mlx-community/zer0-books huggingface dataset:
Chaos Ethics
by Chris Bateman

Facing ethical disaster perhaps what we need isn't moral law but moral chaos.

Balance has no meaning for a politics that is merely the continuation of war by other means. Both religious zealots and defenders of scientific fact declare a monopoly on truth and the moral law, while radicals are powerless to resist since they have lost faith that ethics can be anything but arbitrary. Meanwhile, insane bureaucracy devastates life while nations fall into dishonor as they abandon their promises of justice. If the moral law cannot save us, perhaps it is time to try moral chaos.

Chaos Ethics collides philosophers such as Kant, Nietzsche, Levinas, Mary Midgley, Alasdair MacInytre, Alain Badiou, Isabelle Stengers, and Bruno Latour with everything from cyberpunk science fiction and the fantasy novels of Michael Moorcock to Google, gay marriage, drone assassinations, and the ethics of cats and dogs. A strange and wondrous journey through morality viewed as a facet of imagination that offers a new perspective in which the diversity of ethics is a strength not a weakness, hesitation is more noble than certainty, and virtue can be expressed in both law and chaos.

Reviews:
A revelatory reading of both my own and other's work - a genuine philosophy for the 21st century. ~ Michael Moorcock, award-winning fantasy and literary author
Provocative, lively, engaging and erudite. ~ Allen W. Wood, Ward W. and Priscilla B. Woods Professor emeritus at Stanford University
An elegant yet passionate defence of ethics, the book carefully considers various conflicting accounts of what it means to live a good life before settling on imagination and narrative as chaotic and transient foundations of ethical thinking. Ethics for Bateman is both necessary and necessarily tumultuous; it is also a story which we should try and tell as best we can. Thought-provoking, engaging even if at times controversial, Chaos Ethics is a pleasure to read - and to agree and disagree with. ~ Joanna Zylinska, Professor of New Media, Goldsmiths, and author of Bioethics in the Age of New Media and and The Ethics of Cultural Studies
Circle of the Snake, The
by Grafton Tanner

Why are we more nostalgic in the digital age than ever before?

Shocked by 9/11, the Great Recession, digital anxiety, and ecological collapse, the West suffers from nostalgia. People everywhere yearn for a utopian version of the past that never existed. Desperate for relief, many long to escape from the present. Some will stop at nothing to achieve it.

In his essential new book, Grafton Tanner, author of Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts, argues that our nostalgia today is partly a consequence of the attention economy. At a time when historical literacy is crucial, and old prejudices are percolating into the present, Big Tech’s predictive algorithms are locking us into nostalgic feedback loops. The result is a precarious society with its gaze fixed on the good old days.

Spanning from the ancient Sophists to Black Mirror, The Circle of the Snake is at once a reckoning with the myth of digital utopia and an incisive analysis of nostalgia as a weapon to spread fascism.

Reviews:
Whether it is dissecting the utopian fantasies of Big Tech gurus, revealing the political economy of the nostalgia industry, or uncovering exploitation in the global division of digital labour, The Circle of the Snake is just the guide we need to navigate, resist, and transform the online world. In precise, accessible prose, Grafton Tanner offers a much-needed vision of democratic alternatives to surveillance capitalism. ~ Vincent Mosco, author of The Smart City in a Digital World
Classless
by Carl Neville

Why nobody who knows Britain recognises the Britain represented in British films.A general-interest, polemical book on contemporary British Cinema that focuses heavily on cult movies like "Withnail and I" and "Sexy Beast" both of which have committed audi

Why has mainstream British film been so unrepresentative of the changes in British society over the past twenty years? Classless looks at the erasure of key issues of class and class struggle in recent British film as well as the flattening out of the rich variety of English social types into the bland middle-mass of Love Actually. By analysing a number of key films and emergent genres the ideological character of the Major years on into the false dawn of Blairism and Cool Brittania will be elaborated, and it will be argued that even works that are ostensibly subversive, such as Trainspotting (Danny Boyle), serve to promote the underlying myths of neo-liberalism. The films under discussion will range from The Queen (Steven Frear) to Sexy Beast (Jonathon Glazer). The book will also consider popular genres such as the recent Football Hooligan films along with more recondite works.

Reviews:
This book gave me a welcome slap in the face. Impassioned argumentation and impressively cineliterate.

~ Emmet O'Cuana, http://abookadaytillicanstay.wordpress.com/2011/01/25/219-classless-recent-essays-on-british-film-by-carl-neville/
Cold World
by Dominic Fox

A scintillating critical survey of the "cold worlds" of Romantic poetry, black metal, teenage angst and terrorism.

