Umberto Eco: The Open Work (1962–) [IT, PT, EN]

“Umberto Eco’s The Open Work remains significant for its concept of “openness”–the artist’s decision to leave arrangements of some constituents of a work to the public or to chance–and for its striking anticipation of two major themes of contemporary literary theory: the element of multiplicity and plurality in art, and the insistence on literary response as an interactive process between reader and text. The questions Eco raises, and the answers he suggests, are intertwined in the continuing debate on literature, art, and culture in general.

This new English edition includes an introduction by David Robey that explores Eco’s thought at the period of The Open Work, prior to his absorption in semiotics. The book now contains key essays on Eco’s mentor Luigi Pareyson, on television and mass culture, and on the politics of art.”

First published in Italian as Opera aperta, 1962.

English edition
Translated by Anna Cancogni
With an Introduction by David Robey
Publisher Harvard University Press, 1989
ISBN 0674639766, 9780674639768
285 pages

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Opera aperta (Italian, 4th ed., 1962/1997, added on 2015-1-8)
Obra aberta (Portuguese, trans. Giovanni Cutolo, 8th ed., 1971/1991)
The Open Work (English, trans. Anna Cancogni, 1989)

Jean-François Lyotard: Libidinal Economy (1974/1993)

Libidinal Economy, a major work of modern Continental philosophy in its own right, is regarded as the most important response to Deleuze and Guattari’s groundbreaking work. Having broken from Marxism, Lyotard presents an almost nihilistic attack on the philosophies of desire in a polemical and compelling work.

This philosophical development of the Freudian concept of ‘libidinal economy’ is in part a response to Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus, it can also be seen as culminating a line of modern thought ranging from de Sade, Nietzsche and Bataille, to Deleuze, Klossowski, Irigaray and Cixous.

First published as Economie Libidinale, Les Editions De Minuit, Paris, 1974
Translated and with Introduction by Ian Hamilton Grant
Publisher Indiana University Press, 1993
ISBN 0253207282, 9780253207289
275 pages

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Timothy Lenoir (ed.): Inscribing Science: Scientific Texts and the Materiality of Communication (1998)

Early practitioners of the social studies of science turned their attention away from questions of institutionalization, which had tended to emphasize macrolevel explanations, and attended instead to microstudies of laboratory practice. Though sympathetic to this approach—as the microstudies included in this book attest—the author is interested in re-investigating certain aspects of institution formation, notably the formation of scientific, medical, and engineering disciplines. He emphasizes the manner in which science as cultural practice is imbricated with other forms of social, political, and even aesthetic practices.

This book offers case studies that reexamine certain critical junctures in the traditional historical picture of the evolution of the role of the scientist in modern Western society. It focuses especially on the establishment of new disciplines within German research universities in the nineteenth century, the problematic relationship that emerged between science, industry, and the state at the turn of the twentieth century, and post-World War II developments in science and technology.

After an Introduction and two chapters dealing with science and technology as cultural production and the struggles of disciplines to achieve legitimation and authority, the author considers the following topics: the organic physics of 1847; the innovative research program of Carl Ludwig as a model for institutionalizing science-based medicine; optics, painting, and ideology in Germany, 1845-95; Paul Ehrlich’s “magic bullet”; the Haber-Bosch synthesis of ammonia; and the introduction of nuclear magnetic resonance instrumentation into the practice of organic chemistry.

Publisher Stanford University Press, 1998
Writing Science series
ISBN 0804727775, 9780804727778
476 pages

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