Atropos Press

Less interested in tracing a chronological history of punk and no-wave, than in interrogating its place in artistic and intellectual history, Denah Johnston's NO FUTURE NOW throws us into a rich cultural stew. There are wonderful extended discussions here of Vivienne Dick, Derek Jarman, and Marie Menken, as well as of Jack Smith, Andy Warhol, th... more >>

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An exposition of the implications of betraying as the nonidentity of every identity with itself. A philosophic poetic meditation on the extreme inseparability of truth and untruth, evoking the expressingness of things together with their unaccountabilities, uncertainties, multiplicities, alterities, and heterogeneities. A reflection on what Derr... more >>

The Transreal: Political Aesthetics of Crossing Realities explores the use of multiple simultaneous realities as a medium in contemporary art, including mixed reality, augmented reality and alternate reality approaches. Building on the notion of "trans" from transgender, signifying the crossing of boundaries, the book proposes that transreal aes... more >>

In Drugs - Rhetoric of Fantasy, Addiction to Truth, Schep argues that the majority of writings about drugs fall into two categories: scientific work that establishes objective knowledge but neglects the experiential dimension, and texts that foreground the experiential aspects of drug intoxication at the expense of rigor. In this wide-ranging an... more >>

Fear and Laughter: A Politics of Not Selves 'For' Self explores the possibility of situating oneself within the tension between comedy and horror. An ethical stance is defined as not selves 'for' self in the immanent relation of thought, forgiveness and laughter. Thought as an image, the Gorgon, a death mask, is worn on the face of the self-cons... more >>

Upward Crashes: Fracture's Topoi: Musil, Kiefer, Darger explores the perception of altitude as a locus of fraction, from the inception of modernity to the present.Citing examples from literature, art, theory and media, it examines the paradoxical trope of a fall or crash into the heights, from a spatial, visual and ethical perspective. Tracing t... more >>

This is an aporetic text, one which presents ways of hearing (and speaking from within) the silence of being-an offering that continues to ask Heidegger's essential question, "Why is there any being at all?" Itself challenges us to get over ourselves so we can finally start thinking and living without the melodramatic longings for metaphysical u... more >>

In Laughter and Mourning: Point of Rupture, Noensie asks what it means when laughter or mourning (grieving, or crying) overwhelms a person so that the 'self' breaks-down. This work focuses on the phenomenal experience as laughs and cries burst repeatedly into the body and explode into rupture, a syncopic break with time, where the 'self' i... more >>

Prize-seeking, pleasure-driven, self-involved intent has run its course. This book confronts the ethics of desire in the moment of truth. The indulgence of desire is the decadence of the human condition. Whenever desire is satisfied, the desire diminishes and we reach a vanishing point. In time, desire returns. The tyranny of desire is observed ... more >>

Necessity of Terrorism: aggressively reviews the political implication of the terminology and law creation; goes back through history, using a Hegelian-Marxian reading of event by power and violence all merging to recreate a case study of the phenomenon and the Machiavellian usage of it in politics, war and law. Revealing the role of terrorism... more >>

         There is a fair bit of scratching and sniffing in this book-from an old dog in the opening poem to a fat, bald drunken satyr in the closing one. That dog is Mickey, van de Kamp's gorgeous bearded collie, whom the poet leftbehind, with his darling wife, when he took up a visiting professorship in Singapore this year. Yes: Caroline,... more >>

Here as Virilio states, "all one can do is guess." But Virilio's position is not one of pure guessery. His extrapolationist position against his delirium state, has the architecture of a 23rd century scientist: three parts - fractal geometry, two parts - theory of general relativity, one part - Philip K. Dick. One must step back and stare down t... more >>

When we talk about photography we talk about the image. We tend to look at all photographs as the same. But where the professional photograph is about creating an image; the amateur photograph is about the act of creating the picture. When we ask someone "take a picture of me" we are putting ourselves in the hands of others. We are making them r... more >>

This is a collection of essays, most published here for the first time, on Gilles Deleuze's ideas about history and science. Its focus is on ontological or metaphysical questions: What are the legitimate social entities that can be used in historical explanations, given a materialist metaphysics? What are the legitimate inhabitants of the materi... more >>

Kazuo Ishiugro's 2005 novel Never Let Me Go tells the story of a number of students growing up in a boarding school in England and eventually coming to grips with their destinies, with what they are supposed to do in life. What is both tragic and radically engaging in this novel is that the students are actually clones who will have their organs... more >>

