{"title":"The Italian List","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore Italy through captivating stories with 'The Italian List' series. From sun-drenched villas to charming villages, immerse yourself in tales of love, family, and intrigue. Perfect for armchair travellers!\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"golden-horde-book-nanni-balestrini-9780857427465","title":"The Golden Horde","description":"The Golden Horde is a definitive work on the Italian revolutionary movements of the 1960s and ’70s.   An anthology of texts and fragments woven together with an original commentary, The Golden Horde widens our understanding of the full complexity and richness of radical thought and practice in Italy during the 1960s and ’70s. The book covers the generational turbulence of Italy’s postwar period, the transformations of Italian capitalism, the new analyses by worker-focused intellectuals, the student movement of 1968, the Hot Autumn of 1969, the extra-parliamentary groups of the early 1970s, the Red Brigades, the formation of a radical women’s movement, the development of Autonomia, and the build-up to the watershed moment of the spontaneous political movement of 1977. Far from being merely a handbook of political history, The Golden Horde also sheds light on two decades of Italian culture, including the newspapers, songs, journals, festivals, comics, and philosophy that these movements produced. The book features writings by Sergio Bologna, Umberto Eco, Elvio Fachinelli, Lea Melandri, Danilo Montaldi, Toni Negri, Raniero Panzieri, Franco Piperno, Rossana Rossanda, Paolo Virno, and others, as well as an in-depth introduction by translator Richard Braude outlining the work’s composition and development.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49593509740817,"sku":"GOR013076454","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857427466.jpg?v=1751076974"},{"product_id":"this-body-that-inhabits-me-book-rossana-rossanda-9780857429032","title":"This Body That Inhabits Me","description":"A collection of essays on the mysteries of the body from one of Italy’s leading postwar communist intellectuals.   Politician, translator, and journalist Rossana Rossanda was the most important female left-wing intellectual in post-war Italy. Central to the Italian Communist Party’s cultural wing during the 1950s and ’60s, she left an indelible mark on the life of the mind. The essays in this volume, however, bring together Rossanda’s reflections on the body—how it ages, how it is gendered, what it means to examine one’s own body. The product of a decades-long dialogue with the Italian women’s movement (above all with Lea Melandri, a vital feminist writer who provides an afterword to the current volume), these essays represent an honest and raw meeting between communist and feminist thought. Ranging from reflections on her own hands through to Chinese cinema, from figures such as the Russian cross-dressing soldier Nadezhda Durova to the Jacobin revolutionary Theroigne de Mericourt, here we see Rossanda’s fierce intellect and extraordinary breadth of knowledge applied to the body as a central question of human experience.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49645408747793,"sku":"GOR013061872","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49739425186065,"sku":"NGR9780857429032","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857429035.jpg?v=1751265851"},{"product_id":"nymphs-book-giorgio-agamben-9780857420947","title":"Nymphs","description":"In 1900, Dutch art historians Andre Jolles and Aby Warburg constructed an experimental dialogue in which Jolles supposed he had fallen in love with the figure of a young woman in a painting: \"A fantastic figure - shall I call her a servant girl, or rather a classical nymph? What is the meaning of it all - Who is the nymph? Where does she come from?\" Warburg's response: \"In essence she is an elemental spirit, a pagan goddess in exile,\" serves as the touchstone for this wide-ranging and theoretical exploration of female representation in iconography. In \"Nymphs\", the newest translation of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben's work, the author notes that academic research has lingered on the \"pagan goddess,\" while the concept of \"elemental spirit,\" ignored by scholars, is vital to the history of iconography. Tracing the genealogy of this idea, Agamben goes on to examine subjects as diverse as the aesthetic theories of choreographer Domineco da Piacenza, Friedrich Theodor Vischer's essay on the \"symbol,\" Walter Benjamin's concept of the dialectic image, and the bizarre discoveries of photographer Nathan Lerner in 1972. From these investigations emerges a startlingly original exploration of the ideas of time and the image. Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and \"Nymphs\" will engage not only the author's devoted fans in philosophy, legal theory, sociology, and literary criticism, but his growing audience among art theorists and historians as well.