The Thirst for Annihilation

The Thirst for Annihilation PDF Author: Nick Land
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113493565X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
An important literary and philosophical figure, Georges Bataille has had a significant influence on other French writers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. The Thirst for Annihilation is the first book in English to respond to Bataille's writings. In no way, though, is Nick Land's book an attempt to appropriate Bataille's writings to a secular intelligibility or to compromise with the aridity of academic discourse - rather, it is written as a communion . Theoretical issues in philosophy, sociology, psychodynamics, politics and poetry are discussed, but only as stepping stones into the deep water of textual sacrifice where words pass over into the broken voice of death. Cultural modernity is diagnosed down to its Kantian bedrock with its transcendental philosophy of the object, but Bataille's writings cut violently across this tightly disciplined reading to reveal the strong underlying currents that bear us towards chaos and dissolution - the violent impulse to escape, the thirst for annihilation.

The Thirst for Annihilation

The Thirst for Annihilation PDF Author: Nick Land
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113493565X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 181

Get Book Here

Book Description
An important literary and philosophical figure, Georges Bataille has had a significant influence on other French writers, such as Foucault, Derrida and Baudrillard. The Thirst for Annihilation is the first book in English to respond to Bataille's writings. In no way, though, is Nick Land's book an attempt to appropriate Bataille's writings to a secular intelligibility or to compromise with the aridity of academic discourse - rather, it is written as a communion . Theoretical issues in philosophy, sociology, psychodynamics, politics and poetry are discussed, but only as stepping stones into the deep water of textual sacrifice where words pass over into the broken voice of death. Cultural modernity is diagnosed down to its Kantian bedrock with its transcendental philosophy of the object, but Bataille's writings cut violently across this tightly disciplined reading to reveal the strong underlying currents that bear us towards chaos and dissolution - the violent impulse to escape, the thirst for annihilation.

Deleuze and Guattari

Deleuze and Guattari PDF Author: Philip Goodchild
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1848609671
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
This accessible book examines critically the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, clarifying the ideas of these two notoriously difficult thinkers without over-simplifying them. Divided into three sections - Knowledge, Power, and Liberation of Desire - the book provides a systematic account of the intellectual context as well as an exhaustive analysis of the key themes informing Deleuze and Guattari′s work. It provides the framework for reading the important and influential study Capitalism and Schizophrenia and, with the needs of students in mind, explains the key concepts in Deleuze and Guattari′s discussion of philosophy, art and politics. Definitive and incisive, the book will be invaluable in situating the philosophy of these two major figures within the perspective of the social and human sciences.

Spinal Catastrophism

Spinal Catastrophism PDF Author: Thomas Moynihan
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 1913029638
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
The historical continuity of spinal catastrophism, traced across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology. Drawing on cryptic intimations in the work of J. G. Ballard, Georges Bataille, William Burroughs, André Leroi-Gourhan, Elaine Morgan, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in the late twentieth century Daniel Barker formulated the axioms of spinal catastrophism: If human morphology, upright posture, and the possibility of language are the ramified accidents of natural history, then psychic ailments are ultimately afflictions of the spine, which itself is a scale model of biogenetic trauma, a portable map of the catastrophic events that shaped that atrocity exhibition of evolutionary traumata, the sick orthograde talking mammal. Tracing its provenance through the biological notions of phylogeny and “organic memory” that fueled early psychoanalysis, back into idealism, nature philosophy, and romanticism, and across multiform encounters between philosophy, psychology, biology, and geology, Thomas Moynihan reveals the historical continuity of spinal catastrophism. From psychoanalysis and myth to geology and neuroanatomy, from bioanalysis to chronopathy, from spinal colonies of proto-minds to the retroparasitism of the CNS, from “railway spine” to Elizabeth Taylor's lost gill-slits, this extravagantly comprehensive philosophical adventure uses the spinal cord as a guiding thread to rediscover forgotten pathways in modern thought. Moynihan demonstrates that, far from being an fanciful notion rendered obsolete by advances in biology, spinal catastrophism dramatizes fundamental philosophical problematics of time, identity, continuity, and the transcendental that remain central to any attempt to reconcile human experience with natural history.

Malign Velocities

Malign Velocities PDF Author: Benjamin Noys
Publisher: John Hunt Publishing
ISBN: 1782792996
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 121

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Book Description
We are told our lives are too fast, subject to the accelerating demand that we innovate more, work more, enjoy more, produce more, and consume more. That’s one familiar story. Another, stranger, story is told here: of those who think we haven’t gone fast enough. Instead of rejecting the increasing tempo of capitalist production they argue that we should embrace and accelerate it. Rejecting this conclusion, /Malign Velocities/ tracks this 'accelerationism' as the symptom of the misery and pain of labour under capitalism. Retracing a series of historical moments of accelerationism - the Italian Futurism; communist accelerationism after the Russian Revolution; the 'cyberpunk phuturism' of the ’90s and ’00s; the unconscious fantasies of our integration with machines; the apocalyptic accelerationism of the post-2008 moment of crisis; and the terminal moment of negative accelerationism - suggests the pleasures and pains of speed signal the need to disengage, negate, and develop a new politics that truly challenges the supposed pleasures of speed.

Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin

Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Sin PDF Author: Peter Tracey Connor
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Peter Connor argues that literary scholars, eager to represent Bataille as a philosopher or as an early deconstructionist, have tended to neglect or misunderstand Bataille's interest in mysticism. His study is intended to correct this distorted view of Bataille, giving us a more complete picture of the complex and influential writer.

