Description A collection of essays published during the Weimar Republic that reflect on the contemporary state of reason and society as expressed in the material products of modern mass capitalism, most notebly in dance revues, […]
Category Archives: Materialism
Cinema and Experience: Kracauer, Benjamin, Adorno
Description Hansen explores the promise of cinema as it defined and changed the notion of experience in modernity and modernist thinkers. Here Hansen proposes a materialst theory of the cinema to help work understand the […]
Nature’s Queer Performativity
Description Through a range of vivid examples drawn from scientific research (from social amoebas to lightening), Barad lays out how nature itself is queer, how it models queer communication through a performative rather than represnetative […]
Man a Machine
Description Julien Offray de La Mettrie was one of the earliest French Enlightenment materialists. Exiled from France after publishing a book (A Natural History of the Soul) arguing that psychical phenomena could be explained by […]
The Paradox of the Automaton: From Diderot to Cybernetics
Description A concise and provocative history of the idea of automata from Diderot to the present. She argues that the automaton is the cornerstone of modern knowledge and its powers. Creator Martineau, Julie Publisher Montréal: […]
Machine and Organism
Description Canguilhem inverts the normal scientific question–what is the mechanism underlying this organic process?–and asks how machines are organic. He traces the history of the relationships between organism and machine from the ancient Greek political […]
“Liberté, Égalité, Sororité: The Regime of the Sister in Graffigny’s Lettres d’une Péruvienne.”
Description Discusses 18th-century author Françoise de Graffigny’s important novel (Lettres d’une Péruvienne), focusing on the form of the letters in the novel, which are constructed first in quipos (a peruvian form of communication involving knotted […]
The Great Cat Massacre
Description Translated into 18 languages to date, this work is delightful read and also gets one thinking about the many ways in which we impose our own cultural assumptions, inaccurately, on previous eras; very useful […]
Enlightenment and Pathology: Sensibility in the Literature and Medicine of Eighteenth-Century France
Description Vila’s study is now a classic, not only for its revealing interdisciplinary treatment of sensibility but also for its precise methodology and the clarity of its prose. Creator Vila, Anne Publisher Johns Hopkins, 1997 […]
Critical Theory: Essays
Description Collection of Horkhiemer’s early essays that define the program of critical theory. Includes seminal essays such as “Traditional and Critical Theory” and “The Latests Attacks on Metaphysics,” providing background and context for many of […]