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.
1995, English
Softcover, 414 pages, 23 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$40.00 - Out of stock
Appearing for the first time in an English translation, Introduction to Modernity is one of Henri Lefebvre's greatest works. Published in 1962, when Lefebvre was beginning his career as a lecturer in sociology at the University of Strasbourg, it established his position in the vanguard of a movement which was to culminate in the events of May 1968. It is a book which supersedes the conventional divisions between academic disciplines. With dazzling skill, Lefebvre moves from philosophy to sociology, from literature to history, to present a profound analysis of the social, political and cultural forces at work in France and the world in the aftermath of Stalin's death-an analysis in which the contours of our own "postmodernity" appear with startling clarity.
Lefebvre's lectures have become legendary, and something of his charismatic presence and delivery is captured in this book, which he intended "to be understood in the mind's ear ... and not simply to be read." With its mercurial shifts of tone, now intensely poetic, now conversational, it not only explores modernity, it exemplifies it. Equally experimental in conception is the book's remarkable structure, twelve "preludes" through which a range of recurrent themes are interwoven in free-form counterpoint: irony as a critical tool, utopianism, nature and culture, the Stalinization of Marxism, the alienation of everyday life, the cybernetic society ... What gradually emerges is not only a series of original concepts about humanity and culture, but an extraordinary invocation of the complexity of social contradictions.
Yet the fragmented structure of the book is not left to float free. Its shifting and eclectic melodies and leitmotifs have a solid ground basis: the wish to rehabilitate the Marxist dialectic as a method for understanding and transforming the modern world. This program is at the heart of the book, and gives it its underlying coherence, making Introduction to Modernity not only essential reading for all students of European cultural history, but also a key text for Marxism in the post-communist world of the late twentieth century.
Very Good copy, general light wear.
1991, English
Softcover, 464 pages, 22.8 x 15.1 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Blackwell / Cambridge
$40.00 - Out of stock
Henri Lefebvre has considerable claims to be the greatest living philosopher. His work spans some sixty years and includes original work on a diverse range of subjects, from dialectical materialism to architecture, urbanism and the experience of everyday life.
The Production of Space is his major philosophical work and its translation has been long awaited by scholars in many different fields. The book is a search for a reconciliation between mental space (the space of the philosophers) and real space (the physical and social spheres in which we all live).
In the course of his exploration, Henri Lefebvre moves from metaphysical and ideological considerations of the meaning of space to its experience in the everyday life of home and city. He seeks, in other words, to bridge the gap between the realms of theory and practice, between the mental and the social, and between philosophy and reality. In doing so, he ranges through art, literature, architecture and economics, and further provides a powerful antidote to the sterile and obfuscatory methods and theories characteristic of much recent continental philosophy.
This is a work of great vision and incisiveness. It is also characterized by its author's wit and by anecdote, as well as by a deftness of style which Donald Nicholson-Smith's sensitive translation precisely captures.
Very Good copy some light cover wear.
2006, English
Softcover, 128 pages, 21.5 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Power Publications / Sydney
$60.00 - In stock -
At his two Sydney seminars of August 1999, Jacques Derrida presented some of the principal themes of his work to non-specialist audiences. His willingness to engage with both interlocutors and the audience ensured an exciting demonstration of the subtlety and flexibility of deconstructive thinking in action. This volume presents the edited transcripts of those sessions, and provides a clear, systematic, and highly accessible introduction to many central concerns of Derrida's engagement with philosophy, visual art, and politics.
Paul Patton is a professor of philosophy at the University of New South Wales. Terry Smith is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Contemporary Art History and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh.
Fine copy of the first edition of this out-of-print title.
1987, English
Softcover, 144 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Nebraska Press / Lincoln
$38.00 - Out of stock
First English 1987 paperback edition. Translated by John P. Leavey
In 1746 the French philosopher Condillac published his Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge , one of many attempts during the century to determine how we organize and validate ideas as knowledge. In investigating language, especially written language, he found not only the seriousness he sought but also a great deal of frivolity whose relation to the sober business of philosophy had to be addressed somehow. If the mind truly reflects the world, and language reflects the mind, why is there so much error and nonsense? Whence the distortions? How can they be remedied? In The Archeology of the Frivolous , Jacques Derrida recoups Condillac's enterprise, showing how it anticipated--consciously or not--many of the issues that have since stymied epistemology and linguistic philosophy. If anyone doubts that deconstruction can be a powerful analytic method, try this.
