The product of five years' investigative reporting, the subject of intense national controversy, and the source of death threats that forced the National Human Rights Commission to assign two full-time bodyguards to its author, Anabel Hernndez, Narcoland has been a publishing and political sensation in Mexico. The definitive history of the drug cartels, Narcoland takes readers to the front lines of the ';war on drugs,' which has so far cost more than 60,000 lives in just six years. Hernndez explains in riveting detail how Mexico became a base for the mega-cartels of Latin America and one of the most violent places on the planet. At every turn, Hernndez names names not just the narcos, but also the politicians, functionaries, judges and entrepreneurs who have collaborated with them. In doing so, she reveals the mind-boggling depth of corruption in Mexico's government and business elite. Hernndez became a journalist after her father was kidnapped and killed and the police refused to investigate without a bribe. She gained national prominence in 2001 with her exposure of excess and misconduct at the presidential palace, and previous books have focused on criminality at the summit of power, under presidents Vicente Fox and Felipe Calderon. In awarding Hernndez the 2012 Golden Pen of Freedom, the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers noted, ';Mexico has become one of the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists, with violence and impunity remaining major challenges in terms of press freedom. In making this award, we recognize the strong stance Ms. Hernndez has taken, at great personal risk, against drug cartels.'
A clearly written and highly organized introduction of the work of one of the twentieth century's greatest thinkers Octave Mannoni worked in France, Madagascar and Africa throughout the twentieth century to extend Lacanian psychoanalytical methods into the field of ethnology. He is best known for his research into the psychic repercussions of colonialism's constitutive elements: the domination of a mass by a minority, economic exploitation, paternalism and racialism.Freud: The Theory of the Unconscious is a well-crafted and concise introduction to the life, work and theories of psychoanalysis' founder. Mannoni draws on the perspective provided by his Lacanian work on colonialism to provide a unique intellectual biography of Freud, tracing the genesis and development of various key psychoanalytical concepts. Mannoni provides a critical account of the various shortcomings in Freud's work, as well as its strengths.
A Communist, feminist, and analysand asks what the social function of psychoanalysis should be and condemns what it has become The Weary Sons of Freud lambasts mainstream psychoanalysis for its failure to grapple with pressing political and social matters pertinent to its patients' condition. Gifted with insight and compelled by fury, Catherine Clement contrasts the original, inspirational psychoanalytical work of Freud and Lacan to the obsessive imitations of their uninspired followersthe weary sons of Freud.The analyst's once attentive ear has become deaf to the broader questions of therapeutic practice. Clement asks whether the perspective of socialism, brought to this study by a woman who is herself an analysand, can fill the gap. She reflects on her own history, as well as on that of psychoanalysis and the French left, to show what an activist and feminist restoration of the talking cure might look like.
Originally published in 1978, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman caused a storm of controversy. Michele Wallace blasted the masculine biases of the black politics that emerged from the sixties. She described how women remained marginalized by the patriarchal culture of Black Power, demonstrating the ways in which a genuine female subjectivity was blocked by the traditional myths of black womanhood. With a foreword that examines the debate the book has sparked between intellectuals and political leaders, as well as what hasand, crucially, has notchanged over the last four decades, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman continues to be deeply relevant to current feminist debates and black theory today.
Cinema, like language, can be said to exist as a system of differences. In his latest book, acclaimed philosopher Jacques Ranciere looks at cinematic art in comparison to its corollary forms in literature and theatre. From literature, he argues, cinema takes its narrative conventions, while at the same time effacing literature's images and philosophy; and film rejects theatre, while also fulfilling theatre's dream. Built on these contradictions, the cinema is the real, material space in which one is moved by the spectacle of shadows. Thus, for Ranciere, film is the perpetually disappointed dream of a language of images.
