mlx-community/zer0-books huggingface dataset:
Neglected or Misunderstood: Introducing Theodor Adorno
by Stuart Walton

An introductory approach that evaluates Theodor Adorno's work in its own terms and within those of present-day critical theory.

While Theodor Adorno has continued to be influential since his death in 1969, his very centrality has led to the left simplifying his ideas while the right placed him at the center of a myriad of wild conspiracy theories, all of them filed under the category of Cultural Marxism. Adorno has wrongly been blamed for everything from the Beatles to postmodernism, but he has continued to be read, if read badly.

Stuart Walton's introduction to Adorno attempts to explain how this idiosyncratic thinker reframed elements of the Hegelian-Marxist dialectical in the fields of philosophy, sociology, politics and aesthetics and to rectify some of the major misunderstandings about Adorno and the Frankfurt School.

When Walton began studying Adorno at Oxford in 1983 he felt that Adorno was nowhere in the English-speaking world, but that he should be everywhere. Now Adorno is everywhere, but hardly anywhere sufficiently or deeply understood.

Reviews:
No book about Adorno is going to be an easy read but Stuart Walton succeeds in offering an accessible overview of Adorno's work without over-simplifying it or the cultural contexts in which it developed. The book works both as an introduction and as a refresher for those returning to his thinking, particular for readers who are interested in what has happened to his reputation since they last checked. ~ Michael J, NetGalley
Neglected or Misunderstood: The Radical Feminism of Shulamith Firestone
by Victoria Margree

Should pregnancy and childbirth be transformed, in order for women to be free?

Shulamith Firestone’s The Dialectic of Sex proved immediately controversial upon its publication in 1970. The book’s thesis is that the origins of women’s oppression lie in biology: in the fact that it is women and not men who conceive and give birth to children. Firestone’s solution is revolutionary: since it is biology that is the problem, then biology must be changed, through technological intervention that would have as its end the complete removal of the reproductive process from women’s bodies. With its proposal for the development of artificial wombs, its call for the abolition of the nuclear family and its vision of a cybernetic future, Firestone’s manifesto may seem hopelessly out-dated, a far-fetched, utopian hangover of Swinging Sixties radicalism.

This book, on the contrary, will argue for its importance to the resurgent feminism of today as a text that interrogates issues around gender, biology, sexuality, work and technology, and the ways in which our imaginations in the 21st century continue to be in thrall to ideologies of maternity and the nuclear family.

Reviews:
Clear-eyed, pedagogical and contemporary, Victoria Margree's reading of Firestone will be of use to anyone thinking about feminism and technology today. Providing clear historical and philosophical context, Margree provides a supremely balanced account of Firestone in all her complexity. With reference to other great feminist thinkers, the women's political movement, as well as recent developments in reproductive technology, Margree's book brings Firestone firmly up-to-date. ~ Nina Power, author of One Dimensional Woman
Questioning, rigorous, yet accessible, this is an important contribution to the current reconsideration of the demonized visionary of Second Wave feminism. With careful attention to its intellectual influences and analytical coherence, Victoria Margree offers a lucid exposition of Shulamith Firestone’s argument against the power imbalances created by maternity. As the conservative challenge to contraception and abortion intensifies in Europe and the US, Margree concludes with an invaluable discussion of the post-Firestone politics of reproduction. ~ Mandy Merck, Co-Editor, Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex
Networkologies
by Christopher Vitale

Networks are the future: here's the first philosophy based on networks, a new image of thought for a hyperconnected age.

Networkologies is the first text to develop an entire new philosophy based upon networks. While many contemporary texts on networks have presented critiques or analyses of network formations in our world, this book is the first to develop an entirely new worldview based on the structure of networks themselves. From global capitalism to artificial minds, evolutionary biology to quantum physics, networks are our future. Networkologies presents us with a new image of thought for our hyperconnected age.

Reviews:
We all know that we live in a networked world; but we do not really know just what a "network" is. In this important and vital book, Christopher Vitale provides us with a full-fledged philosophy of networks. He considers the questions of where networks come from, of how they change and develop, and of what conditions may lead to their (and our) continued flourishing. Networkologies is solidly grounded in the latest science, but it is also a powerful work of speculative philosophy. It gives us both a vision of what we are, and intimations of what we might become. ~ Steven Shaviro, author of "The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism"
Vitale is opening a truly philosophical, typological and topological understanding of networks in Contemporary Culture, well beyond the usual technical accounts of Internet development. Entering in a natural dialogue with some masters which have reflected on the concept and practice of relation (Bergson, Deleuze, Simondon among others), Vitale turns himself as a profound new voice which unveals the fascinating philosophical combinatorics of cultural complex systems. Through a series of well-defined tetrads, including immanence/relation/refraction/emergence, and node/link/ground/process, Vitale circumnavigates the explosive contradictions of our times,to offer new perspectives of visualization and integration. ~ Fernando Zalamea, Professor of Mathematics at Universidad Nacional de Cololmbia
New Work, New Culture
by Frithjof Bergmann

A proposed alternative to the failing job system.