----Henri Bergson is the author of numerous works including Matter and Memory, Creative Evolution and Time and Free Will. His work has been influential for many thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Gilles Deleuze. ----Drew Burk is a graduate and technical director at the European Graduate School. He is the translator of su... more >>

New media theorists, performance artists, media culture commentators, and politicians have celebrated life online-the virtual unknown-as shamanic, Eastern, mysterious, transformative, and exotic. SHAMANISM + CYBERSPACE shows that this rhetoric is actually a familiar version of the other, and that imperialism is at its core. This book combines po... more >>

The author employs a philosophical approach in order to conceptualize the space and time in urban realms of the first decades of the 21st century. The so-called 'hi-tech society' has reached its saturation according to Paul Virilio, William Mitchell, Jean Baudrillard, Wolfgang Schirmacher, Marc Augé. Space and time are interchangeably main conc... more >>

Dostoevsky's last published pages, "The Speech by the Stone" at the close of The Brothers Karamazov, have routinely evaded serious comment. Like Oedipus and Hamlet, the murdered father in The Brothers Karamazov serves as the focal point of the novel's events. "The Speech by the Stone", however, is a nebulous treatise on the subject of mourning ... more >>

History is marked by catastrophic events that defy meaning and understanding. The 20th century was a century of prosperity and progress; it was also history's bloodiest. The death toll from war and genocide reached 140 million people. Trauma of this magnitude poses grave challenges to memory and thought. This work explores failures of memory and... more >>

Trans/actions: Art, Film and Death explore the representation of art, artists and art history in film through two primary questions. The first: why are there so many representations of stereotypical mad artists, particularly psychopathic killers and suicidal artists in film when there are so few clearly documented cases of such artists within th... more >>

Deleuze and the Sign presents a concise introduction to Deleuze's semiotics. Expounding upon Deleuze's work on Proust, the author reveals a thoroughly developed theory of the sign that is at the heart of Deleuze's ontology, epistemology, and ethics. Beginning with Deleuze's concept of the sign as a "search for truth", the author argues that th... more >>

What does philosophy have to teach us about education today? How are we to understand traditional education in the world after Nietzsche and Heidegger? The book takes up the ancient Greek ideal of Paideia and contrasts it with the work of Martin Heidegger. A model of teaching emerges that practices "stupidity before the other" (Avital Ronell). I... more >>

The Novel Imagery: Aesthetic Response as Feral Laboratory slowly builds and shapes a theory of reading and how readers participate in meaning creation. From the fundamental ontological and functional connections between author, text and reader, The Novel Imagery develops an original way of seeing the reader's role in the novel as deeply creative... more >>

The core idea of this book is that organisations exist to provide fulfilment. Why should one belong to, work for or contribute to an organisation if fulfilment cannot be achieved? Yet the reality of much of our organisational lives is one of disappointment. Too often organisations are remote abstractions. Here the argument is put forward that an... more >>

In Sonic Soma Elise Kermani traces the history of mankind from the origins of society and language to the present, and un-mutes the silence that resulted from forgetting, or refusing to hear, our own mythology 'right-side-up'. SonicSoma reunites the system of 'vibration/matter', 'sound/medium', and the double helix form of 'mind/body' which was ... more >>

In the face of increasing critique of Modernity’s founding principles, concepts like truth, the autonomous and self grounded subject, morals or solvability of conflicts have become sites of contestation and debate. This book ventures to re-think some of those categories being debated in (post)modernity by invoking transpersonal and transration... more >>

Mirror’s figural imaginations have spread widely along the length of human history. A mirror’s triptych technology, composed of three mirrored figures, each of which has individually been suggested by different mirror figures in the past, appears as an innovative mirror figure in Magritte’s’ La Reproduction Interdite: The Portrait of Edw... more >>

Tony See argues that the notion of a community without identity is derivable from the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In doing so Tony See presents an original interpretation of Heidegger in which he was neither a mere Nazi follower nor an "apolitical" philosopher who was solely concerned with ontological questioning. Drawing upon Heidegger's ea... more >>

The utilization of an instrumental model that sees language as a means of bringing us towards fixed meaning is one of the greatest limitations in the human attempt to establish an authentic understanding of the dynamics of communication. An acceptance of language from this perspective constricts our ability to have an adequate confrontation, or ... more >>

The second and revised edition of a groundbreaking philosophical treatise from a leading authority on the theory and practice of electronic culture in the media age. Continuing the work of post(e)-pedagogy of Applied Grammatology, Ulmer's Teletheory is the second book of his trilogy on the modes of inquiry which concludes with Heuretics. Telethe... more >>