Academic, writer, figure of melancholy, aesthete - Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) not only transformed his academic discipline, he also profoundly changed the way that we view ourselves and the world around us.
In this award-winning biography, historian Emmanuelle Loyer recounts Lévi-Strauss's childhood in an assimilated Jewish household, his promising student years as well as his first forays into political and intellectual movements. As a young professor, Lévi-Strauss left Paris in 1935 for São Paulo to teach sociology. His rugged expeditions into the Brazilian hinterland, where he discovered the Amerindian Other, made him into an anthropologist. The racial laws of the Vichy regime would force him to leave France yet again, this time for the USA in 1941, where he became Professor Claude L. Strauss - to avoid confusion with the jeans manufacturer.
Lévi-Strauss's return to France, after the war, ushered in the period during which he produced his greatest works: several decades of intense labour in which he reinvented anthropology, establishing it as a discipline that offered a new view on the world. In 1955, Tristes Tropiques offered indisputable proof of this the world over. During those years, Lévi-Strauss became something of a French national monument, as well as a celebrity intellectual of global renown. But he always claimed his perspective was a `view from afar', enabling him to deliver incisive and subversive diagnoses of our waning modernity.
Loyer's outstanding biography tells the story of a true intellectual adventurer whose unforgettable voice invites us to rethink questions of the human and the meaning of progress. She portrays Lévi-Strauss less as a modern than as our own great and disquieted contemporary.
We have long since lost our faith in the idea that human beings could achieve human happiness in some future ideal state-a state that Thomas More, writing five centuries ago, tied to a topos, a fixed place, a land, an island, a sovereign state under a wise and benevolent ruler. But while we have lost our faith in utopias of all hues, the human aspiration that made this vision so compelling has not died. Instead it is re-emerging today as a vision focused not on the future but on the past, not on a future-to-be-created but on an abandoned and undead past that we could call retrotopia.
The emergence of retrotopia is interwoven with the deepening gulf between power and politics that is a defining feature of our contemporary liquid-modern world-the gulf between the ability to get things done and the capability of deciding what things need to be done, a capability once vested with the territorially sovereign state. This deepening gulf has rendered nation-states unable to deliver on their promises, giving rise to a widespread disenchantment with the idea that the future will improve the human condition and a mistrust in the ability of nation-states to make this happen. True to the utopian spirit, retrotopia derives its stimulus from the urge to rectify the failings of the present human condition-though now by resurrecting the failed and forgotten potentials of the past. Imagined aspects of the past, genuine or putative, serve as the main landmarks today in drawing the road-map to a better world. Having lost all faith in the idea of building an alternative society of the future, many turn instead to the grand ideas of the past, buried but not yet dead. Such is retrotopia, the contours of which are examined by Zygmunt Bauman in this sharp dissection of our contemporary romance with the past.
We are all fascinated by the mystery of metamorphosis - of the caterpillar that transforms itself into a butterfly. Their bodies have almost nothing in common. They don't share the same world: one crawls on the ground and the other flutters its wings in the air. And yet they are one and the same life. Emanuele Coccia argues that metamorphosis - the phenomenon that allows the same life to subsist in disparate bodies - is the relationship that binds all species together and unites the living with the non-living. Bacteria, viruses, fungi, plants, animals: they are all one and the same life. Each species, including the human species, is the metamorphosis of all those that preceded it - the same life, cobbling together a new body and a new form in order to exist differently. And there is no opposition between the living and the non-living: life is always the reincarnation of the non-living, a carnival of the telluric substance of a planet - the Earth - that continually draws new faces and new ways of being out of even the smallest particle of its disparate body. By highlighting what joins humans together with other forms of life, Coccia's brilliant reflection on metamorphosis encourages us to abandon our view of the human species as static and independent and to recognize instead that we are part of a much larger and interconnected form of life.