Very Good.
1982, English
Softcover, 112 pages, 20.5 x 13.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$38.00 - Out of stock
First English paperback edition from 1982. Positions is a collection of three interviews with Jacques Derrida that illuminate and make more accessible the complex concepts and terms treated extensively in such works as Writing and Difference and Dissemination. Derrida takes positions on his detractors, his supporters, and the two major preoccupations of French intellectual life, Marxism and psychoanalysis.
The interviews included in this volume offer a multifaceted view of Derrida. “Implications: Interview with Henri Ronse” contains a succinct statement of principles. “Seminology and Grammatology: Interview with Julia Kristeva” provides important clarifications of the role played by linguistics in Derrida’s work. “Positions: Interview with Jean-Louis Houdebine and Guy Scarpetta” is a wide-ranging discussion that touches on many of the polemics that Derrida’s work has provoked.
Translated and annotated by Alan Bass.
Alan Bass, whose translation of Writing and Difference was highly praised for its clarity, accuracy, and readability, has provided extremely useful critical notes, full of vital information, including historical background.
Very Good.
1994, English
Softcover, 182 pages, 15.2 x 22.8 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$35.00 - Out of stock
First English language edition of Given Time: 1. Counterfeit Money, by Jacques Derrida, translated by Peggy Kamuf and published by University of Chicago Press in 1994.
Is "giving" possible? Is it possible to give without immediately entering into a circle of exchange that turns the gift into a debt to be returned? This question leads Jacques Derrida to make out an irresolvable paradox at what seems the most fundamental level of the gift's meaning: for the gift to be received as a gift, it must not appear as such, since its mere appearance as gift puts it in the cycle of repayment and debt.
Derrida reads the relation of time to gift through a number of texts: Heidegger's "Time and Being, " Mauss's "The Gift, " as well as essays by Benveniste and Levi-Strauss that assume Mauss's legacy. It is, however, a short tale by Baudelaire, "Counterfeit Money, " that guides Derrida's analyses throughout. At stake in his reading of the tale, to which the second half of this book is devoted, are the conditions of gift and forgiveness as essentially bound up with the movement of dissemination, a concept that Derrida has been working out for many years.
For both readers of Baudelaire and students of literary theory, this work will prove indispensable.
Fine copy.
1973, English
Hardcover, 166 pages, 23.5 x 15.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Northwestern University Press / Evanston
$45.00 - Out of stock
First hardcover 1973 edition of Derrida's Speech and Phenomena : And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of Signs, published by Northwestern University.
In Speech and Phenomena, Jacques Derrida situates the philosophy of language in relation to logic and rhetoric, which have often been seen as irreconcilable criteria for the use and interpretation of signs. His critique of Husserl attacks the position that language is founded on logic rather than on rhetoric; instead, he claims, meaningful language is limited to expression because expression alone conveys sense.
Clothbound hardcover in Good —Very Good condition with tanning to covers, interior perfectly preserved. No dust jacket.
1996, English
Hardcover (w. dust jacket), 124 pages, 215 x 14 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
University of Chicago Press / Chicago
$45.00 - In stock -
First 1995 University of Chicago Press hardcover edition of "The Gift of Death", Jacques Derrida's most sustained consideration of religion to date. While continuing to explore questions introduced in "Given Time" such as the possibility, or impossibility, of giving and the economic and anthropological nature of gifts, Derrida turns to the notion of "responsibility" and the ultimate gifts of life and death.
Derrida divides the book into four parts, which deal respectively with the development of the notion of responsibility in the Platonic and Christian traditions; the relation between sacrifice and mortality; the contemporary meaning of the story of Abraham and Isaac; and the relation between religious ideology and economic rationality, explicitly linking this book with "Given Time." The texts under discussion include the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, as well as writings from Patocka, Heidegger, Levinas, and Kierkegaard (whom he addresses here for the first time in print.)
