kierkegaard came to this formulation. While of importance to scholars of existentialism, intellectual history, and Adorno, this book is not for lay readers.—Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley P.L., Cal.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903—1969) was a German philosopher, sociologist, psychologist, musicologist, and composer. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has come to be associated with thinkers such as Ernst Bloch, Walter Benjamin, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm, and Herbert Marcuse, for whom the works of Freud, Marx, and Hegel were essential to a critique of modern society. As a critic of both fascism and what he called the culture industry, his writings—such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), Minima Moralia (1951) and Negative Dialectics (1966)—strongly influenced the European New Left.
As New copy, first edition, 1989.
2002, English
Softcover, 760 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
Published by
University of California Press / Berkley
$60.00 - Out of stock
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969), one of the principal figures associated with the Frankfurt School, wrote extensively on culture, modernity, aesthetics, literature, and - more than any other subject - music. To this day, Adorno remains the single most influential contributor to the development of qualitative musical sociology which, together with his nuanced intertextual readings of musical works, gives him broad claim as a continuing force in the study of music. This long-awaited collection of twenty-seven essays represents the full range of Adorno's music writing. Nearly half of the essays appear in English for the first time; all of the essays are fully annotated; and, the previously translated essays have been corrected and missing text restored, making this volume the definitive resource on Adorno's musical thought.
1995, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Pluto Press / London-Sydney
$25.00 - In stock -
Louis Althusser is one of France's foremost intellectuals of the postwar period. Controversial and influential, his writings and reputation have extended beyond the boundaries of his own country to leave a lasting mark on the ideas of others. In turn, Althusser found inspiration in many of Lenin's ideas and, in the first significant study of this association, Majumdar offers an objective reevaluation of Althusser's overt espousal of Leninism during the two decades up to the end of the 1970s. Focusing specifically on Althusser's attempt to rehabilitate Lenin as an academically respectable philosopher, rather than as a politician, Majumdar takes the assessment forward to evaluate Lenin's legacy today. Althusser's neglect of the significant contribution Lenin made to political theory and his subsequent shift away from Leninism at the end of the 1970s are also examined.
Margaret A. Majumdar teaches French Political Thought at the University of Westminster and is a member of the University of Westminster Francophone Africa Research Centre. She co-edits the Bulletin of Francophone Africa and has written widely on politics and philosophy.
Very Good—Fine copy.
2014, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 13 x 19.7 cm
Published by
Verso / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Louis Althusser is remembered today as the scourge of humanist Marxism, but that was his later incarnation, an identity formed by years grappling with the intellectual inheritance of Hegel and Catholicism. The Spectre of Hegel collects the writings of the young Althusser, before his final epistemological break with the philosopher's work in 1953. The Spectre of Hegel gives a unique insight into Althusser's engagement with a philosophy he would later renounce.
1995, English
Softcover, 426 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$45.00 - In stock -
A classic work that situates linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences, formulating and developing the minimalist program.
In his foundational book, The Minimalist Program, published in 1995, Noam Chomsky offered a significant contribution to the generative tradition in linguistics.
In four essays, Chomsky attempts to situate linguistic theory in the broader cognitive sciences, with the essays formulating and progressively developing the minimalist approach to linguistic theory. Building on the theory of principles and parameters and, in particular, on principles of economy of derivation and representation, the minimalist framework takes Universal Grammar as providing a unique computational system, with derivations driven by morphological properties, to which the syntactic variation of languages is also restricted. Within this theoretical framework, linguistic expressions are generated by optimally efficient derivations that must satisfy the conditions that hold on interface levels, the only levels of linguistic representation. The interface levels provide instructions to two types of performance systems, articulatory-perceptual and conceptual-intentional. All syntactic conditions, then, express properties of these interface levels, reflecting the interpretive requirements of language and keeping to very restricted conceptual resources.
Very Good copy.
2008, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 376 pages, 14.4 x 22.7 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
Harvard University Press / Cambridge
$45.00 - In stock -
First hardcover edition, published in 2008 by Harvard.
