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The Society of the Spectacle מאת Guy Debord Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative as Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960s up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of ...

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The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture מאת Georges Bataille The Cradle of Humanity: Prehistoric Art and Culture collects essays and lectures by Georges Bataille spanning 30 years of research in anthropology, comparative religion, aesthetics, and philosophy. These were neither idle nor idyllic years; the discovery of Lascaux in 1940 coincides with the ...

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Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive מאת Giorgio Agamben In this book the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben looks closely at the literature of the survivors of Auschwitz, probing the philosophical and ethical questions raised by their testimony. "In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to procee...

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The Claude Glass: Use and Meaning of the Black Mirror in Western Art מאת Arnaud Maillet In this first full-length study of a largely forgotten optical device from the eighteenth century, Arnaud Maillet reconfigures our historical understanding of visual experience and meaning in relation to notions of opacity, transparency, and imagination. Many are familiar with the Claude glass as a ...

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Objectivity מאת Lorraine Daston Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008. 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, trut...

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A Society without Fathers or Husbands: The Na of China מאת Cai Hua The Na of China, farmers in the Himalayan region, live without the institution of marriage. Na brothers and sisters live together their entire lives, sharing household responsibilities and raising the women's children. Because the Na, like all cultures, prohibit incest, they practice a system of som...

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The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation מאת Daniel Heller-Roazen Choice Outstanding Academic Title, 2008. and Winner, 2008 Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Comparative Literary Studies. The Inner Touch presents the archaeology of a single sense: the sense of being sentient. Aristotle was perhaps the first to define this faculty when in his tre...

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Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages מאת Valentin Groebner Destroyed faces, dissolved human shapes, invisible enemies: violence and anonymity go hand in hand. The visual representation of extreme physical violence makes real people nameless exemplars of horror—formless, hideous, defaced. In Defaced, Valentin Groebner explores the roots of the visua...

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Death and the Idea of Mexico מאת Claudio Lomnitz Death and the Idea of Mexico is the first social, cultural, and political history of death in a nation that has made death its tutelary sign. Examining the history of death and of the death sign from sixteenth-century holocaust to contemporary Mexican-American identity politics, anthropologis...