Welcome to our book review site go-pdf.online!
You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
Militant Acts
Militant Acts presents a broad history of the concept and practice of investigations in radical political struggles from the nineteenth century to the present. Radicals launched investigations into the conditions and struggles of the oppressed and exploited to stimulate their political mobilization and organization. These investigations assumed a variety of methodological forms in a wide range of geographical and institutional contexts, and they also drew support from the participation of intellectuals such as Marx, Lenin, Mao, Dunayevskaya, Foucault, and Badiou. Marcelo Hoffman analyzes newspapers, pamphlets, reports, and other source materials, which reveal the diverse histories, underappreciated difficulties, and theoretical import of investigations in radical political struggles. In so doing, he challenges readers to rethink the supposed failure of these investigations and concludes that the value of investigations in radical political struggles ultimately resides in the possibility of producing a new political "we."
The Impossible Revolution
Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a leftist dissident who spent sixteen years as a political prisoner and now lives in exile. He describes with precision and fervour the events that led to Syria's 2011 uprising, the metamorphosis of the popular revolution into a regional war, and the 'three monsters' Saleh sees 'treading on Syria's corpse': the Assad regime and its allies, ISIS and other jihadists, and Russia and the US. Where conventional wisdom has it that Assad's army is now battling religious fanatics for control of the country, Saleh argues that the emancipatory, democratic mass movement that ignited the revolution still exists, though it is beset on all sides.'The Impossible Revolution' is a powerful, compelling critique of Syria's catastrophic war, which has profoundly reshaped the lives of millions of Syrians.
Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit
Winner of the 2020 Choice Outstanding Academic Title Award Guy Debord, the Situationist International, and the Revolutionary Spirit presents a history of the two avant-garde groups that French filmmaker and subversive strategist Guy Debord founded and led: the Lettrist International (1952–1957) and the Situationist International (1957–1972). Debord is popularly known for his classic book The Society of the Spectacle (1967), but his masterwork is the Situationist International (SI), which he fashioned into an international revolutionary avant-garde group that orchestrated student protests at the University of Strasbourg in 1966, contributed to student unrest at the University of Nanterre ...
The History of Disruption
Challenging our understanding of social struggles as movements, Mehmet Dösemeci traces a 300-year counter-history of struggle predicated on disruption Why do we think of social struggles as movements? Have struggles been practiced otherwise, not as motion but as interruption, occupation, disturbance, arrest? Looking at three hundred years of Atlantic social struggle kinetically, Mehmet Dösemeci questions the axiomatic association that academics and activists have made between modern social struggles and the category of movement. Dösemeci argues that this movement politics has privileged some forms of historical struggle while obscuring others and, perhaps more damningly, reveals the compl...
With and Against
No other art movement has so profoundly influenced radical politics as the Situationist International. But beyond the clichs about its purported leader Guy Debord, the "society of the spectacle," dtournement and drive, lies a more complex story about key historical shifts in the composition of capital, work, labor, art, and revolutionary theory during the 1950s and 60s. With and Against reframes the history of the Situationist International as a struggle to come to terms with the then-emerging ideologies of cybernetics and automation. Through each of the book's four chapters, Dominique Routhier dissects Situationist pamphlets, documents, artworks, and objects that refract elements of a "cybernetic hypothesis": the theoretically hyperbolic belief that technological progress, computers and automation make class struggle and the idea of revolution obsolete. With equal attention to aesthetic detail and to the broader contours of political economy, this book serves as a critical intervention in art history as well a call to reconsider, more broadly, the contemporary lessons of the most political of all artistic avantgardes.
Defective Institutions
Defective Institutions overturns the basis of institutionalism. Faith in classic institutions—exposed as clamorously inadequate by the failure of governance under neoliberalism--does not result in greater democracy, greater horizontality, or more equitable living. Nor does trust in the standing of decisions, in the authority of antecedent cases, in the coherence, strength, continuity, or solidity of the institutions that frame and render legitimate these decisions and the rules they buttress. To the contrary: the classically-imagined institution and our faith in it lie at the heart of neoliberal unfreedom and racialized violence. Working at the point of contact and conflict between sociali...
Leaving The Twentieth Century
The acclaimed history of the groundbreaking Situationist movement The Situationist International, which leaped to the fore during the Paris tumult of 1968, has extended its revolutionary influence right up to the present day. In Leaving the Twentieth Century, the movement is captured for the first time in its full range and diversity. McKenzie Wark traces the group’s development from the bohemian Paris of the ’50s to the explosive days of May ’68. She introduces the group as an ensemble, revealing the work and activities of thinkers previously obscured by the reputation of founding member Guy Debord. Roaming through Europe and exploring the vital lives its members—including Constant,...
Walter Benjamin and the Demands of History
This book is the first to consider the presence of history and the question of historical practice in Walter Benjamin's work. Benjamin, the critic and philosopher of history, was also the practitioner, the authors contend, and it is in the practice of historical writing that the materialist aspect of his thought is most evident. Some of the essays analyze Benjamin's writings in cultural history and the philosophy of history. Others connect his historical and theoretical practices to issues in contemporary feminism and post-colonial studies, and to cultural contexts including the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong. In different ways, the authors all find in Benjamin's specific notion of historical materialism a dialectic between textual and cultural analysis which can reinvigorate the relation between literary and historical studies.
The Oxford Encyclopedia of Medieval Warfare and Military Technology
This set is an excellent companion to J. R. Strayer's edited Dictionary of the Middle Ages (CH, Nov'87; Supplement I, ed. by W. C. Jordan, CH, Sep'04, 42-0044). The focus on warfare allows the editors to offer larger entries on major topics (e.g., "Agincourt," "Crusades," "Feudalism") and introduce many complementary topics. The editors are concerned with Europe; they expand coverage into Asia or Africa only because of the connection to medieval Europe. Coverage also includes an abundance of entries pertaining to Central and Eastern Europe. Most of the 1,000-plus entries are about a page in length, but a few approach 50 pages. Medium and large-size entries, such as "Chivalry," "Germany," and...
Step by Step
The street riots that swept through France in the fall of 2005 focused worldwide attention on the plight of the country's immigrants and their living conditions in the suburbs many of them call home. These high-density neighborhoods were constructed according to the principles of functionalist urbanism that were ascendant in the 1960s. Then, as now, the disparities between the planners' utopian visions and the experiences of the inhabitants raised concerns, generating a number of sociological studies of the "new towns." One of the most sophisticated and significant of these critiques is Jean-François Augoyard's Step by Step, which was originally published in France in 1979 and famously infl...
