{"title":"Cultural Critique Books","description":"\u003cp\u003eDive into thought-provoking cultural critique books exploring society, politics, and identity. Uncover insightful perspectives, challenge norms, and broaden your understanding of the world we live in. Browse now!\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"unconditional-equality-book-ajay-skaria-9780816698660","title":"Unconditional Equality","description":"Unconditional Equality examines Mahatma Gandhi’s critique of liberal ideas of freedom and equality and his own practice of a freedom and equality organized around religion. It reconceives satyagraha (passive resistance) as a politics that strives for the absolute equality of all beings. Liberal traditions usually affirm an abstract equality centered on some form of autonomy, the Kantian term for the everyday sovereignty that rational beings exercise by granting themselves universal law. But for Gandhi, such equality is an “equality of sword”—profoundly violent not only because it excludes those presumed to lack reason (such as animals or the colonized) but also because those included lose the power to love (which requires the surrender of autonomy or, more broadly, sovereignty).  Gandhi professes instead a politics organized around dharma, or religion. For him, there can be “no politics without religion.” This religion involves self-surrender, a freely offered surrender of autonomy and everyday sovereignty. For Gandhi, the “religion that stays in all religions” is satyagraha—the agraha (insistence) on or of satya (being or truth).  Ajay Skaria argues that, conceptually, satyagraha insists on equality without exception of all humans, animals, and things. This cannot be understood in terms of sovereignty: it must be an equality of the minor.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49629999137041,"sku":"GOR011212211","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/081669866X.jpg?v=1764928471"},{"product_id":"discourse-figure-book-jean-francois-lyotard-9780816645657","title":"Discourse, Figure","description":"Lyotard’s earliest major work, available in English for the first time  Choice Outstanding Academic Title   Jean-François Lyotard is recognized as one of the most significant French philosophers of the twentieth century. Although nearly all of his major writing has been translated into English, one important work has until now been unavailable. Discourse, Figure is Lyotard’s thesis. Provoked in part by Lacan’s influential seminars in Paris, Discourse, Figure distinguishes between the meaningfulness of linguistic signs and the meaningfulness of plastic arts such as painting and sculpture. Lyotard argues that because rational thought is discursive and works of art are inherently opaque signs, certain aspects of artistic meaning such as symbols and the pictorial richness of painting will always be beyond reason’s grasp. A wide-ranging and highly unusual work, Discourse, Figure proceeds from an attentive consideration of the phenomenology of experience to an ambitious meditation on the psychoanalytic account of the subject of experience, structured by the confrontation between phenomenology and psychoanalysis as contending frames within which to think the materialism of consciousness. In addition to prefiguring many of Lyotard’s later concerns, Discourse, Figure captures Lyotard’s passionate engagement with topics beyond phenomenology and psychoanalysis to structuralism, semiotics, poetry, art, and the philosophy of language.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50028699844881,"sku":"GOR010810250","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0816645655.jpg?v=1750914355"},{"product_id":"dreams-of-interpretation-book-catherine-liu-9780816648009","title":"The Dreams of Interpretation","description":"Rethinking the importance of Sigmund Freud's landmark book  The Interpretation of Dreams","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50063349940497,"sku":"GOR008267109","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/081664800X.jpg?v=1764843742"},{"product_id":"anti-book-book-nicholas-thoburn-9780816621965","title":"Anti-Book","description":"No, Anti-Book is not a book about books. Not exactly. And yet it is a must for anyone interested in the future of the book. Presenting what he terms “a communism of textual matter,” Nicholas Thoburn explores the encounter between political thought and experimental writing and publishing, shifting the politics of text from an exclusive concern with content and meaning to the media forms and social relations by which text is produced and consumed. Taking a “post-digital” approach in considering a wide array of textual media forms, Thoburn invites us to challenge the commodity form of books—to stop imagining books as transcendent intellectual, moral, and aesthetic goods unsullied by commerce. His critique is, instead, one immersed in the many materialities of text.   Anti-Book engages with an array of writing and publishing projects, including Antonin Artaud’s paper gris-gris, Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, Guy Debord’s sandpaper-bound Mémoires, the collective novelist Wu Ming, and the digital\/print hybrid of Mute magazine. Empirically grounded, it is also a major achievement in expressing a political philosophy of writing and publishing, where the materiality of text is interlaced with conceptual production. Each chapter investigates a different form of textual media in concert with a particular concept: the small-press pamphlet as “communist object,” the magazine as “diagrammatic publishing,” political books in the modes of “root” and “rhizome,” the “multiple single” of anonymous authorship, and myth as “unidentified narrative object.”   An absorbingly written contribution to contemporary media theory in all its manifestations, Anti-Book will enrich current debates about radical publishing, artists’ books and other new genre and media forms in alternative media, art publishing, media studies, cultural studies, critical theory, and social and political theory.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50362711703825,"sku":"CIN0816621969G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51166536368401,"sku":"GOR013043760","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0816621969.jpg?v=1764844527"},{"product_id":"discourse-figure-book-jean-francois-lyotard-9780816645664","title":"Discourse, Figure","description":"Lyotard’s earliest major work, available in English for the first time  Choice Outstanding Academic Title   Jean-FranÇois Lyotard is recognized as one of the most significant French philosophers of the twentieth century. 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Between her birth in Vilnius in 1926 and her death in Warsaw in 2020, Janion witnessed some of the most consequential events of the turbulent twentieth century: the rise of authoritarian nationalism in Poland, German occupation during World War II, Soviet control, and Poland’s uneasy integration into the West. As Western countries face their own nationalist resurgences, Janion’s writing holds tools to help move through this historical condition.        The Bad Child offers sharp insights into how societies develop and assert their identities and histories-often at the cost of the people. Janion’s reflections on fascism, popular culture, and national self-fashioning presciently name and critique regional dynamics that have most recently resulted in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and they broadly expose the illusions that cultures can promote and the dangerous slide from national pride to exclusionary right-wing politics. A queer woman and survivor of World War II, a leftist who resisted Soviet orthodoxy, Janion lends a uniquely disruptive voice to contemporary discussions of fascism, and her insights resonate far beyond her Eastern European roots.             Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and\/or extended descriptions.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51606371270929,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51606372253969,"sku":"NGR9781517919672","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1517919673.jpg?v=1752316300"},{"product_id":"bad-child-book-maria-janion-9781517919689","title":"The Bad Child","description":"Collected writings from a visionary thinker about the perilous edge between patriotism and fascism       How do nationalism and patriotism shape our understanding of identity, and when do they drift into dangerous territory? 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