To live well in the world one must be able to enjoy it: to love, Freud says, and work. Dejection is the state of being in which such enjoyment is no longer possible. There is an aesthetic dimension to dejection, in which the world appears in a new light. In this book, the dark serenity of dejection is examined through a study of the poetry of Hopkins and Coleridge, and the music of "depressive" black metal artists such as Burzum and Xasthur.

The author then develops a theory of "militant dysphoria" via an analysis of the writings of the Red Army Fraction’s activist-theoretician, Ulrike Meinhof. The book argues that the "cold world" of dejection is one in which new creative and political possibilities, as well as dangers, can arise. It is not enough to live well in the world: one must also be able to affirm that another world is possible.

Reviews:
Dominic Fox discusses different types of rebellion in his scholarly Cold World: The Aesthetics of Rejection and the Politics of Militant Dysphoria (out from the fantastic Zer0 Books).

~ Devin King, http://makemag.com/reviews-online
We have been told by the living that the idea of a vital world is that of comfort and warmth. Dominic Fox assures us that this is not the case. With an unparalleled militant efficiency, Cold World blackens the lines between poetics and politics, music and negative resistance. It is a haunting sermon from the world of the dead exhorting the living to revolt in the name of a life whose vitality has been disenchanted by coldness and whose sacredness has been profaned by nigredo. ~ Reza Negarestani, Author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials
Dominic Fox's timely and important Cold World pinpoints the fundamental issue underlying contemporary debate about the possibility of revolutionary politics in a culture suffused by paralysing despondency. Drawing on a remarkable array of sources from Coleridge and Gerard Manley Hopkins to Xasthur and Ulrike Meinhof, Fox explores the necessary yet apparently contradictory link between refusal and revolution. While refusal without revolution perpetuates the very condition it would negate, revolution without refusal quickly lapses into phantasmatic utopianism. The quandaries of this particular dialectic have never been as lucidly charted as they are here. ~ Ray Brassier, Author of Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction
Colloquium: Sound Art and Music
by Thomas Gardner, Salomé Voegelin

Declares the relationship between sound art and music “colloquial”: spoken and accessible, rather than locked behind disciplinary boundaries.

In 2012, Thomas Gardner and Salomé Voegelin hosted a colloquium, entitled "Music - Sound Art: Historical Continuum and Mimetic Fissures", at the London College of Communication, University of the Arts London. This colloquium dealt with the current fervent debate concerning the relationship between sound art and music.

This book proposes the opening of the colloquium to a wider readership through the publication of a decisive range of the material that defined the event.

Reviews:
“The act of listening is a complex web of interconnected behaviour and mental manoeuvring between music, pure sound and historical context. This book is an important tool to negotiate the gap between the history of music and the wider panorama of sonic art.” ~ Anne Hilde Neset, writer, broadcaster and artistic director, nyMusikk, Oslo
“Of course we need this book! Why? Because we take too much for granted about the relationship between sound art and music. Because we need incisive, creative thinkers, like the ones gathered in these pages, to help us separate the conjoined twins of sonic practice, such that they might – via their independence – contrive a more salubrious kinship.” ~ Seth Kim-Cohen, Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism, School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Combined and Uneven Apocalypse
by Evan Calder Williams

From salvagepunk to zombie hordes, wastelands to plagued cities, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse grapples with the apocalyptic fantasies of our collapsing era.

From the repurposed rubble of salvagepunk to undead hordes banging on shopping mall doors, from empty waste zones to teeming plagued cities, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse grapples with the apocalyptic fantasies of our collapsing era. Moving through the films, political tendencies, and recurrent crises of late capitalism, Evan Calder Williams paints a black toned portrait of the dream and nightmare images of a global order gone very, very wrong. Situating itself in the defaulting financial markets of the present, Combined and Uneven Apocalypse glances back toward a messy history of zombies, car wrecks, tidal waves, extinction, trash heaps, labour, pandemics, wolves, cannibalism, and general nastiness that populate the underside of our cultural imagination. Every age may dream the end of the world to follow, but these scattered nightmare figures are a skewed refraction of the normal hell of capitalism. The apocalypse isn't something that will happen one day: it's just the slow unveiling of the catastrophe we've been living through for centuries. Against any fantasies of progress, return, or reconciliation, Williams launches a loathing critique of the bleak present and offers a graveside smile for our necessary battles to come.

