mlx-community/zer0-books huggingface dataset:
10/40/70
by Nicholas Rombes

A bold experiment in film theory for the digital era.

In an era of rapid transformation from analog to digital, how can we write about cinema in ways that are as fresh, surprising, and challenging as the best films are? In 10/40/70 Nicholas Rombes proposes one bold possibility: pause a film at the 10, 40, and 70-minute mark and write about the frames at hand, no matter what they are. This method of constraint—by eliminating choice and foreclosing on authorial intention—allows the film itself to dictate the terms of its analysis freed from the tyranny of pre-determined interpretation. Inspired by Roland Barthes’s notion of the “third meaning” and its focus on the film frame as an image that is neither a photograph nor a moving image, Rombes assumes the role of image detective, searching the frames for clues not only about the films themselves—drawn from a wide range of genres and time periods—but the very conditions of their existence in the digital age.

Reviews:
For Nicholas Rombes, every film is an oracle. In 10/40/70, he proposes a new method of divination: stop the film at arbitrary points, and give a careful account of what you see. The result may be an intense formal analysis, or a new appreciation of narrative subtleties, or a kind of emotional weather report, or a dense train of subjective memories and associations. But in every case, Rombes uncovers unsuspected depths, and shows us cinema in a strange new light. ~ Steven Shaviro, Author of Post Cinematic Affect and Doom Patrols
With his 10/40/70 essays, Nicholas Rombes breaks the habitual cycles of film criticism, forcing himself to approach familiar films from odd angles. He delegates to chance the task of selecting a film’s defining images, and the results are a series of revealing observations about movies caught unawares; often, he finds new points of entry to films we all think we know inside out. 10/40/70 can find a film’s vulnerable spots, those moments we rarely notice, whose significance we only gather in freeze-framed close readings. Sometimes the images are well known fragments of the iconic scenes that comprise our shared film culture, but more frequently, they are the unsung or incidental pieces that hold a film together, unassuming but always ripe for re-examination. By bringing into focus these triptychs of framegrabs, Rombes finds fresh perspectives on well-known movies, and demonstrates that there may be riches buried in their every frame if we compel ourselves to look. ~ Dan North, Author of Performing Illusions: Cinema, Special Effects and the Virtual Actor
Rombes dives into the self-imposed constraints of his critical project with both feet, and the result is an innovative splash. Arguing that "digital desire" predated digital cinema, this experiment in film writing pushes readers to re-frame our critical practices and to embrace new cinematic experiences and interpretive acts. We need more books like this. ~ Julia Leyda, Sophia University, Japan
15 Years of Speculative Realism
by Charlie Johns

A definitive and invaluable re-assessment of the last decade of speculative realism.

More than 15 years have passed since the speculative realism conference at Goldsmiths College, London, hosted Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and Quentin Meillassoux. Their dictum was simple: Reality is not what it seems.

15 Years of Speculative Realism begins with four chapters, each dedicated to the work of a speculative realism panellist. On one level, their respective projects engaged with the great philosophical systems of yesteryear: Cartesian dualism; the Platonist distinction between reality and appearance; and the Kantian revival of noumena. But there is much more at stake here, such as the repositioning of the subject as yet another object in the universe, and the radically egalitarian view that individual human thought is best described as a local manifestation of nature. Through these observations, we are also encouraged to ask: 'Could the laws of physics change at any moment?' and 'How does thought think the gradual extinction of itself as but another perishable phenomenon in the physical universe?'

Two further chapters offer wider context: the Analysis & Impact chapter evaluates speculative realism’s relevance to the wider domain of philosophy, as well as its achievements and shortcomings, with commentary by Slavoj Žižek, and the Interviews chapter has contributions from Graham Harman, Ray Brassier, and Goldsmiths College’s speculative realism conference coordinator, Alberto Toscano.

As we prophetically enter into a new epoch - characterized by artificial intelligence and a withering climate - we call the Anthropocene, it seems that many of the insights offered to us through the speculative realist lens have come to fruition. The objective, now, is to speculate upon how far this major shift in the humanities will ensue, and how different this reality will be from our preconceived notion of the real offered to us by previous tenets of realism.

