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Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself.

A consideration of blandness not as the absence of defining qualities but as the harmonious union of all potential values-an infinite opening into human experience.

Following in the wake of his groundbreaking work War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, Manuel De Landa presents a brilliant, radical synthesis of historical development of the last thousand years. A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History sketches the outlines of a renewed materialist philosophy of history in the tradition of Fernand Braudel, Gilles Deleuze, and Felix Guattari, while engaging - in an entirely unprecedented manner - the critical new understanding of material processes derived from the sciences of dynamics. Working against prevailing attitudes that see history merely as the arena of texts, discourses, ideologies, and metaphors, De Landa traces the concrete movements and interplays of matter and energy through human populations in the last millennium. The result is an entirely novel approach to the study of human societies and their always mobile, semi-stable forms, cities, economies, technologies, and languages.De Landa attacks three domains that have given shape to human societies: economics, biology, and linguistics. In each case, De Landa discloses the self-directed processes of matter and energy interacting with the whim and will of human history itself to form a panoramic vision of the West free of rigid teleology and naive notions of progress and, even more important, free of any deterministic source for its urban, institutional, and technological forms. The source of all concrete forms in the West's history, rather, is shown to derive from internal morphogenetic capabilities that lie within the flow of matter-energy itself.A Swerve Edition.

The Accursed Share provides an excellent introduction to Bataille the philosopher.

"Between the twelfth and the sixteenth centuries, European Christians used in worship a plethora of objects, not only prayer books, statues, and paintings but also pieces of natural materials, such as stones and earth, considered to carry holiness, dolls representing Jesus and Mary, and even bits of consecrated bread and wine thought to be miraculously preserved flesh and blood. Theologians and ordinary worshippers alike explained, utilized, justified, and warned against some of these objects, which could carry with them both anti-Semitic charges and the glorious promise of heaven. Their proliferation and the reaction against them form a crucial background to the European-wide movements we know today as "reformations" (both Protestant and Catholic). In a set of independent but inter-related essays, Caroline Bynum considers some examples of such holy things, among them beds for the baby Jesus, the headdresses of medieval nuns, and the footprints of Christ carried home from the Holy Land by pilgrims in patterns cut to their shape or their measurement in lengths of string. Building on and going beyond her well-received work on the history of materiality, Bynum makes two arguments, one substantive, the other methodological. First, she demonstrates that the objects themselves communicate a paradox of dissimilar similitude-that is, that in their very details they both image the glory of heaven and make clear that that heaven is beyond any representation in earthly things. Second, she uses the theme of likeness and unlikeness to interrogate current practices of comparative history. Suggesting that contemporary students of religion, art, and culture should avoid comparing things that merely "look alike," she proposes that humanists turn instead to comparing across cultures the disparate and perhaps visually dissimilar objects in which worshippers as well as theorists locate the "other" that gives their religion enduring power"--

"From missing persons to disenfranchised civil subjects, from individuals tainted with infamy to the dead, Absentees explores the varieties of "nonpersons," human beings all too human, drawing examples, terms and concepts from the archives of European and American literature, legal studies, and the social sciences"--

A new form of investigative practice that uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction.

In this book, his first to appear in English, French sinologist Francois Jullien uses the Chinese concept of shi-meaning disposition or circumstance, power or potential-as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture and to uncover the intricate structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking.

An exploration of the central role of indirect modes of expression in ancient China.

Examining Tony Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art.

