mlx-community/zer0-books huggingface dataset:
Althusser and Art
by Jonathan R Fardy

Althusser and Art examines the relationship between Althusser’s political theory and his writings on art.

Althusser and Art offers a reading of Althusserianism as a meta-mediation on the question concerning the aesthetics of theory. Fardy shows that Althusserian theory is part of a larger genealogy of thought, stretching from Korsch through Laruelle, that has been primarily concerned with the search for a form of theory, an aesthetic of theorizing, capable of transcending the theory-practice dialectic.

Reviews:
In this impressively concise book calling for a "return to Althusser" through the avenue of Althusserian aesthetics, Jonathan Fardy has accomplished nothing short of the twenty-first century equivalent of Althusser's own call for a "return to Marx" in the 1960s. Readers will certainly learn much from Fardy's demonstration of why encountering the aesthetic form of Althusser's approach to critical theory is necessary for understanding the Althusserian project tout court, but where Althusser and Art shines brightest is in its engagement with the heavy Althusserian influence on Pierre Macherey, Jacques Rancière, and Francois Laruelle. In short, Fardy pries open new ground in the continually deepening intersections of the aesthetic and the political, modelling in the process an eminently readable style of prose that should be the envy of all who write on critical theory today. ~ Christopher Langlois, author of Samuel Beckett and the Terror of Literature
America and Other Fictions
by Ed Simon

If America or God didn't exist it would be necessary to invent them. Let's start.

At a moment of cultural and political crisis, with forces of reaction seemingly ascendant throughout the West, it's fair to ask what use does anyone have for America, God, or any other similar fictions? What use does theological language have for the radical facing the apocalypse? Among the subjects considered: the need for an Augustinian left, legacies of American violence, speaking in tongues, the humanities facing climate change, the maturity of realizing that you will die, how to sail towards Utopia, and witches.

'Ed Simon’s essays help readers to understand how we got to this complicated moment in American religious history. Deft, thoughtful, and creatively told.'

Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture

Reviews:
In this book you'll rediscover America, the enchanted and cursed. For an age haunted with reactionary nostalgia, Ed Simon haunts readers with an American greatness that is both lovely and perverse, through masterfully told tales that look their subjects' original sins straight in the eye. His America is more than a country, more than an idea or a history or a code of laws; it's a system of worship, hitherto little-known as such to its own devotees. ~ Nathan Schneider, author of God in Proof: The Story of a Search from the Ancients to the Internet
Ed Simon's powerful, searching essays are conversant with a startling range of subject matter: Augustine and Whitman, Bob Dylan and Thomas Paine, Catholicism and Cathars, Cotton Mather and Martin Luther. Simon's mind goes, quite simply, everywhere. His goal as an essayist is a kind of secular reenchantment of the old, dead creeds—to acknowledge, and cherish, truths that go deeper than mere belief. Most remarkable of all is how often he succeeds. ~ Tom Bissell, author of The Disaster Artist and Apostle
From dusty reliquaries to Walt Whitman’s odes, from Tomas Paine to Thomas Moore and all across the persistently stubborn landscape of the American religious imagination, Ed Simon’s essays help readers to understand how we got to this complicated moment in American religious history. Deft, thoughtful, and creatively told, this book reaches across the divides between left and right, popular and academic, into something greater and more significant: the American imagination. ~ Kaya Oakes, author of Slanted and Enchanted: The Evolution of Indie Culture and Radical Reinvention: An Unlikely Return to the Catholic Church
Anatomy of Thought-Fiction
by Joanna Demers

Why do people choose to believe things they know are untrue?

In the year 2214, the Center for Humanistic Study has discovered an unpublished manuscript by Joanna Demers, a musicologist who lived some two centuries before. Her writing interrogates the music of artists ranging from David Bowie and Scott Walker to Kanye West and The KLF. Questioning how people of the early twenty-first century could have believed that music was alive, and that music was simultaneously on the brink of extinction, light is shed on why the United States subsequently chose to eliminate the humanities from universities, and to embrace fascism...

