Search results for ""Zero Books""

A Western Marxist reading of contemporary art, focusing on the question of the continued presence (or absence) of the avant-garde’s transgressive impulse. Taking art’s ability to contribute to radical social transformation as its point of departure, Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen's new title from Zero Books analyses the relationship between the current neoliberal hegemony and contemporary art, including relational aesthetics and interventionist art, new institutionalism and post-modern architecture. '...a trenchant critique of neoliberal domination of contemporary art.' Gene Ray, author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory

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Coming From Nothing is a tragi-comic love story concerned with notions of identity, such as Judith Butler's idea that sexual identity isn't determined by the body, and John Locke's that personal identity is a question of memory. The first novella in Zero Books new series of Thought Experiment Novellas, these are books that work out philosophical arguments in their plots. Whether focusing on William James' determinism, Descartes' mind/body dualism, or Judith Butler's argument for gender performativity, these short books attempt to flesh out philosophical problems. They are stories wherein philosophical ideas have consequences, at least in the lives of the characters.

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Karl Marx is a revolutionary. He is not alone. It is November 1849 and London is full of them: a bunch of fanatical dreamers trying to change the world. Persecuted by a tyrannical housekeeper and ignored by his sexually liberated wife, Marx immerses himself in his writing, believing that his book on capital is the surest way of ushering in the workers' revolution and his family out of poverty. But when a mysterious figure begins to take an obsessive interest in his work Marx's revolutionary journey takes an unexpected turn... Marx Returns combines historical fiction, psychological mystery, philosophy, differential calculus and extracts from Marx and Engels's collected works to reimagine the life and times of one of history's most exceptional minds, in this next fiction offering from Zero Books.

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In 2030 America is broke. When NASA is forced to raffle off a trip to outer space and the orbiting Houston Astrodome, Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty, the ticket is won by a guy from Cleveland who is so fat he can’t make it out of his own house, let alone get crammed in a rocket ship. Instead he auctions the ticket off, and the winning bid belongs to the patriarch of the Van Kruup family, an American dynasty founded on coal, railroads, and masturbation (not necessarily in that order). But when they lose their inter-generation fortune in the Great Funk Crash, Stanely Van Kruup, sole heir to the Van Kruup fortune, is evicted from the ten thousand acre estate in rural Pennsylvania he has left only once since birth and must search for his (presumed dead) older brother in an attempt to restore his inheritance. Too Fat to go to the Moon is Zero Books' latest foray into avant-garde fiction.

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We are living in the age of decline, or at least crisis, of what might be called a ‘culture of friendship’. Our existence as social beings is constricted in a triangle whose three apices are: the alienated work, subjected to the principle of ruthless competition, the closed, isolated nuclear family and the national or ‘cultural’ community constituted in the act of aggression towards a common enemy (the ‘alien’). It is precisely this constriction that makes the culture of friendship decline, and vice versa: it is this decline that seems to make any other way of life increasingly harder to imagine. However, if we are to resist the temptation of returning to the logic of clashing, violent particularisms and defend ourselves against fascist or fascistoid tendencies that appear on the political horizon, some kind of opening must occur, we must once again be able to experiment with new forms of being together, despite divisions resulting from territorial and cultural identities or family relations. What we need is a renaissance of the culture of friendship. Originally published in Poland, this edition from Zero Books is the first English language publication of In Praise of Friendship.

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