Barbara Will: Unlikely Collaboration: Gertrude Stein, Bernard Faÿ, and the Vichy Dilemma (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · fascism, literature, modernism, politics, war

“A study of the friendship between Gertrude Stein and Bernard Faÿ, director of the Bibliothèque Nationale under the collaborationist Vichy government and chief protector of Stein’s interests in France during World War II. From the late 1920s-40s Stein and Faÿ shared a worldview marked by aesthetic radicalism and political conservatism, culminating in Stein’s agreement in 1941, at the suggestion of Faÿ, to translate the speeches of Marshal Philippe Pétain into English. This book reads the Stein-Faÿ relationship as a case study through which to raise larger theoretical questions: about the role of prominent intellectuals in wartime France; about the place of America in the Vichy imagination; about the libidinal promise or threat of fascist ideology for sexual identity; and most importantly, about the intersection of modernism and fascism.”
Publisher Columbia University Press, 2011
Gender and Culture series
ISBN 0231152620, 9780231152624
xviii+274 pages
Reviews: Renate Stendhal (LA Review of Books 2011), Sarah Posman (Modernism/modernity 2012), Richard M. Berrong (Gay and Lesbian Review 2012), Christopher Benfey (New Republic 2012), Michael Kimmelman (NY Review of Books 2012), Angela Kershaw (French Studies 2012), Birgitvan Puymbroeck (Modern Fiction Studies 2013), Karen Leick (H-France 2013).
See also Gertrude Stein’s war years: Setting the record straight, a dossier edited by Charles Bernstein in May 2012. (added 10 Apr)
Comment (0)Kostas Axelos: Introduction to a Future Way of Thought: On Marx and Heidegger (1966/2015)
Filed under book | Tags: · earth, labour, philosophy, philosophy of technology, production, technology

“‘Technologists only change the world in various ways in generalized indifference; the point is to think the world and interpret the changes in its unfathomability, to perceive and experience the difference binding being to the nothing.’
Anticipating the age of planetary technology Kostas Axelos, a Greek-French philosopher, approaches the technological question in this book, first published in 1966, by connecting the thought of Karl Marx and Martin Heidegger. Marx famously declared that philosophers had only interpreted the world, but the point was to change it. Heidegger on his part stressed that our modern malaise was due to the forgetting of being, for which he thought technological questions were central. Following from his study of Marx as a thinker of technology, and foreseeing debates about globalization, Axelos recognizes that technology now determines the world. Providing an introduction to some of his major themes, including the play of the world, Axelos asks if planetary technology requires a new, a future way of thought which in itself is planetary.”
First published as Einführung in ein künftiges Denken: Über Marx und Heidegger, Niemeyer, Tübingen, 1966.
Edited and with an Introduction by Stuart Elden
Translated by Kenneth Mills
Publisher meson press, Lüneburg, June 2015
Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0 License
ISBN 9783957960061
178 pages
Review: George Tomlinson (Marx & Philosophy 2016).
Comment (1)Colin Rowe, Fred Koetter: Collage City (1978–) [EN, DE, ES]
Filed under book | Tags: · architecture, bricolage, city, collage, modernism, postmodernism, theory, urban design, urban planning, urbanism, utopia

“A theoretical treatise that sets out various analyses of urban form in a number of existing cities known to be aesthetically successful, examining their actually existing urban structure as found, revealing it to be the end product of a ceaseless process of fragmentation, the collision / superimposition / contamination of many diverse ideas imposed on it by successive generations, each with its own idea.”
A major thesis on urban interaction which first introduced the concept of “bricolage” to urban theory.
Publisher MIT Press, 1978
ISBN 0262180863, 9780262180863
186 pages
Commentary: ANY 7-8, dedicated to Rowe’s work (ed. Robert Somol, 1994), K. Michael Hays (Architecture Theory Since 1968, 1998), Joan Ockman (Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 1998), Anthony Vidler (Architectural Review, 2011).
Review: Ed Cutler (2010).
Collage City (English, 1978, 99 MB, via)
Collage City (German, trans. Bernhard Hoesli, 1984, 37 MB)
Ciudad collage (Spanish, trans. Esteve Riambau Sauri, 1998, 23 MB, via)
Introduction to French edition (1993)