Powerful critique of UK and US surveillance and repression of Muslims and prosecution of homegrown terrorism The new front in the War on Terror is the ';homegrown enemy,' domestic terrorists who have become the focus of sprawling counterterrorism structures of policing and surveillance in the United States and across Europe. Domestic surveillance has mushroomedat least 100,000 Muslims in America have been secretly under scrutiny. British police compiled a secret suspect list of more than 8,000 al-Qaeda ';sympathizers,' and in another operation included almost 300 children fifteen and under among the potential extremists investigated. MI5 doubled in size in just five years. Based on several years of research and reportage, in locations as disperate as Texas, New York and Yorkshire, and written in engrossing, precise prose, this is the first comprehensive critique of counterradicalization strategies. The new policy and policing campaigns have been backed by an industry of freshly minted experts and liberal commentators. The Muslims Are Coming! looks at the way these debates have been transformed by the embrace of a narrowly configured and ill-conceived anti-extremism.
A probing collection of essays and interviews addressing police brutality and racial injustice.
A literary fiction about climate disaster and a scientist imploding on a journey to the AntarcticZeno Hintermeier is a scientist working as a travel guide on an Antarctic cruise ship, encouraging the wealthy to marvel at the least explored continent and to open their eyes to its rapid degradation. It is a troubling turn in the life of an idealistic glaciologist. Now in his early sixties, Zeno bewails the loss of his beloved glaciers, the disintegration of his marriage, and the foundering of his increasingly irrelevant career. Troubled in conscience and goaded by the smug complacency of the passengers in his charge, he starts to plan a desperate gesture that will send a wake-up call to an overheating world.The Lamentations of Zeno is an extraordinary evocation of the fragile and majestic wonders to be found at a far corner of the globe, written by a novelist who is a renowned travel writer. Poignant and playful, the novel recalls the experimentation of high-modernist fiction without compromising a limpid sense of place or the pace of its narrative. It is a portrait of a man in extremis, a haunting and at times irreverent tale that approaches the greatest challenge of our ageperhaps of our entire history as a speciesfrom an impassioned human angle.
Louis Althusser's renowned short text ';Ideology andIdeological State Apparatuses' radically transformed theconcept of the subject, the understanding of the stateand even the very frameworks of cultural, political andliterary theory. The text has influenced thinkers such asJudith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj iek.The piece is, in fact, an extract from a much longer book,On the Reproduction of Capitalism, until now unavailablein English. Its publication makes possible a reappraisalof seminal Althusserian texts already available in English,their place in Althusser's oeuvre and the relevance ofhis ideas for contemporary theory. On the Reproductionof Capitalism develops Althusser's conception of historicalmaterialism, outlining the conditions of reproductionin capitalist society and the revolutionary struggle forits overthrow. Written in the afterglow of May 1968, the text addressesa question that continues to haunt us today: in a societythat proclaims its attachment to the ideals of liberty andequality, why do we witness the ever-renewed reproductionof relations of domination? Both a conceptuallyinnovative text and a key theoretical tool for activists,On the Reproduction of Capitalism is an essential additionto the corpus of the twentieth-century Left.
Author of the acclaimed Liberalism: A Counterhistory dissects the revisionist attempts to expunge or criminalize revolutions
Composed in a series of scenes, AisthesisRanciere's definitive statement on the aesthetictakes its reader from Dresden in 1764 to New York in 1941. Along the way, we view the Belvedere Torso with Winckelmann, accompany Hegel to the museum and Mallarme to the Folies-Bergere, attend a lecture by Emerson, visit exhibitions in Paris and New York, factories in Berlin, and film sets in Moscow and Hollywood. Ranciere uses these sites and eventssome famous, others forgottento ask what becomes art and what comes of it. He shows how a regime of artistic perception and interpretation was constituted and transformed by erasing the specificities of the different arts, as well as the borders that separated them from ordinary experience. This incisive study provides a history of artistic modernity far removed from the conventional postures of modernism.
