Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (2012)

The first sustained exploration of Simondon’s work to be published in English.

This collection of essays, including one by Simondon himself, outlines the central tenets of Simondon’s thought, the implication of his thought for numerous disciplines and his relationship to other thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Canguilhem.

Complete with a contextualising introduction and a glossary of technical terms, it offers an entry point to this important thinker and will appeal to people working in philosophy, philosophy of science, media studies, social theory and political philosophy.

Gilbert Simondon’s work has recently come to prominence in America and around the Anglophone world, having been of great importance in France for many years.

Contributors: Miguel de Beistegui, Elizabeth Grosz, Anne Sauvagnargues, Bernard Stiegler, Igor Krtolica, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Yves Michaud, Sean Bowden, Dominique Lecourt, and the editors.

Edited by Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, Ashley Woodward
Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2012
ISBN 074864525X, 9780748645251
236 pages
via lastobserver

review (Wil Kaiser, H-Net Reviews)

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Karl Popper: The Open Society and Its Enemies (1943-) [EN, DE, IT, PT, GR, PL, CZ, BA, ES]

Written in political exile during the Second World War and first published in two volumes in 1945, Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies is one of the most influential books of all time. Hailed by Bertrand Russell as a “vigorous and profound defence of democracy”, its now legendary attack on the philosophies of Plato, Hegel and Marx exposed the dangers inherent in centrally planned political systems and through underground editions become an inspiration to lovers of freedom living under communism in Eastern Europe.

Popper’s highly accessible style, his erudite and lucid explanations of the thoughts of great philosophers and the recent resurgence of totalitarian regimes around the world are just three of the reasons for the enduring popularity of The Open Society and Its Enemies and why it demands to be read today and in years to come.

First edition
Publisher George Routledge & Sons, London, 1945
2 Volumes: The Spell of Plato; The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath
268 and 352 pages

wikipedia (English)
google books (English, 2011 ed.)

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Download (Volumes 1-2, revised edition, with a preface by Václav Havel and a note by E. H. Gombrich, 2002/2011, EPUB)
Die offene Gesellschaft und ihre Feinde, Volume 1, Volume 2 (German, trans. P. K. Feyerabend, 1958/1980)
La società aperta e i suoi nemici, Volume 1, Volume 2 (Italian, 2nd edition, 1973/1981)
A sociedade aberta e seus inimigos, Volume 1, Volume 2 (Portuguese, trans. Milton Amado, 1974)
Η ανοιχτή κοινωνία και οι εχθροί της (Greek, Volume 1, trans. Ειρήνη Παπαδάκη, 1980/1991)
Społeczeństwo otwarte i jego wrogowie (Polish, Volumes 1-2, trans. Halina Krahelska, 1993)
Otevřená společnost a její nepřátelé (Czech, Volume 1, trans. Miloš Calda, 1994, no OCR)
Otvoreno društvo i njegovi neprijatelji (Bosnian, Volumes 1-2, 1998)
La sociedad abierta y sus enemigos (Spanish, Volumes 1-2, trans. Eduardo Loedel Rodríguez, 2006)

Michael Marder: Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013)

The margins of philosophy are populated by non-human, non-animal living beings, including plants. While contemporary philosophers tend to refrain from raising ontological and ethical concerns with vegetal life, Michael Marder puts this life at the forefront of the current deconstruction of metaphysics. He identifies the existential features of plant behavior and the vegetal heritage of human thought so as to affirm the potential of vegetation to resist the logic of totalization and to exceed the narrow confines of instrumentality. Reconstructing the life of plants “after metaphysics,” Marder focuses on their unique temporality, freedom, and material knowledge or wisdom. In his formulation, “plant-thinking” is the non-cognitive, non-ideational, and non-imagistic mode of thinking proper to plants, as much as the process of bringing human thought itself back to its roots and rendering it plantlike.

With a Foreword by Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala
Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 2013
ISBN 0231161255, 9780231161251
248 pages

review (Los Angeles Review of Books)
review (Jeffrey T. Nealon, NDPR)

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Susan Buck-Morss: Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (2000-) [English, Spanish]

In this path-breaking work, Susan Buck-Morss draws new connections between history, inequality, social conflict, and human emancipation. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic and points to a way forward to free critical theoretical practice from the prison-house of its own debates. Historicizing the thought of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the actions taken in the Haitian Revolution, Buck-Morss examines the startling connections between the two and challenges us to widen the boundaries of our historical imagination. She finds that it is in the discontinuities of historical flow, the edges of human experience, and the unexpected linkages between cultures that the possibility to transcend limits is discovered. It is these flashes of clarity that open the potential for understanding in spite of cultural differences. What Buck-Morss proposes amounts to a “new humanism,” one that goes beyond the usual ideological implications of such a phrase to embrace a radical neutrality that insists on the permeability of the space between opposing sides and as it reaches for a common humanity.

English edition
Publisher University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009
ISBN 0822973340, 9780822973348
164 pages

publisher
google books (EN)
Susan Buck-Morss at Monoskop wiki (incl. source bibliography)

Hegel and Haiti (English, paper, Critical Inquiry, 2000)
Hegel y Haití: La dialéctica amo-esclavo, una interpretación revolucionaria (Spanish, book, trans. Fermín Rodríguez, 2005)
Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (English, book, 2009)

Paul Valéry: An Anthology (1977)

The book includes two texts from Monsieur Taste, poems from Poems in the Rough and Poems, several essays and dialogues.

Selected, with an Introduction by James R. Lawler
from The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, edited by Jackson Mathews, 1964
Publisher Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1977
ISBN 071008806X, 0710087640
355 pages
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Andrew Hsiao, Audrea Lim (eds.): The Verso Book of Dissent: From Spartacus to the Shoe-Thrower of Baghdad (2010)

A sparkling anthology of revolt and resistance to orthodoxy and repression.

Throughout the ages and across every continent, people have struggled against those in power and raised their voices in protest—rallying others around them and inspiring uprisings in eras yet to come. Their echoes reverberate from Ancient Greece, China and Egypt, via the dissident poets and philosophers of Islam and Judaism, through to the Arab slave revolts and anti-Ottoman rebellions of the Middle Ages. These sources were tapped during the Dutch and English revolutions at the outset of the Modern world, and in turn flowed into the French, Haitian, American, Russian and Chinese revolutions. More recently, resistance to war and economic oppression has flared up on battlefields and in public spaces from Beijing and Baghdad to Caracas and Los Angeles.

This anthology, global in scope, presents voices of dissent from every era of human history: speeches and pamphlets, poems and songs, plays and manifestos. Every age has its iconoclasts, and yet the greatest among them build on the words and actions of their forerunners. The Verso Book of Dissent will become an invaluable resource, reminding today’s citizens that these traditions will never die.

Preface by Tariq Ali
Publisher Verso Books, 2010
ISBN 1844674487, 9781844674480
366 pages

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Simone Weil: An Anthology (1986/2005)

Simone Weil was one of the foremost thinkers of the twentieth century: a philosopher, theologian, critic, sociologist and political activist. This anthology spans the wide range of her thought, and includes an extract from her best-known work The Need for Roots, exploring the ways in which modern society fails the human soul; her thoughts on the misuse of language by those in power; and the essay “Human Personality”, a late, beautiful reflection on the rights and responsibilities of every individual. All are marked by the unique combination of literary eloquence and moral perspicacity that characterised Weil’s ideas and inspired a generation of thinkers and writers both in and outside her native France.

First published by Virago Press, 1986
Edited and Introduced by Siân Miles
Publisher Penguin Books, 2005
Penguin Classics series
ISBN 0141188197, 9780141188195
312 pages

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