This book charts the essential meaning of the movement in the wake of its spell as one of the most significant philosophical movements of the twenty-first century.

Reviews:
When the first speculative realism symposium was held in 2007, it caused a sensation both inside and outside philosophical circles. It seemed to portend a radical shift in our relation to, and in our understanding of, the world. But it is the fate of successful revolutions in thought to be assimilated into the very frameworks that they initially seemed determined to destroy. The essays in this volume show how speculative realist projects contribute to, and enrich our understandings of, many different philosophical questions. ~ Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University and author of The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism
A definitive and invaluable re-assessment of the last decade of speculative realism. ~ Thomas Nail, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Denver and author of Matter and Motion: A Brief History of Kinetic Materialism
Advancing Conversations: Aubrey de Grey - advocate for an indefinite human lifespan
by Douglas Lain, Aubrey de Grey

A line of interview books documenting conversations with artists, authors, philosophers, economists, scientists, and activists whose works are aimed at the future and at progress.

Advancing Conversations is a line of interview books documenting conversations with artists, authors, philosophers, economists, scientists, and activists whose works are aimed at the future and at progress. The biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, as the world's pre-eminent longevity advocate, is nothing if not future oriented. De Grey is the founder of the SENS Research Foundation, an organization developing medical interventions to repair the damage the body does to itself over time. Stated more directly, Aubrey de Grey and his organization aim to defeat aging.

In 2005 a panel of scientists and doctors from MIT, Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston, Microsoft, and the Venter Institute participated in a contest to judge whether de Grey's "Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence" were worthy of debate and verification or whether these ideas were wrong on their face. The panel found that de Grey's proposals for intervening in the aging process, while speculative, often "ran parallel to existing research" and were not "demonstrably wrong."

Reviews:
Advancing Conversations: Srećko Horvat - Subversion!
by Alfie Bown, Srećko Horvat

An interview with acclaimed European philosopher and political activist Srećko Horvat.

In a world dominated by capitalism which is dangerously sliding into a new kind of fascism, Srećko Horvat's new book explores the concept of subverting the dominant paradigm in politics, technology and love. Drawing from his own experience of participating in different protest movements all around the world, working closely with WikiLeaks and being one of the protagonists of the Democracy in Europe Movement 2025, Horvat resists the prevailing melancholy of the Left by offering new political imagination beyond traditional concepts. Instead of the tension between horizontal movements or vertical political parties, “Subversion!” opts for a radical dialectics of both methods as the only way out of our current deadlock. If there is a crack in everything, the way to use the light that gets in is constructive subversion.

Reviews:
History has only produced decency when good people infiltrated despotic institutions and succeeded in subverting them, often at a terrible cost to themselves. Horvat explains brilliantly subversion’s creative potential, in juxtaposition to isolationism and escapism which are the establishment’s best friends. ~ Yanis Varoufakis, Economist, former Finance Minister of Greece
Based on rich personal experience and participation in constructive subversion, along with wide reading from classics to the latest dreams of artificial intelligence, Horvat leads us on a whirlwind tour of the maladies and discontents of modern civilization and the many ways to right what is wrong and achieve a better future. ~ Noam Chomsky, MIT
Aesthetics & Alienation
by Gary Tedman

What is the role of the aesthetic state apparatus?

Aesthetics has recently become the focus of greater attention, and is now seen as a central problem in critical cultural theory and Marxism. This places Gary Tedman's work at the forefront of this concern, where his concepts of the aesthetic level and of aesthetic state apparatuses have proved to be a challenge even to many conventional Marxisms as well as mainstream academic cultural theory.

Beginning with an immersion in the work of Louis Althusser, Tedman sets out the concepts for an aesthetic theory that expands on and offers solutions to some difficult problems in the Marxist theory of social mediation (cult of personality, for example), the space between Marx and Freud, the question of feelings, and the role of art and media in class struggle. He takes issue with the Lacanian interpretation of Althusser's work, and returns us to the Marxist Althusser in the process.

