Roberto Esposito: Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (1998/2003/2010) [Spanish/English]
Filed under book | Tags: · community, ecstasy, experience, fear, guilt, law, nihilism, philosophy
No theme has been more central to international philosophical debates than that of community: from American communitarianism to Habermas’s ethic of communication to the French deconstruction of community in the work of Derrida and Nancy. Nevertheless, in none of these cases has the concept been examined from the perspective of community’s original etymological meaning: cum munus. In Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community, Roberto Esposito does just that through an original counter-history of political philosophy that takes up not only readings of community by Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Heidegger and Bataille, but also by Hölderlin, Nietzsche, Canetti, Arendt, and Sartre. The result of his extraordinary conceptual and lexical analysis is a radical overturning of contemporary interpretations of community. Community isn’t a property, nor is it a territory to be separated and defended against those who do not belong to it. Rather, it is a void, a debt, a gift to the other that also reminds us of our constitutive alterity with respect to ourselves.
Originally published in Italian as Communitas: Origine e destino della comunita, 1998, Giulio Einaudi Editore
Spanish edition: Communitas: Origen y destino de la comunidad
Translated by Carlo Rodolfo Molinaro Marotto
Publisher Amorrortu editores, Buenos Aires, Argentina, 2003
Mutaciones series
ISBN 9505187149
English edition
Translated by Timothy C. Campbell
Publisher Stanford University Press, 2010
Cultural Memory in the Present Series
ISBN 0804746478, 9780804746472
175 pages
publisher [Spanish]
publisher [English]
google books [Spanish]
google books [English]
Alain Badiou: The Rebirth of History: Times of Riots and Uprisings (2011–)
Filed under book | Tags: · arab spring, cultural revolution, egypt, france, islam, marxism, power, protest, revolution, riot
“Testing the winds of history blowing from the Arab revolts.
In the uprisings of the Arab world, Alain Badiou discerns echoes of the European revolutions of 1848. In both cases, the object was to overthrow despotic regimes maintained by the great powers—regimes designed to impose the will of financial oligarchies. Both events occurred after what was commonly thought to be the end of a revolutionary epoch: in 1815, the final defeat of Napoleon; and in 1989, the fall of the Soviet Union. But the revolutions of 1848 proclaimed for a century and a half the return of revolutionary thought and action. Likewise, the uprisings underway today herald a worldwide resurgence in the liberating force of the masses—despite the attempts of the ‘international community’ to neutralize its power.
Badiou’s book salutes this reawakening of history, weaving examples from the Arab Spring and elsewhere into a global analysis of the return of emancipatory universalism.”
Originally published as Le Reveil de l’histoire, Nouvelles Editions Lignes, 2011
Translated by Gregory Elliott
Publisher Verso Books, 2012
ISBN 1844678792, 9781844678792
126 pages
Reviews: Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover (Los Angeles Review of Books), Daniel Tutt (Platypus), Anindya Bhattacharyya (Socialist Review).
PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)
Comment (0)Andrew Piper: Dreaming in Books: The Making of the Bibliographic Imagination in the Romantic Age (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · book, literature, publishing, romanticism, translation
At the turn of the nineteenth century, publishing houses in London, New York, Paris, Stuttgart, and Berlin produced books in ever greater numbers. But it was not just the advent of mass printing that created the era’s “bookish” culture. According to Andrew Piper, romantic writing and romantic writers played a crucial role in adjusting readers to this increasingly international and overflowing literary environment. Learning how to use and to want books occurred through more than the technological, commercial, or legal conditions that made the growing proliferation of books possible; the making of such bibliographic fantasies was importantly a product of the symbolic operations contained within books as well.
Examining novels, critical editions, gift books, translations, and illustrated books, as well as the communities who made them, Dreaming in Books tells a wide-ranging story of the book’s identity at the turn of the nineteenth century. In so doing, it shows how many of the most pressing modern communicative concerns are not unique to the digital age but emerged with a particular sense of urgency during the bookish upheavals of the romantic era. In revisiting the book’s rise through the prism of romantic literature, Piper aims to revise our assumptions about romanticism, the medium of the printed book, and, ultimately, the future of the book in our so-called digital age.
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 0226669726, 9780226669724
319 pages