ZONE BOOKS

(P/B) REMNANTS OF AUSCHWITZ
"In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna; in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors' testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it. Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made...
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(P/B) THE EXPRESSIVENESS OF THE BODY AND THE DIVERGENCE OF GREEK AND CHINESE MEDICINE
The true structure and workings of the human body are, we casually assume, everywhere the same, a universal reality. But when we look into the past, our sense of reality wavers: accounts of the body in diverse medical traditions often seem to describe mutually alien, almost unrelated worlds. How can perceptions of something as basic and intimate as the body differ so? In this book, Shigehisa Kuriyama explores this fundamental question, elucidating the fascinating contrasts between the human body described in classical Greek medicine and th...
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(P/B) PUBLICS AND COUNTERPUBLICS
Publics and Counterpublics revolves around a central question: What is a public? The idea of a public is a cultural form, a kind of practical fiction, present in the modern world in a way that is very different from other or earlier societies. Like the idea of rights, or nations, or markets, it can now seem universal. But it has not always been so. Publics exist only by virtue of their imagining. They are a kind of fiction that has taken on life, and very potent life at that. Publics have some regular properties as a form, with powerful i...
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(P/B) WALLED STATES, WANING SOVEREIGNTY
Why, just two decades after international celebrations of the fall of the Berlin Wall, are so many nation-states building elaborate walls at or near their borders? Why walls now, given growing global connectedness and given the general imperviousness of late modern powers - from capital to religion to terror - to physical blockading? How do walls shore up an imago of sovereign statehood and to what extent do they fortify reactionary national imaginaries? What do the new walls perform symbolically, materially, psychically? In Walled States,...
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(P/B) MYTH AND TRAGEDY IN ANCIENT GREECE
Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet are leaders in a contemporary French classical scholarship that has produced a stunning reconfiguration of Greek thought and literature. In this work, the authors present a disturbing and decidedly nonclassical reading of Greek tragedy that insists on its radical discontinuity with our own outlook and with our social, aesthetic, and psychological categories. Originally published in French in two volumes, this new single-volume edition includes revised essays from Volume I as well as the first Eng...
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(P/B) IN PRAISE OF BLANDNESS
Already translated into six languages, Francois Jullien's In Praise of Blandness has by now become a classic. Appearing for the first time in English, this groundbreaking work of philosophy, anthropology, aesthetics, and sinology is certain to stir readers to think and experience what may at first seem impossible: the richness of a bland sound, a bland meaning, a bland painting, a bland poem. In presenting the value of blandness through as many concrete examples and original texts as possible, Jullien allows the undifferentiated foundation...
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(P/B) MATTER AND MEMORY
This book affirms the reality of spirit and the reality of matter, and tries to determine the relation of the one to the other by the study of a definite example, that of memory. It is, then, frankly dualistic. But, on the other hand, it deals with body and mind in such a way as, we hope, to lessen greatly, if not to overcome, the theoretical difficulties which have always beset dualism, and which cause it, though suggested by the immediate verdict of consciousness and adopted by common sense, to be held in small honor among philosophers. ...
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(P/B) PERSPECTIVE AS SYMBOLIC FORM
Erwin Panofsky's Perspective as Symbolic Form is one of the great works of modern intellectual history, the text that has dominated all art historical and philosophical discussions on the topic of perspective in this century. Finally available in English, this unrivaled example of Panofsky's early method places him within broader developments in theories of knowledge and cultural change. Here, drawing on a massive body of learning that ranges over Antique philosophy, theology, science, and optics as well as the history of art, Panofsky pro...
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(P/B) BERGSONISM
What is needed for something new to appear? According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the most brilliant of contemporary philosophers, this question of "novelty" is the major problem posed by Bergson's work. In Bergsonism, Deleuze demonstrates both the development and the range of three fundamental Bergsonian concepts: duration, memory, and the elan vital. A perfect companion book to Bergson's Matter and Memory, Bergsonism is also of particular interest to students of Deleuze's own work, influenced as it is by Bergson. Given his texts on Nietzsc...
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(P/B) CONTEMPORARY STATES OF EMERGENCY
From natural disaster areas to zones of conflict around the world, a new logic of intervention has emerged. This new post-Cold War international order combines military action and humanitarian aid, conflates moral imperatives and political arguments, and confuses the concepts of legitimacy and legality. The mandate to protect human lives, however and wherever endangered, has thus promoted a new form of military and humanitarian government that operates in a temporality of urgency, moving from one crisis to the next, applying the same batte...