"There is no world of thought that is not a world of language," Walter Benjamin remarked, "and one only sees in the world what is preconditioned by language." In this book, Samuel Weber, a leading theorist on literature and media, reveals a new and productive aspect of Benjamin's thought by focusing on a little-discussed stylistic trait in his formulation of concepts.
Weber's focus is the critical suffix "-ability" that Benjamin so tellingly deploys in his work. The "-ability" (-barkeit, in German) of concepts and literary forms traverses the whole of Benjamin's oeuvre, from "impartibility" and "criticizability" through the well-known formulations of "citability," "translatability," and, most famously, the "reproducibility" of "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Nouns formed with this suffix, Weber points out, refer to a possibility or potentiality, to a capacity rather than an existing reality. This insight allows for a consistent and enlightening reading of Benjamin's writings.
Weber first situates Benjamin's engagement with the "-ability" of various concepts in the context of his entire corpus and in relation to the philosophical tradition, from Kant to Derrida. Subsequent chapters deepen the implications of the use of this suffix in a wide variety of contexts, including Benjamin's Trauerspiel book, his relation to Carl Schmitt, and a reading of Wagner's Ring. The result is an illuminating perspective on Benjamin's thought by way of his language-and one of the most penetrating and comprehensive accounts of Benjamin's work ever written.
1994, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 15.5 x 23.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Indiana University Press / Indiana
$25.00 - Out of stock
In an eccentric reading of Freud through Laplanche and the Lacanian and feminist revisions, Teresa de Lauretis delineates a model of "perverse" desire and a theory of lesbian sexuality. The Practice of Love discusses classic psychoanalytic narratives of female homosexuality, contemporary feminist writings on female sexuality, and the evolution of the original fantasies into cultural myths or public fantasies.
" . . . a work that builds a substantial bridge between Freudian psychoanalysis and radical feminist thought, particularly on the subject of lesbianism. . . . Presenting a complex argument about an issue vital to the psychoanalytic endeavor as well as to feminist theory, The Practice of Love should stimulate a reconsideration of 'perversion' and the construction of sexual fantasy. The illumination of the fantasies that make lesbian desire distinctive will necessarily open up our understanding of all sexuality." -Jessica Benjamin, New York Times Book Review
"Teresa de Lauretis has entwined three books into one: a critical history of psychoanalytic theories of female homosexuality; a bold study of how lesbians keep disappearing from popular culture, especially film; and an original speculation on the dynamics of lesbian desire." -Elisabeth Young-Bruehl
"An important and original contribution not only to lesbian and gay studies, but also to psychoanalytic theory and film criticism. De Lauretis brings a unique and valuable perspective to issues of great importance today in all these areas." -Leo Bersani
"De Lauretis's influential theory gets top marks from sapphic scholars who know best." -Out
VG copy, first ed.
1990, English
Softcover, 450 pages, 15.4 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$35.00 - In stock -
First 1990 edition of this volume, translated by Frederick G. Lawrence
This critique of French philosophy and the history of German philosophy is a tour de force that has the immediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounter across national cultural boundaries as Habermas takes up the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French postmodernism.
The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity is a tour de force that has the immediacy and accessibility of the lecture form and the excitement of an encounter across, national cultural boundaries. Habermas takes up the challenge posed by the radical critique of reason in contemporary French poststructuralism. Tracing the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity, Habermas's strategy is to return to those historical crossroads at which Hegel and the Young Hegelians, Nietzsche and Heidegger made the fateful decisions that led to this outcome. His aim is to identify and clearly mark out a road indicated but not taken: the determinate negation of subject-centered reason through the concept of communicative rationality. As The Theory of Communicative Action served to place this concept within the history of social theory, these lectures locate it within the history of philosophy. Habermas examines the odyssey of the philosophical discourse of modernity from Hegel through the present and tests his own ideas about the appropriate form of a postmodern discourse through dialogs with a broad range of past and present critics and theorists. The lectures on Georges Bataille, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, and Cornelius Castoriadis are of particular note since they are the first fruits of the recent cross-fertilization between French and German thought. Habermas's dialogue with Foucault--begun in person as the first of these lectures were delivered in Paris in 1983 culminates here in two appreciative yet intensely argumentative lectures. His discussion of the literary-theoretical reception of Derrida in America--launched at Cornell in 1984--issues here in a long excursus on the genre distinction between philosophy and literature. The lectures were reworked for the final time in seminars at Boston College and first published in Germany in the fall of 1985.
