Books in the Theory and History of Literature series

¿Noise is a model of cultural historiography. . . . In its general theoretical argument on the relations of culture to economy, but also in its specialized concentration, Noise has much that is of importance to critical theory today.¿ SubStance¿For Attali, music is not simply a reflection of culture, but a harbinger of change, an anticipatory abstraction of the shape of things to come. The book¿s title refers specifically to the reception of musics that sonically rival normative social orders. Noise is Attali¿s metaphor for a broad, historical vanguardism, for the radical soundscapes of the western continuum that express structurally the course of social development.¿ EthnomusicologyJacques Attali is the author of numerous books, including Millennium: Winners and Losers in the Coming World Order and Labyrinth in Culture and Society.

Maurice Blanchot here sustains a dialogue with a number of thinkers, including Kafka, Pascal, Nietzsche, Brecht, and Camus, who are central to the history of Western thought and who have influenced virtually all the themes that inflect contemporary literary and philosophical debate.

In Kafka Deleuze and Guattari free their subject from his (mis)intrepreters. In contrast to traditional readings that see in Kafka's work a case of Oedipalized neurosis or a flight into transcendence, guilt, and subjectivity, Deleuze and Guattari make a case for Kafka as a man of joy, a promoter of radical politics who resisted at every turn submission to frozen hierarchies.

Since the publication of Visions of Excess in 1985, there has been an explosion of interest in the work of Georges Bataille. The French surrealist continues to be important for his groundbreaking focus on the visceral, the erotic, and the relation of society to the primeval. This collection of prewar writings remains the volume in which Batailles¿s positions are most clearly, forcefully, and obsessively put forward.This book challenges the notion of a ¿closed economy¿ predicated on utility, production, and rational consumption, and develops an alternative theory that takes into account the human tendency to lose, destroy, and waste. This collection is indispensible for an understanding of the future as well as the past of current critical theory.Georges Bataille (1897-1962), a librarian by profession, was founder of the French review Critique. He is the author of several books, including Story of the Eye, The Accused Share, Erotism, and The Absence of Myth.

The texts that comprise this volume were selected from Cixous' seminars on the work of Clarice Lispector. They reflect Cixous' meditations on the art of reading, writing and related themes such as giving and loving as well as trace the influence of Lispector on Cixous' own development.