A historical, literary, and philosophical study that transforms our understanding of reading"Peter Szendy offers a subtle, persuasive, and unprecedented account of the time of reading and its scene of address, one that is as archaic as it is contemporary. When we read, are we listening to a voice or being read to? If it is not a private and monologic exercise, how do we understand the populated scene of reading? What reads when we read, and how does reading push and pull between temporalities and voices? Why do we keep leaving the text when we seek to obey the injunction to stay within its terms?Questions such as these produce a fresh, even startling, consideration of a wide range of literary and popular texts, including Hobbes’ Leviathan, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Kant’s moral injunctions, Sade, Valéry, Blanchot, and de Certeau, but also modern fiction, film, audiobooks, and hypertext. The power of reading turns out to belong to its surprising engagement with time and direction: the deliberate reader stays close but strays, tries to fill in the gaps but gets pushed back by a countercurrent. The key to the text is sought ‘outside’ only to be led back to the text and its failure to deliver a final answer. Equally at odds with older versions of literary formalism that insist on the self-referentiality of the text as well as contextualists who scour an external social order to discover the truth of the text, Szendy approaches that very conflict as an oscillation constitutive of reading itself. Paradoxically, reading is sustained precisely by what interrupts its teleological flow.The result is a comic, profound, and timely reconceptualization of reading which rushes forward only to find itself pushed back into the heart of the text, which discovers that this incessant breaking from the text, this headlong rushing ahead to the world outside the text is a sequence of overreach, delay, and return that forms the ragged rhythm of reading itself. Powers of Reading is a patient, brilliant, and illuminating inquiry into the crosscurrents of voice and address, one that speaks to the speed and complexity of our time, how we are upended by our forward propulsions, to consider how multiple voice, action, and passivity are all rearranged in the scene of reading." –Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley

How the work of several contemporary artists illuminates and challenges the policing of European borders and identityIn this stunningly original book, Sara Nadal-Melsió explores how the work of several contemporary artists illuminates the current crisis of European universalist values amid the brutal realities of exclusion and policing of borders. The “wolf” is the name Baroque musicians gave to the dissonant sound produced in any attempt to temper and harmonize an instrument. Europe and the Wolf brings this musical figure to bear on contemporary aesthetic practices that respond to Europe’s ongoing social and political contradictions. Throughout, Nadal-Melsió understands Europe as a conceptual problem that often relies on harmonization as an organizing category. The “wolf” as an emblem of disharmony, incarnated in the stranger, the immigrant, or the refugee, originates in the Latin proverb “man is a wolf to man.” This longstanding phrase evokes the pervasive fear, and even hatred, of what is foreign, unknown, or beyond the borders of a community. The book follows the “wolf” in a series of relays between the musical, the visual, and the political, and through innovative readings of artworks—by, among others, Carles Santos, Pere Portabella, Allora&Calzadilla, and Anri Sala. Traversed by the musical, these artworks, as well as Nadal-Melsió’s writing, present unstable symbolic and material ensembles in an array of variations of political possibilities and impossibilities that evade institutions intolerant of uncertainty and wary of diversity.

An intellectual history of the concept of life and body politics in Chinese philosophy The philosophical tradition in the West has always subjected life to conceptual divisions and questions about meaning. Although this process has given rise to a rich history of inquiry, it proceeds too fast, contends François Jullien. In its anxiety about meaning, Western thinkers since Plato have forgotten simply to experience life. In Vital Nourishment, Jullien slows down and begins to think about life from a point outside of Western inquiry, using the third- and fourth-century BCE Chinese thinker Zhuanghi as a foil in this installment of his continuing project of plumbing the philosophical divide between Eastern and Western thought. The question of how to "feed life," or nourish it, is the point of departure for the Chinese tradition that Jullien locates in Zhuanghi. Life is something that passes through each of us, and we have a duty to become amenable to its ebbs and flows. We must cultivate a sense of being adequate to it so that we can house it. Exploring notions of breath, energy, and immanence, Jullien reopens a vibrant space of intellectual exchange between East and West. In doing so, he refuses to commit to a rigid thesis of meaning, and his text unfolds as an elegant process that begins to mirror the very type of thought he explores. While his inquiry is certainly weighted toward reinvigorating Western thought with ideas from the East, Jullien points out that this approach is intellectually and politically imperative at present. Against the self-help industry, which pursues an opportunistic simulacrum of this type of intellectual exchange, Jullien seeks to create a space of mutual inquiry that maintains the integrity of both Eastern and Western thinking. Vital Nourishment is therefore both a rich intellectual historical journey and a text very much attuned to the philosophical politics of the present.

