Morning Star

Morning Star

An expanded edition of revered theorist Michael Lwy’s Morning Star: Marxism and Surrealism (previously published in French, Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, and Greek), this masterwork collects the author’s essays on the ways in which surrealism intersected with a variety of revolutionary political approaches, ranging from utopian ideals to Marxism and situationism. Taking its title from Andr Breton’s essay ‘Arcane 17,’ which casts the star as the searing firebrand of rebellion, Lwy’s provocative work spans many perspectives. These include surrealist artists who were deeply interested in Marxism and anarchism (Breton among them), as well as Marxists who were deeply interested in surrealism (Walter Benjamin in particular).

Morning Star

New Directions in Nursing History

New Directions in Nursing History

This collection of essays reflects the current interdisciplinary and international nature of the history of nursing scholarship.

New Directions in Nursing History

The Transnational Unconscious

The Transnational Unconscious

Transnational Unconscious examines psychoanalysis as both a national and trans-national phenomenon. It explores the distinctive national and international aspects of the reception and circulation of psychoanalytic thought and practice, psychoanalysis as a cultural paradigm, and both its oppressive and liberatory potential at different historical periods. While focusing on specific national cases, the essays emphasize the transnational aspects of local reception and diffusion of psychoanalysis, in particular the flow of people, ideas, and practice.

The Transnational Unconscious

The Edge of Reason?

The Edge of Reason?

inspire spiritual wonder? Confrontation between science and religion has defined much public debate about religion in recent years, most lately in bestsellers portraying a clash between scientists and religious believers, such as Richard Dawkins’ ‘The God Delusion ‘and Sam Harris’s ‘The End of Faith ‘or ‘Letter to a Christian Nation.’ But what does this ‘us versus them’ divide mean for society? This collection of essays gives voice to social scientists, natural scientists and theologians whose experience holds direct relevance on these major issues, and clarifies the position of science in the modern debate. Includes contributions by Mary Midgley (University of Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK), Denis Alexander (Cambridge University, UK), Richard Roberts (Lancaster University, UK), Bob Layton (Durham University, UK), Simon Coleman (Sussex University, UK), Michael Shermer (Executive Director of the Sceptics Society and monthly columnist for ‘Scientific American’), Lewis Wolpert (University College London, UK), Andrew Newberg (University of Pennsylvania), Timothy Taylor (University of Bradford, UK), Steven Mithen (University of Reading, UK), David Sloan Wilson (Binghamton University), Herbert Maschner (Idaho State University), Ian Reader (University of Manchester, UK), Hiroko Kawanami (Lancaster University, UK), Andrian Kreye (Suddeutsche Zeitung), John Hedley Brooke (Oxford University, UK), Gordy Slack (Author of ‘The Battle Over The Meaning Of Everything’), Seth Shostak (Seti Institute), William Calvin (University Of Washington), and David Wilkinson (Durham University, UK).

The Edge of Reason?

The Cambridge Companion to Jung

The Cambridge Companion to Jung

This volume of specially commissioned essays is a critical introduction to the psychology of Carl Jung, one of the founders of psychoanalysis. Jung broke with Freud and developed his own theories which he called ‘analytical psychology’. The essays set Jung in the context of his own time, outline the practice and theory of Jungian psychology and show how Jungians continue to question and evolve his thinking to fit the post-modern, multi-cultural world of contemporary psychoanalysis. Andrew Samuels’s introduction gives an appreciation of Jung’s work and discusses the three approaches to analytical psychology. The Companion includes a full chronology of his life and work, reading lists, a case study and a glossary. It is an indispensible reference tool for beginning students and specialists, written by an international team of Jungian analysts and scholars from various disciplines.

