69 Ways to Play the Blues
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Short stories from Switzerland’s architect of the noological enigma. “Jurg Laederach captures the spirit of the new Europe. Characters vanish, reappear. There is something relentlessabout the buildup… Everything is transitory. Everything is on the verge of being discarded. Everything resonateswith an imminent change.” – Walter Abish
Written after the Swiss writer Jurg Laederach’s third trip to New York in the late 1980s, 69 Ways was hailed by award-winning author Walter Abish as a text predictive of “a Europe to come, when borders dissolve.” Like Alain-Robbe Grillet, Georges Perec, and the great Oulipo writers, Laederach constructs seamless narratives based on sly compositional strategies. The reader is only somewhat aware of the rules of the game. Transposed to America, Laederach’s texts, Abish argues, “function as a scanning device. Characters vanish, reappear. There is something relentless. Everything is transitory. No sentimentality. No clinging to the past. Everything is on the verge of being discarded. Everything is on the verge of dissolution....
Read more about: 69 Ways to Play the Blues »Germania
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In this collection of texts, the late playwright Heiner Muller explores the East German psychogeography as it was immediately preceding the fall of the Berlin Wall. He avers that Capitalism and Socialism have proven to be simply two different ways to control production andensure the discipline of work. And that, since the “end of ideologies” in the West, all people have begun to question the validity of ideological conflict.
... Read more about: Germania »Semiotext(e) Architecture
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This three-foot, in-your-face, on-your-lap monster belongs on every five-foot shelf. Feisty and defiant designs. Complex texts struggling with architectures intended to drag you into a visual and conceptual maelstrom. Brian Boigon, Atom Egoyan, Felix Guattari, Arthur Kroker, Catherine Ingraham, and others, in a volume too big to open in most city apartments.
... Read more about: Semiotext(e) Architecture »Fearless Speech
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Comprised of six lectures delivered, in English, by Michel Foucault while teaching at Berkeley in the Fall of 1983, Fearless Speech was edited by Joseph Pearson and published in 2001. Reviewed by the author, it is the last book Foucault wrote before his death in 1984 and can be read as his last testament. Here, he positions the philosopher as the only person able to confront power with the truth, a stance that boldly sums up Foucault’s project as a philosopher.
Still unpublished in France, Fearless Speech concludes the genealogy of truth that Foucault pursued throughout his life, starting with his investigations in Madness and Civilization, into the question of power and its technology. The expression “fearless speech” is a rough translation of the Greek parrhesia, which designates those who take a risk to tell the truth; the citizen who has the moral qualities required to speak the truth, even if it differs from what the majority of people believe and faces danger for speaking it....
Read more about: Fearless Speech »Foucault Live
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This is the only major collection of Michel Foucault’s interviews. Foucault dreams “of an intellectual destroyer of evidence and universalities who incessantly displaces himself, [and] doesn’t know exactly where he is heading [or] what he’ll think tomorrow because he is too attentive to the present.” Composed of every extant interview made by Foucault from the mid-60s until his death in 1984, Foucault Live sheds new light on the philosopher’s ideas about friendship, the intent behind his classical studies, while clarifying many of the professional and popular misinterpretations of his ideas over the course of his career. Most notably, Foucault Live includes interviews he made with the gay underground press during his stays in America during the 1970s. In them, Foucault suggests that homosexuality presents a new paradigm for ways of living beyond the predictable, binary couple. All of the philosopher’s interests, from madness and delinquency to film and sexuality, and their resultant writings, are probed by knowledgeable critics and journalists....
Read more about: Foucault Live »Why Different?
Price: $12.95
“Abolishing the rights and privileges of one genderover another means working for the possibility of a world democratic culture. But this can only happen in the respect of differences, in order to avoid this culture being abstract and not real.” For Luce Irigaray, one of the most original French feminist theorists, deconstructing the patriarchal tradition is not enough. She admits that it is not an easy task, but she believes that it is necessary to also define new values directly or indirectly suitable to feminine subjectivity and to feminine identity. She begins this project by analyzing and interpreting the absence of the feminine subject in the definition of dominant cultural values. She then wonders how these new values can be constructed without simply reversing the roles. Far from implying a hierarchy, difference affirms the coexistence and fruitful encounter of two different identities. These two heterogeneous identities, masculine and feminine, are not socially but ontologically constructed and describing the feminine requires establishing methods other than those already used by the masculine subject....
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