mlx-community/zer0-books huggingface dataset:
Universal Subject of Our Time, The
by Darius Nikbin

The Subject itself is the Subject of the Machine.

The Subject itself is the Subject of the Machine.

What does it mean to be human? We live in a technological age, where rapid advances in personal tech and the science of Artificial Intelligence are challenging us in ways never before imagined.

A book in two parts, The Universal Subject of Our Time begins with an exploration of 20th Century post-modernism's undermining of subjectivity with thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida, Baudrillard and Althusser and continues with a description of the science wars, where physical realists challenged the post-modernists up to the 1990s when the intellectual conflict resulted in an uncompromising stand-off after the Sokal Hoax. In Part II the subject is resurrected by taking a look at arguments for machine intelligence and AI and also, from the perspective of physics, examines what subjectivity means, particularly in relation to black holes or black stars, and look to what lies ahead in the future, in terms of space exploration, Martian habitats and even the possibility of first contact with extra-terrestrials.

Reviews:
Nikbin's The Universal Subject of Our Time challenges the current discourse on human subjectivity and its difficult encounter with virtual technologies. Lucidly written and well argued, it is a concise philosophical-scientific primer for anybody who is concerned with the predicament of the human subject facing machine and its uncertain future—this is a necessary reading. ~ Nadir Lahiji
"This could be the Big Bang of philosophy..." ~ Slavoj Zizek
"In the last decades, the notion of human subject was undermined at two totally different levels: in deconstructionist theory which played with "the death of the subject", and in cognitive sciences which debunked the myth of unified conscious subject controlling its acts. Nikbin's book intervenes into this debates in a double way: it brings deconstructionism and cognitive sciences into a dialogue, plus it demonstrates how, out of this dialogue, a new universal subject can emerge. The Universal Subject of Our Time strikes at the very heart of our theoretical (and not only theoretical) traumas. It hurts, but all true healing begins with pain." ~ Slavoj Zizek
Unlearning Marx
by Steve Paxton

An authentically Marxist understanding of the USSR's place in Russian history. Unlearning Marx will surprise Marx’s admirers and his detractors alike.

The theories of Karl Marx and the practical existence of the Soviet Union are inseparable in the public imagination, but for all the wrong reasons. This book provides detailed analyses of both Marx’s theory of history and the course of Russian and Soviet development and delivers a new and insightful approach to the relationship between the two.

Most analyses of the Soviet Union, from any perspective, focus on trying to explain the failure to establish socialism, giving too much weight to the political pronouncements of the regime. But, for Marx, this approach to historical explanation is back-to-front, it's the political tail wagging the economic dog. When we move our focus from the stated aims of building socialism, and look at what actually happened in Russia from emancipation in the 1860s, through the Soviet era to the 1990s, we can clearly see the patterns which Marx identified as the essential features of the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth. As such, the Soviet experiment forms an important part of Russia’s transition from feudalism to capitalism and provides an excellent example of the underlying forces at play in the course of historical development.

Unlearning Marx will surprise Marx’s admirers and his detractors alike, and not only shed new light on Marxism's relationship with the Soviet Union, but on his ongoing relationship with our world.

Reviews:
With its robust argument that the collapse of the Soviet Union vindicated rather than disproved Marxian theory, Steve Paxton’s timely book reclaims a vital part of humanity’s conceptual toolbox, just as we witness the persisting dry cough of capitalism approach its distressing conclusion. Highly recommended. ~ Alan Moore, author of novels and graphic novels including Watchmen and V for Vendetta
By returning to a carefully assembled ground of classical materialist analysis, Steve Paxton brings a rare clarity of critical perspective to the complexities of Soviet history and their placement in a larger framework of comparative socio-economic development. ~ Geoff Eley, Professor of Contemporary History, University of Michigan, author of Forging Democracy: The History of the Left in Europe, 1850-2000
Unmaking Merlin
by Elliot Murphy

A unique exploration of how anarchist philosophy and practice has inspired some of the English language's most revered, and reviled, authors.