Reviews:
Focused on music, but with implications that extend to just about everything, Anatomy of Thought-Fiction explores the role of false ideas in our intellectual and emotional life. Joanna Demers’ elegant monograph (or should that be polygraph?) softly shatters myths and tenderly takes apart received wisdom. Yet this cluster-bomb of a book also leaves the reader convinced that illusions aren’t just useful, they’re indispensable: a thought at once unsettling and liberating. ~ Simon Reynolds, Author of Retromania and Shock and Awe: Glam Rock and Its Legacy
Animatic Apparatus, The
by Deborah Levitt

How the transition from analogue to digital, and the rise of animation and simulation transform our concepts of life in contemporary culture.

Unprecedented kinds of experience, and new modes of life, are now produced by simulations, from the CGI of Hollywood blockbusters to animal cloning to increasingly sophisticated military training software, while animation has become an increasingly powerful pop-cultural form. Today, the extraordinary new practices and radical objects of simulation and animation are transforming our neoliberal-biopolitical “culture of life”. The Animatic Apparatus offers a genealogy for the animatic regime and imagines its alternative futures, countering the conservative-neoliberal notion of life’s sacred inviolability with a new concept and ethics of animatic life.

Reviews:
At once theoretically dazzling and fearless, The Animatic Apparatus shows how the production of life in animation deconstructs ontology as such: “There is no death in animation, because there is no being, no existence, to begin with.” But an-ontology is not the end of living. Instead, carefully tracing how the medium of animation has come to operate as a supermedium, Levitt finds animation to be the key not only to modelling the contemporary condition but also to formulating an ethical relation to it. Animation offers nothing less than a toolkit for new assembling of lives upon the active void of contemporary media. ~ Thomas Lamarre, Author of The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation. Professor of East Asian Studies and Communication Studies, McGill University
With subtlety and élan, Levitt compellingly animates an historical journey with dolls, puppets, automata, replicants and artificial life to secure the case for “an-ontology.” Media, in the form of novels, films, images, cartoons, screens, robots, and other automata are recursively part of the “human" condition such that distinctions between life and artificial life or intelligence and AI are ultimately unsustainable. Levitt’s inspired pursuit of a mediology of technology and metaphysics demonstrates that whatever we are, our emergence is bound up with the simulacrum, and that animation is at least as real as the real itself. What’s more, our ethics and our politics must come from that condition. ~ Jonathan Beller, Author of The Cinematic Mode of Production, Professor of Humanities and Media Studies and Critical and Visual Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn, NY
What if Mamoru Oshi's 2004 anime Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence is not just a midnight cult film, but the secret template for nearly all of 21st century technoculture? In The Animatic Apparatus, Deborah Levitt convincingly argues that this is actually the case. "Images possess their own forms of vitality," ones that cannot be easily distinguished from our own. ~ Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University, author of Connected: Or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society
Anti-Hero
by A.J. Lozier

One man’s journey into, and out of, the movement that foreshadowed the modern-day “Antifa.”

A memoir of one man’s journey into, and out of, the movement that foreshadowed the modern-day “Antifa.”

Between 1999-2005, as the nation convulsed with uncertainty over a contested election and the Sept. 11 attacks, A.J. Lozier attended and helped organize protests across the United States, as an active participant in the anarchist "black bloc," predecessor to the modern-day "Antifa." He was charged, tackled, swung at, shot at with rubber bullets, punched and, once, arrested. He did his fair of shoving too, all in the name of Anarchy, which he believed to be the only hope for a more peaceful and equitable society, in which capitalism was a thing of the past.

This is no "behind the mask" exposé, but nor is it a work of unselfconscious propaganda. It is first and foremost a story, but one that charts how a pure-intentioned desire for peace and justice morphed into a mechanism for justifying any behavior. It is a story that foreshadows the Antifa we see today.