Reviews:
Against Capitalist Education
by Nadim Anjum Bakhshov

The birth of a revolutionary art of world-creation.

Out there in the so-called real world the education system is being crushed by the demands of capitalism and, in turn, is crushing those who pass through it, reducing them, diminishing them. The dream of the economic functioning unit.

How do we break this? We need alternatives but not just one or two. We need the freedom and education to generate a trillion possibilities. An education system that is as broad as it is deep, that brings back a different type of thinking and a new use of fiction.

This book signals the return of the dialogue and the conversation as the ground out of which new realities are born, the root out of which new alternatives are nurtured and explored.

Reviews:
Somewhere in this book, amongst the flashes of insight and exchange, lie the seeds of a revolution in our modes of existence, our forms of value and meaning and fundamental ways of existing as humans within this fragile planetary ecology.

~ Baba Shree Vardi
It is only through developing reasoned and imaginative alternatives that we can generate the light to shine into the ever-fragmenting modern world and open up paths into new worlds - speculative fiction meets philosophy. ~ Ibn Aflatun, author of Distilling the Universal
Is the market and consumer logic the right way to manage our education systems? This book thinks not. This is conversation worth listening to. ~ Peter Lato, CEO of Shovian Analytics
It is like stumbling into a corner of the world we had forgotten. It is time for a revival. A revolution. ~ Karl F. Tullah
A fundamental challenge to those who argue the humanities have no place in the brave new world dominated by the technocrats. ~ Friedrich Faust, author of Gone With the Crowd
For me, this type of exchange touches issues that lie at the heart of existence, all the while remaining within the world. ~ Frank N. Steinisch, creator of the VOAT Generator
Age of Nixon, The
by Carl Freedman

applies Marxism and psychoanalysis to the study of American politics. In America, every age is the Age of Nixon.

The fundamental argument of this book is, first, that Richard Nixon, though not generally regarded as a charismatic or emotionally outgoing politician like Franklin Roosevelt or Ronald Reagan, did establish profound psychic connections with the American people, connections that can be detected both in the brilliant electoral success that he enjoyed for most of his career and in his ultimate defeat during the Watergate scandal; and, second and even more important, that these connections are symptomatic of many of the most important currents in American life. The book is not just a work of political history or political biography but a study of cultural power: that is, a study in the ways that culture shapes our politics and frames our sense of possibilities and values. In its application of Marxist, psychoanalytic, and other theoretical tools to the study of American electoral politics, and in a way designed for the general as well as for the academic reader, it is a new kind of book.

Reviews:
Richard Nixon was real, for all that he seems like a fictional character concocted in the course of some strange literary collaboration between Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Theodore Dreiser, and J. G. Ballard. And Nixon continues to fascinate us, and to haunt our dreams, even these many years after his death. Carl Freedman's compelling book takes the full measure of Nixon the man, Nixon the media image, Nixon the myth, and even Nixon the ideal type, the quintessential expression, and the most capacious representative of the political and economic system under which we continue to live today.

~ Steven Shaviro, author of CONNECTED, WITHOUT CRITERIA, and POST-CINEMATIC AFFECT
This is a wonderfully informed and enlightening exercise in cultural and political analysis, in which Freedman tackles the problem, just what was this man who was vice president, then a two-term president of the United States. It examines how Nixon's flaws--and his considerable strengths--fitted into, reflected, and finally illuminate philosophy, novels, and films, to produce, what, for better or for worse, can reasonably be called the Age of Nixon. Given the U.S.'s recent turn toward the conservative, it's amazingly timely and informative about the nature of such forces.

~ Samuel R. Delany, author of DHALGREN, DARK REFLECTIONS, and TIMES SQUARE RED/TIMES SQUARE BLUE
Agency of Their Own, An
by Gregor Gall

Sex workers of the world are uniting and fighting to gain control over their working lives.

This book concerns the projects and processes of sex worker unionisation and more widely forms of sex worker self-interest representation. Since the late 1980s, sex workers have unionised themselves as collective associations of workers in their worksites in many countries. The term ‘sex workers’, chosen by sex workers themselves, is a generic one covering all those who sell sexual services and comprises prostitutes, exotic dancers, porn actors and sex chat line workers.

