Books in the Zone Books series

In this book, his first to appear in English, French sinologist Francois Jullien uses the Chinese concept of shi-meaning disposition or circumstance, power or potential-as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture and to uncover the intricate structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking.

A novel attempt to make sense of our preoccupation with copies of all kinds--from counterfeits to instant replay, from parrots to photocopies.

Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself.

The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century.

In this groundbreaking work, Ariella Azoulay provides a compelling rethinking of the political and ethical status of photography. In her extraordinary account of the "civil contract" of photography, she thoroughly revises our understanding of the power relations that sustain and make possible photographic meanings. Photography, she insists, must be thought of and understood in its inseparability from the many catastrophes of recent history. Azoulay argues that photography is a particular set of relations between individuals to the power that governs them, and, at the same time, a form of relations among equal individuals that constrains this power. Her book shows how anyone, even a stateless person, who addresses others through photographs or occupies the position of a photograph's addressee, is or can become a citizen in the citizenry of photography. The civil contract of photography enables him or her to share with others the claim made or addressed by the photograph.

Essays that span the career of a prominent anthropologist and address the fundamental questions of the field.

A groundbreaking reassessment of Symbolist artists and writers that investigates the concerns they shared with scientists of the period--the problem of subjectivity in particular.

How the ear came to play a central role in modern culture and rationality.

Essays by a provocative Italian philosopher on memory and oblivion, on what is lost and what remains.

In this analysis of one major philosopher by another, Gilles Deleuze identifies three pivotal concepts - duration, memory, and elan vital - that are found throughout Bergson's writings and shows the relevance of Bergson's work to contemporary philosophical debates.

A deft reinterpretation of the most zealously interpreted picture in the Western canon as a therapeutic artifact.

If Marx¿s opus Capital provided the foundational account of the forces of production in all of their objective, machine formats, what happens when the concepts of political economy are applied not to dead labor, but to its living counterpart, the human subject? The result is Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt¿s History and Obstinacy, a groundbreaking archaeology of the labor power that has been cultivated in the human body over the last two thousand years. First published in German 1981, and never before translated into English, this epochal collaboration between Kluge and Negt has now been edited, expanded, and updated by the authors in response to global developments of the last decade to create an entirely new analysis of ¿the capitalism within us.¿

Why do nation-states wall themselves off despite widespread proclamations of global connectedness?

In its form, this book is a kind of perpetual commentary on testimony. It did not seem possible to proceed otherwise. At a certain point, it became clear that testimony contained at its core an essential lacuna: in other words, the survivors bore witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to. As a consequence, commenting on survivors' testimony necessarily meant interrogating this lacuna or, more precisely, attempting to listen to it. Listening to something absent did not prove fruitless work for this author. Above all, it made it necessary to clear away almost all the doctrines that, since Auschwitz, heva been advanced in the name of ethics.

A meditation on the human body as described by the classical Greeks and by the ancient Chinese.

A far-reaching philosophical investigation into the persistence and disappearance of speech, in individuals and in linguistic communities.

Rituals of war and images of violence in Mesopotamia ca. 3000-500 BCE examined as "magical technologies of warfare."

A fascinating account of the Na society, which functions without the institution of marriage.