Reviews:
In what is told via a compelling narrative from start to finish, Anti-Hero: Memories of a Black Bloc Anarchist is a book for the ages; a refreshing take, an exposed side of a raging argument of a distorted viewpoint that now gets its day in the sun through Lozier. ~ Anne Carlini, Exclusive Magazine
Lozier's book is a cocktail that mixes passion with politics, direct action with drunkenness, and self-deception with longing in his quest for belonging inside the alienating features of modern society. In doing so, he delivers a love letter to anyone curious enough to listen. ~ David Redmon, Award-Winning Director of Mardi Gras: Made in China
In "Anti-hero", Lozier reminds us that Antifa activists and others on the radical Left are not as one-dimensional as political talking heads would like you to believe. And ultimately, if we want to overcome hatred and build a better society, we need to remember the simple truth that we are all more alike than different as human beings. ~ Gabriel Nadales, Author of Behind the Black Mask, My Time as an Antifa Activist
Anti-Matter
by Ben Jeffery

An interrogation of art's ability to face unpleasant truths.

Michel Houellebecq, author of five novels including Atomised and Platform, has become possibly the world’s most famous literary pessimist. His work declares that life is painful and disappointing, death is terrifying, and the human condition is a nasty sort of joke. He has been wildly successful – translated into over 25 different languages and hailed as the voice of a generation.

Beginning with Houellebecq’s novels, this book explores the concept of ‘Depressive Realism’ in literature and philosophy – the proposition that the facts of life are bleak and unkind. Ranging over work by David Foster Wallace, Susan Sontag, Fredric Jameson and Margaret Atwood, Anti-Matter surveys the case for pessimism, asks how a mass culture rooted in sentimentality and trivialisation manages to produce so much cynicism and apathy, and hunts for the space that remains for serious, life-affirming art.

Reviews:
Anti-Matter is an example of the kind of rigorous and refined criticism that one rarely stumbles across these days. ~ Jacques Testard, Times Literary Supplement
Ben Jeffery's Anti-Matter is the kind of intelligent, sophisticated response to provocative work that affirms criticism's value as art in itself. ... A more rigorous, less stylized version of the kind of long critical essay usually associated with writers like Geoff Dyer and Pierre Bayard, Anti-Matter is a work of criticism that honors—and occasionally exceeds—its source. ~ Scott Esposito , Book Forum
Ben Jeffery has produced not only an excellent critical assessment of Houellebecq’s writings, but a fantastic think-piece in and of itself, refining the intentions of his subject, as well as opening up this erudite discussion of art to the act of living in the world.

~ Emmet O'Cuana , abookadaytillicanstay
A searching and eloquent consideration of one of the definitive bodies of work of our time, Anti-Matter is also a vital essay on the more general difficulties of meaning-making for contemporary novelists and/or human beings. ~ Benjamin Kunkel, author of Indecision and co-editor of n+1 magazine
Art Kettle, The
by Sinead Murphy

Is art a mode of control? Does our desire to create constrain us as effectively as our desire to consume?

In contemporary society, art is that which appears to open up all of those possibilities that our daily lives would close down, with developments in community art, art therapy, and public art extending this seemingly liberating effect to us all. But what if art is a mode of control? What if art operates to kettle us as effectively as, if much more subtly than, recent police curtailment of protestors in public squares in London?

The Art Kettle argues that our capacities for imagination, creativity, even resistance, in being apparently fostered by art are being channelled safely and to no purpose, all the better for our continued subjection to the round of means and ends that defines our profit-driven Western democracies. Through analysis of contemporary artworks and an intriguing account of the later decades of the Victorian age, The Art Kettle would convince us to question the ways in which we currently feel ourselves to be free and to begin to practice for a better future, a future founded in our past, when fundamentalism was a kind of courage, art a kind of craft, and needlepoint a kind of revolution.

Reviews:
Austerity Ecology & the Collapse-porn Addicts
by Leigh Phillips

Modernity is not the cause of our ecological woes. Only through a deepening of our modernity can we save the planet.

