Bare Acts
Price: $20.00
This year, the annual Sarai Reader looks at ‘Acts’ – at instruments of legislation, at things within and
outside the law, and at ‘acts’ – as different ways of ‘doing’ things in society and culture.
Several essays echo and complement themes that have emerged in earlier readers. Piracy,
borders, surveillance, claims to authority and entitlement, the language of expertise, the
legal regulation of sexual behaviour and trespasses of various kinds have featured
prominently in previous Readers. This collection foregrounds these issues in a way we hope
can make a series of coherent but autonomous and interrelated arguments.Produced and Designed at the Sarai Media Lab, Delhi, IndiaEditors: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Jeebesh Bagchi + Geert Lovink
Guest Editor: Lawrence Liang
Associate Editor: Smriti Vohra
Translations: Shveta SardaEditorial Collective: Monica Narula, Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Ravi Sundaram,
Ravi S. Vasudevan, Awadhendra Sharan, Jeebesh Bagchi + Geert LovinkDesign: Mrityunjay Chatterjee
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Associate Design: Gauri Bajaj
Design Coordinator: Monica Narula
Cover Design: Gauri BajajPREFACE –...The Conspiracy of Art
Price: $14.95
In The Conspiracy of Art, Jean Baudrillard questions the privilege attached to art by its practitioners. Art has lost all desire for illusion: feeding back endlessly into itself, it has turned its own vanishment into an art unto itself. Far from lamenting the ‘end of art,’ Baudrillard celebrates art’s new function within the process of insider-trading. Spiralling from aesthetic nullity to commercial frenzy, art has become transaesthetic, like the rest of society as a whole.
Conceived and edited by life-long Baudrillard collaborator Sylvère Lotringer, The Conspiracy of Art presents his writings on art in a complicitous dance with politics, economy and media. Culminating with “War Porn,” a scathing analysis of the spectacular images of Abu Ghraib prison as a new genre of reality TV, the book folds back on itself to question the very nature of radical thought.
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Born in Reims in 1929 to a family of French peasants, French theorist Jean Baudrillard has challenged all existing theories and visions of contemporary society with radical humor and great precision....Sounding Off! (Without Music CD)
Price: $15.95
Under the rallying cry of “Music is our bomb!”, this collection of 38 articles and interviews with all sorts of practitioners of musicopolitical activism will refresh, incite, and inspire.
... Read more about: Sounding Off! (Without Music CD) »Archeology of Violence
Price: $14.95
Clastres attempts to answer the question: “What is the function of primitive war?” And, despite his apparent formalism, manages to rise so far above and beyond the limitations of both his discipline and his strategies that a complete world emerges above the clouds. This is an extraordinary ethnographic and theoretical look into the minds of warriors.
... Read more about: Archeology of Violence »Anarchy & Culture
Price: $18.95
Anarchism is generally understood as a failed ideology, a political philosophy that once may have had many followers but today attracts only cranks and eccentrics. This book argues that the decline of political anarchism is only half the story; the other half is a tale of widespread cultural success. David Weir develops this thesis in several ways. He begins by considering the place of culture in the political thought of the classical anarchist thinkers William Godwin, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Mikhail Bakunin, and Peter Kropotkin. He then shows how the perceived “anarchy” of nineteenth-century society induced writers such as Matthew Arnold, Henry James, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky to turn away from politics and seek unity in the idea of a common culture. Yet as other late-nineteenth-century writers and artists began to sympathize with anarchism, the prospect of a common culture became increasingly remote. In Weir’s view, the affinity for anarchism that developed among members of the artistic avant-garde lies behind much of fin de siecle culture....
Read more about: Anarchy & Culture »Being On Line: Net Subjectivity
Price: $15.95
Being On Line, Net Subjectivity is not about virtual reality, cyberspace or the Internet– instead the texts included in this volume are fragments and commentaries snatched from never-ending global discourses. All tests are presented in both Engliah and Korean.
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