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49730399928593,"sku":"NGR9780857420947","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51917821870353,"sku":"GOR010859921","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857420941.jpg?v=1751439384"},{"product_id":"taste-book-giorgio-agamben-9780857424365","title":"Taste","description":"Our taste buds are a powerful way for humans to know beauty and experience beautiful things. In Taste, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes a close look at why the sense of taste has not historically been appreciated as a means to know and experience pleasure or why it has always been considered inferior to actual theoretical knowledge.  Taste, Agamben argues, is a category that has much to reveal to the contemporary world. Taking a step into the history of philosophy and reaching to the very origins of aesthetics, Agamben critically recovers the roots of one of Western culture's cardinal concepts. Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and with Taste he turns his critical eye to the realm of Western art and aesthetic practice. This volume will not only engage the author's devoted fans in philosophy, sociology, and literary criticism, but also his growing audience among art theorists and historians.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49731365437713,"sku":"NGR9780857424365","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51892541718801,"sku":"GOR014449953","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53032490631441,"sku":"CIN085742436XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53370963001617,"sku":"GOR009786443","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/085742436X.jpg?v=1750786864"},{"product_id":"church-and-the-kingdom-book-giorgio-agamben-9780857425874","title":"The Church and the Kingdom","description":"Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben is the rare writer whose ideas  and works have a broad appeal across many fields, and his devoted fans  are not just philosophers, but readers of political and legal theory,  sociology, and literary criticism as well. In March 2009, Agamben was  invited to speak in Paris’ Notre-Dame Cathedral in the presence of the  Bishop of Paris and a number of other high-ranking church officials. His  resulting speech, a stunningly lucid and provocative look at the  history and state of the Church and its role in society, is presented  here. The Church and the Kingdom is at once a pointed attack on the  institutional structure of the Catholic Church and a theoretical  excursus on the concepts of messianic time and economy. Presenting an exegesis of certain key passages in the New  Testament, Agamben examines the philology and philosophy at the root of  the Church and of its earthly reign. With its examinations of the  foundational texts of the Church, which are also the foundational texts  of our modern idea of economy, The Church and the Kingdom reveals significant connections and parallel ideologies which are imperative to understanding the current global situation. This edition of Agamben’s text is accompanied by photographs by  artist Alice Attie. Made from folded and twisted reproductions of  paintings culled from Christian iconography, these works of art evoke  the restless challenge that well-characterizes Agamben’s four decades of  philosophy and critique. This book will be welcomed by Agamben’s many  readers across the disciplines.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49733131174161,"sku":"NGR9780857425874","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51503451144465,"sku":"GOR014306003","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857425870.jpg?v=1750850354"},{"product_id":"primo-levi-book-marco-belpoliti-9780857428998","title":"Primo Levi","description":"Drawing on twenty years of research, this is the definitive biography of Primo Levi.   Over the last seventy years, Primo Levi (1919–87) has been recognized as the foremost literary witness of the extermination of the European Jews. In Primo Levi: An Identikit, a product of twenty years of research, Marco Belpoliti explores Levi’s tormented life, his trajectory as a writer and intellectual, and, above all, his multifaceted and complex oeuvre.     Organized in a mosaic format, this volume devotes a different chapter to each of Levi’s books. In addition to tracing the history of each book’s composition, publication, and literary influences, Belpoliti explores their contents across the many worlds of Primo Levi: from chemistry to anthropology, biology to ethology, space flights to linguistics. If This Is a Man, his initially rejected masterpiece, is also reread with a fresh perspective. We learn of dreams, animals, and travel; of literary writing, comedy, and tragedy; of shame, memory, and the relationship with other writers such as Franz Kafka and Georges Perec, Jean Améry and Varlam Shalamov. Fundamental themes such as Judaism, the camp, and testimony innervate the book, which is complemented with photographs and letters found by the author in hitherto unexplored archives.     This will be the definitive book on Primo Levi, a treasure trove of stories and reflections that paint a rich, nuanced composite portrait of one of the twentieth century’s most unique and urgent voices.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49739440849169,"sku":"NGR9780857428998","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857428993.jpg?v=1751433282"},{"product_id":"rain-s-falling-up-book-luca-rastello-9780857429902","title":"Rain's Falling Up","description":"A beautifully crafted novel set in the late 1960s and 1970s Italy, a tempestuous period that shaped the lives of generations to come in many countries.   