Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (1978–) [FR, EN, ES]

“With an eye for the sensual bloom of young schoolgirls, and the torrid style of the romantic novels of her day, Herculine Barbin tells the story of her life as a hermaphrodite. Herculine was designated female at birth. A pious girl in a Catholic orphanage, a bewildered adolescent enchanted by the ripening bodies of her classmates, a passionate lover of another schoolmistress, she is suddenly reclassified as a man. Alone and desolate, he commits suicide at the age of thirty in a miserable attic in Paris.

Here, in an erotic diary, is one lost voice from our sexual past. Provocative, articulate, eerily prescient as she imagines her corpse under the probing instruments of scientists, Herculine brings a disturbing perspective to our own notions of sexuality. Michel Foucault, who discovered these memoirs in the archives of the French Department of Public Hygiene, presents them with the graphic medical descriptions of Herculine’s body before and after her death. In a striking contrast, a painfully confused young person and the doctors who examine her try to sort out the nature of masculine and feminine at the dawn of the age of modern sexuality.”

“Herculine Barbin can be savored like a libertine novel. The ingenousness of Herculine, the passionate yet equivocal tenderness which thrusts her into the arms, even into the beds, of her companions, gives these pages a charm strangely erotic…Michel Foucault has a genius for bringing to light texts and reviving destinies outside the ordinary.” (Le Monde, July 1978)

Originally published as Herculine Barbir, dite Alexina B., Gallimard, 1978

English edition
Edited and Introduced by Michel Foucault
Translated by Richard McDougall
First published by Pantheon Books, 1980
Publisher Vintage Books, 2010
ISBN 9780394738628
199 pages
via homoluden

Review (Andrea Rossi, Foucault Studies, 2013)
Review (G. S. Rousseau, Medical History, 1981)
Review (Kirkus Reviews)
Commentary (Sarug Dagir Ribeiro, Belo Horizonte, 2010, in Spanish)

Wikipedia (EN)

Adélaïde Herculine Barbin: Mes souvenirs (French, 1978/2002, on Scribd.com)
Herculine Barbin, Being the Recently Discovered Memoirs of a Nineteenth-Century French Hermaphrodite (English, 1980/2010) (updated to OCR’d version, via bbjanz).
Herculine Barbin, Llamada Alexina B. (Spanish, sel. Antonio Serrano, 2a ed., 1985/2007)

Cathy Porter: Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography (1980)

Alexandra Kollontai is “one of the most fascinating and least understood figures of the Bolshevik revolution. A feminist and a socialist, Kollontai defended a vision of emancipation premised on equality, comradeship, and personal autonomy, where society would take responsibility for domestic labour while enabling individuals freely to express their sexuality.” (source)

She was a key leader of the Russian Socialist movement, the only woman in the early Soviet government, and one of the most famous women in Russian history. She worked tirelessly all her life, as a speaker, writer, and organizer for women’s emancipation. This compelling biography recounts her life for an emerging generation of fighters for women’s liberation.

Publisher Virago, 1980
ISBN 0860680134
537 pages

Review (Tamara Deutscher, Marxism Today, 1980)
Review (Sarah Creagh, Socialist Review)
Commentary (Christine Sypnowich, Labour/Le Travail, 1993)
Commentary (Nick Evans, The Oxford Left Review, 2012)

PDF (no OCR)

Martin Davis: The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing (2000–) [EN, IT, CR]

“Martin Davis, a fluent interpreter of mathematics and philosophy, locates the source of this knowledge in the work of the remarkable German thinker G. W. Leibniz, who, among other accomplishments, was a distinguished jurist, mining engineer, and diplomat but found time to invent a contraption called the “Leibniz wheel,” a sort of calculator that could carry out the four basic operations of arithmetic. Leibniz subsequently developed a method of calculation called the calculus raciocinator, an innovation his successor George Boole extended by, in Davis’s words, “turning logic into algebra.” (Boole emerges as a deeply sympathetic character in Davis’s pages, rather than as the dry-as-dust figure of other histories. He explained, Davis reports, that he had turned to mathematics because he had so little money as a student to buy books, and mathematics books provided more value for the money because they took so long to work through.) Davis traces the development of this logic, essential to the advent of “thinking machines,” through the workshops and studies of such thinkers as Georg Cantor, Kurt Gödel, and Alan Turing, each of whom puzzled out just a little bit more of the workings of the world–and who, in the bargain, made the present possible.”

The paperback edition was retitled Engines of Logic: Mathematicians and the Origin of the Computer.

Publisher W. W. Norton, 2000
ISBN 0393047857, 9780393047851
257 pages

Review (Mark Johnson, Mathematical Association of America)
Review (Georges Ifrah, The American Mathematical Monthly)

The Universal Computer. The Road from Leibniz to Turing (English, 2001)
Il calcolatore universale: da Leibniz a Turing (Italian, trans. Gianni Rigamonti, 2003)
Na logički pogon: podrijetlo ideje računala (Croatian, trans. Ljerka Vukić and Ognjen Strpić, 2003)