A unique exploration of how anarchist philosophy and practice has inspired some of the English language's most revered, and reviled, authors.

Reviews:
'Murphy is remarkably erudite for such a young scholar. Though not even 25 years old, he zooms with apparent ease and familiarity from George Orwell to Friedrich Nietzsche to James Joyce to Christopher Hitchens ... The book is wide-ranging, touching on a number of themes – including education, representative democracy, the New Atheism, corporate power, crime, and poststructuralism. Throughout, Murphy does a good job of showing that the popular association of anarchism with violence and chaos is deeply inaccurate. He shows that the central concerns of anarchists have always been self-determination, mutual aid, and an end to structural violence.' ~ Tom Malleson, author of After Occupy: Economic Democracy for the 21st Century, https://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/review-unmaking-merlin-anarchist-tendencies-english-literature-zero-books//
Elliot Murphy is a superb guide and analyst of the repressed and marginalised anarchist tradition in British culture. His fresh readings of both renowned and obscure writers and the historical political undercurrents with which they engaged will intrigue scholars and activists interested in politics and culture. The relevance of these concerns to our current neoliberal condition renders this a gripping and important book. ~ Anita Biressi, co-author of 'Class and Contemporary British Culture'
Vade Mecum
by Richard Skinner

A collection of highly-informed essays offering fresh perspectives on cutting-edge writers, musicians and filmmakers.

Vade Mecum brings together Richard Skinner’s best essays, reviews and interviews from 1992-2014. There are close critical engagements with writers (Kazuo Ishiguro, Italo Calvino, Shakespeare’s The Tempest) and composers (Erik Satie, Iannis Xenakis, Luc Ferrari), meditations on films and filmmakers (Antonioni, Krzysztof Kieślowski, Chinatown) and idiosyncratic reflections on Werner Herzog’s Of Walking in Ice and Steely Dan.

Reviews:
'The British writer Richard Skinner has found new inputs in Erik Satie's creation in his dual/double narrative ‘The Mirror’. From the mundane to the imaginary, without adding anything, you just follow the stream of impressions, the silences that occur and the freedom in the small and simple ... through the feat of dissolving the real contours, Skinner manages to get the dream architecture to emerge, not unlike Satie's cartoon fantasies of Gothic cathedrals and hidden schemes.' ~ Magnus Haglund, GöteborgsPosten
'These novellas are two meditations on life. They resonate in the reader's imagination in truly memorable ways, often for what is left unsaid. We carry away the sense of two rich lives: from the perspective of one life yet to be lived and another that has been fully and truly lived.' ~ Dermot Bolger, Sunday Business Post
'There are tinges of the uncanny, strains of the gothic, to both stories. In each there are corridors and locked doors it would be best not to pry into. Skinner’s prose has the strangely contradictory quality of being so clear and crystalline that you feel it must be hiding something. It’s an effect that is, like the settings of both these highly unusual tales, creepingly claustrophobic.' ~ Lucy Daniel, Telegraph
'The story [of The Mirror] trickles out daintily at first before building to a torrent; Skinner’s elegant prose is restrained and increasingly hypnotic. These two narratives are linked by one eternal question: why are we here?' ~ Alexander Gilmour, Financial Times
'Bucking the trend for bulky, sweeping narratives, Skinner has produced two tightly crafted novellas with a dreamlike quality ... Two absorbing meditations on art and identity with a common thread: obsessive dedication to a calling and its effects, self-destructive or creative.' Book of the Week ~ Juanita Coulson, The Lady
Vagabond Witness:
by Paul Gordon

A unique witness to the revolutionary upheavals of the last century, endlessly creative, deeply humanist, Serge is a resource of hope for today.

