Category: books

by bell hooks

In these twelve essays, bell hooks digs ever deeper into the personal and political consequences of contemporary representations of race and ethnicity within a white supremacist culture.

by Slavoj Žižek
Exploring the ideologies fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society. The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek’s first book, published in 1989, is a provocative and original work looking at the question of human agency in a postmodern world. In a thrilling tour de force that made his name, he explores the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion which make up human society.

Silvia Federici

De la emancipación de la servidumbre a las herejías subversivas, un hilo rojo recorre la historia de la transición del feudalismo al capitalismo. Todavía hoy expurgado de la gran mayoría de los manuales de historia, la imposición de los poderes del Estado y el nacimiento de esa formación social que acabaría por tomar el nombre de capitalismo no se produjeron sin el recurso a la violencia extrema. La acumulación originaria exigió la derrota de los movimientos urbanos y campesinos, que normalmente bajo la forma de herejía religiosa reivindicaron y pusieron en práctica diversos experimentos de vida comunal y reparto de riqueza. Su aniquilación abrió el camino a la formación del Estado moderno, la expropiación y cercado de las tierras comunes, la conquista y el expolio de América, la apertura del comercio de esclavos a gran escala y una guerra contra las formas de vida y las culturas populares que tomó a las mujeres como su principal objetivo. Al analizar la quema de brujas, Federici no sólo desentraña uno de los episodios más inefables de la historia moderna, sino el corazón de una poderosa dinámica de expropiación social dirigida sobre el cuerpo, los saberes y la reproducción de las mujeres. Esta obra es también el registro de unas voces imprevistas (las de los subalternos: Calibán y la bruja) que todavía hoy resuenan con fuerza en las luchas que resisten a la continua actualización de la violencia originaria.

by Marina Gržinić

While so-called new capitalist global exhibition projects that either include selected Third and Second World artists and their artworks or are organized just for them are developing, so is a subtle system of inclusion and exclusion. These projects demonstrate some important new directions that can be seen not only as conceptual shifts but also as technological ones. Key here is the technique of transfer that provides the means of reproduction. The center (the capitalist First World) establishes hegemonic interpretations of the other worlds. We can detect a dialectical process between the technology of writing and the politics of publishing. Theory and the industry of theoretical writings are precise pyramidal constructions which are carefully safeguarded. Who can publish where and at what time and, moreover, who is positioned to provide the first line of interpretation, are extremely important decisions within the capitalist system. Huge symposia, seminars and panels are organized to support world exhibitions and global cultural projects, circulating the same theoretical personalities and public opinion makers who continually reproduce the capitalist system in theoretical terms. It is perfectly clear that in the field of global contemporary art and culture, we are not dealing with gestures of just exchange and production. We are instead dealing with the delineation of political lines within a certain (public) space, with a codification of this space and a naming of its political subjects. The question is whether, in addition to this process of codification, we also have spaces of resistance?