Élisabeth Roudinesco: Jacques Lacan: Outline of a Life, History of a System of Thought (1993-) [Spanish/English]

Jacques Lacan remains not only one of the foremost intellectuals of the century, but also one of the most controversial. As a young doctor he set out to reinvent clinical psychotherapy and ended up transforming fundamental notions of the self, sexuality and the culture that shapes it all. This first major biography of Lacan is a fascinating portrait of his life and a masterful explication of the unorthodox, often perplexing ideas that brought him renown. 22 photos.

Originally published in French as Jacques Lacan: Esquisse d’une vie, histoire d’un systeme de pensee, Librairie Artheme Fayard, 1993

Spanish edition
Translated by Tomás Segovia
Publisher FCE, Argentina, 1994, FCE, Colombia, 2000
ISBN 9505572107, 9789505572106
815 pages

English edition
Translated by Barbara Bray
Publisher Columbia University Press, New York, 1997
European Perspectives series
ISBN 0231101465, 9780231101462
574 pages

google books (EN)

Lacan: Esbozo de una vida, historia de un sistema de pensamiento (Spanish, 1994)
Lacan: A Biography (English, 1997, DJVU, no OCR)

Erkki Huhtamo, Jussi Parikka (eds.): Media Archaeology: Approaches, Applications, and Implications (2011)

“This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media – one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.”

Publisher University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 2011
ISBN 0520262743, 9780520262744
x+356 pages

Reviews: Simone Natale (Canadian Journal of Communication, 2012), Sarah Lugthart (TMG, 2012), John Potts (Screen, 2013), Michael Goddard (Journal of Visual Culture, 2013), Swagato Chakravorty (Senses of Cinema, 2013), Astrid Mager (Information, Communication & Society, 2013).

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2021-4-9)

Jean Baudrillard: Seduction (1979-) [ES, EN, CZ, PL]

“Seduction, in French thinker Baudrillard’s apocalyptic discourse, is a power of attraction and fascination capable of subverting mechanical, orgasm-centered sexuality and reality in general. Two chief obstacles to unleashing the potentially liberating forces of seduction are the women’s movement and psychoanalysis, charges the author of America and Forget Foucault. While recognizing that seduction has a negative side–turning the seduced person away from his/her true thoughts and impulses–Baudrillard is intrigued by the seductive processes at work in the vertigo induced by games, in magic and the lottery, in the transvestite’s “total gestural, sensual and ritual” behavior. He decodes pornography as “an orgy of realism,” a hyperreality of signs. In his analysis, seduction has itself been corrupted in a world of manufactured desires and ready-made satisfactions. With seductive irony, Baudrillard storms the fragile phallic fortress of patriarchy in this heady, sometimes obscure meditation.”

Originally published in French as De la seduction by Editions Galilee, 1979
Translated to English by Brian Singer
Publisher New World Perspectives, 1991
CultureTexts series
ISBN 092039325X
182 pages
for gnd

google books (English)

PDF (Spanish, trans. Elena Benarroch, 1981)
PDF (English, trans. Brian Singer, 1991)
PDF (Czech, trans. Alena Dvořáčková, 1996)
PDF (Polish, trans. Janusz Margański, 2005, updated on 2016-10-28)