(P/B) THE PANOPTICON WRITINGS
The Panopticon project for a model prison obsessed the English philosopher Jeremy Bentham for almost 20 years. In the end, the project came to nothing; the Panopticon was never built. But it is precisely this that makes the Panopticon project the best exemplification of Bentham's own theory of fictions, according to which non-existent fictitious entities can have all too real effects. There is probably no building that has stirred more philosophical controversy than Bentham's Panopticon. The Panopticon is not merely, as Foucault thought, "...
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(P/B) PASSWORDS
Sixteen points of entry - from the object and the virtual, to seduction and the transparency of evil - draw readers into a knockoff world of fantasy and calamity that could only be our own. Passwords serves as both an accessible introduction and a guide to the deeper connections running through almost four decades of the author's thought. (from the publisher)...
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(P/B) FREUDIAN SLIP
In an iconoclastic work of great verve-with an introductory essay by Perry Anderson-Sebastiano Timpanaro submits the whole field of psychoanalysis to one of its most sustained and serious Marxist critiques. Using textual criticism, Timpanaro reconsiders the most famous cases of the 'slips' analyzed by Freud in The Psychopathology of Everyday Life, and argues that in virtually every case Freud's explanations of them are arbitrary or unnecessary. His book ends with a remarkable interpretation of the cultural and historical destiny of Freud's...
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(P/B) POSTMODERN GEOGRAPHIES
Written by one of America's foremost geographers, Postmodern Geographies contests the tendency, still dominant in most social science, to reduce human geography to a reflective mirror, or, as Marx called it, an "unnecessary complication." Beginning with a powerful critique of historicism and its constraining effects on the geographical imagination, Edward Soja builds on the work of Foucault, Berger, Giddens, Berman, Jameson and, above all, Henri Lefebvre, to argue for a historical and geographical materialism, a radical rethinking of the d...
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(P/B) CRITIQUE OF ECONOMIC REASON
Andre Gorz's earlier books-from Ecology as Politics to Farewell to the Working Class and Paths to Paradise-have informed and inspired the most radical currents in Green movements in Europe and America over the last two decades. In Critique of Economic Reason, he offers his fullest account to date of the terminal crisis of a system where every activity and aspiration has been subjected to the rule of the market. By carefully delineating the existential and cultural limits of economic rationality, he emphasizes the urgent need to create a so...
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(P/B) COMMENTS ON THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE
First published in 1967, Guy Debord's stinging revolutionary critique of contemporary society, The Society of the Spectacle has since acquired a cult status. Credited by many as being the inspiration for the ideas generated by the events of May 1968 in France, Debord's pitiless attack on commodity fetishism and its incrustation in the practices of everyday life continues to burn brightly in today's age of satellite television and the soundbite. In Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, published twenty years later, Debord returned to th...
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