The death of God in the West was the prelude to a metaphysical soap opera that continues to this day. Christianity's masterstroke was to combine a fierce belief in the individual with the promise of eternal participation in the Absolute. When that dream evaporated, various attempts were made to offer the individual a minimum of being. The latest of these attempts is advertising, which seeks to arouse desire and transform the subject into a docile phantom, doomed to follow advertising's every whim. But, like all previous attempts, this superficial participation in the world fails, and unhappiness and depression continue to spread. We can all produce a cold revolution in ourselves, however, by stepping outside the flow of information and advertising. We need to take some time out, unplug the television, turn off our smartphones, stop buying stuff and adopt an aesthetic attitude to the world. We just need to stay still for a few seconds. This is one of the key themes developed by Michel Houellebecq in this collection of his texts and interviews from the last three decades. Here he explains and elaborates his point of view, discusses his novels and addresses a wide range of topics from politics, religion and literature to suicide, euthanasia and paedophilia. An indispensable book for anyone interested in the work of one of the most widely read and controversial novelists of our time.
We are living in an open sea, caught up in a continuous wave, with no fixed point and no instrument to measure distance and the direction of travel. Nothing appears to be in its place any more, and a great deal appears to have no place at all. The principles that have given substance to the democratic ethos, the system of rules that has guided the relationships of authority and the ways in which they are legitimized, the shared values and their hierarchy, our behaviour and our life styles, must be radically revised because they no longer seem suited to our experience and understanding of a world in flux, a world that has become both increasingly interconnected and prone to severe and persistent crises.
We are living in the interregnum between what is no longer and what is not yet. None of the political movements that helped undermine the old world are ready to inherit it, and there is no new ideology, no consistent vision, promising to give shape to new institutions for the new world. It is like the Babylon referred to by Borges, the country of randomness and uncertainty in which `no decision is final; all branch into others'. Out of the world that had promised us modernity, what Jean Paul Sartre had summarized with sublime formula `le choix que je suis' (`the choice that I am'), we inhabit that flattened, mobile and dematerialized space, where as never before the principle of the heterogenesis of purposes is sovereign.
This is Babel.
From ancient philosophy to contemporary theories of fiction, it is a common practice to relegate illusory appearances to the realm of the non-existent, like shadows on the wall of Plato's cave. Contrary to this traditional mode of drawing a metaphysical distinction between reality and fiction, Markus Gabriel argues that the realm of the illusory, fictional, imaginary and conceptually indeterminate is as real as it gets. Being in touch with reality need not and cannot require that we overcome appearances in order to grasp a meaningless reality which exists `out there', outside and maybe even beyond our minds. Human mindedness (Geist) exists in the mode of fictions through which we achieve self-consciousness. This novel approach provides a fresh perspective on our existence as subjects who lead their lives in the light of self-conceptions. Fictions also develops a social ontology according to which the social unfolds as a constant renegotiation of dissent, of different points of view onto the same reality. Thus we cannot ever hope to ground human society in a fiction-free realm of objective transactions. However, this does not mean that truth and reality are somehow outdated concepts. On the contrary, we need to enlarge our conception of reality so that it fully encompasses ourselves as specifically minded social animals. This major new work of philosophy will be of interest to students and scholars throughout the humanities and to anyone interested in contemporary philosophy and social thought.
The election of Donald Trump as president of the United States sent shockwaves across the globe. How was such an outcome even possible? In two lectures given at American universities in the immediate aftermath of the election, the leading French philosopher Alain Badiou helps us to make sense of this extraordinary occurrence. He argues that Trump's victory was the symptom of a global crisis made up of four characteristics: the triumph of a brutal form of global capitalism, the decomposition of the established political elite, the growing frustration and disorientation that many people feel today, and the absence of a compelling alternative vision. It was in this context that Trump could emerge as a new kind of political figure that was both inside and outside the political order, a member of the Republican Party who, at the same time, represents something outside the system. The progressive political challenge now is to create something new that offers people a real choice, a radical alternative based on principles of universality and equality. This concise account of the meaning of Trump should be read by everyone who wants to understand what is happening in our world today.
