Books about Resemblance from Amazon.com

Simulations never existed as a book before it was "translated" into English Actually it came from two different bookCovers written at different times by Jean Baudrillard. The first part of Simulations, and most provocative because it made a fiction of theory, was "The Procession of Simulacra." It had first been published in Simulacre et Simulations (1981). The second part, written much earlier and in a more academic mode, came from L'Echange Symbolique et la Mort (1977). It was a half-earnest, half-parodical attempt to "historicize" his own conceit by providing it with some kind of genealogy of the three orders of appearance: the Counterfeit attached to the classical period; Production for the industrial era; and Simulation, controlled by the code. It was Baudrillard's version of Foucault's Order of Things and his ironical commentary of the history of truth. The book opens on a quote from Ecclesiastes asserting flatly that "the simulacrum is true." It was certainly true in Baudrillard's book, but otherwise apocryphal.

One of the most influential essays of the 20th century, Simulations was put together in 1983 in order to be published as the first little black book of Semiotext(e)'s new Foreign Agents Series. Baudrillard's bewildering thesis, a bold extrapolation on Ferdinand de Saussure's general theory of general linguistics, was in fact a clinical vision of contemporary consumer societies where signs don't refer anymore to anything except themselves. They all are generated by the matrix.

In effect Baudrillard's essay (it quickly became a must to read both in the art world and in academe) was upholding the only reality there was in a world that keeps hiding the fact that it has none. Simulacrum is its own pure simulacrum and the simulacrum is true. In his celebrated analysis of Disneyland, Baudrillard demonstrates that its childish imaginary is neither true nor false, it is there to make us believe that the rest of America is real, when in fact America is a Disneyland. It is of the order of the hyper-real and of simulation. Few people at the time realized that Baudrillard's simulacrum itself wasn't a thing, but a "deterrence machine," just like Disneyland, meant to reveal the fact that the real is no longer real and illusion no longer possible. But the more impossible the illusion of reality becomes, the more impossible it is to separate true from false and the real from its artificial resurrection, the more panic-stricken the production of the real is..
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"Just as Robert Hullot-Kentor's new translations of Adorno's main works are a stroke of good fortune for philosophical literature, in his Things Beyond Resemblance he presents completely new and altogether original aspects of Adorno's thought. Here, under the optic of the artist, Adorno's philosophy once again begins to breathe; indeed, the philosopher and philologist that Hullot-Kentor equally is, gives voice to Adorno's aesthetics and its own often artistic prose. This occurs most astoundingly, however, when the American author undertakes to comprehend the current political and social situation of his country in the concepts and theories of the German philosopher and thus demonstrates beyond any doubt Adorno's undiminished contemporary import." -- Rolf Tiedemann, director emeritus of the T.W. Adorno-Archive, Frankfurt, and editor of T.W. Adorno's Collected Writings

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This long overdue English translation of Karl Löwith's magisterial study is a major event in Nietzsche scholarship in the Anglo-American intellectual world. Its initial publication was extraordinary in itself--a dissident interpretation, written by a Jew, appearing in National Socialist Germany in 1935. Since then, Löwith's book has continued to gain recognition as one of the key texts in the German Nietzsche reception, as well as a remarkable effort to reclaim the philosopher's work from political misappropriation.
For Löwith, the centerpiece of Nietzsche's thought is the doctrine of eternal recurrence, a notion which Löwith, unlike Heidegger, deems incompatible with the will to power. His careful examination of Nietzsche's cosmological theory of the infinite repetition of a finite number of states of the world suggests the paradoxical consequences this theory implies for human freedom. How is it possible to will the eternal recurrence of each moment of one's life, if both this decision and the states of affairs governed by it appear to be predestined? Löwith's book, one of the most important, if seldom acknowledged, sources for recent Anglophone Nietzsche studies, remains a central text for all concerned with understanding the philosopher's work..
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Girls' heads bowed in a secretive huddle, girls' hands wrapped 'round another girl's arm, girls' bare legs and feet dangling in a chorus, girls' lab-coated figures standing in a clinical circle. Girls staring into another girl's mouth, girls being eaten by one another, girls throttling another girl's two-foot long neck. Girls' stockings, girls' hair, girls' spindly hands and skinny legs. In this, her first artist's book, are Anna Gaskell's girls, in mysterious color photographs and scratchy, toothy drawings..
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Focusses on Vedic ideas and Hinduism to explore theoretical and methodological issues in comparative religion. By a leading scholar. good reviews .
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