The Cambridge Companion to Jung

The Brain is the Screen

The Brain is the Screen

In the nearly twenty years since their publication, Gilles Deleuze’s books about cinema have proven as daunting as they are enticing — a new aesthetics of film, one equally at home with Henri Bergson and Wim Wenders, Friedrich Nietzsche and Orson Welles, that also takes its place in the philosopher’s immense and difficult oeuvre. With this collection, the first to focus solely and extensively on Deleuze’s cinematic work, the nature and reach of that work finally become clear. Composed of a substantial introduction, twelve original essays produced for this volume, and a new English translation of a personal, intriguing, and little-known interview with Deleuze on his cinema books, The Brain Is the Screen is a sustained engagement with Deleuze’s cinematic philosophy that leads to a new view of the larger confrontation of philosophy with cinematic images.

The Brain is the Screen

Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity

Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity

Karl Jaspers, who died in 1969, had a profound impact on 20th-century theology and philosophy. His central thesis called for, among other things, a de-centering of philosophy from its Eurocentric roots and a renewal of its dialogue with other traditions, especially Asian ones. This collection of essays includes unpublished work by Jaspers himself as well as testimonies to his life and career by colleagues, associates, and translators, some of who knew Jaspers personally. Readers will also find commentary and interpretation by researchers who have explored Jaspers work for decades, and a biographical account of Jaspers student Leonard Ehrlich, who handled much of Jaspers English translation.

Philosophical Faith and the Future of Humanity

The Edge of the Precipice

The Edge of the Precipice

Can a case be made for reading literature in the digital age? Does literature still matter in this era of instant information? Is it even possible to advocate for serious, sustained reading with all manner of social media distracting us, fragmenting our concentration, and demanding short, rapid communication? In The Edge of the Precipice, Paul Socken brings together a thoughtful group of writers, editors, philosophers, librarians, archivists, and literary critics from Canada, the US, France, England, South Africa, and Australia to contemplate the state of literature in the twenty-first century. Including essays by outstanding contributors such as Alberto Manguel, Mark Kingwell, Lori Saint-Martin, Sven Birkerts, Katia Grubisic, Drew Nelles, and J. Hillis Miller, this collection presents a range of perspectives about the importance of reading literature today. The Edge of the Precipice is a passionate, articulate, and entertaining collection that reflects on the role of literature in our society and asks if it is now under siege. Contributors include Michael Austin (Newman University), Sven Birkerts (author), Stephen Brockmann (Carnegie-Mellon University), Vincent Giroud (University of Franche-Comt), Katia Grubisic (poet), Mark Kingwell (University of Toronto), Alberto Manguel (author), J. Hillis Miller (University of California, Irvine), Drew Nelles (editor-in-chief, Maisonneuve), Keith Oatley (University of Toronto), Ekaterina Rogatchevskaia (British Library), Leonard Rosmarin (Brock University), Lori Saint-Martin (translator), Paul Socken (University of Waterloo), and Gerhard van der Linde (University of South Africa).

The Edge of the Precipice

Time for Revolution

Time for Revolution

Written in prison two decades apart, these two essays reflect Antonio Negri’s abiding interest in the philosophy of time and resistance. The first essay traces the fracture lines that force capitalist society into perpetual crisis. The second, written immediately after the global bestseller, Empire, develops the two key concepts of empire and multitude.

Time for Revolution

Rhythmanalysis

Rhythmanalysis

Rhythmanalysis displays all the characteristics which made Lefebvre one of the most important Marxist thinkers of the twentieth century. In the analysis of rhythms — both biological and social — Lefebvre shows the interrelation of space and time in the understanding of everyday life.With dazzling skills, Lefebvre moves between discussions of music, the commodity, measurement, the media and the city. In doing so he shows how a non-linear conception of time and history balanced his famous rethinking of the question of space. This volume also includes his earlier essays on ‘The Rhythmanaly.

Rhythmanalysis

Refusing to be a Man

Refusing to be a Man

Since its original publication in 1989, Refusing to be a Man has been acclaimed as a classic and widely cited in gender studies literature. In 13 eloquent essays, Stoltenberg articulates the first fully argued liberation theory for men that will also liberate women. He argues that male sexual identity is entirely a political and ethical construction whose advantages grow out of injustice. His thesis is, however, ultimately one of hope – that precisely because masculinity is so constructed, it is possible to refuse it, to act against it and to change. A new introduction by the author discusses the roots of his work in the American civil rights and radical feminist movements and distinguishes it from the anti-feminist philosophies underlying the recent tide of reactionary mens movements.