The pace of modern life is undoubtedly speeding up, yet this acceleration does not seem to have made us any happier or more content. If acceleration is the problem, then the solution, argues Hartmut Rosa in this major new work, lies in "resonance." The quality of a human life cannot be measured simply in terms of resources, options, and moments of happiness; instead, we must consider our relationship to, or resonance with, the world. Applying his theory of resonance to many domains of human activity, Rosa describes the full spectrum of ways in which we establish our relationship to the world, from the act of breathing to the adoption of culturally distinct worldviews. He then turns to the realms of concrete experience and action - family and politics, work and sports, religion and art - in which we as late modern subjects seek out resonance. This task is proving ever more difficult as modernity's logic of escalation is both cause and consequence of a distorted relationship to the world, at individual and collective levels. As Rosa shows, all the great crises of modern society - the environmental crisis, the crisis of democracy, the psychological crisis - can also be understood and analyzed in terms of resonance and our broken relationship to the world around us. Building on his now classic work on acceleration, Rosa's new book is a major new contribution to the theory of modernity, showing how our problematic relation to the world is at the crux of some of the most pressing issues we face today. This bold renewal of critical theory for our times will be of great interest to students and scholars across the social sciences and humanities.
Carbon is much more than a chemical element: it is a polymorphic entity with many faces, at once natural, cultural and social. Ranging across ten million different compounds, carbon has as many personas in nature as it has roles in human life on earth. And yet it rarely makes the headlines as anything other than the villain of our fossil-based economy, feeding an addiction which is driving dangerous levels of consumption and international conflict and which, left unchecked, could lead to our demise as a species. But the impact of CO on climate change only tells part of the story, and to demonize carbon as an element which will bring about the downfall of humanity is to reduce it to a pale shadow of itself. In this major new history of carbon, Bernadette Bensaude-Vincent and Sacha Loeve show that this omnipresent element is at the root of countless histories and adventures through time, thanks to its extraordinary versatility. Carbon has a long and prestigious CV: its work and achievements extend far beyond the burning of fossil fuels. The fourth most abundant element in the universe and the second most abundant element in the human body, carbon is the chemical basis of all known life. Carbon chemistry has a long history, with applications ranging from jewellery to heating, underpinning developments in metallurgy, textiles, pharmaceuticals, electronics, nanoscience and green technologies. A biography of carbon transgresses the boundaries between chemical and social existence, between nature and culture, forcing us to abandon the simplified image of carbon as the anti-hero of human civilization and enabling us to see instead the great diversity of carbon's modes of existence. With scientific precision and literary flair, Bensaude-Vincent and Loeve unravel the surprising ways in which carbon has shaped our world, showing how unrecognizable the earth would be without it. Uncovering the many hidden lives of carbon allows us to view our own with fresh eyes.
In this compelling dialogue, two of the world's most influential thinkers reflect on the value of equality and debate what citizens and governments should do to narrow the gaps that separate us. Ranging across economics, philosophy, history, and current affairs, Thomas Piketty and Michael Sandel consider how far we have come in achieving greater equality. At the same time, they confront head-on the extreme divides that remain in wealth, income, power, and status nationally and globally.
What can be done at a time of deep political instability and environmental crisis? Piketty and Sandel agree on much: more inclusive investment in health and education, higher progressive taxation, curbing the political power of the rich and the overreach of markets. But how far and how fast can we push? Should we prioritize material or social change? What are the prospects for any change at all with nationalist forces resurgent? How should the left relate to values like patriotism and local solidarity where they collide with the challenges of mass migration and global climate change?
To see Piketty and Sandel grapple with these and other problems is to glimpse new possibilities for change and justice but also the stubborn truth that progress towards greater equality never comes quickly or without deep social conflict and political struggle.
Gisèle Pelicot's story outraged the world. The sickening parade of crimes to which she was subjected and her betrayal are dark pages in our history. Feminist philosopher Manon Garcia decided to attend the trial and to analyse its resonance for our future. It became the trial that demonstrated that trials will never suffice to serve justice. If the perpetrators, for the most part, seemed so unashamed of what they had done, can we see in their sentencing anything meaningful? If their lawyers defend their clients by relieving them of responsibility for their actions, how will these men, their families, their friends see this trial as anything other than an injustice? If, even as the most explicit proof streamed before the court, the victim was stonewalled with the bland denial of facts, what can juries achieve in cases when the evidence is lacking? The threat of incarceration will never be powerful enough to stop men raping. If trusting the justice system, as those who fret about feminist overreach counsel us to do, gets us nowhere, what do we do? Above all, one question haunted Garcia: under such circumstances, can we live with men? And at what price?