Derrida's main concern is with the meaning of moral and ethical responsibility in Western religion and philosophy. He questions the limits of the rational and the responsible that one reaches in granting or accepting death, whether by sacrifice, murder, execution, or suicide. Beginning with a discussion of Patocka's "Heretical Essays on the History of Philosophy," Derrida develops Patocka's ideas concerning the sacred and responsibility through comparisons with the works of Heidegger, Levinas, and, finally, Kierkegaard. Derrida's treatment of Kierkegaard makes clear that the two philosophers share some of the same concerns. He then undertakes a careful reading of Kierkegaard's "Fear and Trembling," comparing and contrasting his own conception of responsibility with that of Kierkegaard, and extending and deepening his recent accounts of the gift and sacrifice. For Derrida, the very possibility of sacrifice, especially the ultimate sacrifice of one's own life for the sake of another, comes into question.
This work resonates with much of Derrida's earlier writing and will be of interest to scholars in anthropology, philosophy, and, of course, literary criticism. In addition, given the emphasis on the work of Kierkegaard and on the role of religion in our thinking, it will be of particular interest to a new readership among scholars of ethics and religion.
1989, English
Softcover, 205 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / as new
Published by
University of Nebraska Press / Lincoln
$35.00 - In stock -
Edmund Husserl's Origin of Geometry": An Introduction (1962) is Jacques Derrida's earliest published work. In this commentary-interpretation of the famous appendix to Husserl's The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Derrida relates writing to such key concepts as differing, consciousness, presence, and historicity. Starting from Husserl's method of historical investigation, Derrida gradually unravels a deconstructive critique of phenomenology itself, which forms the foundation for his later criticism of Western metaphysics as a metaphysics of presence. The complete text of Husserl's Origin of Geometry is included.
Translated by John P. Leavey
1999, English
Softcover, 192 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Johns Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$25.00 - In stock -
In this volume, Fenves expands the context of Jacques Derrida's work on voice and tonality by presenting English translations of two of Kant's important late essays, "On a Newly Arisen Superior Tone in Philosophy" and "Announcement of a Near Conclusion of a Treaty for Eternal Peace in Philosophy". The book also includes a revised translation, by John Leavey, of Derrida's "On a Newly Arisen Apocalyptic Tone in Philosophy" which rewrites and reorients Kant's essays. Observing that Derrida continues the speculation Kant begins, Fenves proposes that these essays reveal tonality and the "end" of philosophy to be perennial compulsions.
Very Good copy of first 1999 paperback edition.
1992, English
Softcover, 608 page, 20 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Minerva / London
$25.00 - Out of stock
Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer were written between 1912 and 1917, during which time they were twice engaged to be married. This complex relationship, which coincided with a period of great productivity for Kafka, gave him both hope and strength, but gradually disillusionment and the onset of illness drove them apart. These letters remain as a monument to the inner life of a unique creative artist.
"Letters to Felice, written without the faintest idea that they would be published, read like a well-constructed novel—a somewhat harrowing one"—Anthony Powell
Good copy of scarcer Minerva edition from 1992.
1980, English / Hebrew
Hardcover, 86 pages, 24 x 22 cm
1st UK Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
The Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora / Tel-Aviv
$35.00 - Out of stock
Scarce first hardcover edition of the catalogue "Kafka—Prague", published on the occasion of the exhibition at the Beth Hatefutsoth, The Nahum Goldmann Museum of the Jewish Diaspora, Tel-Aviv, in 1980. The "Kafka-Prague" exhibition is the first of its kind at Beth Hatefutsoth. It tells the story of an exceptional writer who made an unforgettable contribution to world literature. Kafka's story is recounted against the background of his birthplace —the city of Prague — a meeting point for eastern and western cultures. This is a city where ancient Jewish communities flourished in a ferment of intellectual achievement; a city that produced Jewish thinkers and creators who made an indelible impression on the twentieth century. This exhibition was prepared and compiled for Beth Hatefutsoth by the photographer, Jan Parik. it comprises documentary material on the life of Franz Kafka, collected from various sources by Parik, as well as exceptional photographs of Prague which he took himself. Parik's camera captures the landscape that surrounded Kafka, and offers the visitor a glimpse of the unique atmosphere of Prague through its churches and towers, bridges and alleys, as well as through the endless corridors of the office buildings. All texts in both English and Hebrew.
Very Good copy.
1966, English
Softcover, 252 pages, 20.5 x 13 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Cambridge University Press / Cambridge
$20.00 - In stock -
First 1966 softcover edition of Kant's Analytic by New Zealand born philosopher Jonathan Bennett.
