Our taste buds are a powerful way for humans to know beauty and experience beautiful things. In Taste, Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben takes a close look at why the sense of taste has not historically been appreciated as a means to know and exper...

The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and publish...

British soldiers have been known as Tommies for centuries, but the name is particularly associated with the British soldier in World War I. In 1914, a small professional force of British soldiers crossed the Channel to aid the French. It soon became...

Tanks made their first appearance on the battlefield in September 1916 and have captured the public imagination ever since. Other countries scrambled to develop tanks of their own, and by the time war broke out again in 1939, a wide variety of tanks,...

For more than three decades, artist William Kentridge has explored in his work the nature of subjectivity, the possibilities of revolution, the Enlightenment's legacy in Africa, and the nature of time itself. At the same time, his creative work has s...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger, widely regarded as Germany's greatest living poet, was already well known in the 1960s, the tempestuous decade of which "Tumult" is an autobiographical record. Derived from old papers, notes, jottings, photos, and letters th...

The ten plays in this collection offer unprecedented grassroots perspectives on the jubilation, terror, hope, and heartbreak of mass uprising as seen during and in the wake of the Tahrir Square demonstrations. Collectively tracing events as they unfo...

Originally published in Italian in 1965, "A Test of Powers" was immediately seen as one of the central texts of Italian intellectual life. By the time of the 1968 student revolts, it was clear that Franco Fortini had anticipated many of the themes an...

In "This Strange Idea of the Beautiful", Francois Jullien explores what it means when we say something is beautiful. Bringing together ideas of beauty from both Eastern and Western philosophy, Jullien challenges the assumptions underlying our commonl...

"In 1968-1969 I wanted to die, that is to say, stop living, being killed, but it was blocked on all sides", wrote Helene Cixous, esteemed French feminist, playwright, philosopher, literary critic and novelist. Instead of suicide, she began to dream o...