Refusing to be a Man

Silence

Silence

Silence, John Cage’s first book and epic masterpiece, was published in October 1961. In these lectures, scores, and writings, Cage tries, as he says, to find a way of writing that comes from ideas, is not about them, but that produces them. Often these writings include mesostics and essays created by subjecting the work of other writers to chance procedures using the I Ching. Fifty years later comes a beautiful new edition with a foreword by eminent music critic Kyle Gann. A landmark book in American arts and culture, Silence has been translated into more than forty languages and has sold over half a million copies worldwide. Wesleyan University Press is proud to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the book’s publication with this special hardcover edition.

Silence

Victorian Freaks

Victorian Freaks

While freaks have captivated our imagination since well before the nineteenth century, the Victorians flocked to shows featuring dancing dwarves, bearded ladies, missing links, and six-legged sheep. Indeed, this period has been described by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson as the epoch of consolidation for freakery: an era of social change, enormously popular freak shows, and taxonomic frenzy. Victorian Freaks: The Social Context of Freakery in Britain, edited by Marlene Tromp, turns to that rich nexus, examining the struggle over definitions of freakery and the unstable and sometimes conflicting ways in which freakery was understood and deployed. As the first study centralizing British culture, this collection discusses figures as varied as Joseph Merrick, The Elephant Man; Daniel Lambert, King of the Fat Men; Julia Pastrana, The Bear Woman; and Laloo The Marvellous Indian Boy and his embedded, parasitic twin. The Victorian Freaks contributors examine Victorian culture through the lens of freakery, reading the production of the freak against the landscape of capitalist consumption, the medical community, and the politics of empire, sexuality, and art. Collectively, these essays ask how freakery engaged with notions of normalcy and with its Victorian cultural context.

Victorian Freaks

Demenageries

Demenageries

Demenageries, Thinking (of) Animals after Derrida is a collection of essays on animality following Jacques Derridas work. The Western philosophical tradition separated animals from men by excluding the former from everything that was considered proper to man: laughing, suffering, mourning, and above all, thinking. The animal has traditionally been considered the absolute Other of humans. This radical otherness has served as the rationale for the domination, exploitation and slaughter of animals. What Derrida called la pense de lanimal (which means both thinking concerning the animal and animal thinking) may help us understand differently such apparently human features as language, thought and writing. It may also help us think anew about such highly philosophical concerns as differences, otherness, the end(s) of history and the world at large. Thanks to the ethical and epistemological crisis of Western humanism, animality has become an almost fashionable topic. However, Demenageries is the first collection to take Derridas thinking on animal thinking as a starting point, a way of reflecting not only on animals but starting from them, in order to address a variety of issues from a vast range of theoretical perspectives: philosophy, literature, cultural theory, anthropology, ethics, politics, religion, feminism, postcolonialism and, of course, posthumanism.

Demenageries

Strategy and Intellegence

Strategy and Intellegence

Strategy and Intelligence, which brings together original essays by a number of leading authorities on various aspects of the First World War, aims both to summarise the latest literature on Britain’s participation in that war and also to open up new lines of investigation. These include the role of intelligence in land and air battles; Anglo-American financial relations; Anglo-Russian and Anglo-Irish relations; the British Labour movement in the war; and the final campaigns of 1918, which led to the Allied victory. These essays are written not only for the specialist but also to be accessible to students and to the general reader.