"This book is a critical exposition and evaluation of the ideas contained in the first half of Kant's "Critique of Pure Reason". The author believes that we understand Kant only in proportion as we can say, clearly and in contemporary terms, what his problems were, which of them are still problems and what contribution Kant makes to their solution. Many commentaries and expositions of Kant's philosophy adopt a rigidly anti- or pro-Kantian approach, which make it difficult for the student to command a clear view of his theories. Mr Bennett tries to avoid partisan disputes and to present an unbiased assessment of !Cant based on modern analytical technique. Kant's Analytic, though intended primarily as an 'introduction' for students who have read little by or about Kant, also seeks to recon-struct, assess and criticise his work, and devotes much space to independent discussion of philosophical issues."
"And so Bennett does argue, continuously, fiercely, and fruitfully; and summons to join in the argument, at appropriate moments, those older contemporaries, Locke, Leibniz, Berkeley, and Hume, and those younger contemporaries, Wittgenstein, Ryle, Ayler, Quine, Quinton, Warnock, and others. This is splendid, and a necessary corrective to that extraordinary isolation in which Kant tends to be islanded, partly indeed, by his own unique qualities, but partly by oceans of the wrong kind of respect. Bennett, continuously engaging his great antagonist, shows the right kind."
Jonathan Bennett (b. 1930) is a New Zealand born philosopher of language and metaphysics, specialist of Kant's philosophy and a historian of early modern philosophy.
Good copy with general wear/marking/age.
1995, English
Softcover, 338 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
University of New York Press / Albany
$45.00 - Out of stock
This book examines the significance of Bataille's contributions to various areas of investigation: philosophical inquiry in the broadest sense; economic theory relative to waste, expenditure, and the heterogeneous; the political commitment expected of the intellectual and his relationship to the whole man; the experience of a subject at its limits, in moments of alterity, or of inscription within the literary text.
Contributors include Robert Sasso, Lionel Abel, Denis Hollier, Tony Corn, Rodolphe Gasché, Pierre Klossowski, Jean Piel, Arkady Plotnitsky, Jean Borreil, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Louis Baudry, Paul Smith, Michael Halley, Mikhal Popowski, and Susan Rubin Suleiman.
First 1995 edition, Very Good copy.
1985, English
Softcover, 272 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$25.00 - In stock -
Yale French Studies, Number 68, 1985, dedicated entirely to texts on French philosopher, novelist, political activist and existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905—1980), edited by Fredric Jameson.
"Five years after Jean-Paul Sartre's death it is possible to begin the reinterpretation and reevaluation of his work. This means reopening the question of his stature in French intellectual history as, in Fredric Jameson's phrase, 'the Victor Hugo of philosophy'—a role denied him by the generation that followed him. Professor Jameson has assembled eleven stimulating essays and has arranged for the first-time publication of extracts from Sartre's notes for the unwritten fourth volume of The Family Idiot. He has also contributed a provocative and forthright introduction."
Good copy.
1990, English
Softcover, 270 pages, 23.5 x 16 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / good
Published by
Yale University Press / New Haven
$45.00 - Out of stock
Yale French Studies, Number 78, 1990, dedicated entirely to texts on the work of French philosopher Georges Bataille (1897—1962), edited by Allan Stoekl.
"During his lifetime Bataille was known mainly as the editor of Critique and as an author of erotic novels. Since his death nearly thirty years ago, however, he has become known as a major theorist in his own right. The articles in this issue of Yale French Studies discuss and rewrite Bataille's philosophy, interrogate his concepts, politics, economics, and esthetics, and attempt to revise the past and the future on the basis of his text."
Good copy.
2023, English
Softcover, 304 pages, 20 x 23 cm
Published by
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts / San Francisco
Inventory Press / New York
$80.00 - In stock -
Artists from Francis Alys to the Otolith Group meditate on the aesthetic and political possibilities of “the percussive”
Accompanying the 2022 exhibition at Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts in San Francisco, 'Drum Listens to Heart' reflects on the many ways that percussion exists beyond the framework of music and imagines 'the percussive' as an aesthetic, expressive and political form more broadly. The publication includes a new essay by the curator, images of the works in the exhibition by the 25 artists and artist collectives, and short texts by 10 scholars, writers, artists and curators.
