Forms of Living

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Levels of Organic Life and the Human

Levels of Organic Life and the Human

Helmuth Plessner, Millay Hyatt, J. M. Bernstein

Helmuth Plessner

Translated by Millay Hyatt

A modern classic, this powerful and sophisticated account of embodiment was first published in German in 1928 and now appears in English for the first time. With reference simultaneously to science, social theory, and philosophy, Plessner shows how life can be seen on its own terms to establish its own boundaries. Plessner’s account of how the human establishes itself in relation to the nonhuman will invigorate a range of current conversations around the animal, posthumanism, the material turn, and the biology and sociology of cognition.

ISBN: 9780823283989

Being Brains

Fernando Vidal, Francisco Ortega

Fernando Vidal and Francisco Ortega

Sketches the history of the belief that human beings are essentially their brains, and documents and critically discusses its contemporary forms across a range of contexts, including mental health, the human sciences, and literature and film.

ISBN: 9780823283682

The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor

The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor

Anson Rabinbach

Anson Rabinbach

The Eclipse of the Utopias of Labor brings together a series of essays bridging intellectual history and the history of the body tracing the shift from the eighteenth-century concept of man as machine to the late twentieth-century concept of digital organisms. The book looks at the rise and decline of “the great utopias of labor” in the first half of the twentieth century.

ISBN: 9780823278572

Pathological Realities

Pathological Realities

Mirko Grmek, Pierre-Olivier Méthot, Hans-Jörg Rheinberger

Mirko Grmek

Translated and Edited by Pierre-Olivier Méthot

A collection of essays by Mirko D. Grmek, providing a portrait of his career as a historian of science and an engaged intellectual figure. Uniting some important strands of his published work, it covers deep epistemological changes in disease concepts and major advances in the life sciences and their historiography.

ISBN: 9780823280353

Systems of Life

Systems of Life

Richard A. Barney, Warren Montag, Richard A. Barney, Timothy C. Campbell, Mrinalini Chakravorty, James Edward Ford, III, Amanda Jo Goldstein, Pierre Macherey, Annika Mann, Christian Marouby, Warren Montag, Catherine Packham, Joseph Serrano

Edited by Richard A. Barney and Warren Montag

Contributor(s): Richard A. Barney, Timothy C. Campbell, Mrinalini Chakravorty, James Edward Ford, III, Amanda Jo Goldstein, Pierre Macherey, Annika Mann, Christian Marouby, Warren Montag, Catherine Packham and Joseph Serrano

Systems of Life offers a wide-ranging revaluation of the emergence of biopolitics in Europe from the mid– eighteenth to the mid–nineteenth century. In staging an encounter among literature, political...

ISBN: 9780823281718

Affliction

Veena Das

Veena Das

Affliction: Health, Disease, Poverty inaugurates a novel way of understanding the trajectories of health and disease in the context of poverty. It traces the unfolding of illness within families, local communities, neighborhood markets and in occult worlds. Privileging the experience of people living in these neighborhoods it asks how can global health be made to take this experience into account rather than escape from it?

ISBN: 9780823261819

Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ

Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ

Leif Weatherby

Leif Weatherby

Transplanting the Metaphysical Organ reconstructs Romantic Organology, a discourse that German Romantics developed by combining scientific and philosophical discourses about biological function and speculative thought. Organology attempted to think a politically and scientifically destabilized world, and offered a metaphysics meant to alter the structure of that world.

ISBN: 9780823269419

What's These Worlds Coming To?

What's These Worlds Coming To?

Jean-Luc Nancy, Aurélien Barrau, Travis Holloway, Flor Méchain, David Pettigrew

Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurélien Barrau

Translated by Travis Holloway and Flor Méchain

One of the world’s leading philosophers and an emerging astrophysicist revive the ancient philosophical practice of cosmology for our time. Jean-Luc Nancy and Aurélien Barrau’s collaboration is a study of life, plural worlds, and what the authors call the struction of new worlds. It is also a radical revisioning of post-structuralist thought (from deconstruction to struction) and contemporary physics (from a universe to a multiverse).

ISBN: 9780823263349

The Helmholtz Curves

The Helmholtz Curves

Henning Schmidgen, Nils F. Schott

Henning Schmidgen

Translated by Nils F. Schott

In 1850, Hermann von Helmholtz conducted path breaking experiments on the propagation speed of the nervous impulse. This book reconstructs the cultural history of these experiments by focusing on Helmholtz’s use of the “graphic method” and the subsequent use of his term “lost time” by Marcel Proust.

ISBN: 9780823261956

Cytomegalovirus

Cytomegalovirus

Hervé Guibert, David Caron, Todd Meyers, Clara Orban

Hervé Guibert

Translated by Clara Orban

Afterword by Todd Meyers

Cytomegalovirus is a lucid and spare autobiographical narrative by Hervé Guibert (1955-1991) of the everyday moments of his hospitalization due to complications of AIDS. In one of his last works, the acclaimed writer presents his struggle with the disease in terms that are unsentimental and deeply human.

ISBN: 9780823268573

The Ploy of Instinct

The Ploy of Instinct

Kathleen Frederickson

Kathleen Frederickson

Without wholly or consistently unseating the idea that instinct marked the proper province of women, workers and/or savages, this shift in instinct’s appeal to civilized European men at the turn of the twentieth century nonetheless modified the governmentality of empire, labor, and gender.

