Bøker utgitt av Other Press

In this collection of new and previously published essays, political theorist Isaac D. Balbus deepens and extends the feminist neo-Kleinian account of sexual, political, and technological domination he developed in his earlier works. The first half of Mourning and Modernity responds to Marxist, nonpsychoanalytic, feminist, and post-structuralist criticisms of that psychoanalytic account. The second half applies Kleinian theory to a number of salient topics, including: the issue of reparations for slavery and racism, the fantasies of omnipotence fostered by computer-mediated communication, and the way in which deep ecology and 12-step recovery programs contest omnipotence in the realms of production and consumption.Balbus conceptualizes modernity as a manic cultural defense against mourning the very losses it mandates and as a source of reparative movements of mourning that challenge its contemporary configuration. This argument allows Balbus to transcend the tired debate between those scholars for whom modernity is an unambiguous emancipation and those for whom modernity is entirely bereft of emancipatory possibilities. Mourning and Modernity thus renews the tradition of critical cultural psychoanalysis that includes the works of Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Norman O. Brown, Christopher Lasch, and Dorothy Dinnerstein, and will be particularly provocative to readers who are familiar with that tradition as well as anyone who is interested in the intersection of psychoanalysis and social or political theory.

"First published in the UK in 2021 by Head of Zeus Ltd."

A classic of Holocaust literature, the eloquent, acclaimed memoir of childhood by a Pulitzer-winning historian, now reissued with a new introduction by Claire Messud Four months before Hitler came to power, Saul Friedlnder was born in Prague to a middle-class Jewish family. In 1939, seven-year-old Saul and his family were forced to flee to France, where they lived through the German Occupation, until his parents' ill-fated attempt to flee to Switzerland. They were able to hide their son in a Roman Catholic seminary before being sent to Auschwitz where they were killed. After an imposed religious conversion, young Saul began training for priesthood. The birth of Israel prompted his discovery of his Jewish past and his true identity. Friedlnder brings his story movingly to life, shifting between his Israeli present and his European past with grace and restraint. His keen eye spares nothing, not even himself, as he explores the ways in which the loss of his parents, his conversion to Catholicism, and his deep-seated Jewish roots combined to shape him into the man he is today. Friedlnder's retrospective view of his journey of grief and self-discovery provides readers with a rare experience: a memoir of feeling with intellectual backbone, in equal measure tender and insightful.