Books from Zone Books

Vital Nourishment: Departing from Happiness
By François Jullien
The philosophical tradition in the West has always subjected life to conceptualdivisions and questions about meaning. In Vital Nourishment, François Jullien contends that althoughthis process has given rise to a...
Contemporary States of Emergency: The Politics of Military and Humanitarian Interventions
By Didier Fassin, Mariella Pandolfi
From natural disaster areas to zones of conflict around the world, a new logic of intervention has emerged. This new post-Cold War international order combines military action and humanitarian aid,...
The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals
By Adi Ophir, Mellon Visiting Professor of Humanities and Middle East Studies Adi Ophir
A new moral theory from an Israeli philosopher and activist emphasizing the existential and political nature of evil.What remains of moral judgment when truth itself is mistrusted, when the validity...
Leonardo Da Vinci Last Supper /: Last Supper
By Leo Steinberg
A fresh look at the multiplicity of meanings in Leonardo's Last Supper.A picture universally recognized, endlessly scrutinized and described, incessantly copied, adapted, lampooned: does Leonardo's near-ruined Last Supper still offer...
War in the Age of Intelligent Machines
By Manuel De Landa
In the aftermath of the methodical destruction of Iraq during the Persian Gulf War, the power and efficiency of new computerized weapons and surveillance technology have become chillingly apparent. For...
The Panorama: History of a Mass Medium
By Stephan Oettermann
In the wide-ranging contemporary debates about visuality and the emergence of the modern spectator, the significance of panorama painting in the nineteenth century is frequently cited. Stephan Oettermann's book The...
The Divided City: On Memory and Forgetting in Ancient Athens
By Nicole Loraux
Athens, 403 BCE. The end of the bloody oligarchic dictatorship of the Thirty. The democrats return to the city victorious. Renouncing vengeance, in an act of amnesia, citizens call for...
The Propensity of Things: Toward a History of Efficacy in China
By François Jullien
In this strikingly original contribution to our understanding of Chinese philosophy,Françle;ois Julien, a French sinologist whose work has not yet appeared in English usesthe Chinese concept of shi - meaning...
Anachronic Renaissance
By Alexander Nagel, Christopher S. Wood
This book is not the story about the Renaissance, nor is it just a story. It imagines the infrastructure of many possible stories.
The Act of Being: The Philosophy of Revelation in Mullā Sadrā
By Christian Jambet
This recent study by Christian Jambet explores the essential elements of the philosophical system of Mullā Sadrā Shīrāzī, an Iranian Shi'ite of the seventeenth century. The writings of Mullā Sadrā...
Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza
By Gilles Deleuze
In this extraordinary work Gilles Deleuze, the most renowned living philosopher in France, reflects on one of the figures of the past who has most influenced his own sweeping reconfiguration...
A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century
By Andrei Pop
In A Forest of Symbols, Andrei Pop presents a groundbreaking reassessment of those writers and artists in the late nineteenth century associated with the Symbolist movement.
Masochism
By Gilles Deleuze, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch
In his stunning essay Coldness and Cruelty Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of late nineteenth-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze’s essay, certainly...
Death and the Idea of Mexico
By Claudio Lomnitz-Adler
Death and the Idea of Mexico is the first social, cultural, and political history of death in a nation that has made death its tutelary sign. Examining the history of...
The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France
By Asti Hustvedt
In fin-de-siècle France, progress and material prosperity coincided with widespread alarm about disease and decay. The obsessions of our own culture at the end of the millennium resonated in a...
Bergsonism
By Gilles Deleuze
What is needed for something new to appear? According to Gilles Deleuze, one of the most brilliant of contemporary philosophers, this question of “novelty” is the major problem posed by...
Art & Technology in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
By Pierre Francastel
A nuanced study of the effects of technology on the traditional concerns of artists and other symbol-makers.Although the work of Pierre Francastel (1900-1970) has long carried the label "sociology of...
Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion
By Caroline Walker Bynum
These seven essays by noted historian Caroline Walker Bynum exemplify her argument that historians must write in a "comic" mode, aware of history's artifice, risks, and incompletion.
Intimate Enemy: Images and Voices of the Rwandan Genocide
By Scott Straus
In 1994, an interim government in Rwanda orchestrated one of the world’s worst mass crimes: a hundred-day extermination campaign that took half a million lives. At the time, Rwanda’s genocide...
Two Sisters and Their Mother: The Anthropology of Incest
By Françoise Héritier
In this remarkable work, anthropologist Françoise Héritier charts the incest prohibition throughout history, from the strict decrees of Leviticus to modern civil codes. Through close and subtle readings, Héritier exposes...