Artists include: Francis Alÿs, Luke Anguhadluq, Marcos Ávila Forero, Raven Chacon, Em’kal Eyongakpa, Theaster Gates, Milford Graves, David Hammons, Consuelo Tupper Hernández, Susan Howe & David Grubbs, NIC Kay, Barry Le Va, Rose Lowder, Lee Lozano, Guadalupe Maravilla, Harold Mendez, Rie Nakajima, the Otolith Group, Lucy Raven, Davina Semo, Michael E. Smith, Haegue Yang and David Zink Yi. Live performances by Elysia Crampton Chuquimia, Moor Mother, Nkisi, Nomon, Karen Stackpole, Marshall Trammell and William Winant.
Edited with text by Anthony Huberman. Text by Diego Villalobos, Geeta Dayal, Natasha Ginwala, Lê Quan Ninh, Hannah Black, Anthony Elms, Hamza Walker, Hypatia Vourloumis, JJJJJerome Ellis, Will Holder, Sofia Lemos.
2023, English
Softcover, 176 pages, 19 x 25.4 cm
Published by
Inventory Press / New York
$90.00 - In stock -
Milford Graves (1941–2021) was a revelatory force in music beginning in the mid-1960s, liberating the drummer from the role of time-keeper to instrumental improviser. A pivotal figure in the free jazz movement, he created groundbreaking work with Albert Ayler, the New York Art Quartet, Min Tanaka, and John Zorn, and led the way in artistic self-production. But his kaleidoscopic genius was not bound by music, and it led him to develop an oeuvre unprecedented in its breadth—from healing arts to botany, cardiac research to martial arts.
This fully illustrated catalogue includes documentation from the exhibition A Mind-Body Deal, including hand-painted album covers and posters, idiosyncratic drum sets, recording ephemera, multimedia sculptures, photographs, costumes, and artifacts from his scientific studies. This first-ever overview of Graves as a creative polymath attempts to unlock his unique habitat by gathering his intricate, multifaceted work and exploring the practices and predilections of this extraordinary jazz mind.
Edited by Anthony Elms, Celeste DiNucci, and Mark Christman
Co-Published by Inventory Press and Ars Nova Workshop
2022, English / French
Softcover, 128 pages, 11.8 x 19 cm
Published by
Diaphanes / Zürich
$32.00 - In stock -
Translated by Clayton Eshleman
With an Introduction by Richard Hawkins
The first comprehensive collection in English of Antonin Artaud’s writings on his artworks.
The many major exhibitions of Antonin Artaud’s drawings and drawn notebook pages in recent years—at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst, and Paris’s Centre Georges Pompidou—have entirely transformed our perception of his work, reorienting it toward the artworks of his final years. This volume collects all three of Artaud’s major writings on his artworks. “The Human Face” (1947) was written as the catalog text for Artaud’s only gallery exhibition of his drawings during his lifetime, focusing on his approach to making portraits of his friends at the decrepit pavilion in the Paris suburbs where he spent the final year of his life. “Ten years that language is gone” (1947) examines the drawings Artaud made in his notebooks—his main creative medium at the end of his life—and their capacity to electrify his creativity when language failed him. “50 Drawings to assassinate magic” (1948), the residue of an abandoned book of Artaud’s drawings, approaches the act of drawing as part of the weaponry deployed by Artaud at the very end of his life to combat malevolent assaults and attempted acts of assassination. Together, these three extraordinary texts—pitched between writing and image—project Artaud’s ferocious engagement with the act of drawing.
French dramatist, poet, essayist, actor, and theater director Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) is one of the seminal figures of twentieth century writing, art and sound experimentation, known especially for his work with the Surrealist movement, his performance theories, his asylum incarcerations, and his artworks which have been exhibited in major exhibitions, at New York's MoMA and many other art-museums.
1984, English
Softcover, 232 pages, 23 x 15 cm
Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Johns Hopkins University Press / Baltimore
$20.00 - Out of stock
Published in 1984, Lacan and Narration : The Psychoanalytic Difference in Narrative Theory, edited by Robert Con Davis, invites nine distinguished scholars to assess the influence of French psychoanalyst
Jacques Lacan on literary theory. From various perspectives, they pursue the implications for narrative theory of Lacanian reading and attempt to position Lacan's thinking in the context of current discussions of narration and narratology.
Very Good, some light cover creasing, interior like new.
1987, English
Softcover, 200 pages, 15.2 x 22.9 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Cornell University Press / New York
$25.00 - Out of stock
The influence of the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan has extended into nearly every field of the humanities and social sciences-from literature and film studies to anthropology and social work. yet Lacan's major text, Ecrits, continues to perplex and even baffle its readers. In Reading Lacan, Jane Gallop offers a novel approach to Lacan's work based on his own theories of language.