Today, many readers could easily list thirty classic authors, or thirty classic works of art, literature, music, philosophy, or science. But would they be able to name thirty classic works of history? In spite of history's outsized influence in the world of ideas, the books that made - and-remade - the history we know so well are often forgotten. In this panoramic book, distinguished historian Jaume Aurell sets out to introduce readers to a new canon of historical writing. Taking a global approach, he places the work of Herodotus, Thucydides, Gibbon, Michelet and Braudel alongside masterpieces from a myriad of periods and civilizations, from Sima Qian, Anna Komnene, al-Masudi and Fukuzawa Yukichi to Edmundo O'Gorman, C. L. R. James and Natalie Zemon Davis. At the same time, Aurell argues that we should not see these books as a definitive canon - instead, any canon should be seen as a list-in-progress to be contested and debated anew with each generation. It is only by being exposed to these diverse and deeply significant works that we can fully perceive the shape of the discipline, and carve out a new appreciation for the art of history writing.
'Even the biographical individual is a social category', wrote Adorno. `It can only be defined in a living context together with others.' In this major new biography, Stefan Müller-Doohm turns this maxim back on Adorno himself and provides a rich and comprehensive account of the life and work of one of the most brilliant minds of the twentieth century. This authoritative biography ranges across the whole of Adorno's life and career, from his childhood and student years to his years in emigration in the United States and his return to postwar Germany. At the same time, Muller-Doohm examines the full range of Adorno's writings on philosophy, sociology, literary theory, music theory and cultural criticism. Drawing on an array of sources from Adorno's personal correspondence with Horkheimer, Benjamin, Berg, Marcuse, Kracauer and Mann to interviews, notes and both published and unpublished writings, Muller-Doohm situates Adorno's contributions in the context of his times and provides a rich and balanced appraisal of his significance in the 20th Century as a whole. Müller-Doohm's clear prose succeeds in making accessible some of the most complex areas of Adorno's thought. This outstanding biography will be the standard work on Adorno for years to come.
A spectre is haunting us: fear. We are constantly confronted with apocalyptic scenarios: pandemics, world war, the climate catastrophe. Images of the end of the world and the end of human civilization are conjured up with ever greater urgency. Anxiously, we face a bleak future. Preoccupied with crisis management, life becomes a matter of survival.
But it is precisely at such moments of fear and despair that hope arises like a phoenix from the ashes. Only hope can give us back a life that is more than mere survival. Fear isolates people and closes them off from one another; hope, by contrast, unites people and forms communities. It opens up a meaningful horizon that re-invigorates and inspires life. It nurtures fantasy and enables us to think about what is yet to come. It makes action possible because it infuses our world with purpose and meaning. Hope is the spring that liberates us from our collective despair and gives us a future.
In this short essay on hope, Byung-Chul Han gives us the perfect antidote to the climate of fear that pervades our world.
Mobile media such as smartphones, apps, and social media are an integral part of everyday life, used by billions of people around the world. For students and researchers, mobile media also offer a treasure trove of new concepts, methods, and techniques to do research - representing a new phase in digital methods. Across disciplines, researchers rely upon mobile media for quantitative and qualitative projects, to gather data and document sound and images, engage with participants, and disseminate findings.
This is the first textbook devoted to explaining these innovative and groundbreaking mobile media methods. Exploring the opportunities and limitations mobile media offer for methods, the book covers a range of topics from mobilities and placemaking to virtual reality and AI, as well as new kinds of mobility such as e-scooters and connected cars. Student-friendly features such as practical guidance on how to gather and analyse data alongside exercises are also included. Underscoring the book throughout is the definition of methods as not just a series of tools and techniques, but as an invitation to rethink how to conceptualize, practice, study and theorize the relationship between research, data and the field.