Reviews:
More than a blueprint for liberation, Williams’s limpid and creative dissection of these cultural artefacts is an exemplary illustration of the serious scrutiny we should apply to our imaginative lives.

~ The Oxonian Review
Yes, another book about zombies and the end of the world. But this is not just another book about zombies and the end of the world. Like one of the junk-suturing recusants whose philosophy he has been central to constructing, Evan Calder Williams builds something rageful and compelling and quite new out of all this fucking wreckage.

~ China MiÃ©ville
Coming From Nothing
by Matthew McKeever

A tragi-comic philosophical novella about how the internet is reshaping our notions of personal identity.

Coming From Nothing is a tragi-comic love story concerned with notions of identity, such as Judith Butler's idea that sexual identity isn't determined by the body, and John Locke's that personal identity is a question of memory.

The first novella in Zero Books new series of Thought Experiment Novellas, these are books that work out philosophical arguments in their plots. Whether focusing on William James' determinism, Descartes' mind/body dualism, or Judith Butler's argument for gender performativity, these short books attempt to flesh out philosophical problems. They are stories wherein philosophical ideas have consequences, at least in the lives of the characters.

Reviews:
The first novella in Zero Books new series of 'Thought Experiment Novellas', "Coming From Nothing" works out philosophical arguments in it's plot. Successfully fleshing out philosophical problems, "Coming From Nothing" is a deftly crafted story where philosophical ideas have consequences in the lives of its characters.

Deftly crafted, entertainingly thoughtful and thought-provoking, "Coming From Nothing" is an ideal vehicle for launching the new Zero Books 'Thought Experiment' series of novellas and will prove to be a welcome and enduringly popular addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Literary Fiction collections. ~ Julie's Bookshelf, Midwest Book Review
Coming from Nothing is a literary beignet sweetened by a rich powdering of philosophical speculation. The metaphysics of gender, the nature of personal identity, the relations among mind, body, information, and society - all of these contribute to a central philosophical enigma. Are Carrie’s and Jules’s driftingly intersecting lives governed by the causal powers of absences, or by the absence of causal powers? ~ Josh Dever, Professor of Philosophy, University of Texas at Austin
Continental Realism
by Paul J. Ennis

In Continental Realism Paul Ennis tackles the rise of realist metaphysics in contemporary continental philosophy.

In Continental Realism Paul Ennis tackles the rise of realist metaphysics in contemporary continental philosophy. Pitted against the dominant antirealist and transcendental continental hegemony Ennis argues that continental thinking must establish an alliance between metaphysics, speculation, and realism if we are to truly get back to the things themselves.

Reviews:
Aan excellent introduction to a fascinating new development in philosophical thinking.

~ Emmet Oâ€™Cuana, abookadaytillicanstay
Paul J. Ennis has given us the first general overview of the theses of After Finitude , and of their reception in the Anglo-American philosophical field. The theses in question - speculative and correlationist - are here exposed with clarity and fidelity. An indispensable introduction to speculative realism.

~ Professor Quentin Meillassoux, Le DÃ©partement de philosophie, Ã‰cole normale supÃ©rieure
In its brief compass Ennis’s book gives a lively, sympathetic though critical account of a newly emergent movement of thought - speculative realism - that looks set to transform received ideas of what counts as “continental” philosophy.

~ Professor Christopher Norris, Distinguished Research Professor in Philosophy, School of English, Communication and Philosophy, Cardiff University
Corona Generation, The
by Jennie Bristow and Emma Gilland

How teenagers' experiences of lockdown will impact on their future.

It is already clear that the COVID-19 crisis will have huge social and economic implications. The Corona Generation considers its effect on the generation currently coming of age: the demographic currently known as ‘Generation Z’. A generation that was already considered to be teetering on the brink of an uncertain political, economic, and environmental future now finds itself entering an adulthood in which nothing can be taken for granted; where continuous crisis management is already presented as the ‘new normal’.

Reviews:
"One of the UK's leading sociologists of generation uses both her scholarship and her ability to write beautifully to give meaning to the experience of Spring and Summer 2020. Together her daughter Emma, whose insights display maturity well beyond her years, Bristow helps us think and reflect on what social crisis means, and how we move forwards." ~ Professor Ellie Lee, Director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, University of Kent
"As a teacher who watched her Year 6 class lose a special end of primary school time, and the mother to a 16-year-old who lost the rite of passage given by GCSEs, this book chimed with me and raised some important issues for the future that we should all be discussing." ~ Josephine Hussey, teacher and parent
Given its timely and responsive quality, this proposed book is very much of the moment. It deals with a theme that is widely discussed and in which there is widespread interest. Its generational angle will provide a much needed and original take on the politics of a pandemic. ~ Professor Frank Furedi, University of Kent
The proposed book promises to read wide audience, responding intelligently to the present situation, with a focus on an aspect of social life that touches everyone. The issues and problems identified for the future of interactions between generations are critical ones, about which the author already has a well-established track record of writing (both academic and popular). This track record also includes publication based around writing high quality text at speed, making this proposal ideal for the requirements of this point in time. It is to be expected that the book can sell well, appealing to a diverse audience. ~ Professor Ellie Lee, Director of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, University of Kent
Creepiness
by Adam Kotsko