Lacan locates truth in the letter rather than in the spirit-in the ways statements are expressed rather than in their intended meaning. Gallop here grapples with six of Lacan's essays from Ecrits: "The Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter,' " "The Mirror Stage," "The Freudian Thing,'' "The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious,'' "The Signification of the Phallus," and "The Subversion of the Subject." While other commentators have chosen not to confront Lacan's notoriously problematic style in their discussions of his ideas, Gallop addresses herself directly to the problem and the practice of reading Lacan. She takes her direction from Lacan's view of subjectivity and offers a deeply personal, feminist reading of Ecrits. Concentrating on the relation of desire and interpretation, she opens up the rich implications of Lacan's thought, for psychoanalytic theory, for the act of reading, and for knowledge itself.
Forceful and revealing, yet utterly candid about its own areas of uncertainty, Gallop's book will be indispensable to readers of Lacan and to scholars and students who have felt his impact.
Very Good copy of the 1987 edition, 2nd 1988 prinitng.
1988, English
Softcover, 335 pages, 12.7 x 20.3 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / very good
Published by
Verso / London
$45.00 - Out of stock
In the most comprehensive study of Jacques Lacan yet to be published in English, David Macey challenges many of the assumptions that have come to surround Lacan's work. He shows that key elements of Lacanian thought relate not to structuralism, as is often claimed, but to surrealism, Bataille and the early French phenomenologists. The famous "return to Freud" is shown to mask Lacan's adherence to a psychiatric tradition and to trends within French psychoanalysis which were opposed by Freud himself.
A detailed and challenging reading of work by Lacan and his associates on femininity reveals its reliance upon a virulently sexist discourse and upon an iconography derived from surrealism. The view that Lacanian psychoanalysis has a positive contribution to make to feminism and to theories of gender and sexual difference is contested. As well as providing a new and provocative reading of Lacan's work, Lacan in Contexts is an important contribution to psychoanalytic history and to the history of French intellectual life.
Very Good copy of the first 1988 edition.
1999, English
Softcover, 464 pages, 14.8 x 16.5 cm
1st Edition, Out of print title / used / fine
Published by
Harvard University Press / Cambridge
$40.00 - In stock -
Are the "culture wars" over? When did they begin? What is their relationship to gender struggle and the dynamics of class? In her first full treatment of postcolonial studies, a field that she helped define, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, one of the world's foremost literary theorists, poses these questions from within the postcolonial enclave.
"We cannot merely continue to act out the part of Caliban," Spivak writes; and her book is an attempt to understand and describe a more responsible role for the postcolonial critic. A Critique of Postcolonial Reason tracks the figure of the "native informant" through various cultural practices-philosophy, history, literature-to suggest that it emerges as the metropolitan hybrid. The book addresses feminists, philosophers, critics, and interventionist intellectuals, as they unite and divide. It ranges from Kant's analytic of the sublime to child labor in Bangladesh. Throughout, the notion of a Third World interloper as the pure victim of a colonialist oppressor emerges as sharply suspect: the mud we sling at certain seemingly overbearing ancestors such as Marx and Kant may be the very ground we stand on.
A major critical work, Spivak's book redefines and repositions the postcolonial critic, leading her through transnational cultural studies into considerations of globality.
Very Good copy.
2021, English
Softcover, 328 pages, 30 x 24 cm
Published by
Hatje Cantz / Berlin
$98.00 - In stock -
The title seems to announce a comprehensive encyclopedia: from A to Z, each and every object or material has the potential to become an element in one of Alexandra Bircken's (b. 1967) charged objects and installations. Whether it's packaging materials, machine parts, or bones, everything finds a use-the organic as well as the inorganic, raw materials and industrially produced goods. The constant reference point in her artistic explorations is the human body and its contradictory relationship to the environment, as defenselessly at its mercy as it is dependent on it. This catalogue is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of Bircken's sculptural practice from all creative periods, which here enter into a dialogue that explores the artist's multi-layered statements on surface, body, movement, shell, and skin.
Edited with text by Monika Bayer-Wermuth. Text by Marie-Luise Angerer, Kirsty Bell, Hans-Christian Dany, Sebastian Hackenschmidt, T'ai Smith.