Victor Serge was the first and the greatest witness of the twentieth century. An anarchist in France, a syndicalist in Spain, a critical Bolshevik in Russia, an agent of the Comintern in Germany and Austria, an exile, Serge once said that people judged history, but they did so without knowing what really happened and who the actors really were. All his work - novels. reportage, poetry, criticism - was an attempt to show what really happened, and why. Serge never lost hope, that ordinary people would act for themselves and take control of their own lives. On the ship taking him to exile in Mexico, where he would die isolated and in poverty, he recalled, 'The Russians and Spaniards among us know what it is to take the world into their hands, to set the railways running and the factories working...no kind of predestination impels us to become the offal of the concentration camps.'

Reviews:
Voodoo Science Park
by Steve Beard

A filmic essay which cross-cuts between Thomas Hobbes, William Blake, the science of accident investigation and the psychogeography of the Peak District.

Voodoo Science Park started life as a poetic film about the science of accident investigation practised by the Health and Safety Laboratory in the Peak District of England. In the book of the film, Victoria Halford and Steve Beard reveal the thinking that went into the preparation of the script. The Health and Safety Lab is the place where large-scale accidents such as tunnel collapses, fires and rail crashes are recreated to examine their destructive pathways. Halford and Beard explore the connections with imitative magic, drawing on the secret histories of dissident religious sects, miners and shamans as well as the prophecies of William Blake. They rethink the lab's industrial safety rigs as monstrous emblems of the state, as theorised by Thomas Hobbes, and retrace the steps of a journey the political philosopher took through the hollow lands of the Peak in 1626. Testimony from highwaymen, ramblers and urban explorers is collected along the way. The book is composed in a fragmentary style which weaves together philosophy, travelogue, history of science, sociology and religious study.

Reviews:
Voodoo Science Park convincingly demonstrates that history is only ever rewritten and that there can consequently be little room for ‘accidents’ in any of our accepted historical accounts. If this text overturns all orthodox readings of the documented past, it does so simply in the name of prophecy, the authors being bold enough to let the existing state of affairs speak for itself. Such eloquent restraint is extremely rare, extracting a simple yet undeniable poetry from the unearthing of connections between events. Through this gently persistent accumulation of facts, an enigmatic half-hidden landscape is gradually transformed into the starkest of mythologies.

~ Ken Hollings, Author of Welcome to Mars
Combining compelling archive with contemporary footage of the Health and Safety Laboratory in the Peak District, Derbyshire, Voodoo Science Park summons the poetic and political archetypes of Leviathan, Albion and Gogmagog in order to anatomise the powers of accident, reenactment, sacrifice, punishment, artificial life, magic, sleep and civil war in the state of Britain. Part video-essay, video-poem and video-guide, Voodoo Science Park is a vivid and erudite conjuration that redreams the history of our present with a passion and a purpose that is entirely visionary.

~ Kodwo Eshun, on the film-of-the-book
“Here maverick theorist Steve Beard, working with Victoria Halford, fashions a fascinating, Keiller-esque meditation on Hobbes’s Leviathan , the covert geographies of Albion and post-Ballardian crash theory.”

~ Sukhdev Sandhu, on the film-of-the-book
We Hear Only Ourselves
by Bill Cashmore

A bold response to a question everyone asks but few answer: What is utopia?

We Hear Only Ourselves is a study of utopia and its contradictions. If a future beyond capitalism cannot be imagined, what is the place of utopia today? The answer, Cashmore argues, lies beyond either idle speculation or merely hopeful optimism. We Hear Only Ourselves seeks a concept of utopia which is strengthened, not undermined, by its contradictions. From the dialectics of the Frankfurt School to the energetics of resistance in the writings of the Black Panthers, this book draws on a wide range of thought to offer a new concept of utopia, one adequate for our present moment.

