Recommendations based on "Michel Foucault's Archaeology of Scientific Reason Science and the History of Reason"

In Black Sun, Julia Kristeva addresses the subject of melancholia, examining this phenomenon in the context of art, literature, philosophy, the history of religion and culture, as well as psychoanalysis. She describes the depressive as one who perceives the sense of self as a crucial pursuit and a nearly unattainable goal and explains how the love of a lost identity of attachment lies at the very core of depression's dark heart.In her discussion she analyzes Holbein's controversial 1522 painting "The Body of the Dead Christ in the Tomb," and has revealing comments on the works of Marguerite Duras, Dostoyevsky and Nerval. Black Sun takes the view that depression is a discourse with a language to be learned, rather than strictly a pathology to be treated.

The most popular occult work of the twentieth century--now in a hardbound edition that evokes the original volume, with a new introduction by scholar of mysticism Richard Smoley.For generations, readers have debated the origins and studied the knowledge of this mysterious exploration of Hermetic wisdom, attributed to "Three Initiates."Now in its second century, The Kybalion is restored to hardcover in a commemorative volume that evokes the appearance of the occult landmark's first edition.The new introduction by Richard Smoley, a celebrated scholar of mystical traditions, makes this a historical keepsake.

This groundbreaking classic explores the necessity of connections between our life and soul and developing the main lines of the soul-making process.

When it first appeared in 1975, After Babel created a sensation, quickly establishing itself as both a controversial and seminal study of literary theory. In the original edition, Steiner provided readers with the first systematic investigation since the eighteenth century of the phenomenology and processes of translation both inside and between languages. Taking issue with the principal emphasis of modern linguistics, he finds the root of the "Babel problem" in our deep instinct for privacy and territory, noting that every people has in its language a unique body of shared secrecy. With this provocative thesis he analyzes every aspect of translation from fundamental conditions of interpretation to the most intricate of linguistic constructions.For the long-awaited second edition, Steiner entirely revised the text, added new and expanded notes, and wrote a new preface setting the work in the present context of hermeneutics, poetics, and translation studies. This new edition brings the bibliography up to the present with substantially updated references, including much Russian and Eastern European material. Like the towering figures of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, Steiner's work is central to current literary thought. After Babel, Third Edition is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the debates raging in the academy today.

At the end of the eighteenth century, scientists for the first time demonstrated what medieval and renaissance alchemists had long suspected; ice is not lifeless but vital, a crystalline revelation of vigorous powers. Studied in esoteric and exoterical representations of frozen phenomena, several Romantic figures - including Coleridge and Poe, Percy and Mary Shelley, Emerson and Thoreau - challenged traditional notions of ice as waste and instead celebrated crystals, glaciers, and the poles as special disclosures of a holistic principle of being. The Spiritual History of Ice explores this ecology of frozen shapes in fascinating detail, revealing not only a neglected current of the Romantic age but also a secret history and psychology of ice.

Volumeÿ2 of the definitive English translation of one of the most important philosophical works of the 19th century, the basic statement in one important stream of post-Kantian thought. Corrects nearly 1,000 errors and omissions in the older Haldane-Kemp translation. For the first time, this edition translates and locates all quotes and provides full index.

We tend to suppose that the ancient Greeks had primitive ideas of the self, of responsibility, freedom, and shame, and that now humanity has advanced from these to a more refined moral consciousness. Bernard Williams's original and radical book questions this picture of Western history. While we are in many ways different from the Greeks, Williams claims that the differences are not to be traced to a shift in these basic conceptions of ethical life. We are more like the ancients than we are prepared to acknowledge, and only when this is understood can we properly grasp our most important differences from them, such as our rejection of slavery. The author is a philosopher, but much of his book is directed to writers such as Homer and the tragedians, whom he discusses as poets and not just as materials for philosophy. At the center of his study is the question of how we can understand Greek tragedy at all, when its world is so far from ours. Williams explains how it is that when the ancients speak, they do not merely tell us about themselves, but about ourselves. Shame and Necessity gives a new account of our relations to the Greeks, and helps us to see what ethical ideas we need in order to live in the modern world.

All the components of Greek art which were to culminate in the Classical styles of the 5th century BC can be traced in the development of vase painting in early Greece, from the 11th to the 6th centuries BC. Geometric styles gave way by about 700 BC to the influence of the Near East; in the following Orientalizing period the Greeks learned how to tell a story in pictures; and by the 6th century various regional studios were competing with the dominant Corinthian and Athenian potters and painters for markets east and west. Early Greek vases display the Greek painter's craft at its most mathematical, its most colorful, and in its most directly narrative mode. They closely mirror the history and culture of their day. The later achievements of Greek art can only be fully understood in the light of this formative period of variety, competition and experiment.

Illustrated throughout with revealing images, this is the first and only work in which the world-famous Swiss psychologist explains to the layperson his enormously influential theory of symbolism as revealed in dreams.

The first English-language publication of a classic French book on the relationship between the development of photography and of the medical category of hysteria.In this classic of French cultural studies, Georges Didi-Huberman traces the intimate and reciprocal relationship between the disciplines of psychiatry and photography in the late nineteenth century. Focusing on the immense photographic output of the Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for insane and incurable women, Didi-Huberman shows the crucial role played by photography in the invention of the category of hysteria. Under the direction of the medical teacher and clinician Jean-Martin Charcot, the inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics were methodically photographed, providing skeptical colleagues with visual proof of hysteria's specific form. These images, many of which appear in this book, provided the materials for the multivolume album Iconographie photographique de la Salpetriere.As Didi-Huberman shows, these photographs were far from simply objective documentation. The subjects were required to portray their hysterical "type"—they performed their own hysteria. Bribed by the special status they enjoyed in the purgatory of experimentation and threatened with transfer back to the inferno of the incurables, the women patiently posed for the photographs and submitted to presentations of hysterical attacks before the crowds that gathered for Charcot's "Tuesday Lectures."Charcot did not stop at voyeuristic observation. Through techniques such as hypnosis, electroshock therapy, and genital manipulation, he instigated the hysterical symptoms in his patients, eventually giving rise to hatred and resistance on their part. Didi-Huberman follows this path from complicity to antipathy in one of Charcot's favorite "cases," that of Augustine, whose image crops up again and again in the Iconographie. Augustine's virtuosic performance of hysteria ultimately became one of self-sacrifice, seen in pictures of ecstasy, crucifixion, and silent cries.