The “job system” for organizing work has only existed for around 200 years - since the industrial revolution. Always problematic, it now approaches collapse, and what follows, either for good or ill, depends on decisions made and executed in current times. Many people are filled with dismay, and turn for succor to political opportunists.

Prescient of the looming disaster, Frithjof Bergmann began to devise alternatives to the job system in the 1970s. He started with the fostering of dialogue; about ameliorating the impacts of layoffs in times of recession, among the workforce in the auto industry and community, in Flint, Michigan. What has evolved, over years, is his proposed alternative to the job system.

New Work, New Culture recounts the development of his ideas, and describes one course which humanity might follow, that all might live better lives.

Reviews:
Night
by Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

Engages the myriad dimensions of Night in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark.

This short book engages the myriad dimensions of Night, through ancient rituals, medieval storytelling, modern philosophy, and futuristic images, in order to explore the human experience of the after-dark. It thereby tracks Night through the prisms of its most fascinating practitioners: namely, those who keep strange hours and navigate the various potentialities of nocturnal experience (both of terror and enchantment). The Thief’s Night; The Runaway’s Night; The Drunkard’s Night; The Insomniac’s Night; The Revolutionary’s Night; The Lunatic’s Night; The Sorcerer’s Night. Undoubtedly, each of these conceptual figures provides a unique gateway into understanding the powerful sensorial effects of evening, as well as its vast connections to larger questions of time, space, fear, nothingness, desire, death, forgetting, vision, secrecy, criminality, monstrosity, and the body.

Reviews:
I have read two of the author’s books prior to reading this and I find the latter very much in keeping with his remarkable voice and almost sui generis approach to and retrieval of contemporary non-western thought. Mohaghegh challenges the prevailing contours of philosophy, creatively and philosophically rethinking not only what matters to philosophy but also how philosophy can matter. ~ Jason Wirth, Professor of Philosophy, Seattle University
Night emerges as an intellectually unique and methodologically courageous work...Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh's stylistic and methodological novelty is a great advantage, for it gives the reader the chaotic and multidimensional universe of culture, and increasingly the world in which live. It gives us not a clear and transparent unity, a structure, but an ever-changing, fractal cosmos, and invites the reader to follow the trace of the affect in the everyday. ~ Mahmut Mutman, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Tampere
Night, Volume II
by Jason Bahbak Mohaghegh

To enter the many experiential chambers of Night--space, silence, cruelty, secrecy--and thereby confront a vision of the end of worlds.

This book follows and expands on the boundaries of its precursor Night: A Philosophy of the After-Dark by presenting a series of new conceptual territories, figures, sources, images and imaginative possibilities. The central idea of Night is contemplated in its intricate relation to space, silence, cruelty and secrecy while also taking thought toward the futural limits of a vision of the last world.

Reviews:
There are always—by twists of fate—deviant exceptions. Mohaghegh’s Night: A Philosophy of the Last World is precisely one of such exceptions. Navigating the undercurrents and the untrodden cave systems which form that tenebrous underside of literature upon which the greatest works have been casually or rigorously erected, Mohaghegh’s Night project is more akin to a play, set after the sunset where the unconscious forces of literature begin to take center stage in a plot that involves feats of ambush, intrigue, tremors, terror, and an easy quietude, where the bite of night leaves its greatest mark on us. ~ Reza Negarestani, author of Cyclonopedia
No More Heroes?
by Carl Neville

Neoliberalism, steroids, cocaine, deregulation and finance as reflected in the films of the 70s.

The interface between neoliberalism, steroids, cocaine, finance and American mythology as reflected in the films of the 70s and 80s.

Reviews:
Austrian strongmen have often had a malign influence on 20th century history. Holding out for a Hero makes a bold claim - that the true, rippling-muscled embodiment of the 'Austrian school' neoliberal economists was the Styrian bodybuilder and rightwing activist Arnold Schwarzenegger. It follows his influence through a landscape populated by monster trucks, closing car factories, apocalyptic visions and heartland dreams. A bizarre, exhilarating and mordant secret history of the 1980s ~ Owen Hatherley, Author of A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain (Verso) and Militant Modernism.
Non-Stop Inertia
by Ivor Southwood

A theoretical investigation into the culture of precarious work, digital consumption and personal flexibility, calling for a counter-discourse of resistance.

