Zygmunt Bauman: Liquid Modernity (2000-) [EN, PT, CZ, ES, PL, RU]

In this book, Bauman examines how we have moved away from a ‘heavy’ and ‘solid’, hardware-focused modernity to a ‘light’ and ‘liquid’, software-based modernity. This passage, he argues, has brought profound change to all aspects of the human condition. The new remoteness and un-reachability of global systemic structure coupled with the unstructured and under-defined, fluid state of the immediate setting of life-politics and human togetherness, call for the rethinking of the concepts and cognitive frames used to narrate human individual experience and their joint history.

This book is dedicated to this task. Bauman selects five of the basic concepts which have served to make sense of shared human life – emancipation, individuality, time/space, work and community – and traces their successive incarnations and changes of meaning.

Liquid Modernity concludes the analysis undertaken in Bauman’s two previous books Globalization: The Human Consequences and In Search of Politics. Together these volumes form a brilliant analysis of the changing conditions of social and political life by one of the most original thinkers writing today.

Publisher Polity Press
ISBN 074562409X, 9780745624099
240 pages

publisher
google books

Liquid Modernity (English, 2000)
Modernidade líquida (Portuguese, trans. Plínio Dentzien, 2001)
Tekutá modernita (Czech, trans. Blumfeld s.m., 2002)
Modernidad líquida (Spanish, trans. Mirta Rosenberg with Jaime Arrambide Squirru, 2003)
Płynna nowoczesność (Polish, trans. Tomasz Kunz, 2006)
Текучая современность (Russian, trans. С. А. Комаров, 2008)

Gilles Deleuze: Bergsonism (1966-) [FR, ES, EN, PT, RU, CZ]

“What is needed for something new to appear? According to Gilles Deleuze, this question of ‘novelty’ is the major problem posed by Bergson’s work. In Bergsonism, Deleuze demonstrates both the development and the range of three fundamental Bergsonian concepts: duration, memory, and the élan vital.

A good companion book to Bergson’s Matter and Memory, Bergsonism is also of particular interest to students of Deleuze’s own work, influenced as it is by Bergson.”

French edition
Publisher Presses Universitaires de France, 1966
3rd edition, 2004
ISBN 2130545416

English edition
Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam
Publisher Zone Books, 1988
ISBN 094229906X, 9780942299069
131 pages

Publisher (EN)

Le bergsonisme (French, 1966/2004)
El bergsonismo (Spanish, trans. Luis Ferrero Carracedo, 1987, no OCR)
Bergsonism (English, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam, 1988, no OCR)
Bergsonismo (Portuguese, trans. Luiz B. L. Orlandi, 1999/2008)
Empirizm i subektivnost. Kriticheskaya filosofiya Kanta. Bergsonizm. Spinoza (Russian, trans. Я.И. Свирский, 2001)
Bergsonismus (Czech, trans. Josef Fulka, 2006, no OCR)

See also Mémoire et vie (1957-), Bergson’s texts selected by Deleuze.

Isabelle Stengers: Cosmopolitics (1996-97–) [FR, EN]

Cosmopolitics I.

“From Einstein’s quest for a unified field theory to Stephen Hawking’s belief that we ‘would know the mind of God’ through such a theory, contemporary science—and physics in particular—has claimed that it alone possesses absolute knowledge of the universe. In a sweeping work of philosophical inquiry, originally published in French in seven volumes, Isabelle Stengers builds on her previous intellectual accomplishments to explore the role and authority of science in modern societies and to challenge its pretensions to objectivity, rationality, and truth.

For Stengers, science is a constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and highly contingent system that does not simply discover preexisting truths but, through specific practices and processes, helps shape them. She addresses conceptual themes crucial for modern science, such as the formation of physical-mathematical intelligibility, from Galilean mechanics and the origin of dynamics to quantum theory, the question of biological reductionism, and the power relations at work in the social and behavioral sciences. Focusing on the polemical and creative aspects of such themes, she argues for an ecology of practices that takes into account how scientific knowledge evolves, the constraints and obligations such practices impose, and the impact they have on the sciences and beyond.

This perspective, which demands that competing practices and interests be taken seriously rather than merely (and often condescendingly) tolerated, poses a profound political and ethical challenge. In place of both absolutism and tolerance, she proposes a cosmopolitics—modeled on the ideal scientific method that considers all assumptions and facts as being open to question—that reintegrates the natural and the social, the modern and the archaic, the scientific and the irrational.”

Cosmopolitics I includes the first three volumes of the original work: The Science Wars; The Invention of Mechanics; and Thermodynamics.

Cosmopolitics II

“Arguing for an “ecology of practices” in the sciences, Isabelle Stengers explores the discordant landscape of knowledge derived from modern science, seeking intellectual consistency among contradictory, confrontational, and mutually exclusive philosophical ambitions and approaches. For Stengers, science is a constructive enterprise, a diverse, interdependent, and highly contingent system that does not simply discover preexisting truths but, through specific practices and processes, helps shape them.

Stengers concludes this philosophical inquiry with a forceful critique of tolerance; it is a fundamentally condescending attitude, she contends, that prevents those worldviews that challenge dominant explanatory systems from being taken seriously. Instead of tolerance, she proposes a “cosmopolitics” that rejects politics as a universal category and allows modern scientific practices to peacefully coexist with other forms of knowledge.

Cosmopolitics II includes the first English-language translations of the last four books: Quantum Mechanics: The End of the Dream; In the Name of the Arrow of Time: Prigogine’s Challenge; Life and Artifice: The Faces of Emergence; and The Curse of Tolerance. ”

French edition
Publisher La Découverte; Le Plessis-Robinson (Essonne): Synthélabo, Paris, 1996, 1997

English edition
Translated by Robert Bononno
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2010, 2011
Posthumanities series
ISBN 0816656878, 9780816656875 (Vol. I)
ISBN 0816656894, 9780816656899 (Vol. II)
312 and 472 pages

Reviews: Steven Shaviro, Michael Halewood (Radical Philosophy).

Author’s lecture on Cosmopolitics, video.

Publisher (EN/1)
Publisher (EN/2)

Cosmopolitiques I: La Guerre des sciences (French, Nov 1996)
Cosmopolitiques III: Thermodynamique: la réalité physique en crise (French, Jan 1997)
Cosmopolitiques VI: La Vie et l’Artifice: visages de l ‘émergence (French, Apr 1997)
Cosmopolitiques VII: Pour en finir avec la tolérance (French, May 1997)
Cosmopolitics I (1-3) (English)
Cosmopolitics II (4-7) (English)