ISBN: 9780823262526

Bruno Latour in Pieces

Bruno Latour in Pieces

Henning Schmidgen, Gloria Custance

Henning Schmidgen

Translated by Gloria Custance

Bruno Latour is one of the major figures of contemporary thought. This book provides a comprehensive overview of the Latourian oeuvre, spanning from his early work in the sociology and anthropology of science to his recent philosophy of multiple “modes of existence.”

ISBN: 9780823263707

War in Worcester

War in Worcester

Pamela Reynolds

Pamela Reynolds

War in Worcester explores the experiences of the young in taking a stand against the apartheid regime in the 1980s at the height of the struggle for freedom. It combines an analysis of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s process and findings with a close ethnographic study in a small town. Issues including tactics, pain, betrayal and ethics are examined from the point of view of young activists and the forms of documentation of conflict used by the Commission are critiqued.

ISBN: 9780823243105

Realizing the Witch

Realizing the Witch

Richard Baxstrom, Todd Meyers

Richard Baxstrom and Todd Meyers

Realizing the Witch follows the unfolding of Benjamin Christensen’s visual narrative in his 1922 film, Häxan (The Witch). Through a close reading of Häxan, Baxstrom and Meyers examine the study of witchcraft from historical and anthropological perspectives, as well as the intersection of popular culture, artistic expression and scientific ideas.

ISBN: 9780823268252

Wording the World

Wording the World

Roma Chatterji

Roma Chatterji

The essays in this book examine how important themes in Veena Das’s work have been critically assimilated in the work of a younger generation. Looking at the relation between the event and the everyday, the essays ask how we might trace the picture of thinking in anthropology through ethnography and through artistic, literary and philosophical practice.

ISBN: 9780823261864

The Government of Life

The Government of Life

Vanessa Lemm, Miguel Vatter

Edited by Vanessa Lemm and Miguel Vatter

An examination of Foucault’s last thought, centered on his ideas about biopolitics, governmentality, and subjectivity. This volume aims to explain why the politics and policies of neoliberalism are best understood as a “government of life” whose effects and consequences still remain to be fathomed.

ISBN: 9780823255979

Chagas Disease

François Delaporte, Arthur Goldhammer, Todd Meyers

François Delaporte

Translated by Arthur Goldhammer

In Chagas Disease: History of a Continent’s Scourge, François Delaporte describes how the interaction of public health policy with medical knowledge and epistemological transformations in the period 1900-1935 can account for the discovery of a continental endemic. It also deconstructs the myths that surround a number of major medical discoveries in both Brazil and Argentina.

ISBN: 9780823242504

Selected Writings

Selected Writings

Henri Atlan, Stefanos Geroulanos, Todd Meyers

Henri Atlan

Edited by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers

Best known for his pioneering work in theories of self-organization and complexity, the biophysicist and philosopher Henri Atlan has during the past thirty years been a major voice in contemporary European...

ISBN: 9780823231829

Writings on Medicine

Writings on Medicine

Georges Canguilhem, Stefanos Geroulanos, Todd Meyers

Georges Canguilhem

Translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Todd Meyers

At the time of his death in 1995, Georges Canguilhem was a highly respected historian of science and medicine, whose engagement with questions of normality, the ideologization of scientific thought,...

ISBN: 9780823234325

The New Wounded

The New Wounded

Catherine Malabou, Steven Miller

Catherine Malabou

Translated by Steven Miller

This book addresses the issue of trauma and psychic wounds to stage a confrontation between psychoanalysis and contemporary neurobiology. In so doing, it reevaluates the brain as an organ that is not separated from psychic life but rather appears as its very locus. A philosophical approach of the “new wounded” (brain lesion patients) forms the matter of the confrontation.

ISBN: 9780823239689

Human Remains

Jonathan Strauss

Jonathan Strauss

The living and the dead cohabited Paris until the late eighteenth century, when, in the name of public health, measures were taken to drive the latter from the city. Cemeteries were removed from urban...

ISBN: 9780823233809

Knowledge of Life

Knowledge of Life

Georges Canguilhem, Stefanos Geroulanos, Daniela Ginsburg, Paola Marrati, Todd Meyers

Georges Canguilhem

Translated by Stefanos Geroulanos and Daniela Ginsburg

As the work of thinkers such as Michel Foucault, François Jacob, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Bourdieu demonstrates, Georges Canguilhem has exerted tremendous influence on the philosophy of science...

ISBN: 9780823229260

Figures of Medicine

Figures of Medicine

François Delaporte, Nils F. Schott, Christopher Lawrence

François Delaporte

Translated by Nils F. Schott

In this provocative collection of essays, François Delaporte shows how every epistemological concern demands its own mode of engagement. Through six seemingly disparate cases, Figures of Medicine reanimates the methodological and intellectual stakes at the core of the history of science and medicine.

ISBN: 9780823244454

Science, Reason, Modernity

Science, Reason, Modernity

Anthony Stavrianakis, Gaymon Bennett, Lyle Fearnley

Edited by Anthony Stavrianakis, Gaymon Bennett and Lyle Fearnley

Science, Reason, Modernity: Readings for an Anthropology of the Contemporary provides an introduction to a legacy of philosophical and social scientific thinking about sciences, and their integral role in shaping modernities, a legacy that has contributed to a specifically anthropological form of inquiry.

ISBN: 9780823265947

On Time, Being, And Hunger

On Time, Being, And Hunger

, Juan Manuel Garrido

and Juan Manuel Garrido

Situating itself within the context of current debates in continental philosophy, and through a series of readings of Aristotle, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Derrida to recent developments in life sciences, this book offers a critical enquiry concerning the traditional way of understanding life in the history of metaphysics.

ISBN: 9780823239368