SEAGULL BOOKS

(H/B) HOELDERLIN'S MADNESS
One of Europe's greatest living philosophers, Giorgio Agamben, analyzes the life and work of one of Europe's greatest poets, Friedrich Holderlin. What does it mean to inhabit a place or a self? What is a habit? And, for human beings, doesn't living mean-first and foremost-inhabiting? Pairing a detailed chronology of German poet Friedrich Holderlin's years of purported madness with a new examination of texts often considered unreadable, Giorgio Agamben's new book aims to describe and comprehend a life that the poet himself called habitual a...
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(H/B) Pulcinella : Or Entertainment for Children
The list of subjects that Giorgio Agamben has tackled in his career is dizzying--from the dangers of our current political moment to the traces of the distant past that inflect the culture around us today. With Pulcinella, Agamben is back with yet another surprising-and surprisingly relevant-subject: the commedia dell'arte character. At the heart of Pulcinella is Agamben's exploration of an album of 104 drawings, created by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804) near the end of his life, that cover the life, adventures, death, and resurrect...
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(H/B) Studiolo
In Renaissance palaces, the studiolo was a small room to which the prince withdrew to meditate or read, surrounded by paintings he particularly loved. This book is a kind of studiolo for its author, Giorgio Agamben, as he turns his philosophical lens on the world of Western art. Studiolo is a fascinating take on a selection of artworks created over millennia; some are easily identifiable, others rarer. Though they were produced over an arc of time stretching from 5000 BCE to the present, only now have they achieved their true legibility. ...
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(H/B) Pinocchio
In Pinocchio, Giorgio Agamben turns his keen philosopher's eye to the famous nineteenth-century novel by Carlo Collodi. To Agamben, Pinocchio's adventures are a kind of initiation into life itself. Like us, the mischievous puppet is caught between two worlds. He is faced with the alternatives of submitting to authority or of carrying on, stubbornly indulging his way of being. From Agamben's virtuoso interpretation of this classic story, we learn that we can harbor the mystery of existence only if we are not aware of it, only if we manage t...
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(H/B) The Labyrinth of Tender Force : 166 Love Stories
No human quality is more necessary for survival than love. But while love has the power to lift us up with boundless joy, it has equal strength to crush us-it is easy to lose your way within love's complex labyrinth of oppositions. The Labyrinth of Tender Force collects 166 of Alexander Kluge's love stories previously concealed among his vast library of more than 2,000 texts. "Basic stories" was what he once called them. Organized thematically, these stories take readers on a flight over the maps-the varied topography-of love. This flight ...
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(H/B) Kong's Finest Hour
In a world full of devils, the giant ape Kong defends what he loves the most. But who and what is this undomesticated animal? Might it reside within us? As we tread confidently, is this where the earth opens up beneath us? In Kong's Finest Hour, Alexander Kluge explores anew the accessible spaces where Kong dwells within us and in our million-year-old past. The more than two hundred stories contained in this volume form a chronicle of connections that together survey these spaces using diverse perspectives. These include stories about the ...
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(P/B) THE IDEA OF WORLD
A philosophical exploration of what capitalistic societies truly mean for the individual. A short vade mecum for unrepentant materialism, The Idea of World collects three essays by Italian philosopher Paulo Virno that are intricately wrapped around one another. The first essay, "Mundanity," tries to clarify what the term "world," as referred to as the perceptual and historical context of our existence, means―both with and against Kant and Wittgenstein. How should we understand expressions such as "worldly people," "the course of the world...
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(P/B) THE PHILOSOPHY OF LIVING
Living holds us between two places. It expresses what is most elementary―to be alive―and the absoluteness of our aspiration―finally living! But could we desire anything other than to live? In The Philosophy of Living, Fran?ois Jullien meditates on Far Eastern thought and philosophy to analyze concepts that can be folded into a complete philosophy of living, including the idea of the moment, the ambiguity of the in-between, and what he calls the "transparency of morning." Jullien here develops a strategy of living that goes beyond morality ...
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(H/B) THE LIMITS OF ART
Tzvetan Todorov, one of Europe's leading intellectuals, explores the complex relations between art, politics, and ethics in the essays that make up The Limits of Art. In one essay, "Artists and Dictators," Todorov traces the intimate relationship between avant-garde art and radical politics in pre-revolutionary Russia, pre-fascist Italy, and pre-Nazi Germany. Todorov sets forth the radical idea that the project of totalitarian dictators and avant-garde artists actually "emerged from the same womb": both artists and dictators set out to mak...
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(P/B) THREE PLAYS
Despite being widely acknowledged as one of the most important German dramatists since Bertolt Brecht, Heiner M?ller (1929-95) still remains relatively unknown in the English-speaking world. This collection of plays aims to change that, presenting new translations and opening up his work to a larger audience. Collected here are three of his plays-Philoctetes, The Horatian, and Mauser-whose poetic texts evidence the influence of Shakespeare, classical Greek tragedy, and avant-garde political theater on his works. Together they constitute wh...