Good copy with general light wear.
1994, English
Softcover, 261 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$20.00 - In stock -
First 1994 edition, long out-of-print. Translated by William Mark Hohengarten.
This collection of Habermas's recent essays on philosophical topics continues the analysis begun in The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. In a short introductory essay, he outlines the sources of twentieth-century philosophizing, its major themes, and the range of current debates. The remainder of the essays can be seen as his contribution to these debates.
Habermas's essay on George Herbert Mead is a focal point of the book. In it he sketches a postmetaphysical, intersubjective approach to questions of individuation and subjectivity. In other essays, he develops his distinctive, communications-theoretic approach to questions of meaning and validity. The book as a whole expands on his earlier efforts to define a middle ground between nostalgic revivals of metaphysical conceptions of reason and radical deconstructions of reason.
VG copy.
1992, English
Softcover, 300 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$20.00 - In stock -
First 1992 edition, long out-of-print.
These thirteen essays by noted philosophers and social theorists continue a timely celebration and examination of Jurgen Habermas's unfinished project of reconstructing enlightenment rationality. Focusing on the cultural and political aspects of Habermas's work, the essays take up critical theory and political practice, the sociology of political practice, historical-philosophical reflections on culture, moral development in childhood and society, and the foundations of critical social theory. Essays in a companion volume, Philosophical Interventions in the Unfinished Project of Enlightenment, look at the metaphysical aspects of Habermas's work. Together, the two volumes underscore the richness and variety of Habermas's project.
Contributors: Johann P. Amason, Andrew Arato, Seyla Benhabib, Hauke Brunkhorst, Cornelius Castoriadis, Jean Cohen, Helmut Dubiel, Klaus Eder, Gunter Frankenberg, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Axel Honneth, Johann Baptist Metz, Gertrud Nunner-Winkler, Claus Offe.
VG copy.
1992, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 15 x 22.6 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$20.00 - Out of stock
First 1992 edition, long out-of-print. Translated by Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen.
This long-awaited book sets out the implications of Habermas's theory of communicative action for moral theory. "Discourse ethics" attempts to reconstruct a moral point of view from which normative claims can be impartially judged. The theory of justice it develops replaces Kant's categorical imperative with a procedure of justification based on reasoned agreement among participants in practical discourse. Habermas connects communicative ethics to the theory of social action via an examination of research in the social psychology of moral and interpersonal development. He aims to show that our basic moral intuitions spring from something deeper and more universal than contingent features of our tradition, namely from normative presuppositions of social interaction that belong to the repertoire of competent agents in any society.
VG copy.
1994, English
Softcover, 242 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The MIT Press / Massachusetts
$20.00 - In stock -
First 1994 edition, long out-of-print.
The book juxtaposes key texts from Foucault and Habermas; it then adds a set of reactions and commentaries by theorists who have taken up the two alternative approaches to power and critique. The result is a guide for those seeking to understand and build on an unfinished debate between two of the 20th century's most important philosophers.