Reviews:
First, this book is the beautiful breakthrough of an enormously gifted young philosopher. Then, an original elaboration of the aporias affecting the concept of utopia, after Marx, Bloch, and Jameson. Above all, it demonstrates how decisive the "narration of blackness", as cast by Fred Moten and Saidiya Hartman, will be for energizing an actual resistance to our catastrophic actuality. On all three accounts, I highly recommend it. ~ Étienne Balibar, author of The Philosophy of Marx
Welcome to the Rebellion
by Michael Harris

In the first book to present Star Wars as a mirror for contemporary politics, Michael Harris reveals Star Wars' new Left roots.

What does it mean that our most popular modern myth is a radical left story about fighting corporate authoritarianism? From its roots in the 1960s new left, Star Wars still speaks to millions of people today. By design, the saga mirrors our own time and politics. A real empire of corporate domination has arisen within weakened and corrupted republics. Now it threatens our existence on a planetary scale.

But, the popularity of Star Wars also suggests that if we tell the right stories, we can Welcome to the Rebellion many more people to fight for a better world...

Reviews:
What Is Post-Modern Conservatism
by Matthew McManus

What Is Post-Modern Conservatism develops a way to understand the emergence of right wing populism in the era of postmodern capitalism.

What is post-modern conservatism? How it has come to dominate the political landscape in many developed countries? Edited by Matt McManus, Professor of Politics and International Relations at the University of Tec de Monterrey, What Is Post-Modern Conservatism touches on how technological, economic, and social transformations of the post-modern epoch have brought about a political landscape where the irrational and traditionalist aspects of conservative thought have mutated into the hugely tremendous forms we see today.

With contributory essays from Dylan De Jong, Erik Tate, Borna Radnik, David Hollands and Conrad Hamilton.

Reviews:
Featuring contributory essays from Dylan De Jong, Erik Tate, Borna Radnik, David Hollands and Conrad Hamilton, "What Is Post-Modern Conservatism: Essays On Our Hugely Tremendous Times" is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand why so many traditional Republicans have left the Republic Party, which itself has mutated into a haven for white supremacists, anti-immigrants, isolationists, entrench hostilities toward democratic institutions such as the State Department and the Judiciary, and effectively becoming a Donald Trump oriented cult of personality movement willing to abandoned traditional conservative Republic values of personal decency, balanced budgets, small government, and congressional oversight of the executive branch. "What Is Post-Modern Conservatism" truly lives up to its subtitle and is unreservedly recommended for community and academic library Contemporary Political Science collections, as well as the personal reading lists of political science students, academia, political activists, and all former and current members of the Republican Party. ~ James A. Cox, Editor-in-Chief, Mid West Book Review
This thoughtful essay collection speaks to a fundamental question of our times: when abundance and technological advance render struggle and meaning less pressing, what comes to replace these longstanding cornerstones of life? Sometimes the effort to fill that gap leads societies to some unexpected places. ~ Erich J Prince, Editor of Merion West
What's Left of the World
by David J. Blacker

For long-term viability the left must move beyond identity emotivism and articulate a larger worldview.

In 1960, Paul Goodman argued that the Fordist system that treated people as mere cogs in a machine had created a profound unhappiness in young people and in American society as a whole.

More than half a century later, professor David Blacker recognizes that decades of neoliberalism have pushed young people beyond unhappiness and into a collective identity crisis. Overall, Americans no longer feel needed to do jobs that had previously anchored them in society and are becoming disconnected and purposeless. The proliferation of new identities, based not on work but on consumption, is symptomatic of neoliberalism and its hyper-commodification and deregulation of everyday life.

Reviews:
This is an impressive overview of the enduring effects of neoliberalism on the interdependent areas of identity politics, progressivism. education and climate change. Its sweep is impressive, but at times, it does not allow its argument to breathe. The discussion of education is a case in point, focused predominantly on higher education in the USA; this undermines the generalisations it makes about education more widely (leaving aside the fact that many are accurate). Its concluding promotion of a pro-Gaia approach to climate recovery, although signalled earlier, is a little surprising but reasonably convincing, and Blacker's investment is obvious. A fascinating and informative overview overall. ~ Michael J , Netgalley
From a difficult beginning, the book manages to break through the soil and flower into something incredibly interesting. I kind of want to hand out copies, but the list of people who need to read it is too large and unfortunately I think those who could benefit most probably wouldn't read it because of how well it challenges their perspectives!