In our culture of short-term work, mobile communications and rolling media, it seems we are always on the move; but are we really getting anywhere? Non-Stop Inertia argues that this appearance of restless activity conceals and indeed maintains a deep paralysis of thought and action, and that rather than being unquestionable or inevitable, the environment of personal flexibility and perpetual crisis which we now inhabit is ideologically constructed.

Reviews:
One of the pithiest and most powerful descriptions of the political economy of inertia. Southwood really anatomises the new culture of the workplace that ties the precarity of finding work and keeping work to this culture of enforced positive thinking and action. That’s what he’s describing as ‘non-stop inertia,’ because you feel like you’re never really getting anywhere. ~ Josh Cohen, psychoanalyst, professor of modern literary theory at Goldsmiths, University of London, and author of Not Working: Why We Have to Stop
Norms Under Siege. The Parallel Political Lives of Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi
by Edoardo M Fracanzani

Both leaders have amassed huge followings, ready to support them at all costs, sometimes having observers wonder if this bond should be considered a cult, rather than political affiliation.

A look at the striking similarities between Donald Trump and Silvio Berlusconi, from their business and TV backgrounds to the unprecedented way in which they broke into politics. Both leaders introduced new language patterns, deepened the political wedge between parties, and managed to recruit a significant base of followers; should they be considered a cult, rather than political affiliation? In Norms Under Siege, Edoardo M. Fracanzani goes beyond comparisons between Trump and Berlusconi and asks what is revealed about the kind of society that would allow their rise to power.

Reviews:
Now and Forever: Towards a theory and history of the loop
by Tilman Baumgärtel

A Secret Acoustic History of the 20th Century

Elvis Presley and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The Beatles and Andy Warhol. Terry Riley and Ken Kesey. What all these artists have in common is that loops have played a significant role in their work. The short sequences of sounds or images repeated using recording media have proved to be an astonishingly flexible, versatile and momentous aesthetic method in post-World War II art and music.

Today, loops must be counted among the most important creative tools of postmodern art and music. Yet until now they have been largely overlooked as an aesthetic phenomenon. Now, for the first time, this book tells a secret story of the 20th century: how a formerly inconspicuous basic function of all modern media technology gave rise to complete artistic oeuvres, musical styles such as minimal music, hip hop and techno, and, most recently, entire scenes and subcultures that would have been unthinkable without loops.

Reviews:
"Repetition is both as old as time and the defining characteristic of our postmodern age. In Now and Forever, Tilman Baumgärtel deftly examines this cultural paradox via the cyclical operations inherent to technical media: film and audiotape loops, analog synthesizers, and, ultimately, the computers that now replicate them." ~ Dr Andrew Lison, University at Buffalo, SUNY
"Baumgärtel explores the phenomenon of the loop not just as a music-historical but as a broad socio-cultural phenomenon. A seminal work for anyone interested in the histories, technologies, and aesthetics of musical repetition."

~ Dr Christine Dysers, Uppsala University
Nuclear Futurism
by Liam Sprod

In the time of ends, the most dangerous technology of nuclear weapons confronts us with a new philosophy of the future.

Starting from the end of history, the end of art and the failure of the future set out by such ends, Nuclear Futurism reinvigorates art, literature and philosophy through the unlikely alliance of hauntology and the Italian futurists. Tracing the paradoxes of the possibilities of total nuclear destruction reveals the terminal condition of culture in the time of ends, where the logic of the apocalyptic without apocalypse holds sway. These paradoxes also open the path for a new vision of the future in the form of experimental art and literature. By re-examining the thought of both Derrida and Heidegger with regards to the history of art, the art of history and their responses to the most dangerous technology of nuclear weapons the future is exposed as a progressive event, rather than the atrophied and apocalyptic to-come of the present world. It is happening now, opening up through the force of art and literature and charting a new path for a futural philosophy.

Reviews:
Un libro come Nuclear Futurism di Liam Sprod (Zer0 books 2012), in cui Derrida viene confrontato con Marinetti, è il segno di una apertura del mondo di lingua inglese in altri tempi inconcepibile

[A book like Nuclear Futurism by Liam Sprod (Zer0 books 2012), in which Derrida is compared with Marinetti, is the sign of an opening of the English-speaking world that was inconceivable in the past] ~ MAURIZIO FERRARIS, La Repubblica : http://ricerca.repubblica.it/repubblica/archivio/repubblica/2013/12/19/web-platonico-cosi-il-dibattito-filosofico-si.html?ref=search
The central thesis of the book, that this hauntological futurity is applicable to a study of Italian Futurism, remains an interesting topic, and my only criticism would be that I would have preferred a longer study which pays greater attention to Futurist works of art themselves, as well as the famous manifestos. The care and attention paid to the construction and qualification of the arguments in Nuclear Futurism is both admirable but also the reason why you wouldn’t exactly pick this book up unless you had a specific interest in doing so. It is most definitely ‘difficult theory’, not because it is particularly difficult per se, or lacking in clarity, rather, the arguments are so dense and well qualified that any clumsy turns of thought are banished, and what remains is 120 pages of taut and challenging philosophical investigation. The book doesn’t let up until the endnotes, so anyone spying its slim spine and considering a quick theory fix should be warned off - this is hardcore. ~ Callam Green, Review31: http://review31.co.uk/article/view/118/apocalypse-tomorrow
OccupyMedia!
by Christian Fuchs

OccupyMedia! shows how Occupy activists confront capitalism and communication in a world of crisis, capitalism, surveillance and social media.