Which paradigm of critique--Foucault's or Habermas's--is philosophically and practically superior, especially with regard to the nature and role of power in contemporary society? In shaping this collection, Michael Kelly has sought to address this question in relation to the ethical, political, and social theory of the past two decades. Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas had only just begun to come to terms with one another's work when Foucault died in 1984; they had even discussed the possibility of a formal debate on Enlightenment in the neutral arena of the United States. In the decade since, Habermas and his supporters have continued to respond to Foucault in various ways, but Foucault's followers have not shown as strong an inclination to keep up his side of the dialogue. For this reason an invaluable exchange on the nature and limits of philosophy in the present age has never achieved its full potential. In this anthology Michael Kelly recasts the debate in a way that will open it up for further development. The book starts by juxtaposing key texts from the two philosophers; it then adds a set of reactions and commentaries by theorists who have taken up the two alternative approaches to power and critique. (Two of these essays were written especially for this volume.) The result is a guide for those seeking to understand and build on this important but unfinished debate.
Essays by: Michel Foucault, Jürgen Habermas, Axel Honneth, Nancy Fraser, Richard Bernstein, Thomas McCarthy, James Schmidt, Thomas E. Wartenberg, Gilles Deleuze, Jana Sawicki, Michael Kelly.
VG copy.
1986, English
Softcover, 253 pages, 13.8 x 21.6 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$55.00 - Out of stock
1986 edition, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
A revolutionary work in philosophy and a book about cinema that identifies three principal types of image-movement using examples from the work of a diverse group of filmmakers including Griffith, Eisenstein, Cassavetes, and Altman.
The appearance of Cinema 1 is an exciting event for film study and one that well deserves serious attention and commentary.—Film Quarterly
Fifth printing of this 1986 edition (c. 1997), out-of-print.
1989, English
Softcover, 352 pages, 13.8 x 21.6 cm
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$55.00 - Out of stock
1986 edition, translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam.
Brings to completion Deleuze’s work on the implications of the cinematographic image. In Cinema 2, Deleuze explains why, since World War II, time has come to dominate film. Among the filmmakers discussed are Rossellini, Fellini, Godard, Resnais, Pasolini, and many others.
Fifth printing of this 1986 edition (c. 1997), out-of-print.
1986, English / French
Softcover, 104 pages, 15.6 x 23.4 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Minnesota Press / Minnesota
$40.00 - Out of stock
1986 English edition of this classic of critical thought, in which Deleuze and Guattari challenge conventional interpretations of Kafka’s work. Instead of exploring preexisting categories or literary genres, they propose a concept of “minor literature”—the use of a major language that subverts it from within. Writing as a Jew in Prague, they contend, Kafka made German “take flight on a line of escape” and joyfully became a stranger within it. His work therefore serves as a model for understanding all critical language that must operate within the confines of the dominant language and culture.
In Kafka Deleuze and Guattari free their subject from his (mis)intrepreters. In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.
Text in English and original French.
2022, English
Hardcover, 320 pages, 25.4 x 26.7 cm
Published by
Anthology Editions / Brooklyn
$80.00 - Out of stock
If any one musical act of the rock and roll era can be said to have transcended the simple categorization of “band,” the Grateful Dead is it: by the time they stopped performing in 1995, the Dead had become an international institution with a vast backing organization, a massive and devoted fanbase, and archival recordings both official and bootlegged. The cultural significance of these bootlegs—live concert cassettes which solidified the Dead’s legendary status even as they occupied a legal gray area for decades—is utterly unique in the annals of music, and the story of their creation, trading, and endless proliferation is a people’s history unto itself. Featuring dozens of interviews with tape enthusiasts and members of the Grateful Dead organization as well as the show stopping visuals from hundreds of archival cassette covers, After All Is Said and Done is artist Mark A. Rodriguez’s exploration of that history, a saga of homegrown psychedelia, anarchic graphic styles, and black market fandom as written in magnetic tape.
Mark A. Rodriguez is an artist who divides his time between Los Angeles and New Mexico. He has drawn from and expanded on his experiences as a collector to develop a sculptural practice that explores themes of cultural ownership, folk art, and technological obsolescence. Since getting his start collecting Grateful Dead cassettes in the mid-90s, more than 27,000 tapes have passed through his hands.
1980, English
Softcover, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Panther / London
$28.00 - Out of stock
First 1980 Panther edition of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Eye of the Heron and Other Stories.
