Series: Zone Books

The emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences is revealed through images in scientific atlases—a story of how lofty epistemic ideals fuse with workaday practices. Objectivity has a history, and it is full of surprises. In Objectivity, Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison chart the emergence of objectivity in the mid-nineteenth-century sciences and show how the concept differs from its alternatives:...

A classic work that rereads questions of muthos and logos in multifaceted contexts. When Jean-Pierre Vernant first published Myth and Thought among the Greeks in 1965, it transformed the field of ancient Greek scholarship, calling forth a new way to think about Greek myth and thought. In eighteen essays—three of which, along with a new preface, are translated into English...

Myth and Tragedy in Ancient Greece by Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet offers a compelling reinterpretation of Greek thought and literature. These scholars are at the forefront of contemporary French classical studies, renowned for their innovative approaches. In this work, presented as a single volume, the authors deliver a provocative and unconventional reading of Greek tragedy. They highlight its stark...

In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing' love while at the same time...

The acclaimed French classicist Marcel Detienne's first book traces the odyssey of truth, aletheia, from mytho-religious concept to philosophical thought in archaic Greece. Detienne begins by examining how truth in Greek literature first emerges as an enigma. He then looks at the movement from a religious to a secular thinking about truth in the speech of the sophists and orators....

A novel attempt to make sense of our preoccupation with copies of all kinds—from counterfeits to instant replay, from parrots to photocopies. The Culture of the Copy is a novel attempt to make sense of the Western fascination with replicas, duplicates, and twins. In a work that is breathtaking in its synthetic and critical achievements, Hillel Schwartz charts the repercussions...

A new narrative for the emergence of human music, drawing from archaeology, cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. What is the origin of music? In the last few decades, this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and developments in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. In this path-breaking book, renowned musicologist Gary Tomlinson draws...

Late Medieval Christianity's encounter with miraculous materials is viewed in the context of changing conceptions of matter itself. In the period between 1150 and 1550, an increasing number of Christians in western Europe made pilgrimage to places where material objects—among them paintings, statues, relics, pieces of wood, earth, stones, and Eucharistic wafers—allegedly erupted into life through such activities as bleeding,...

In these two essays, two of the most important French thinkers of our time reflect on each other's work. In so doing, novelist/essayist Maurice Blanchot and philosopher Michel Foucault develop a new perspective on the relationship between subjectivity, fiction, and the will to truth. The two texts present reflections on writing, language, and representation which question the status of the...

In this book, his first to appear in English, French sinologist François Jullien uses the Chinese concept of shi—meaning disposition or circumstance, power or potential—as a touchstone to explore Chinese culture and to uncover the intricate structure underlying Chinese modes of thinking. In this strikingly original contribution to our understanding of Chinese philosophy, François Jullien uses the Chinese concept of...

A new form of investigative practice uses architecture as an optical device to investigate armed conflicts and environmental destruction. In recent years, the group Forensic Architecture has begun using novel research methods to undertake a series of investigations into human rights abuses. Today, the group provides crucial evidence for international courts and works with a wide range of activist groups,...

An investigation of how the idea of a public as a central fiction of modern life informs our literature, politics, and culture. Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in...

This text explores ways in which European naturalists from the High Middle Ages through to the Enlightenment used wonder and wonders, the passion and its objects, to envision themselves and the natural world. Monsters, gems that shone in the dark, and celestial apparitions adorned romances and puzzled philosophers. Drawing on the histories of art, science, philosophy, and literature, this book...