What was it really like to be a teenager growing up in Italy in the 1970s, during a time it has become all too easy to file away under \"years of lead,\" as the fathers' betrayed ideals came face to face with the sons' and daughters' rebellions? What was happening in schools, in assemblies, social centers, and occupied factories as the postwar \"economic miracle\" was being dismantled from within? What moved the foremost French intellectuals of the time to sign an appeal against the repression of the student and workers' movement in Italy? What did the bullets and heroin bring to a halt, and where did they come from? How does it feel when strategies of terror and police brutality become as ordinary as a TV dinner and as eerie as the plots of the science fiction novels you are plagiarizing to impress a girl? How are metropolitan geographies alchemized in the muscles of a young body crossing the shady lines between ages and sexes?       Luca Rastello raises these and other questions in an astonishing novel that splices chunks of plot and historical reconstruction into the free flow of memory and dream. Rain's Falling Up tracks the trajectory of a generation while refusing to romanticize its protagonists or resolve the tensions that powered its volatile energy.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49742146699537,"sku":"NGR9780857429902","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52394367025425,"sku":"GOR014515916","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857429906.jpg?v=1750883819"},{"product_id":"idea-of-world-book-paolo-virno-9780857429896","title":"The Idea of World","description":"A philosophical exploration of what capitalistic societies truly mean for the individual.     A short vade mecum for unrepentant materialism, The Idea of World collects three essays by Italian philosopher Paulo Virno that are intricately wrapped around one another. The first essay, \"Mundanity,\" tries to clarify what the term \"world,\" as referred to as the perceptual and historical context of our existence, means-both with and against Kant and Wittgenstein. How should we understand expressions such as \"worldly people,\" \"the course of the world,\" or \"getting by in this world\"? The second, \"Virtuosity and Revolution,\" is a minor political treatise. Virno puts forward a set of concepts capable of confronting the magnetic storm that has knocked out the compasses that every reflection on the public sphere has relied on since the seventeenth century. The third, \"The Use of Life\", is the shorthand delineation of a research program on the notion of use. What exactly are we doing when we use a hammer, a time span, or an ironic sentence? And, above all, what does the use of the self-of one's own life, which lies at the basis of all uses-amount to in human existence?     Presenting his ideas in three distinct vignettes, Virno examines how the philosophy of language, anthropology, and political theory are inextricably linked.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49742187888913,"sku":"NGR9780857429896","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0857429892.jpg?v=1751202671"},{"product_id":"essay-on-negation-book-paolo-virno-9781803093635","title":"An Essay on Negation","description":"A vital addition to Seagull’s growing Italian List that focuses on leftist Italian thought, bringing famous as well as little-known yet crucial voices into the English language.   As speaking animals, we continuously make use of an unassuming grammatical particle, without suspecting that what is at work in its inconspicuousness is a powerful apparatus, which orchestrates language, signification, and the world at large. What particle might this be? The word not.   In Essay on Negation, Paolo Virno argues that the importance of the not is perhaps comparable only to that of money—that is, the universality of exchange. Negation is what separates verbal thought from silent cognitive operations, such as feelings and mental images. Speaking about what is not happening here and now, or about properties that are not referable to a given object, the human animal deactivates its original neuronal empathy, which is prelinguistic; it distances itself from the prescriptions of its own instinctual endowment and accesses a higher sociality, negotiated and unstable, which establishes the public sphere. In fact, the speaking animal soon learns that the negative statement does not amount to the linguistic double of unpleasant realities or destructive emotions: while it rejects them, negation also names them and thus includes them in social life. Virno sees negation as a crucial effect of civilization, one that is, however, also always exposed to further regressions. Taking his cue from a humble word, the author is capable of unfolding the unexpected phenomenology of the negating consciousness.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49753569755409,"sku":"NGR9781803093635","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50707159023889,"sku":"CIN1803093633VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1803093633.jpg?v=1751378137"},{"product_id":"spartakus-book-furio-jesi-9781803093628","title":"Spartakus","description":"A crucial text at the intersection of history and philosophy in twentieth-century Italy.   