Reviews:
Airplane Reading
by Christopher Schaberg, Mark Yakich

Re-examining the strange and ordinary world of air travel, one flight at a time.

In Airplane Reading, Christopher Schaberg and Mark Yakich bring together a range of essays about air travel. Discerning and full of wonder, this prismatic collection features perspectives from a variety of writers, airline workers, and everyday travelers. At turns irreverent, philosophical, and earnest, each essay is a veritable journey in and of itself. And together, they illuminate the at once strange and ordinary world of flight.

Contributors:

Lisa Kay Adam • Sarah Allison • Jane Armstrong • Thomas Beller • Ian Bogost • Alicia Catt • Laura Cayouette • Kim Chinquee • Lucy Corin • Douglas R. Dechow • Nicoletta-Laura Dobrescu • Tony D’Souza • Jeani Elbaum • Pia Z. Ehrhardt • Roxane Gay • Thomas Gibbs • Aaron Gilbreath • Anne Gisleson • Anya Groner • Julian Hanna • Rebecca Renee Hess • Susan Hodara • Pam Houston • Harold Jaffe • Chelsey Johnson • Nina Katchadourian • Alethea Kehas • Greg Keeler • Alison Kinney • Anna Leahy • Allyson Goldin Loomis • Jason Harrington • Kevin Haworth • Randy Malamud • Dustin Michael • Ander Monson • Timothy Morton • Peter Olson • Christiana Z. Peppard • Amanda Pleva • Arthur Plotnik • Neal Pollack • Connie Porter • Stephen Rea • Hugo Reinert • Jack Saux • Roger Sedarat • Nicole Sheets • Stewart Sinclair • Hal Sirowitz • Jess Stoner • Anca L. Szilágyi • Priscila Uppal • Matthew Vollmer • Joanna Walsh • Tarn Wilson

Reviews:
A marvelous story round-up exploring and explaining what air travel does to us—and makes us do. Buy it now, but save it to read on your next cross-country flight. ~ Harriet Baskas, travel writer for USAToday.com, author of Stuck at the Airport
An insightful exploration into the airplane journey that is both existential and humorous. This collection uncovers the surreal capacity of air travel to transport across tremendous distance but only after imposing a million grating indignities along the way. ~ Rafia Zakaria, author of The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan
Allegories of the End of Capitalism
by Milo Sweedler

How contemporary films transcode popular discontent with global capitalism.

In Allegories of the End of Capitalism, Milo Sweedler examines how filmmakers from six different countries, across four continents, give narrative and audio-visual form to the frustration and anger that burst into public view in 2011, the ongoing class war between the super-rich and the rest of the world's population, and the insurrection that it yet to come. Films examined include Melancholia, Cosmopolis, Suffragette, Django Unchained, Elysium and Snowpiercer.

"Allegories of the End of Capitalism ventures beyond the typical ambit of Hollywood Left productions to provide astute readings of six films from around the globe that agitate for revolution.' - Kirk Boyle, co-editor of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television

Reviews:
Sweedler's book deserves to be widely read. Its subject is of vital importance. ~ Daniel Lindvall, Film International
Milo Sweedler’s book is an unfailingly interesting and indeed fun read from start to finish. Focusing on six films which conjure with various images of revolt against capitalism and even with capitalism’s demise, Sweedler offers accessible and intelligent decodings of the films, contextualised by reference to key cultural thinkers and political scientists.... The detailed micro-attention to and sophistication of his reading of film form are two of the book’s many strengths. ~ Mike Wayne, Culture Matters
It has often been said that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. Milo Sweedler’s highly readable and continually engaging book focuses on several recent films responsive in widely different ways to this lament. From considerations of the end of the world by celestial body to the creative destruction of financial markets, in both senses of the phrase, Sweedler places six “cinematic expressions of popular discontent” in a rich historical, theoretical, and aesthetic context, and demonstrates that, even in the bleakest circumstances, the hope of creating a better world survives. ~ Jeff Kinkle, co-author of Cartographies of the Absolute
Contradicting the assumption that popular film inculcates the masses with reactionary ruling-class ideologies, Sweedler argues that the motion picture industry cannot sell its wares if it ignores the real-world struggles of its viewing audience. If those struggles have become anti-capitalistic, so be it: films will find ways—at times direct, at times coded—to reflect the widespread discontent with global capitalism’s failure to deliver on its promises. Allegories of the End of Capitalism ventures beyond the typical ambit of Hollywood Left productions to provide astute readings of six films from around the globe that agitate for revolution. ~ Kirk Boyle, co-editor of The Great Recession in Fiction, Film, and Television: Twenty-First-Century Bust Culture
Almighty Machine, The
by Pekka Vahvanen
Mark Jones (Translator)