This is a book worth reading.

Full review at:

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2734745668 ~ Ellie Strickland, GoodReads
A very timely and painstakingly done book. Interesting and well done, very highly informative and has a lot pf effort put in. The post modern style is very well done.

~ Tasnima Yasmin, NetGalley
When Journalism was a Thing
by Alexandra Kitty

Journalism used to be everything until the day it became nothing. What happened and why?

Journalism used to be a thing. It used to be a powerful and wonderful thing, yet now it has become a curiosity, and not even the Internet can resurrect it. When Journalism was a Thing considers the downfall and the reasons why, but also offers a model for a new approach to the once-noble profession.

Reviews:
Timely and needed analysis of the media relation to our common world. Perhaps since medium really became a message the trouble started. Propaganda-based broadcasting and writing was an exception (or a rule reserved only for tabloid-media) until the news and opinion became a product. Until that time one could expect from serious journalist informed opinion and balanced judgement. The young generation of media workers do not know about these standards. It is being attracted often by quick fame (social media) rather than work for common good. Ms Kitty elaborates on the problem brilliantly. Anyone who perceives herself or himself as an intelligent person should familiarise themselves with "When Journalism was a Thing". ~ Ben Goldberg, Journalist
A very timely book at a era when journalism and journalists are being attacked as fake news,this is a clear concise look at what journalists do & how important their jobs are.Young journalists should grab this book anyone interested in free presses role wil find this book well worth reading. ~ Rhonda Lomazow , NetGalley
As a lover in investigative journalism, I wanted to learn about the author's take on the rise and fall of general journalism.

Journalism is still everything, yet to some it has become like a joke.. Kitty explores the downfall of the profession and presents a solid strategy for its resurrection.

Informative read!

~ Erica Watkins, NetGalley
Growing up in a journalist’s home and having been a journalist myself, I was keen to read When Journalism was a Thing. As a profession, journalism used to be a powerful, positive force, one many young people aspired to pursue, especially after The Washington Post broke the Watergate scandal and helped to depose a President.

The advent and explosive growth of digital, however, relegated print to a red-haired stepchild position or worse ... changing the face of journalism forever. And the evolution from a truth-seeking entity to a biased ratings-driven hack has destroyed the profession’s credibility, claims author Alexandra Kitty.

Kitty, who has published three books, including Don’t Believe It!: How Lies Become News, and Outfoxed: Rupert Murdoch’s War on Journalism, explains the forces that led to the death of “old journalism” while offering a model for a new version she believes can be noble again. She says, “It will take humility, honesty, idealism, and most of all, bravery to make the bold revolutionary changes ... where the battle for truth [not ratings] counts the most.” Highly recommended! ~ Literary Soiree, NetGalley
Where God Comes From
by Ira Livingston

What happens when language and thought come face-to-face with their maker: the self-organizing processes out of which they emerge?

Where God Comes From explores how the sublime and miraculous can be found in a whole range of processes-- from chemistry and biology to language and literature and social interactions -- and how they loop back on themselves to form complex systems, stitching themselves and their environments together. The book traces an arc that passes through a series of different essay forms: a prose poem in Twitter-length units, a philosophical dialogue, traditional essays, and finally a story. Each is a metacognitive investigation of mystical experience as what happens when consciousness discovers its family resemblances with other recursive processes.

Reviews:
Livingston’s unique and beautiful book is a soulful mixture of memoir and theoretical meditation. Ideas move in fractal trajectories across boundaries, coupling up multiple systems of thought. This is high-level discursive performance art full of conceptual kicks.

~ Bruce Clarke, Paul Whitfield Horn Professor of Literature and Science, Texas Tech University, --