A Companion to Descartes

A Companion to Descartes PDF Author: Janet Broughton
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 144433784X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 562

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Book Description
A collection of more than 30 specially commissioned essays, this volume surveys the work of the 17th-century philosopher-scientist commonly regarded as the founder of modern philosophy, while integrating unique essays detailing the context and impact of his work. Covers the full range of historical and philosophical perspectives on the work of Descartes Discusses his seminal contributions to our understanding of skepticism, mind-body dualism, self-knowledge, innate ideas, substance, causality, God, and the nature of animals Explores the philosophical significance of his contributions to mathematics and science Concludes with a section on the impact of Descartes's work on subsequent philosophers

The Essence of Nihilism

The Essence of Nihilism PDF Author: Emanuele Severino
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1784786128
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
In 1969, Emanuele Severino underwent a Vatican trial for the 'fundamental incompatibility' between his thought and the Christian doctrine, and was removed from his position as professor of philosophy at the Catholic University in Milan. The Essence of Nihilism published in 1972, was the first book to follow his expulsion, and to firmly establish Severino's preeminent position within the constellation of contemporary philosophy. In this groundbreaking book, Severino reinterprets the history of Western philosophy as the unfolding of 'the greatest folly', that is, of the belief that 'things come out of nothing and fall back into nothing'. According to Severino, such a typically Western understanding of reality has produced a belief in the radical 'nothingness' of things. This, in turn has justified the treatment of the world as an object of exploitation, degradation and destruction. To move beyond Western nihilism, suggests Severino, we must first of all 'return to Parmenides'. Joining forces with the most venerable of Greek philosophers, Severino confutes the 'path of night' of nihilism, and develops a new philosophy grounded on the principle of the eternity of reality and of every single existent.

Bataille

Bataille PDF Author: Fred Botting
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350310026
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
One of the most profound thinkers of the twentieth century, Georges Bataille has only recently come to prominence in the Anglophone academy, partly through the influence of post-structuralism. Once seen as no more than a philosopher of eroticism and a writer of avant-garde pornography, Bataille is emerging as an absolutely central figure to discussions of culture, economy, subjectivity and difference. Batailleis the first volume of its kind to offer lucid, diverse and relevant examples of the ways of reading literary and cultural texts in the light of Bataille's work. The essays explore the significance of Bataillean notions like heterology, general economy, transgression and eroticism, through detailed readings of Shakespearean, Elizabethan and Jacobean literature; in analyses of Gothic and postmodern fiction; and in critiques of popular culture, rock music and Hollywood movies. In order to make Bataillean notions more comprehensible to contemporary readers, his concepts are situated in relation to the ideas of renowned critical and cultural theorists like Baudrillard, Deleuze, Derrida, Kristeva, Lacan, as well as Hegel, Freud, Nietzsche and Marx. Here the influence of Bataille is outlined in intellectual and historical terms and the significance of his work can be seen for both contemporary and futural modes of cultural analysis.

Annihilation of Caste

Annihilation of Caste PDF Author: B.R. Ambedkar
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 178168832X
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 391

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Book Description
“What the Communist Manifesto is to the capitalist world, Annihilation of Caste is to India.” —Anand Teltumbde, author of The Persistence of Caste The classic work of Indian Dalit politics, reframed with an extensive introduction by Arundathi Roy B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste is one of the most important, yet neglected, works of political writing from India. Written in 1936, it is an audacious denunciation of Hinduism and its caste system. Ambedkar – a figure like W.E.B. Du Bois – offers a scholarly critique of Hindu scriptures, scriptures that sanction a rigidly hierarchical and iniquitous social system. The world’s best-known Hindu, Mahatma Gandhi, responded publicly to the provocation. The hatchet was never buried. Arundhati Roy introduces this extensively annotated edition of Annihilation of Caste in “The Doctor and the Saint,” examining the persistence of caste in modern India, and how the conflict between Ambedkar and Gandhi continues to resonate. Roy takes us to the beginning of Gandhi’s political career in South Africa, where his views on race, caste and imperialism were shaped. She tracks Ambedkar’s emergence as a major political figure in the national movement, and shows how his scholarship and intelligence illuminated a political struggle beset by sectarianism and obscurantism. Roy breathes new life into Ambedkar’s anti-caste utopia, and says that without a Dalit revolution, India will continue to be hobbled by systemic inequality.

Jealousy

Jealousy PDF Author: Marsha Jenkins-Sanders
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416596909
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 387

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Book Description
How much should beauty determine a person’s worth in society, and how far will one woman go to gain approval? Rochelle Jackson is a woman born without, as she calls it, the “pretty gene.” Without makeup, she believes she more closely resembles a man, and she hasn’t revealed to anyone that she prefers dating women—though she isn’t noticed by anyone of any gender. This mix of repressing volatile emotions and the simmering resentment bred by years of rejection becomes the destructive force behind her scheme to dethrone Dakota North, Rochelle’s beautiful cousin and a prima donna in her own right. Rochelle is ready to emerge, for the first time, from Dakota’s shadow. When Rochelle lets loose with her vicious plan, it becomes an all-out war that will leave both parties changed forever. In the compelling tradition of E. Lynn Harris, Jealousy has an emotionally wrenching plot and characters dealing with tough issues. Jenkins-Sanders skillfully explores the emotional issues of cravings approval, power, and validation, which is intertwined with struggles of bisexuality and homosexuality. Jenkins-Sanders’s powerful novel questions our values and provides a fresh perspective on the fight for power and identity in a world full of negative self-image.