Strategy and Intellegence

The Wit and Wisdom of G K Chesterton

The Wit and Wisdom of G K Chesterton

G.K. Chesterton was a consummately witty man. In this new collection, Bevis Hillier draws on his most humorous epigrams and more serious extracts not only from his most popular works, the Father Brown stories, but also his contributions to the Illustrated London News and GK’s Weekly, as well as his numerous novels, poems, essays and tracts on a vast array of subjects. These pieces shine a light into the margins of Chesterton’s work and give a sense of the distinctive flavour of his mind. Hillier, the acclaimed biographer of John Betjeman, considers what it was that made Chesterton such a complex and fascinating character. Some of Chesterton’s remarkable drawings (he trained as an artist at the Slade) are included, among them a hitherto unpublished caricature of Winston Churchill, c. 1919. This is a book for Chesterton fans everywhere.

The Wit and Wisdom of G K Chesterton

World Christianity in Local Context

World Christianity in Local Context

Global Christianity in Local Context is the first volume of a unique collection of essays in honour of David A. Kerr, well-known for his contributions in the areas of Christian-Muslim dialogue, Ecumenical Studies and Missions. With contributions from recognized experts in these fields, the book provides a platform for examining contemporary Christian-Muslim relations and critical issues facing twenty-first century Christianity.

World Christianity in Local Context

The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

A deft reconstruction of what Georges Bataille envisioned as a continuation of his work La Somme Athologique, this volume brings together the writings of one of the foremost French thinkers of the twentieth century on the central topic of his oeuvre. Gathering Batailles most intimate writings, these essays, aphorisms, notes, and lectures on nonknowledge, sovereignty, and sacrifice clarify and extend Batailles radical theology, his philosophy of history, and his ecstatic method of meditation. Following Batailles lead, as laid out in his notebooks, editor Stuart Kendall assembles the fragments that Bataille anticipated collecting for his summa. Kendalls introduction offers a clear picture of the authors overall project, its historical and biographical context, and the place of these works within it. The ‘system’ that emerges from these articles, notes, and lectures is ‘atheology,’ understood as a study of the effects of nonknowledge. At the other side of realism, Batailles writing in La Somme pushes language to its silent end. And yet, writing toward the ruin of language, in search of words that slip from their meanings, Bataille uses languageand the discourses of theology, philosophy, and literatureagainst itself to return us to ourselves, endlessly. The system against systems is in fact systematic, using systems and depending on discourses to achieve its own endsthe end of systematic thought.A medievalist librarian by training, Georges Bataille (18971962) was active in the French intellectual scene from the 1920s through the 1950s. He founded the journal Critique and was a member of the Acphale group and the Collge de Sociologie. Among his works available in English are Visions of Excess (Minnesota, 1985), Tears of Eros (1989), and Erotism (1990).

The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge

Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture

Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture

This book introduces readers to the practice of Vodou and helps deconstruct and destroy stereotypes which have survived for hundreds of years. The authors in the collection–from Karen McCarthy Brown to Gerdes Fleurant to Leslie Desmangles–are leading scholars in the rapidly growing field of Vodou Studies. Tackling a wide range of Vodou practices and images, the essays within work to introduce readers to the history and practice of this religion, and to correct the fiction of Vodou which has been circulating as fact. The book focuses specifically on the role Vodou plays in Haiti, the country in which it has its strongest following, examining the influence it has on spiritual beliefs, cultural practices, national identity, popular culture, writing and art. By looking in detail at the beliefs and practices in one country, the reader will begin to understand this unique religion and the multiple domains in which it operates.

Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture

The Reception of David Hume In Europe

The Reception of David Hume In Europe

The intellectual scope and cultural impact of British writers cannot be assessed without reference to their European ‘fortunes’. These essays, prepared by an international team of scholars, critics and translators, record the ways in which David Hume has been translated, evaluated and emulated in different national and linguistic areas of Europe. This is the first collection of essays to consider how and where Hume’s works were initially understood throughout Europe. They reflect on how early European responses to Hume relied on available French translations, and concentrated on his Political Discourses and his History, and how later German translations enabled professional philosophers to discuss his more abstract ideas. Also explored is the idea that continental readers were not able to judge the accuracy of the translations they read, nor did many consider the contexts in which Hume was writing: rather, they were intent on using what they read for their own purposes.

The Reception of David Hume In Europe