Economic growth, progress, industry and, erm, stuff have all come in for a sharp kicking from the green left and beyond in recent years. Everyone from black-hoodied Starbucks window-smashers to farmers' market heirloom-tomato-mongers to Prince Charles himself seem to be embracing 'degrowth' and anti-consumerism, which is nothing less than a form of ecological austerity. Meanwhile, the back-to-the-land ideology and aesthetic of locally-woven organic carrot-pants, pathogen-encrusted compost toilets and civilisational collapse is hegemonic.

Yet modernity is not the cause of climate change and the wider biocrisis. It is indeed capitalism that is the source of our environmental woes, but capitalism as a mode of production, not the fuzzy understanding of capitalism of Naomi Klein, Bill McKibben, Derrick Jensen, Paul Kingsnorth and their anarcho-liberal epigones as a sort of globalist corporate malfeasance.

In combative and puckish style, science journalist Leigh Phillips marshals evidence from climate science, ecology, paleoanthropology, agronomy, microbiology, psychology, history, the philosophy of mathematics, and heterodox economics to argue that progressives must rediscover their historic, Promethean ambitions and counter this reactionary neo-Malthusian ideology that not only retards human flourishing, but won't save the planet anyway.

We want to take over the machine and run it rationally, not turn the machine off.

Reviews:
Awkwardness
by Adam Kotsko

Argues that the awkwardness of our age is a key to understanding human experience.

Awkwardness has been one of the defining traits of the awkwardly unnamed first decade of our young century dominating comedy on both the big and small screens. Could this trend point toward something deeper? In Awkwardness Adam Kotsko answers that question with a resounding yes. Drawing on key insights of cultural theory he argues that awkwardness is a structuring principle of human experience something that the particular conditions of our time allow us to see with greater clarity than ever before. In an analysis that begins with the difference between the US and UK versions of Ricky Gervais's The Office then passes through the films of Judd Apatow and culminates in the apotheosis of awkwardness Larry David's Curb Your Enthusiasm Kotsko looks at the ways we cope with our awkwardness and the unexpected opportunities awkwardness opens up when we stop resisting it and learn to enjoy it.

Reviews:
Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness is the kind of criticism — pertinent, witty, sophisticated but without sophistry — in which one can glimpse a culture that doesn’t quite exist. As with the other essays adapted from blogs and published by Zero Books. Awkwardness, in a different America, would supplant the dumbed-down pop and self-help schlock atop the nonfiction best-seller lists. Kotsko’s greatest achievement might be this slim volume’s readability.

~ Malcolm Harris, The New Inquiry
Awkwardness , like others in publisher Zero’s O line, is a short (a mere 90 pages) accessible philosophical/cultural examination of the phenomenon of awkwardness aimed at an popular audience. A Th This This is a great short work of criticism, intelligent without being unnecessarily jargony, often insightful and a pleasure to read.

~ Emmy Manuel, globulcomment.com
Awkwardness is just what a work of philosophy should be. Its subject is relevant and its thesis is audacious: awkwardness is more than a funny feeling—it tells us about ourselves, and it might even be the basis of a utopian practice, “an awkwardness that is so awkward it becomes its own kind of grace.”

~ Tony Cuttenham, Oxonian Review
It is easy to write a deep book on a big crucial concept like anxiety love or evil but it takes a true master to do for awkwardness what Heidegger in his Sein und Zeit did for anxiety and this is what Kotsko does. In his book which combines philosophical stringency with references to popular culture awkwardness is elevated into a universal singularity: a prismatic knot in which our entire historical moment is reflected. If this will not become an instant classic then we really live in awkward times.

~ Slavoj Zizek, Slovenian continental philosopher & Professor at the European Graduate School
Between
by Martin Lee

Welcome to the spaces between.

Forget any idea of a fixed, dependable centre ground. The suggestion in this book is that the real story of modern life is found in and along edges, cracks, and boundaries. It’s in these places of ambiguity and glorious uncertainty where the richness is, and often where the fun stuff happens.