Drawing from the best of mobile and digital communication research, Mobile Media Methods offers a clear, accessible, and practical guide to mobile media methods. It is essential reading and a useful resource for students and scholars of digital technology and research methods.
Ditching the stuffy hang-ups and benighted sexual traditionalism of the past is an unambiguously positive thing. The sexual revolution has liberated us to enjoy a heady mixture of erotic freedom and personal autonomy. Right? Wrong, argues Louise Perry in her provocative new book. Although it would be neither possible nor desirable to turn the clock back to a world of pre-60s sexual mores, she argues that the amoral libertinism and callous disenchantment of liberal feminism and our contemporary hypersexualised culture represent more loss than gain. The main winners from a world of rough sex, hook-up culture and ubiquitous porn - where anything goes and only consent matters - are a tiny minority of high-status men, not the women forced to accommodate the excesses of male lust. While dispensing sage advice to the generations paying the price for these excesses, she makes a passionate case for a new sexual culture built around dignity, virtue and restraint. This counter-cultural polemic from one of the most exciting young voices in contemporary feminism should be read by all men and women uneasy about the mindless orthodoxies of our ultra-liberal era.
Also available as an audiobook narrated by the author.
In autumn 1962 Theodor W. Adorno gave a lecture on fighting antisemitism to the German Coordinating Council of Societies for Christian-Jewish Cooperation, a lecture that remains as topical and urgent today as it was in the 1960s.
After the Second World War, Germany was grappling with a reluctance to admit collective guilt for the horrors of the Holocaust and German society was witnessing the emergence of various forms of hidden or `crypto' antisemitism. In his lecture Adorno demonstrated that antisemitism is a central and essential element of right-wing extremism and is identical in structure to racism. It is accompanied by an authoritarian mindset and a conformist anti-intellectualism. Moreover, a classic trick used by anti-Semites is to protest against taboos which prevent them from freely spreading their hate by classing them as a form of persecution, and to present themselves as victims of it. The only antidote to this poison is an unwavering loyalty to the truth in dealing with historical and political realities.
Adorno advocates an anti-authoritarian programme to prevent antisemitic character development and advises taking firm action against outbreaks of antisemitic behaviour. His brilliant analysis of the sources and dangers of antisemitism is as relevant now as it was sixty years ago.
Susanna Rustin's Sexed is a radical retelling of the story of British feminism. Starting in the revolutionary 1790s and ending in the present day, she introduces the 1830s radicals who demanded "LIBERTY FOR EVER!", Victorian petitioners who expected to be dead before women won the vote, and rival camps of suffragists who embraced and rejected violence. She considers the contributions of the first female MPs, as well as activists including the Greenham peace protesters and the black and Asian women's groups of the 1970s and 1980s.
Her goal? To show how successive generations have fiercely contested what it means to be a woman, and why this matters. Biology on its own is not destiny. But this book argues that differences between male and female bodies have always been feminist issues. While gender is a useful concept, women cannot be supported by a politics that forgets that they, like men, are sexed.
Once there were princes and peasants and very few between. The extremes of wealth and poverty are still with us, but that shouldn't blind us to the fact our societies have been utterly transformed for the better over the past century. As Daniel Waldenstrm makes clear in this authoritative account of wealth accumulation and inequality in the modern west, we are today both significantly richer and more equal.
Using cutting-edge research and new, sometimes surprising, data, Waldenstrm shows that what stands out since the late 1800s is a massive rise in the size of the middle class and its share of society's total wealth. Unfettered capitalism, it seems, doesn't have to lead to boundless inequality. The key to progress was political and institutional change that enabled citizens to become educated, better paid, and to amass wealth through housing and pension savings. Waldenstrm asks how we can consolidate these gains while encouraging the creation of new capital. The answer, he argues, is to pursue tax and social policies that raise the wealth of people in the bottom and middle rather than cutting wealth of entrepreneurs at the top.
Richer and More Equal is a benchmark account of one of the most profound and encouraging social changes in human history and a blueprint for continued progress.