A sequel to Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths, Creepiness explores popular culture to examine the worst character trait of all.

A specter is haunting contemporary television—the specter of creepiness. In our everyday lives, we try to avoid creepiness at every cost, shunning creepy people and recoiling in horror at the idea that we ourselves might be creeps. And yet when we sit down to watch TV, we are increasingly entranced by creepy characters. In this follow-up to Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths, Adam Kotsko tries to account for the strange fascination of creepiness. In addition to surveying a wide range of contemporary examples—from Peep Show to Girls, from Orange is the New Black to Breaking Bad—Kotsko mines the television of his 90s childhood, marveling at the creepiness that seemed to be hiding in plain sight in shows like Full House and Family Matters. Using Freud as his guide through the treacherous territory of creepiness, Kotsko argues that we are fascinated by the creepy because in our own ways, we are all creeps.

Reviews:
Rarely do we find a book which combines detailed analysis of a concrete pop-cultural phenomenon – the rise of creepy characters in today’s sitcoms and TV series, from Sex and the City and Breaking Bad to Mad Men and Louie – with properly metaphysical reflections on the traumatic core of subjectivity. And, on the top of it all, the books is immensely readable, simply unputdownable, without sacrificing any of its theoretical stringency. Adam Kotsko not only provides the social and ideological context for the fascinating figure of a creep, as well as the Freudian account of what makes a subject creepy. His ultimate insight is that creepiness is a name for the uncanny dimension in all of us which makes us strangers to ourselves – a creep is ultimately our name for what the Judeo-Christian tradition calls a neighbor. Even creeps will enjoy this book… and only real creeps will not buy it! ~ Slavoj Zizek, philosopher and psychoanalyst
Cyber Disobedience
by Jeff Shantz, Jordon Tomblin

Few activities have captured the contemporary popular imagination as hacking and online activism, from Anonymous and beyond. Few political ideas have gained more notoriety recently than anarchism. Yet both remain misunderstood and much maligned.

Few activities have captured the contemporary popular imagination as hacking and online activism, from Anonymous and beyond. Few political ideas have gained more notoriety recently than anarchism. Yet both remain misunderstood and much maligned. /Cyber Disobedience/ provides the most engaging and detailed analysis of online civil disobedience and anarchism today.

Reviews:
One thing is clear: the Internet is likely the largest decentralized project in all of human history. Shantz and Tomblin hone in on the Internet’s renegades and radicals, who utilize the Internet’s unprecedented power for the purposes of resisting authority, creating international solidarity, and spreading the meme of anarchy. /Cyber Disobedience/ describes hacktivists, the free software and anti-copyright movements, digital whistleblowing, and other efforts to create a freer and more just future, both online and offline. This book truly captures the rebel spirit at the heart of the Internet Age. ~ Dana M. Williams, California State University, Chico.
Beyond the restrictive and narrow politics-as-usual from both left and right, the authors demonstrate the passionate and creative forces of contemporary anarchism that fly in the face of both corporate media and traditional academic accounts alike that perpetrate the mythical popular image of anarchism as utopic and disorderly. Providing discussions on everything from the rise of Anonymous, the Arab Spring, and demonization of whistleblowers such as Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden, to the coining of the term “hacktivism” in 1998, Cyber Disobedience explores the role of social media in information-sharing and movement-building possibilities. Activists, students, scholars - anyone interested in anti-capitalist social movements and digital resistance from below - will benefit from reading Shantz and Tomblin’s arguments that are theoretically sophisticated, empirically rigorous and historically significant. A lucid, compelling and provocative account of the potential of the digital revolutionary spirit, the text sets a very high standard for debates in the social studies of power, knowledge and technology. Overall, Cyber Disobedience constitutes a significant and timely contribution - a must-read for anyone concerned with freedom, technology, social justice and state repression in the twenty-first century. ~ Dr. Heidi M. Rimke, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Winnipeg.