Read this book and re-evaluate your relationship with digital tech – is it making you unhappy?

The hymn of Digitalization is nothing new: We must encourage the creation of new apps. We must develop AI in order to prevail among international competition. Technology's advance will halt climate change and let robots do the dumb stuff for us. Our faith in technology is powerful because it has saved us in the past.

The Almighty Machine shows us technology’s flip side. The things that once powered us toward a brighter tomorrow are already undermining our quality of life. The data stream has shattered our concentration, human relationships have been reduced to a menu of emojis, constant surveillance has nullified much of our privacy, and the development of AI could be the beginning of the end for us. We are becoming the casualties of our own success.

Pekka Vahvanen's bristling and timely critique, deftly translated by Mark Jones, throws doubt on the necessity of technological development in a world saturated in tech. The Almighty Machine presents an important question: Does progress no longer make us happier?

Reviews:
Technological advancements are always necessary to keep up in the world, but here within The Almighty Machine, author Pekka Vahvanen shows us technology’s flip side.

Within this book and the eight chapters therein are a series of dedicated, expertly thought out, concise and at their crux, deeply worrying theories that are both pondered and expanded on by Vahvanen. ~ Anne Carlini, Exclusive Magazine
Alphonso Lingis and Existential Genealogy
by Alexander E. Hooke

The first book-length study of the work of Alphonso Lingis' philosophical works.

What is philosophy? Is philosophy an academic discipline that produces arguments and theories, or is philosophy also about understanding the world through stories, metaphors, analogies, ambience, and even through feelings?

Alphonso Lingis approaches philosophy the way a travel writer approaches a strange new land, with his eyes open and with a conscious desire for experience. Using the genealogical approach of Nietzsche and Foucault, his work continues the phenomenological tradition.

Alexander E. Hooke's Alphonso Lingis and Existential Genealogy is the first book-length study of Lingis' philosophical works.

Reviews:
Alphonso Lingis has been so far ahead of the intellectual curve that he has received less than his share of attention in orthodox philosophy. Alex Hooke closes that temporal deficit. This is a compelling and absorbing book that will more than repay the time it takes to dwell in and with it. A timely and exceptional study. ~ William E. Connolly, author of Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and The Politics of Swarming
Professor Hooke’s existential genealogy expands Alphonso Lingis’s doctrine of the motility of thought, imperatively deepening Husserl’s battle cry - ”back to the things themselves” - to “back to the sensations themselves,” which move and affect our thought. With his own teleological insights into collaboration that extend Lingis’s theme of symbiosis, Hooke offers us a compelling collaboration with Lingis throughout. ~ Randolph Wheeler, editor of Passion in Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Alphonso Lingis
Alexander Hooke has given us a quite personal introduction to Alphonso Lingis’s vast body of work. Drawing on decades of familiarity and time spent in the Lingis corpus, Hooke leads the reader directly into Lingis’s milieu like only a close companion can. He never leaves readers to wander on their own, however. Just the opposite. Under the rubric of “existential genealogy,” Hooke has provided readers with a roadmap with which to navigate the output of one of the most engaging and original interdisciplinary thinkers of the last half century. ~ Tom Sparrow, editor of The Lingis Reader