Capitalism is failing us. Instead of bringing a decent life for the majority, it generates an outrageous gap between the rich and the rest, unaffordable housing, a profit-driven healthcare system, skyrocketing educational debt, racial and gender inequality, and the threat of climate disaster. Economist David Kotz argues that it's time we built a new socialism for the unique challenges of the twenty-first century.
The problems of capitalism are too profound for reform, Kotz writes. Reform can help, but only temporarily, and not for all. Nor can we turn back to the socialist experiments of the twentieth century. But we can learn from those experiments, both their successes and failures, to build a democratic and participatory economic and political system. The result would be a sustainable future of economic justice, equality, material comfort, human development, and meaningful freedom. The journey towards a new socialism may be difficult. But Kotz combines a clear and rigorous account of how socialism can be made to work with a realistic strategy for how to get there. This is the book we need to help us escape the cruelties of our capitalist present.
This book argues that the psychoanalytic concept of disavowal best renders the structure underlying our contemporary social response to traumatic and disturbing events, from climate change to unsettling tectonic shifts in our social tissue. Unlike denialism and negation, disavowal functions by fully acknowledging what we disavow. Zupancic contends that disavowal, which sustains some belief by means of ardently proclaiming the knowledge of the opposite, is becoming a predominant feature of our social and political life. She also shows how the libidinal economy of disavowal is a key element of capitalist economy. The concept of fetishistic disavowal already exposes the objectified side of the mechanism of the disavowal, which follows the general formula: I know well, but all the same, the object-fetish allows me to disregard this knowledge. Zupancic adds another twist by showing how, in the prevailing structure of disavowal today, the mere act of declaring that we know becomes itself an object-fetish by which we intercept the reality of that very knowledge. This perverse deployment of knowledge deprives it of any reality. This structure of disavowal can be found not only in the more extreme and dramatic cases of conspiracy theories and re-emerging magical thinking, but even more so in the supposedly sober continuation of business as usual, combined with the call to adapt to the new reality. To disrupt this social embedding of disavowal, it is not enough to change the way we think: things need to change, and hence the way they think for us.
1989 ushered in a new age of freedom and prosperity. Thirty years later, the golden era is over. What went wrong? How did the age of globalization - of growing connectivity, affluence, and growth - give way? Jonathan Holslag navigates through the calm seas and rip tides of global politics from the Cold War to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He tells a story of faltering momentum and squandered opportunities that explains how the West's sources of strength were lost to rising consumerism, unbalanced trade, and half-hearted diplomatic engagement. All the while, other powers, like China and Russia, grew stronger. With his trademark verve, Holslag untangles the threads of this story to reveal that it was not so much the ambition of China, the cunning of Putin, or the greed of African strongmen that led the world into this dark place; it was the failure of the West to listen to its people, to show clear leadership, and reinvent itself, in spite of ample evidence that things were going awry.
In our busy and hurried lives, we are losing the ability to be inactive. Human existence becomes fully absorbed by activity - even leisure, treated as a respite from work, becomes part of the same logic. Intense life today means first of all more performance or more consumption. We have forgotten that it is precisely inactivity, which does not produce anything, that represents an intense and radiant form of life. For Byung-Chul Han, inactivity constitutes the human. Without moments of pause or hesitation, acting deteriorates into blind action and reaction. When life follows the rule of stimulus-response and need-satisfaction, it atrophies into pure survival: naked biological life. If we lose the ability to be inactive, we begin to resemble machines that simply function. True life begins when concern for survival, for the exigencies of mere life, ends. The ultimate purpose of all human endeavour is inactivity. In a beautifully crafted ode to the art of being still, Han shows that the current crisis in our society calls for a very different way of life: one based on the vita contemplative. He pleads for bringing our ceaseless activities to a stop and making room for the magic that happens in between. Life receives its radiance only from inactivity.
Race is arguably the single most troublesome and volatile concept of the social sciences in the early 21st century. It is invoked to explain all manner of historical phenomena and current issues, from slavery to police brutality to acute poverty, and it is also used as a term of civic denunciation and moral condemnation. In this erudite and incisive book based on a panoramic mining of comparative and historical research from around the globe, Loï