A major rethinking of twentieth-century abstract art mobilized by the work of Brazilian artist Lygia Clark What would it mean to treat an interval of space as a line, thus drawing an empty void into a constellation of art and meaning-laden things? In this book, Irene V. Small elucidates the signal discovery of the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark in 1954: a fissure of space between material elements Clark called "the organic line." For much of the history of art, Clark's discovery, much like the organic line, has escaped legibility. Once recognized, however, the line has seismic repercussions for rethinking foundational concepts such as mark, limit, surface, and edge. A spatial cavity that binds discrepant entities together, the organic line transforms planes into flexible topologies, borders into membranes, and interstices into points of connection. As a paradigm, the organic line has profound historiographic implications as well, inviting us to set aside traditional notions of influence and origin in favor of what Small terms weak links and plagiotropic relations. These fragile, oblique, and transversal ties have their own efficacy, and Small's innovative readings of canonical modernist works such as Kazimir Malevich's Black Square, John Cage's 4'33", and Le Corbusier's machine-à-habiter, as well as contemporary works by such artists as Adam Pendleton, Ricardo Basbaum, and Mika Rottenberg, reveal the organic line's remarkable potential as an analytic instrument. Mobilizing a rich repertoire of archival sources and moving across multiple chronologies, geographies, and disciplines, the book invites us to envision modernism, not as a stable construct defined by centers and peripheries, inclusions and exclusions, but as a topological field of interactive, destabilizing tensions. More than a history of a little-known artistic device, The Organic Line: Toward a Topology of Modernism is a user's guide and manifesto for reimagining modern and contemporary art for the present.

"In the history of human societies, images have not only been destined for contemplation. They have also been eaten or drunk. But what purposes and what structures of the imagination can explain such behavior? These are the questions that this book aims to answer"--

A new history of the concept of fetal life in the human sciences At a time when the becoming of a human being in a woman's body has, once again, become a fraught issue--from abortion debates and surrogacy controversies to prenatal diagnoses and assessments of fetal risk--Of Human Born presents the largely unknown history of how the human sciences came to imagine the unborn in terms of "life before birth." Caroline Arni shows how these sciences created the concept of "fetal life" by way of experimenting on animals, pregnant women, and newborns; how they worried about the influence of the expectant mother's living conditions; and how they lingered on the question of the beginnings of human subjectivity. Such were the concerns of physiologists, pediatricians, psychologists, and psychoanalysts as they advanced the novel discipline of embryology while, at the same time, grappling with age-old questions about the coming-into-being of a human person. Of Human Born thus draws attention to the fundamental way in which modern approaches to the unborn have been intertwined with the configuration of "the human" in the age of scientific empiricism. Arni revises the narrative that the "modern embryo" is quintessentially an embryo disembedded from the pregnant woman's body. On the contrary, she argues that the concept of fetal life cannot be separated from its dependency on the maternal organism, countering the rhetorical discourses that have fueled the recent rollback of abortion rights in the United States.

"A transdisciplinary investigation of biological motion as the most profound definition of living existence, Biological Motion studies the foundational relationship between motion and life. To answer the question, "What is Life?," Wellmann engages in a transdisciplinary investigation of motion as the most profound definition of living existence. For decades, information and structure have predominated the historiography of the life sciences with its prevailing focus on DNA structure and function. Now more than ever, motion is a crucial theme of basic biological research. Tracing motion from Aristotle's animal soul to molecular motors, to medical soft robotics and mathematical analysis, prize-winning historian of science, Janina Wellmann locates biological motion at the intersection of knowledge domains and scientific and cultural practices. She offers signposts to mark the sites where researchers, technologies, ideas, and practices opened up new paths in the constitution of the phenomenon of motion. An ambitious rethinking of the life sciences, Biological Motion uncovers the secret life of movement and offers a new account of what it means to be alive"--