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(P/B) MYTH AND THOUGHT AMONG THE GREEKS
"Myth and Thought among the Greeks is Jean-Pierre Vernant's magisterial first entry upon the scene of classical studies. As fresh and challenging as it was when first published in 1965, this new edition of his eighteen essays, which includes two previously untranslated chapters, will provide the English-speaking world with a long-overdue edition. As the very words of the title announce, two major themes run throughout this pathbreaking study. On the one hand, 'myth' and 'thought' suggest a certain transition from the mythic to the rational...
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(P/B) THE INVENTION OF ATHENS
How does the funeral oration relate to democracy in ancient Greece? How did the death of an individual citizen-soldier become the occasion to praise the city of Athens? In The Invention of Athens, Nicole Loraux traces the different rhetoric, politics, and ideology of funeral orations - epitaphioi - from Thucidydes, Gorgias, Lysias, and Demosthenes to Plato. Arguing that the ceremony of public burial began circa 508-460 BCE, Loraux demonstrates that the institution of the funeral oration developed under Athenian democracy. A secular, not a ...
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(H/B) UNDOING THE DEMOS
Neoliberal rationality - ubiquitous today in statecraft and the workplace, in jurisprudence, education, and culture - remakes everything and everyone in the image of homo economicus. What happens when this rationality transposes the constituent elements of democracy into an economic register? In Undoing the Demos, Wendy Brown explains how democracy itself is imperilled. The demos disintegrates into bits of human capital; concerns with justice bow to the mandates of growth rates, credit ratings, and investment climates; liberty submits to t...
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(P/B) OBJECTIVITY
Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences - and show how the concept differs from its alternatives, truth-to-nature and trained judgment. This is a story of lofty epistemic ideals fused with workaday practices in the making of scientific images. From the eighteenth through the early twenty-first centuries, the images that reveal the deepest commitments of the empirical sciences - from anatomy to crystall...
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(P/B) PURE IMMANENCE
The essays in this book present a complex theme at the heart of the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, what in his last writing he called simply "a life." They capture a problem that runs throughout his work - his long search for a new and superior empiricism. Announced in his first book, on David Hume, then taking off with his early studies of Nietzsche and Bergson, the problem of an "empiricist conversion" became central to Deleuze's work, in particular to his aesthetics and his conception of the art of cinema. In the new regime of communicat...
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(P/B) MASOCHISM
In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time sexualizing the entire history of humanity." He shows that masochism is something far more subtle and complex than the enjoyment of pain...
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(P/B) MYTH AND SOCIETY IN ANCIENT GREECE
In this groundbreaking study, Jean-Pierre Vernant delineates a compelling new vision of ancient Greece. Myth and Society in Ancient Greece takes us far from the calm and familiar images of Polykleitos and the Parthenon to reveal a fundamentally other culture - one of slavery, of masks and death, of scapegoats, of ritual hunting, and of ecstasies. Vernant's provocative discussions of various institutions and practices (including war, marriage, and sacrifice) detail the complex intersection of the religious, social, and political structures ...
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THE CRADLE OF HUMANITY
"The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture" collects Georges Bataille's essays and lectures spanning thirty years of his research in anthropology, comparative religion, aesthetics, and philosophy. These were neither idle nor idyllic years: the discovery of Lascaux in 1940 coincides with the bloodiest war in history -with new machines of death, Auschwitz, and Hiroshima. Bataille's reflections on the possible origins of humanity concur with the intensified threat of its possible extinction. For Bataille, prehistory is universal his...
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(P/B) THE ACCURSED SHARE
The three volumes of The Accursed Share address what Georges Bataille sees as the paradox of utility: namely, if being useful means serving a further end, then the ultimate end of utility can only be uselessness. The first volume of The Accursed Share, the only one published before Bataille's death, treated this paradox in economic terms, showing that "it is not necessity but its contrary, luxury, that presents living matter and mankind with their fundamental problems." In the second and third volumes, The History of Eroticism and Soverei...
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(H/B) THE SIGNATURE OF ALL THINGS
The Signature of All Things is Giorgio Agamben’s sustained reflection on method. To reflect on method implies for Agamben an archeological vigilance: a persistent form of thinking whose path is to expose, examine, and elaborate that which remains obscure, unthematized, even unsaid, in an author’s thought. To be archeologically vigilant, then, is to return to, even invent, a method attuned to a "world supported by a thick plot of resemblances and sympathies, analogies and correspondences." The range of authors and of topics Agamben collects...
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