The Eye of the Heron (1978) is a science fiction novel set on the fictional planet of Victoria in a speculative future, probably sometime in the 22nd century, when the planet has been colonized for about a century and has no communication with Earth. The protagonist is a young woman called Luz but the story is told in the third person and the reader sees events from the point of view of several different characters. The Eye of the Heron was first published in the science fiction anthology Millennial Women.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American author of speculative fiction, realistic fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, librettos, essays, poetry, speeches, translations, literary critiques, chapbooks, and children's fiction. She was primarily known for her works of speculative fiction. These include works set in the fictional world of Earthsea, stories in the Hainish Cycle, and standalone novels and short stories. Though frequently referred to as an author of science fiction, critics have described her work as being difficult to classify.
Very Good copy.
2012, English
Softcover, 256 pages, 16 x 22 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Independent Curators / New York
$30.00 $20.00 - In stock -
First 2012 edition, out-of-print.
In these five essays, art historian and theorist Terry Smith surveys the international landscape of current thinking by curators; explores a number of exhibitions that show contemporaneity in recent, present and past art; describes the enormous growth world wide of exhibition infrastructure and the instability that haunts it; re-examines the contribution of artist-curators and questions the rise of curators utilizing artistic strategies; and, finally, assesses a number of key tendencies in curating as responses to contemporary conditions. Thinking Contemporary Curating is the first book to comprehensively chart the variety of practices of curating undertaken today, and to think through, systematically, what is distinctive about contemporary curatorial thought.
VG copy, light wear.
1978, English
2 Volumes, softcover, 158 + 138 pages, 18 x 11 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Panther / London
$65.00 - Out of stock
First 1978 Panther editions of Ursula K. Le Guin's The Wind's Twelve Quarters Vol. 1 and 2.
The Wind's Twelve Quarters is a collection of short stories by American writer Ursula K. Le Guin, named after a line from A. E. Housman's A Shropshire Lad and first published by Harper & Row in 1975. Described by Le Guin as a retrospective, it collects 17 previously published stories, four of which were the germ of novels she was to write later: "The Word of Unbinding" and "The Rule of Names" gave Le Guin the place that was to become Earthsea; "Semley's Necklace" was first published as "Dowry of the Angyar" in 1964 and then as the Prologue of the novel Rocannon's World in 1966; "Winter's King" is about the inhabitants of the planet Winter, as is Le Guin's later novel The Left Hand of Darkness. Most of the other stories are also connected to Le Guin's novels. The story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" won the Hugo Award in 1974, while "The Day Before the Revolution" won the Locus and Nebula Awards in 1975.
Very Good copies of both volumes. Complete together.
1992, English
Softcover, 208 pages, 11 x 18 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Puffin / UK
$25.00 - Out of stock
Tehanu: The Last Book of Earthsea is a fantasy novel by the American author Ursula K. Le Guin, first published in 1990. It is the fourth novel set in the fictional archipelago Earthsea, following almost twenty years after the Earthsea trilogy (1968–1972), and not the last, despite its subtitle. Tehanu continues the stories of Tenar, the heroine of the second book of the Earthsea series The Tombs of Atuan, and Ged, the hero of the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea. "It is a time of growing evil and the perversion of magic. Power hangs in the balance, and uncertainty and fear are widespread, as magi and king alike seek a woman of Gont to show them the way forward. Tenar, erstwhile Priestess of Atuan, cares for Therru, a young girl who has been abused."
Tehanu won the annual Nebula Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel.
Ursula K. Le Guin (1929–2018) was an American author of speculative fiction, realistic fiction, non-fiction, screenplays, librettos, essays, poetry, speeches, translations, literary critiques, chapbooks, and children's fiction. She was primarily known for her works of speculative fiction. These include works set in the fictional world of Earthsea, stories in the Hainish Cycle, and standalone novels and short stories. Though frequently referred to as an author of science fiction, critics have described her work as being difficult to classify.
Very Good copy.
