Books published by Zone Books

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.¿

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.

The history of Mexico's fearless intimacy with death--the elevation of death to the center of national identity.

Exploring the thought of Mulla Sadra Shirazi, an Iranian Shi'ite of the seventeenth century: a universe of politics, morality, liberty, and order that is indispensable to our understanding of Islamic thought and spirituality.

Examining Tony Conrad's collaborative interactions as a guiding thread by which to investigate the contiguous networks and discursive interconnections in 1960s art.

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.

An exploration of the roles of metamorphosis and hybridity in the establishment of personal identity, with particular emphasis on the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.

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.

A history and theory of the powers, the failures, and even the pleasures of paperwork.

A history and theory of the drive to hide in plain sight.

A provocative study of the iconoclastic impulse in medieval and modern art.

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

An exploration of the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness.

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