The Occupy movement has emerged in a historical crisis of global capitalism. It struggles for the reappropriation of the commodified commons. Communications are part of the commons of society. Yet contemporary social media are ridden by an antagonism between private corporate control (YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and self-managed, commons-based activist media. In this work, Christian Fuchs analyses the contradictory dialectic of social media in the Occupy movement. Drawing on a political economy framework and interpretation of the results of the OccupyMedia! Survey, in which more than 400 Occupy activists reported on their social media use, OccupyMedia! The Occupy Movement and Social Media in Crisis Capitalism shows how activists confront the contradictions of capitalism and communication in the age of crisis and social media. The book discusses the contradiction between commercial and alternative social media and argues that the existence of a surveillance-industrial complex expressed in the PRISM system shows the urgent necessity to create social media beyond Facebook and Google.

Reviews:
Occupy Media! by Christian Fuchs is in part a recognition of how deep the change that is needed in the theories and practice of traditional oppositional politics. Christian explains the role of social media, as a model of organisation as well as a tool of communication, in terms of the transformation of protest movements world-wide. Such a role though isn’t by any means automatic ~ Mark Perryman, Philosophy Football
There have been many attempts to examine the Occupy Movement, but none with the theoretical and empirical rigour of Fuchs’ masterful book. OccupyMedia! offers a critical vision of a world in crisis, a detailed description of the voices of resistance, and a thorough analysis of new forms of communication. The result is a much-needed model for research on social movements and a rich store of information for today’s movement activists. ~ Prof. Vincent Mosco, Queen's University – Author of “The Political Economy of Communication”
Christian Fuchs has written an indispensable guide - based on new research - to the breaking story of the relationship of the massive explosion in worldwide protest and upheaval and social media. The book is a terrific read and has important insights into the most serious issues facing media scholars and activists. It deserves close attention. ~ Prof. Robert W. McChesney, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign – Author of “Digital Disconnect"
Officious
by Josie Appleton

Anatomy of the new breed of state regulation colonising everyday life.

In Anglo-Saxon countries there is a new and distinctive form of state: the busybody state. This state is defined by an attachment to bureaucratic procedures for their own sake: the rule for the sake of a rule; the form for the sake of a form. Its insignias are the badge, the policy, the code and the procedure. The logic of the regulation is neither to represent an elite class interest, nor to serve the public, nor even to organise social relations with the greatest efficiency as with classic bureaucracy, but rather to represent regulation itself.

This book analyses the logic of the busybody state, explains its origins, and calls for a popular alliance defending the free realm of civil society.

Reviews:
An intellectually gripping analysis of what its author Josie Appleton characterises as a new kind of state power, one that is arbitrary and encroaching on what is left of our unregulated lives. Overall this is a subtle and intelligently argued essay. Its reconstruction of the essential trajectory of the officious state will be a valuable weapon for those keen to argue for greater freedom in everyday life. (http://www.spiked-online.com/newsite/article/the-rise-of-the-officious-state/19081#.WHOgfnipvFI) ~ James Heartfield, spiked
This is a must read for anyone thinking about the workings and nature of the modern State. It combines sensitive insights from the author based on her experience of working as hard as possible to uphold freedoms, and a genuinely thought provoking argument about the State and its purposes, drawing on serious intellectual work. I would recommend that anyone teaching in the areas of Social Policy, Sociology or Politics and Government reads this book and uses it for teaching. ~ Dr Ellie Lee, Director of Centre for Parenting Culture Studies, Reader in Social Policy, University of Kent
The antics of meddlesome bureaucrats are frequently so ridiculous that it is tempting to laugh them off. Officialdom is no joke, however, as Josie Appleton’s insightful book makes clear. Our freedoms will be lost unless we confront these incremental steps towards an authoritarian state. ~ Nick Cater, Executive Director, Menzies Research Centre; author, 'The Lucky Culture (and the rise of an Australian ruling class)'
"The state once left us alone unless we committed a crime or fought in a war. Now its tendrils creep everywhere. Josie Appleton, a doughty champion of the free citizen, brilliantly exposes the meddlesome bossiness of the modern state". ~ Philip Johnston, author, 'Bad Laws'