Margaret Thatcher branded the leaders of the 1984-85 miners strike ';the enemy within.' With the publication of this book, the full irony of that accusation became clear. Seumas Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destroy the power of Britain's miners' union. There was an enemy within. It was the secret services of the British state, operating inside the NUM itself.Milne revealed for the first time the astonishing lengths to which the government and its intelligence machine were prepared to go to destroy the power of Britain's miners' union. Using phoney bank deposits, staged cash drops, forged documents, agents provocateurs and unrelenting surveillance, M15 and police Special Branch set out to discredit Scargill and other miners' leaders. Planted tales of corruption were seized on by the media and both Tory and Labour politicians in what became an unprecedentedly savage smear campaign.
Our fates lie in our genes and not in the stars, said James Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA. But Watson could not have predicted the scale of the industry now dedicated to this new frontier. Since the launch of the multibillion-dollar Human Genome Project, the biosciences have promised miracle cures and radical new ways of understanding who we are. But where is the new world we were promised?In Genes, Cells, and Brains, feminist sociologist Hilary Rose and neuroscientist Steven Rose take on the bioscience industry and its claims. Examining the rivalries between public and private sequencers,the establishment of biobanks, and the rise of stem cell research, they ask why the promised cornucopia of health benefits has failed to emerge. Has bioethics simply become an enterprise? As bodies become increasingly commodified, perhaps the failure to deliver on these promises lies in genomics itself.
"Marvelously drawn tribute to free thinkers ... Engaging, informative, and inspiring." - Joe Sacco
';Watching the president's Christmas message produces this necropolar, white-mass sensation. Seeing the video broadcast of the Christmas service in the cathedral itself, with these pathetic screens and the young worshippers slumped around them here and there, you tell yourself that God and religion deserved better. Deserved to die, yes, but not this. However, watching the presidential figure and his sonorous inanity, you tell yourself that here at least you got what you deserved. Chirac is useless that goes without saying but so are we all ... Uselessness of this kind has no origin: it exists immediately, reciprocally; like a shared secret, you savour it implicitly with its warm bitterness particularly in these cold snaps, as the very essence of the social bond. Sanctioned by that other interactive uselessness the uselessness of the screen.'World-renowned for his lively and often iconoclastic reading of contemporary culture and thought, Jean Baudrillard here turns his hand to topical political debates and issues. In this stimulating collection of journalistic essays Baudrillard addresses subjects ranging from those already established as his trademark (virtual reality, Disney, television) to more unusual topics such as the Western intervention in Bosnia, children's rights, Holocaust revisionism, AIDS, the Rushdie fatwa, Formula One racing, mad cow disease, genetic cloning, and the uselessness of Chirac. These are coruscating and intriguing articles, not least because they show that Baudrillard is pace his critics still susceptible and alert to influences from social movements and the world beyond the hyperreal.
Louis Althusser is remembered today as the scourge of humanist Marxism, but that was his later incarnation, an identity formed by years grappling with the intellectual inheritance of Hegel and Catholicism. The Spectre of Hegel collects the writings of the young Althusser, before his final epistemological break with the philosopher's work in 1953. Including his famed essay ';Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses', The Spectre of Hegel gives a unique insight into Althusser's engagement with a philosophy he would later renounce.
In this vehement defence of democracy, Jacques Ranciere explodes the complacency of Western politicians who pride themselves as the defenders of political freedom. As America and its allies use their military might in the misguided attempt to export a desiccated version democracy, and reactionary strands in mainstream political opinion abandon civil liberties, Ranciere argues that true democracygovernment by allis held in profound contempt by the new ruling class. In a compelling and timely analysis, Hatred of Democracy rethinks the subversive power of the democratic ideal.
Developing themes of his earlier works, Poulantzas here advances a vigorous critique of contemporary Marxist theories of the state, arguing against a general theory of the state, and identifying forms of class power crucial to socialist strategy that goes beyond the apparatus of the state.This new edition includes an introduction by Stuart Hall, which critically appraises Poulantzas's achievement.
