Raoul Vaneigem: The Movement of the Free Spirit (1986/1994)
Filed under book | Tags: · economics, history, market, religion
“This book by the legendary Situationist activist and author of The Revolution of Everyday Life examines the heretical and millenarian movements that challenged social and ecclesiastical authority in Europe from the 1200s into the 1500s.
Although Vaneigem discusses a number of different movements such as the Cathars and Joachimite millenarians, his main emphasis is on the various manifestations of the Movement of the Free Spirit in northern Europe. He sees not only resistance to the power of state and church but also the immensely creative invention of new forms of love, sexuality, community, and exchange. Vaneigem is particularly interested in the radical opposition presented by these movements to the imperatives of an emerging market-based economy, and he evokes crucial historical parallels with the antisystemic rebellions of the 1960s. The book includes translations of original texts and source materials.”
Originally published as Le Mouvement du libre-esprit, Editions Ramsay, 1986
Full title: The Movement of the Free Spirit: General Considerations and Firsthand Testimony Concerning Some Brief Flowerings of Life in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and, Incidentally, Our Own Time
Translated by Randall Cherry and Ian Patterson
Publisher Zone Books, 1994
ISBN 0942299701, 9780942299700
302 pages
via aleksag
PDF (updated on 2013-4-30, thanks esco_bar!)
Comment (1)Joan Retallack: The Poethical Wager (2003)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, life, music, poethics, poetry
In these highly inventive essays, Joan Retallack, acclaimed poet and essayist, conveys her unique post-utopian vision as she explores the relationship between art and life in today’s chaotic world. In the tradition of the essay as complex humanist exploration, she engages ideas from across history: Aristotle’s definition of happiness, Epicurus’s swerve into unpredictable possibility, Montaigne’s essays as an instrument of self-invention, John Cage’s redefinition of Silence. Within her unifying rubric of poethics, Retallack gives the reader plenty of surprises with a wonderful range of examples, situations, and texts through which she conducts her exploration. A computer glitch, a passage from Gertrude Stein’s favorite detective novelist, the idea of the experimental feminine, a John Cage performance—all serve as occasions for inquiry and speculation on the way to her poethics of a “complex realism.”
Publisher University of California Press, 2003
ISBN 0520218418, 9780520218413
279 pages
PDF (updated on 2014-4-3)
View online (HTML, added on 2014-4-3)
Marc Augé: Journal d’un SDF: Ethnofiction (2011) [French]
Filed under book | Tags: · ethnology
« La perte du lieu, c’est comme la perte d’un autre, du dernier autre, du fantôme qui vous accueille chez vous lorsque vous rentrez seul. »
Il suffit d’avoir déménagé une ou deux fois dans sa vie pour pouvoir imaginer sans trop de mal les effets destructeurs qu’entraîne la perte des repères spatiaux-temporels. Ce n’est plus seulement la psychologie qui est en cause dans la situation des sans-logis, mais directement le sens de la relation, de l’identité et de l’être. Candide ou le Persan de Montesquieu étaient des personnages d’ethnofiction, mais ils regardaient le monde pour s’en étonner. C’est en se regardant lui-même, aujourd’hui, que le personnage d’ethnofiction découvre la folie du monde.
Publisher Editions du Seuil, 2011
Librairie du XXIe siècle series
ISBN 2020978288, 9782020978286
131 pages