Joris-Karl Huysmans: Against Nature (1884–) [FR, CZ, DE, EN, ES, PL, NO, IT]

“The narrative of this novel concentrates almost entirely on its principal character and is mostly a catalogue of the tastes and inner life of Jean Des Esseintes, an eccentric, reclusive aesthete and antihero who loathes 19th-century bourgeois society and tries to retreat into an ideal artistic world of his own creation. The novel contains many themes that became associated with the Symbolist aesthetic. In doing so, it broke from Naturalism and became the ultimate example of ‘decadent’ literature.” (Wikipedia)

French edition
With illustrations by Auguste Leroux
Publisher A. Ferroud – F. Ferroud, Paris, 1920
219 pages

English edition: Against the Grain
Translated by John Howard
Introduction by Havelock Ellis
Publisher Lieber & Lewis, New York, 1922
331 pages

English edition: Against Nature
Translated by Robert Baldick, 1956
With an Introduction and Notes by Patrick McGuinness
Publisher Penguin Books, 2003
ISBN 9780141906607

À rebours (French, 1884/1920), HTML, IA
Na ruby (Czech, trans. Arnošt Procházka, in Moderní revue, 1896, pages 9-16, 44-53, 69-76, 116-124, 148-152 and 174-183, added on 2015-2-5)
Gegen den Strich (German, trans. Hans Jacob, 1921/1978, added on 2015-2-5)
Against the Grain (English, trans. John Howard, 1922), IA
Al revés (Spanish, trans. Rodrigo Escudero, 1977, 12 MB, added on 2015-2-5)
Na wspak (Polish, trans. Julian Rogoziński, 1977, 40 MB, added on 2015-2-5)
Mot strømmen (Norwegian, trans. Jan Olav Gatland, 1998, requires Norwegian IP)
Against Nature (English, trans. Robert Baldick, 2003, EPUB)
Controcorrente (Italian, 2014, EPUB, added on 2015-2-5)

James C. Scott: Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (2012)

“James Scott taught us what’s wrong with seeing like a state. Now, in his most accessible and personal book to date, the acclaimed social scientist makes the case for seeing like an anarchist. Inspired by the core anarchist faith in the possibilities of voluntary cooperation without hierarchy, Two Cheers for Anarchism is an engaging, high-spirited, and often very funny defense of an anarchist way of seeing–one that provides a unique and powerful perspective on everything from everyday social and political interactions to mass protests and revolutions. Through a wide-ranging series of memorable anecdotes and examples, the book describes an anarchist sensibility that celebrates the local knowledge, common sense, and creativity of ordinary people. The result is a kind of handbook on constructive anarchism that challenges us to radically reconsider the value of hierarchy in public and private life, from schools and workplaces to retirement homes and government itself.

Beginning with what Scott calls “the law of anarchist calisthenics,” an argument for law-breaking inspired by an East German pedestrian crossing, each chapter opens with a story that captures an essential anarchist truth. In the course of telling these stories, Scott touches on a wide variety of subjects: public disorder and riots, desertion, poaching, vernacular knowledge, assembly-line production, globalization, the petty bourgeoisie, school testing, playgrounds, and the practice of historical explanation.

Far from a dogmatic manifesto, Two Cheers for Anarchism celebrates the anarchist confidence in the inventiveness and judgment of people who are free to exercise their creative and moral capacities.”

Publisher Princeton University Press, 2012
ISBN 1400844622, 9781400844623
192 pages

review (Malcolm Harris, Los Angeles Review of Books)
review (Michael Weiss, The Wall Street Journal)
review (Malcolm Harris, Salon)
review (Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Times)

publisher

PDF (updated on 2016-12-23)

Walter Benjamin: The Arcades Project (1982/1999) [German, English]

“To great writers,” Walter Benjamin once wrote, “finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives.” Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years—“the theater,” as Benjamin called it, “of all my struggles and all my ideas.”

Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris—glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism—Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them in 36 categories with descriptive rubrics such as “Fashion,” “Boredom,” “Dream City,” “Photography,” “Catacombs,” “Advertising,” “Prostitution,” “Baudelaire,” and “Theory of Progress.” His central preoccupation is what he calls the commodification of things—a process in which he locates the decisive shift to the modern age.

The Arcades Project is Benjamin’s effort to represent and to critique the bourgeois experience of nineteenth-century history, and, in so doing, to liberate the suppressed “true history” that underlay the ideological mask. In the bustling, cluttered arcades, street and interior merge and historical time is broken up into kaleidoscopic distractions and displays of ephemera. Here, at a distance from what is normally meant by “progress,” Benjamin finds the lost time(s) embedded in the spaces of things.

German edition: Gesammelte Schriften, Bd 5: Das Passagen-Werk
Edited by Rolf Tiedemann
Publisher Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1982
ISBN 3518285351
1354 pages

English edition
Translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin
Publisher The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge/MA and London, 1999
ISBN 067404326X, 9780674043268
1073 pages

Wikipedia (EN)
Publisher (EN)

Das Passagen Werk (German)
The Arcades Project (English)

See also Susan Buck-Morss’ The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (1989), and Benjamin at Monoskop (incl. source bibliography).