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(H/B) THE LITERARY LACAN
The relationship between literature and psychology is long and richly complex, and no more so than in the work of Jacques Lacan, the most controversial psychoanalyst since Freud. The Literary Lacan: From Literature to 'Lituraterre' and Beyond is dedicated to assessing Lacan's significant contribution to literary studies and the contribution, in turn, of literature to Lacanian psychoanalysis. The first essays in this collection provide close readings of Lacan's literature-related work, specifically his work on Hamlet, his homage to Marguer...
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(H/B) TOMBE
"In 1968-69 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides," wrote Helene Cixous, esteemed French feminist, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and novelist.Instead of suicide, she began to dream of writing a tomb for herself. This tomb became a work that is a testament to Cixous' life and spirit and a secret book, the first book she ever authored. Originally written in 1970, Tombe is a Homerian recasting of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis in the thickets of Central Park, a book Cixous provo...
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(H/B) THE HOLOCAUST AS CULTURE
Hungarian Imre Kertesz was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2002 for 'writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history'. His conversation with literary historian Thomas Cooper that is presented here speaks specifically to this relationship between the personal and the historical. Kertesz recalls his childhood in Buchenwald and Auschwitz and as a writer living under the so-called soft dictatorship of communist Hungary. Reflecting on his experiences of the Holocaust and the S...
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(H/B) THE ARRIERE-PAYS
Since the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has become one of the most important French poets of the postwar years. At last, we have the long-awaited English translation of Yves Bonnefoy's celebrated work, L'Arriere-pays, which takes us to the heart of his creative process and to the very core of his poetic spirit. In his poem, "The Convex Mirror," Bonnefoy writes: "Look at them down there, at that crossroads, / They seem to hesitate, then go on." The idea of the crossroads haunts Bonnefoy's work, as he is troubled by th...
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(P/B) WHO SINGS THE NATION-STATE?
Who Sings the Nation-State brings together two of America's foremost critics and two of the most influential theorists of the last decade. Together, they explore the past, present and future of the state in a time of globalization. What is contained in a state has become ever more plural whilst the boundaries of a state have become ever more fluid. No longer does a state naturally come with a nation. In a world of migration and shifting allegiances - caused by cultural, economic, military and climatic change - the state is a more provision...
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(P/B) 50 DRAWINGS TO MURDER MAGIC
A poet, philosopher, essayist, playwright, actor, and director, Antonin Artaud was a visionary writer and a major influence within and beyond the French avant-garde. A key text for understanding his thought and his appeal, 50 Drawings to Murder Magic is rooted in the nine years Artaud spent in mental asylums, struggling with schizophrenia and the demonic, persecutory visions it unleashed. Set down in a dozen exercise books written between 1946 and 1948, these pieces trace Artaud's struggle to escape a personal hell that extends far beyond ...
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(H/B) A KIND OF TOUCHING BEAUTY
Photographer Pedro Meyer is one of the pioneers of contemporary photography and was an early leader in its digital revolution. In A Kind of Touching Beauty his lens is focused on the American city, capturing its growth and transition through the 1980s and '90s. Alongside Meyer's striking images that distill the spirit of the city, the book presents essays by Jean-Paul Sartre. Originally published as part of The Aftermath of War and based upon Sartre's extended visit to America in 1945, the essays create a parallel journey with Meyer's phot...
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(H/B) THE IMMATERIAL
In The Immaterial, French social philosopher Andre Gorz (1923-2007) argues, in his finely-tuned and polemical style, that the economic boom that accelerated in the 1990s and crashed so spectacularly in 2008 was based largely on an immaterial consumption of symbols and ideas, as capitalism tried to overcome the crisis of the formally industrial regime by throwing itself into a new, so-called knowledge economy. In this, the last full-length theoretical work Gorz completed before his death, he argues instead for the creation of a true knowled...
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(H/B) A WINTER'S JOURNEY
French cultural theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio is best known for his writings on media, technology, and architecture. Gathered here in A Winter's Journey are four remarkable conversations in which Virilio and architectural writer Marianne Brausch look at a twentieth century characterized by enormous technological acceleration and by technocultural accidents of barbarism and horror. The dialogues in A Winter's Journey-structured loosely around the dates 1940, 1950, 1960, and 1980-chart Virilio's intimate intellectual biography, from his...
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(H/B) THE TOTALITARIAN EXPERIENCE
The fall of the Berlin Wall marked the beginning of the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as many other communist totalitarian regimes around the world. But it would be naive to assume that this historic, symbolic event and its aftermath have completely rid the world of totalitarianism. Instead, we should ask, what is the totalitarian experience and how does it survive today? This is the imposing question raised by acclaimed philosopher and writer Tzvetan Todorov in this compact, highly personal essay. Here, he recounts his own experi...
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