Classic study of Jewish libertarian thought, from Walter Benjamin to Franz Kafka Towards the end of the nineteenth century, there appeared in Central Europe a generation of Jewish intellectuals whose work was to mark modern culture. Drawing at once on the traditions of German Romanticism and Jewish messianism, their thought was organized around the cabalistic idea of the ‘tikkoun’: redemption. Redemption and Utopia uses the concept of ‘elective affinity’ to explain the surprising community of spirit that existed between redemptive messianic religious thought and the wide variety of radical secular utopian beliefs held by this important group of intellectuals. The author outlines the circumstances that produced this unusual combination of religious and non-religious thought and illuminates the common assumptions that united such seemingly disparate figures as Martin Buber, Kafka, Walter Benjamin and Georg Lukács.
A journey through twentieth-century philosophy with the titan of French thought. Pocket Pantheon is an invitation to engage with the greats of postwar Western thought, such as Lacan, Sartre and Foucault, in the company of one of today's leading political and philosophical minds. Alain Badiou draws on his encounters with this pantheon – his teachers, opponents and allies – to offer unique insights into both the authors and their work. These studies form an accessible, authoritative distillation of continental theory and a capsule history of a period in Western thought.
Acclaimed author follows the work of the Situationist International after May 1968. Following his acclaimed history of the Situationist International up until the late sixties, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark returns with a companion volume which puts the late work of the Situationists in a broader and deeper context, charting their contemporary relevance and their deep critique of modernity. Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the disintegrating spectacle. The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, René Vienet’s earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sangunetti’s pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice-Becker Ho’s account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord’s late films and his surprising work as a game designer. At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to arms in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century, and plots an exit from the twenty first.
The renowned philosopher finds a utopian future in worldwide protests. Call it the year of dreaming dangerously: 2011 caught the world off guard with a series of shattering events. While protesters in New York, Cairo, London, and Athens took to the streets in pursuit of emancipation, obscure destructive fantasies inspired the world’s racist populists in places as far apart as Hungary and Arizona, achieving a horrific consummation in the actions of mass murderer Anders Breivik. The subterranean work of dissatisfaction continues. Rage is building, and a new wave of revolts and disturbances will follow. Why? Because the events of 2011 augur a new political reality. These are limited, distorted—sometimes even perverted—fragments of a utopian future lying dormant in the present.
Rethinking the role of the radical public intellectual. Following the previous volume of essays by Jacques Rancière from the 1970s, Staging the People: The Proletarian and His Double , this second collection focuses on the ways in which radical philosophers understand the people they profess to speak for. The Intellectual and His People engages in an incisive and original way with current political and cultural issues, including the “discovery” of totalitarianism by the “new philosophers,” the relationship of Sartre and Foucault to popular struggles, nostalgia for the ebbing world of the factory, the slippage of the artistic avant-garde into defending corporate privilege, and the ambiguous sociological critique of Pierre Bourdieu. As ever, Rancière challenges all patterns of thought in which one-time radicalism has become empty convention.
Imperiled Life theorizes an exit from the potentially terminal consequences of capital-induced climate change. It is a collection of reflections on the phenomenon of catastrophe—climatological, political, social—as well as on the possibilities of overcoming disaster. Javier Sethness-Castro presents the grim news from contemporary climatologists while providing a reconstructive vision inspired by anarchist intellectual traditions and promoting critical thought as a means of changing our historical trajectory. Javier Sethness-Castro is a libertarian socialist and a rights advocate. Imperiled Life is his first book.
David Hume is traditionally seen as a devastating critic of religion. He is widely read as an infidel, a critic of the Christian faith, and an attacker of popular forms of worship. His reputation as irreligious is well forged among his readers, and his argument against miracles sits at the heart of the narrative overview of his work that perennially indoctrinates thousands of first-year philosophy students. In Toward a Humean True Religion , Andre Willis succeeds in complicating Hume’s split approach to religion, showing that Hume was not, in fact, dogmatically against religion in all times and places. Hume occupied a “watershed moment,” Willis contends, when old ideas of religion were being replaced by the modern idea of religion as a set of epistemically true but speculative claims. Thus, Willis repositions the relative weight of Hume’s antireligious sentiment, giving significance to the role of both historical and discursive forces instead of simply relying on Hume’s personal animus as its driving force. Willis muses about what a Humean “true religion” might look like and suggests that we think of this as a third way between the classical and modern notions of religion. He argues that the cumulative achievements of Hume’s mild philosophic theism, the aim of his moral rationalism, and the conclusion of his project on the passions provide the best content for this “true religion.”
It seems to me that there is something Mysterious about Art. The History of Art is closely connected with Philosophical Ideas of the time. In this book we are going to scrutinize the way in which Philosophical Ideas have been expressed in Art from Antiquity to the Present Day. We are going to visit a lot of cities – Rome, Florence, Munich, Barcelona, Berlin, Riga, Tallin, Prague, Helsinki, Stokholm, Saint Petersburg… That is to say, we are going to Travel throughout the Whole History of Humanity and I hope that at the end of our Journey we will know more not only about Art, but also about ourselves.
Мозг – это невероятный прибор, с помощью которого можно делать практически что угодно, но большинство людей и не подозревают об этом. Благодаря же «чертогам разума» человек получает мощный инструмент работы с собственным сознанием, направленный на улучшение умственных и даже физических показателей. Посредством создания и использования некого метального пространства, человек получает ощутимое превосходство над другими людьми и в буквальном смысле становится способен перевернуть горы.