On December 29, 1918, the Spartakus League, a Marxist revolutionary movement, rose up in Germany calling for an end to class rule by the bourgeoisie. Massive demonstrations followed and more than 500,000 Berliners took to the streets in January—only to be crushed by police and anticommunist paramilitary troops. Several leaders of the Spartakus League were killed and the revolt was quashed.   Through a detailed reconstruction of the events of that bloody winter, historian and critic Furio Jesi recasts our understanding of a foundational political difference—revolt or revolution? Drawing on a deep reserve of literary sources like Brecht, Eliade, Dostoyevsky, and Mann, Jesi outlines a uniquely incisive phenomenology of revolt that distinguishes between the purposeful historical temporality of revolution and the suspension of time that marks a revolt. 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In a tour-de-force reinterpretation of the Christian tradition, Agamben shows that the Garden of Eden has always served as a symbol of humanity’s true nature. Where earlier theologians viewed the expulsion as temporary, Augustine’s doctrine of original sin makes it permanent, reimagining humanity as the paradoxical creature that has been completely alienated from its own nature. From this perspective, there can be no return to paradise, only the hope for the messianic kingdom. Yet there have always been thinkers who rebelled against this idea, and Agamben highlights two major examples. The first is the early medieval philosopher John Scotus Eriugena, who argued for a radical unity of humanity with all living things. The second is Dante, whose vision of the earthly paradise points towards the possibility of genuine human happiness in this world. In place of the messianic kingdom, which has provided the model for modern revolutionary movements, Agamben contends that we should place our hopes for political change in a return to our origins, by reclaiming the earthly paradise.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49753585647889,"sku":"NGR9781803093642","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52495618441489,"sku":"NIN9781803093642","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52965908775185,"sku":"GOR014672870","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1803093641.jpg?v=1751426699"},{"product_id":"studiolo-book-giorgio-agamben-9781803093680","title":"Studiolo","description":"A brief study of select Western art from Italy’s foremost philosopher.   In Renaissance palaces, the studiolo was a small room to which the prince withdrew to meditate or read, surrounded by paintings he particularly loved. This book is a kind of studiolo for its author, Giorgio Agamben, as he turns his philosophical lens on the world of Western art.    Studiolo is a fascinating take on a selection of artworks created over millennia; some are easily identifiable, others rarer. Though they were produced over an arc of time stretching from 5000 BCE to the present, only now have they achieved their true legibility. Agamben contends that we must understand that the images bequeathed by the past are really addressed to us, here and now; otherwise, our historical awareness is broken. Notwithstanding the attention to detail and the critical precautions that characterize the author’s method—they provoke us with a force, even a violence, that we cannot escape. When we understand why Dostoevsky feared losing his faith before Holbein’s Body of the Dead Christ, when Chardin’s Still Life with Hare is suddenly revealed to our gaze as a crucifixion or Twombly’s sculpture shows that beauty must ultimately fall, the artwork is torn from its museological context and restored to its almost prehistoric emergence. 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Tracing these dichotomies, Agamben is in top form, able to articulate paradoxes that in another writer's hands might be ineffable. In the second and third parts of the book the reader is treated to a series of beautiful paintings by acclaimed artist Monica Ferrando, as well as her translation of crucial Greek and Latin source materials. 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It is also the book in which Fortini sought to clarify for himself his conflicted identity as an Italian Jew. An uncomfortably timely book, The Dogs of the Sinai combines polemic and autobiography with narrative and criticism in a terse and finely wrought reflection on politics, identity, and truthfulness in the period after the Six Day War of 1967. Fortini describes with rich personal detail the Nazi occupation of Italy and the rise of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, meditating on the birth of fascism and the increasing anti-Arabic influence in Europe. As topical today as it was forty-five years ago, this meditation against power is published alongside Fortini\/Cani, a film by Jean-Marie Straub and Daniele Huillet, drawn from Fortini's essay. The film includes moving scenes of the author reading excerpts from his book against quiet landscapes. 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