Showing all 5 books
Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Louis Althusser enjoyed virtually unrivalled status as the foremost living Marxist philosopher. Today, he is remembered as the scourge and severest critic of ‘humanist’ or Hegelian Marxism, as the proponent of rigorously scientific socialism, and as the theorist who posited a sharp rupture—an epistemological break—between the early and the late Marx. This collection of texts from the period 1945–53 turns these ...
Over the past few decades Tom Nairn has become one of the most respected and provocative writers on questions of nationalism, British politics and the constitution. In his seminal essay ‘The Modern Janus’, Nairn argued for the democratic necessity of nationalism in the modern world. Here, in this strikingly original and timely new work, he addresses the subsequent upheavals caused by nationalism. In this book Nairn argues that nation-building movements from ...
Bleak in its analysis of the social destruction wrought by modern technologies of communication and surveillance but passionately political, Open Sky is Paul Virilio’s most far-reaching and radical book for many years. Deepening and extending his earlier work on speed, perception and political control, and applying it now to the global ‘real time’ of the information superhighways, he explores the growing danger of what he calls a ‘generalized accident,’ ...
‘O my friends, there is no friend.’ This strange and provocative address, attributed to Aristotle and interrogated and re-inflected by many subsequent philosophers, provides the focus and keynote for each of the ‘ten chapters of Jacques Derrida’s long-awaited new book. The ‘political turn’ many noted in Derrida’s Spectres of Marx continues here is a profound exploration of political history of Aristotle’s haunting exclamation, of the singularities ...
Viramma tells her fascinating life story with the unsentimentality, humour and dramatic sense of a born storyteller: her carefree childhood, her marriage before puberty, giving birth to twelve children ‘very gently, like stroking a rose’, adult life as an agricultural worker ‘condemned to bake in the sun’, tales of gods and malign forces like Irsi Katteri ‘the foetus-eater’ who cast their shadows over her daily life. Told over ten years to Josiane and ...