Alain Badiou: The Century (2005–)
Filed under book | Tags: · art, avant-garde, cinema, fascism, france, history, ideology, nazism, nihilism, philosophy, politics, reality, religion, united states, violence
“Everywhere, the twentieth century has been judged and condemned: the century of totalitarian terror, of utopian and criminal ideologies, of empty illusions, of genocides, of false avant-gardes, of democratic realism everywhere replaced by abstraction.
It is not Badiou’s wish to plead for an accused that is perfectly capable of defending itself without the authors aid. Nor does he seek to proclaim, like Frantz, the hero of Sartre’s Prisoners of Altona, ‘I have taken the century on my shoulders and I have said: I will answer for it!’ The Century simply aims to examine what this accursed century, from within its own unfolding, said that it was. Badiou’s proposal is to reopen the dossier on the century – not from the angle of those wise and sated judges we too often claim to be, but from the standpoint of the century itself.”
First published as Le Siècle, 2005.
Translated, with a Commentary and Notes by Alberto Toscano
Publisher Polity, 2007
ISBN 0745636314, 9780745636313
233 pages
PDF (updated on 2020-7-5)
Comment (0)Henri Lefebvre: Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life (1992/2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · city, everyday, history, life, marxism, movement, presence, space, time
“Rhythmanalysis displays all the characteristics which made Lefebvre one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. In the analysis of rhythms — both biological and social — Lefebvre shows the interrelation of space and time in the understanding of everyday life. With dazzling skills, Lefebvre moves between discussions of music, the commodity, measurement, the media and the city. In doing so he shows how a non-linear conception of time and history balanced his famous rethinking of the question of space. This volume also includes his earlier essays on ‘The Rhythmanalysis Project’ and ‘Attempt at the Rhythmanalysis of Mediterranean Towns’.”
First published as Éléments de rythmnanalyse, Syllepse, Paris, 1992.
Translated by Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore
With an Introduction by Stuart Elden
Publisher Continuum, 2004
Athlone Contemporary European Thinkers series
ISBN 0826472990, 9780826472991
112 pages
Reviews and commentaries: Guillerm (L Homme et la société, 1992, FR), Horton (Time & Society, 2005), Revol (Rhuthmos, 2012).
PDF (updated on 2016-11-27)
Comments (2)Fredric Jameson: The Modernist Papers (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · aesthetics, history, ideology, literary criticism, literary theory, literature, modernism, narrative, postmodernism, resistance
“A new perspective on Proust, Joyce, Kafka and others from master of literary theory.
Cultural critic Fredric Jameson, renowned for his incisive studies of the passage of modernism to postmodernism, for the first time since his acclaimed A Singular Modernity returns to the movement that dramatically broke with all tradition in search of progress.
The Modernist Papers is a tour de froce of anlysis and criticism, in which Jameson brings his dynamic and acute thought to bear on the modernist literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jameson discusses modernist poetics, including intensive discussions of the work of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Wallace Stevens, Joyce, Proust, and Thomas Mann. He explores the peculiarties of the American literary field, taking in William Carlos Williams and the American epic, and examines the language theories of Gertrude Stein. Refusing to see modernism as simply a Western phenomenon he also pays close attention to its Japanese expression; while the complexities of a late modernist representation of twentieth-century politics are articulated in a concluding section on Peter Weiss’s novel The Aesthetics of Resistance.”
Publisher Verso, 2007
ISBN 1844670961, 9781844670963
426 pages
PDF (11 MB, updated on 2016-6-26)
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