2022, English
Softcover, 244 pages, 10.8 x 17.8 cm
First edition, edition of 160, numbered,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$35.00 - Out of stock
no more poetry presents one story a day, the the debut anthology by writer Genevieve Callaghan.
First edition, edition of 160, numbered.
"…Il était une fois… an Australian woman had an idea on the plane to France. The idea was quite simple - she would write one very short story every day, and post it on Instagram. Posting the stories online would keep her accountable to any potential followers, but handwriting the stories in her often illegible script would keep her from pandering to those followers - keep her storytelling pure. Honest. Her handwriting was like her speaking voice, or her language, or her mind - some people would understand it, some people wouldn’t. C’est la vie. Aside from the artistic and practical benefits the woman thought she might gain from embarking on the project, the deeper benefit (she hoped) would be a personal one."
“the woman” reflects on one story a day.
What we have been given by Genevieve Callaghan in one story a day is an unwavering mastery of time and craft. The book offers a generous mapping of the author’s spontaneity in speculation and narrative. What we receive is therefore not just a collection of stories, questions and ponderings, but an illuminating insight into the operation of ritual and persistence. We are given an inspiring perspective on the craft of craft itself; the honed, daily practice of observation and imagination.
Sure, a day presents us with a near endless expanse of possibilities, but these possibilities are often so tightly wound within the expectations of work, time, care and place that we fail to see or act in accordance to our infinite potential. Which is to say life gets in the way. But what Callaghan reminds us is of the limitlessness of poetry and art; the expansive opportunity and delight of our own minds and how we may use this to remind ourselves of our own and other’s immeasurable potential. Or perhaps how we may use writing or art to operate on our own grief, pain, confusion or indecision. The writing is therefore both grounding and inspiring, in her own words as Callaghan states in story 28 she is ‘humming something holy to remind us where we are’.
We follow the author in her survey of all things: unwavering grief, striking humour, bountiful love, paralysing normality, professional explorations of intimacy, musical perchance, unbridled joy, lengthy pain, spiritual mundanity, quiet indulgence, failing memory, potent magic, elongated heartbreak, blind risk, chaotic bus rides, uncontrollable loss, supreme silence, unexpected fantasy, and nothing… sometimes nothing at all. We follow the author as she explores the whirlwind navigation of life through the eyes of children, construction workers, jasmine vines, pigeons, lovers, diplomats, cities, spiders, monuments, nurses, jacaranda trees, oceans, and even the humble ponderings of a concrete block. Callaghan throws us briefly but surely between time and desire. Her writing is specific and generous, at once both simple and elaborate.
one story a day delicately strings together the disparate and unifying elements of human and non-human existence; the broad mechanics of life itself. Further, through tenderness, wit and striking nuance Callaghan so gently monitors and magnifies the delightful and alluring specificities that colour such existence. As she states in story 381 ‘I eyed the world, daring it to say one fucking thing.’
Callaghan states in story 167 ‘i realise that the same things can happen anywhere’. And so here in this book we are given a few things that happen in a few places to a few people, and what a glorious few it is. no more poetry are incredibly excited to publish what will be our 13th collection and one of the most enriching and unique books to date. We are extremely grateful to Genevieve for trusting our home to let it land in.
2022, English
Softcover, 148 pages, 14.5 x 20.4 cm
First edition, edition of 200, numbered,
Published by
no more poetry / Naarm
$35.00 - In stock -
no more poetry presents eternal delight paralysis, the second publication by poet daniel ward.
First edition, edition of 200, numbered
"…a book about days and pleasure. the dizzying inaction of life’s excess. it’s an interrogation on the balance of the circle time brings. they are mostly automatic poems. the book feels to be the beginning of a dialogue/catalogue of spirit, in as much as the poems enact a pantheism in their noticing of the body of/as earth. a long ode to witnessing the patterns we lay in avoidance of suffering. it examines a philosophy of patient indifference. and so much else i can’t say, because i’ve spent too long trying to say it. life as the grand poem."
daniel ward reflects on eternal delight paralysis.