Myron Sharaf: Fury on Earth: A Biography of Wilhelm Reich (1983)

In this book, Myron Sharaf explodes the myths that have collected around the name “Wilhelm Reich”–the psychoanalytic myth of the early brilliant Reich, and the later insane Reich of orgone energy; the Marxist myth of the radical Reich, and the conservative myth of the Republican Reich. Sharaf’s Reich is profoundly human: complex and contradictory, a generous, loving person capable of extraordinary bursts of bizarre ideas and impassioned cruelty. Of particular interest are the illuminations of the relationship between Reich’s childhood traumas and his major concepts; and the pivotal personal and scientific significance of Freud for Wilhelm Reich.

In 1944, Sharaf met Reich and for the next decade, as student, patient, and coworker, kept careful notes toward the eventual preparation of this biography. He has interviewed Reich’s colleagues, family, friends and enemies, and gathered important papers. From these many sources he has discovered significant unpublished connections between Reich’s personality, his social-intellectual milieu, and his work.

Publisher St Martin’s Press, New York, 1983.
ISBN 0312313705
550 pages

Reich at Wikipedia

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Élisabeth Roudinesco: Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System of Thought (1993-) [Spanish/English]

Jacques Lacan remains not only one of the foremost intellectuals of the century, but also one of the most controversial. As a young doctor he set out to reinvent clinical psychotherapy and ended up transforming fundamental notions of the self, sexuality and the culture that shapes it all. This first major biography of Lacan is a fascinating portrait of his life and a masterful explication of the unorthodox, often perplexing ideas that brought him renown. 22 photos.

Originally published in French as Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un systeme de pensee, Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1993

Spanish edition
Translated by Tomás Segovia
Publisher FCE, Argentina, 1994, FCE, Colombia, 2000
ISBN 9505572107, 9789505572106
815 pages

English edition
Translated by Barbara Bray
Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 1997
European Perspectives series
ISBN 0231101465, 9780231101462
574 pages

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Lacan: Esbozo de una vida, historia de un sistema de pensamiento (Spanish, 1994)
Lacan: A Biography (English, 1997, DJVU, no OCR)

Erkki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka (eds.): Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011)

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media – one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

Publisher University of California Press, 2011
ISBN 0520262743, 9780520262744
356 pages

review (Simone Natale, Canadian Journal of Communication)

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Media archaeology at Monoskop wiki

Jean Baudrillard: Seduction (1979-) [ES, EN, CZ, PL]

Seduction, in French thinker Baudrillard’s apocalyptic discourse, is a power of attraction and fascination capable of subverting mechanical, orgasm-centered sexuality and reality in general. Two chief obstacles to unleashing the potentially liberating forces of seduction are the women’s movement and psychoanalysis, charges the author of America and Forget Foucault. While recognizing that seduction has a negative side–turning the seduced person away from his/her true thoughts and impulses–Baudrillard is intrigued by the seductive processes at work in the vertigo induced by games, in magic and the lottery, in the transvestite’s “total gestural, sensual and ritual” behavior. He decodes pornography as “an orgy of realism,” a hyperreality of signs. In his analysis, seduction has itself been corrupted in a world of manufactured desires and ready-made satisfactions. With seductive irony, Baudrillard storms the fragile phallic fortress of patriarchy in this heady, sometimes obscure meditation.

Originally published in French as De la seduction by Editions Galilee, 1979
Translated to English by Brian Singer
Publisher New World Perspectives, 1991
CultureTexts series
ISBN 092039325X
182 pages
for gnd

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Download (Spanish, trans. Elena Benarroch, 1981)
Download (English, trans. Brian Singer, 1991)
Download (Czech, trans. Alena Dvořáčková, 1996)
Download (Polish, trans. Janusz Margański, 2005)

Ian Buchanan (ed.): Jameson on Jameson: Conversations on Cultural Marxism (2007)

Fredric Jameson is one of the most influential literary and cultural critics writing today. He is a theoretical innovator whose ideas about the intersections of politics and culture have reshaped the critical landscape across the humanities and social sciences. Bringing together ten interviews conducted between 1982 and 2005, Jameson on Jameson is a compellingly candid introduction to his thought for those new to it, and a rich source of illumination and clarification for those seeking deeper understanding. Jameson discusses his intellectual and political preoccupations, most prominently his commitment to Marxism as a way of critiquing capitalism and the culture it has engendered. He explains many of his key concepts, including postmodernism, the dialectic, metacommentary, the political unconscious, the utopian, cognitive mapping, and spatialization.

Jameson on Jameson displays Jameson’s extraordinary grasp of contemporary culture—architecture, art, cinema, literature, philosophy, politics, psychoanalysis, and urban geography—as well as the challenge that the geographic reach of his thinking poses to the Eurocentricity of the West. Conducted by accomplished scholars from United States, Egypt, Korea, China, Sweden, and England, the interviews elicit Jameson’s reflections on the broad international significance of his ideas and their applicability and implications in different cultural and political contexts, including the present phase of globalization.
The volume includes an introduction by Jameson and a comprehensive bibliography of his publications in all languages.

Interviewers: Mona Abousenna, Abbas Al-Tonsi, Srinivas Aravamudan, Jonathan Culler, Sara Danius, Leonard Green, Sabry Hafez, Stuart Hall, Stefan Jonsson, Ranjana Khanna, Richard Klein, Horacio Machin, Paik Nak-chung, Michael Speaks, Anders Stephanson, Xudong Zhang

Publisher Duke University Press, 2007
Post-Contemporary Interventions series
ISBN 0822340879, 9780822340874
296 pages

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Carl Freedman: The Age of Nixon: A Study in Cultural Power (2012)

Applies Marxism and psychoanalysis to the study of American politics. In America, every age is the Age of Nixon.

The fundamental argument of this book is, first, that Richard Nixon, though not generally regarded as a charismatic or emotionally outgoing politician like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, did establish profound psychic connections with the American people, connections that can be detected both in the brilliant electoral success that he enjoyed for most of his career and in his ultimate defeat during the Watergate scandal; and, second and even more important, that these connections are symptomatic of many of the most important currents in American life. The book is not just a work of political history or political biography but a study of cultural power: that is, a study in the ways that culture shapes our politics and frames our sense of possibilities and values. In its application of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and other theoretical tools to the study of American electoral politics, and in a way designed for the general as well as for the academic reader, it is a new kind of book.

Publisher Zero Books, an imprint of John Hunt Publishing, 2012
ISBN 1846949432, 9781846949432
295 pages

commentary (Steven Shaviro)

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Mary Ann Caws: Surrealism and the Literary Imagination: A Study of Breton and Bachelard (1966)

Publisher Mouton, The Hague, 1966
Volume 12 of Studies in French Literature
85 pages

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