Books in the Zone Books series

How the far North offered a different kind of terra incognita for the Renaissance imagination.

An examination of pleasure--short-term delight and the cultivation of longer-term satisfaction--in early Chinese thought.

An original, elegant, and far-reaching philosophical inquiry into what it means to feel alive.

Chantal Thomas presents the history of the mythification of one of the most infamous queens in all history, whose execution still fascinates us today.

Beginning with a definition of the pre-rational meaning of "truth" in archaic Greece, Detienne traces the lineage of the concept. Its distinct difference from the logic of the western philosophers is discussed and a movement from a religious to a secular thought about truth is identified.

Women's bodies and the study of anatomy in Italy between the late thirteenth and the mid-sixteenth centuries.

A consideration of blandness not as the absence of defining qualities but as the harmonious union of all potential values-an infinite opening into human experience.

Understanding late medieval pictorial representations of violence.

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.

Kurt Goldstein (1878-1965) was already an established neuropsychologist when he emigrated from Germany to the United States in the 1930s. This book, his magnum opus and widely regarded as a modern classic in psychology and biology, grew out of his dissatisfaction with traditional natural science techniques for analyzing living beings.

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

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

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

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

Essays by Gilles Deleuze on the search for a new empiricism.

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.