A thorough investigation of the current combination of austerity and extravagance that characterizes government spending and central bank monetary policy At the close of the 1970s, government treasuries and central banks took a vow of perpetual self-restraint. To this day, fiscal authorities fret over soaring public debt burdens, while central bankers wring their hands at the slightest sign of rising wages. As the brief reprieve of coronavirus spending made clear, no departure from government austerity will be tolerated without a corresponding act of penance. Yet we misunderstand the scope of neoliberal public finance if we assume austerity to be its sole setting. Beyond the zero-sum game of direct claims on state budgets lies a whole realm of indirect government spending that escapes the naked eye. Capital gains on existing wealth are multiply subsidized by a tax system that reserves its greatest rewards for financial asset holders. And for all its airs of haughty asceticism, the Federal Reserve has become adept at facilitating the inflation of financial asset values while ruthlessly suppressing wages. Neoliberalism is as extravagant as it is austere, and this paradox needs to be grasped if we are to challenge its core modus operandi. Melinda Cooper examines the major schools of thought that have shaped neoliberal common sense around public finance. Focusing in particular on Virginia school public choice theory and supply-side economics, she shows how these currents produced distinct but ultimately complimentary responses to the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. With its intellectual roots in the conservative Southern Democratic tradition, Virginia school public choice theory espoused an austere doctrine of budget balance. The supply-side movement, by contrast, advocated tax cuts without spending restraint, in an apparent repudiation of austerity. Yet, for all their differences, the two schools converged around the need to rein in the redistributive uses of public spending. Together, they drove a counterrevolution in public finance that deepened the divide between rich and poor and revived the fortunes of dynastic wealth. Far-reaching as the neoliberal counterrevolution has been, Cooper still identifies a counterfactual history of unrealized possibilities in the capitalist crisis of the 1970s. She concludes by inviting us to rethink the concept of revolution and raises the question: is another politics of extravagance possible?

"A pioneering exploration of the defining traits and contradictions of our relationship to the future through the lens of discounting Forest fires, droughts, and rising sea levels beg a nagging question: have we lost our capacity to act on the future? Liliana Doganova's book sheds new light on this anxious query. It argues that our relationship to the future has been trapped in the gears of a device called discounting. While its incidence remains little known, discounting has long been entrenched in market and policy practices, shaping the ways firms and governments look to the future and make decisions accordingly. Thus, a sociological account of discounting formulas has become urgent. Discounting means valuing things through the flows of costs and benefits that they are likely to generate in the future, with these future flows being literally dis-counted as they are translated in the present. How have we come to think of the future, and of valuation, in such terms? Building on original empirical research in the historical sociology of discounting, Doganova takes us to some of the sites and moments in which discounting took shape and gained momentum: valuation of European forests in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; economic theories devised in the early 1900s; debates over business strategies in the postwar era; investor-state disputes over the nationalization of natural resources; and drug development in the biopharmaceutical industry today. Weaving these threads together, the book pleads for an understanding of discounting as a political technology, and of the future as a contested domain"--

"This book features essays on modern and contemporary art and media systems"--

"A historical and theoretical investigation of the unexpected ways screen-based media protect and excite viewers' fears and anxieties of the world.

"This book explores the many ways in which European artists, writers, and cartographers described and represented an Amerasian continuum in the first two centuries after Columbus"--

"Merging recent evolutionary thought, theories of information and signs, and new findings in animal studies, Gary Tomlinson's The Machines of Evolution and the Scope of Meaning offers a groundbreaking account of meaning in our world"--

"This book recalibrates literature's political role for the twenty-first century by excavating the deep history of storytelling as a civic agency"--