In A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley skewered New Labour's architectural legacy in all its witless swagger. Now, in the year of the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympics, he sets out to describe what the Coalition's altogether different approach to economic mismanagement and civic irresponsibility is doing to the places where the British live.In a journey that begins and ends in the capital, Hatherley takes us from Plymouth and Brighton to Belfast and Aberdeen, by way of the eerie urbanism of the Welsh valleys and the much-mocked splendour of modernist Coventry. Everywhere outside the unreal Southeast, the building has stopped in towns and cities, which languish as they wait for the next bout of self-defeating austerity.Hatherley writes with unrivalled aggression about the disarray of modern Britain, and yet this remains a book about possibilities remembered, about unlikely successes in the midst of seemingly inexorable failure. For as well as trash, ancient and modern, Hatherley finds signs of the hopeful country Britain once was and hints of what it might become.
For two hundred years after the French Revolution, the Republican tradition celebrated the execution of princes and aristocrats, defending the Terror that the Revolution inflicted upon on its enemies. But recent decades have brought a marked change in sensibility. The Revolution is no longer judged in terms of historical necessity but rather by ';timeless' standards of morality. In this succinct essay, Sophie Wahnich explains how, contrary to prevailing interpretations, the institution of Terror sought to put a brake on legitimate popular violencein Danton's words, to ';be terrible so as to spare the people the need to be so'and was subsequently subsumed in a logic of war. The Terror was ';a process welded to a regime of popular sovereignty, the only alternatives being to defeat tyranny or die for liberty.'
Following his acclaimed history of the Situationist International, The Beach Beneath the Street, McKenzie Wark continues the SI's story, charting its post-sixties legacy and putting the late work of the Situationists in a broader, deeper context. He uncovers a contemporary relevance and searching critique of modernity. Wark builds on their work to map the historical stages of the society of the spectacle, from the diffuse to the integrated to what he calls the ';disintegrating spectacle.' The Spectacle of Disintegration takes the reader through the critique of political aesthetics of former Situationist T.J. Clark, the Fourierist utopia of Raoul Vaneigem, Ren Vinet's earthy situationist cinema, Gianfranco Sanguinetti's pranking of the Italian ruling class, Alice Becker-Ho's account of the anonymous language of the Romany, Guy Debord's late films and his surprising work as a game designer.At once an extraordinary counter history of radical praxis and a call to action in the age of financial crisis and the resurgence of the streets, The Spectacle of Disintegration recalls the hidden journeys taken in the attempt to leave the twentieth century and plots an exit from the twenty-first.The dustjacket unfolds to reveal a fold-out poster of the collaborative graphic essay combining text selected by McKenzie Wark with composition and drawings by Kevin C. Pyle.
The political nature of Absolutism has long been a subject of controversy within historical materialism. Developing considerations advanced in Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, this book situates the Absolutist states of the early modern epoch against the prior background of European feudalism. It is divided into two parts. The first discusses the overall structures of Absolutism as a state-system in Western Europe, from the Renaissance onwards. It then looks in turn at the trajectory of each of the specific Absolutist states in the dominant countries of the WestSpain, France, England and Sweden, set off against the case of Italy, where no major indigenous Absolutism developed. The second part of the work sketches a comparative prospect of Absolutism in Eastern Europe. The peculiarities, as well as affinities, of Eastern Absolutism as a distinct type of royal state, are examined. The variegated monarchies of Prussia, Austria and Russia are surveyed, and the lessons asked of the counter-example of Poland. Finally, the structureof the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans is taken as an external gauge by which the singularity of Absolutism as a European phenomenon is assessed. The work ends with some observations on the special position occupied by European development within universal history, which draws themes from both Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism andLineages of the Absolutist State together into a single argumentwithin their common limitsas materials for debate.
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