Jean-Luc Nancy: The Inoperative Community (1986–) [EN, ES, CR, RO]

“In this powerful work, Jean-Luc Nancy examines community as an idea that has dominated modern thought and traces its relation to concepts of experience, discourse, and the individual. Contrary to popular Western notions of community, Nancy shows that it is neither a project of fusion nor production. Rather, he argues, community can be defined through the political nature of its resistance against immanent power.”

Publisher Christian Bourgois, Paris, 1986
New edition, 2004
ISBN 22670008939
278 pages

English edition
Edited by Peter Connor
Translated by Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney
Foreword by Christopher Fynsk
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 1991
Theory and History of Literature series, 76
176 pages

Publisher (FR)
Publisher (EN)
WorldCat (FR)
WorldCat (EN)

The Inoperative Community (English, ed. Peter Connor, 1991)
La comunidad inoperante (Spanish, trans. Juan Manuel Garrido Wainer, 2000)
Dva ogleda. Razdjelovljena zajednica. O singularnom pluralnom bitku (Croatian, trans. Tomislav Medak, 2003)
Comunitatea absentă (Romanian, trans. Emilian Cioc, 2005, 69 MB)

Northrop Frye: Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (1957–) [EN, PT, ES]

Striking out at the conception of criticism as restricted to mere opinion or ritual gesture, Northrop Frye wrote this magisterial work proceeding on the assumption that criticism is a structure of thought and knowledge in its own right. In four brilliant essays on historical, ethical, archetypical, and rhetorical criticism, employing examples of world literature from ancient times to the present, Frye reconceived literary criticism as a total history rather than a linear progression through time.

Literature, Frye wrote, is “the place where our imaginations find the ideal that they try to pass on to belief and action, where they find the vision which is the source of both the dignity and the joy of life.” And the critical study of literature provides a basic way “to produce, out of the society we have to live in, a vision of the society we want to live in.”

Harold Bloom contributes a fascinating and highly personal preface that examines Frye’s mode of criticism and thought (as opposed to Frye’s criticism itself) as being indispensable in the modern literary world.

Publisher Princeton University Press, 1957
383 pages

Selected reviews (1956-59)
Review (Graham Nicol Forst, Canadian Literature, 2003)
Review (Frank Kermode, The Review of English Studies, 1959)

Publisher (EN)
Wikipedia (EN)

Anatomy of Criticism (English, Third printing, 1973, 19 MB), View online (HTML)
Anatomia da crítica (Portuguese, trans. Péricles Eugênio and Silva Ramos, 1973, 21 MB)
El camino critico (Spanish, trans. Miguel Mac-Veigh, 1986, essays 1-3 only, 21 MB)
Anatomy of Criticism (English, Fifteenth printing, with a new Foreword by Harold Bloom, 2000)

Marcel Mauss: The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (1925–) [FR, EN, DE, RO]

“The Gift is a short book by the French sociologist Marcel Mauss and is the foundation of social theories of reciprocity and gift exchange.

It is perhaps the first systematic study of the custom, widespread in primitive societies from ancient Rome to present-day Melanesia, of exchanging gifts. The gift is conceived as a transaction forming part of all human, personal relationships between individuals and groups. These gift exchanges are at the same time moral, economic, juridical, aesthetic, religious, mythological and social phenomena.

The Gift has been very influential in anthropology, where there is a large field of study devoted to reciprocity and exchange. It has also influenced philosophers, artists and political activists, including Georges Bataille, Jacques Derrida and more recently the work of David Graeber.”

French edition
Essai sur le don: Forme et raison de l’échange dans les sociétés archaïques
Publisher Librairie Félix Alcan, Paris, 1925
157 pages
via Gallica

English edition
Translated by Ian Cunnison
With an Introduction by E. E. Evans-Pritchard
Publisher Cohen & West, London, 1966
130 pages

Another English edition
Translated by W. D. Halls
With a foreword by Mary Douglas
Publisher Routledge, London/New York, 1990
ISBN 041526748X
200 pages

New English edition
Edited, annotated and translated by Jane I. Guyer
Foreword by Bill Maurer
Publisher Hau Books, Chicago, 2016
ISBN 9780990505006
248 pages

Wikipedia

Essai sur le don (French, 1923-24/1925)
The Gift (English, 1966)
The Gift (English, 1990)
Die Gabe (German, added on 2014-2-6, DJVU)
Eseu despre dar (Romanian, trans. Silvia Lupescu, 1993; new edition, 1997, added on 2013-6-3, via sorin, updated on 2019-6-10)
The Gift: Expanded Edition (English, trans. Jane I. Guyer, 2016, added on 2016-4-24, updated on 2019-6-10: removed from Open Access by publisher)