By providing a wide-ranging look at a variety of contexts, Martin Lee invites readers to step into a broad set of distinctive borderlands — some physical and geographic, some emotional and personal, some having to do with the world of ideas, nature, time, or language and stories — and reflect on what it means for us to live our lives in these contemporary transitional zones.

Reviews:
Lee showed me something wonderful. However uncertain our world feels, there always is the opportunity to celebrate ‘being between’. It's a deep, fresh way of making sense of modern life. ~ David Bodanis, science author, including Einstein’s Greatest Mistake
Beyond Capitalism?
by Simon Hardy, Luke Cooper

An in-depth examination into the social nature of the austerity crisis and how we can move "Beyond Capitalism".

How to move 'beyond capitalism' and whether indeed it is possible to do so, has become a question of general interest, rather than simply the preserve of left-literary discussion, since the credit crisis of 2008. This book examines the social nature of the austerity crisis, and whether an anticapitalist message can successfully intersect and create a new virtuous dynamic for the radical left after decades of retreat.

Intended as a contribution to debates around fundamental social change which have emerged in the wake of Occupy and the Arab revolutions, Beyond Capitalism is a book which combines 'historical sociology' with the politics of social emancipation. The question these movements have posed is how can the radical left marshal its often meagre forces to create a new counter hegemony to the ethos and culture of capitalism?

Reviews:
Luke Cooper and Simon Hardy's vivid and invigorating Beyond Capitalism builds upon the analysis of leftist paralysis I started to develop in Capitalist Realism. Writing from the perspective of experienced activists, Cooper and Hardy offer an incisive and clear-eyed explanation of why the left has so far failed to take advantage of the current major crisis of capitalism. But this analysis is not just another jeremiad; it is a contribution to a leftist renewal which Cooper and Hardy believe is within our grasp. The future is ours for the reclaiming, and Beyond Capitalism outlines some concrete strategies for how we can win it back. ~ Mark Fisher, author of Capitalist Realism
John McDonnell, the new Shadow Chancellor, made this comment on Beyond Capitalism in 2013: "A superb analysis of where the Left has got to and why, this book offers an insightful agenda to be addressed by the anti capitalist movement."

~ John McDonnell , Email
Beyond the Left
by Stephen Harper

Attacking the cherished assumptions of liberal media criticism, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.

The ideological distortions of the conservative media, from Fox News to the Daily Mail, are widely acknowledged and often denounced among contemporary critics and commentators. But what if The Guardian newspaper and BBC news, in fact, constitute the most insidious forms of capitalist propaganda? In a wide-ranging and erudite polemic, Beyond the Left analyses capitalist news and current affairs media from a radical perspective. The book rejects the liberal and pluralist paradigms that often underpin critiques of the media, showing how media texts reflect and reinforce the material interests of the ruling class and arguing that the principal ideological menace today is posed not by the right wing, but by the left-liberal media, as it co-opts and obscures radical political positions and reinforces a range of mystifications, from anti-fascism and humanitarian war to green politics. Drawing on the work of radical media critics as well as the writings of revolutionary communist groups and considering the recent reporting of war, industrial action, immigration and the environment, Beyond the Left updates and recharges the Marxist critique of the media.

Reviews:
Even if you find yourself disagreeing with certain portions of this book -- as I have -- you will find much in it that is well reasoned and historically informed, a valuable critique of how the mainstream media serves the capitalist plutocracy.

~ Michael Parenti, author of The Face of Imperialism and Contrary Notions.
Stephen Harper cuts through mystifying accounts of the media with a steady hand, placing a real left politics firmly at the centre of any productive understanding of the daily circulation of casual idiocies and pernicious ideologies.

~ Nina Power, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, Roehampton University
In an accessible and robust polemic Harper shows why we must go beyond the left and embrace a communist critique of both the capitalist media’s news agenda which disempowers and disinforms and the un-reformable system that shapes its ideological universe – the capitalist system itself. In this sense Harper’s book is vulgar, unrealistic and deeply unfashionable: it is in short essential reading in an increasingly insane world.

~ Mike Wayne, Professor of Screen Studies, Brunel University