In "Carnival and Cannibal", distinguished French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) reflects on many of his most significant ideas concerning the significance of language and the relationship between the technological and the social. In this,...

Though it has been nearly two decades since the fall of Communism in the former Soviet Union and the accompanying disintegration of the Soviet state, a strange aspect of the current cultural situation in Russia and in the other former republics of th...

Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic here presents an unorthodox, imaginative take on the transition from Communism to capitalism in the former Soviet Union. Three characters – a dog, an underdog, and a cat – offer the reader narratives that reflect on...

Art today is in deep crisis. Criticism seems to have abandoned any notion of evaluation, the public has been denied the possibility of understanding, and aesthetics have lost all legitimacy. Formerly, artists claimed their right to decide for themsel...

Artist meets writer; young woman meets older man; daughter meets father. All these encounters are played out in the arresting conversations between the artist Ninar Esper (b. 1971) and the father she hardly knew, the Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis (b. 1...

Tzvetan Todorov is one of Europe's leading intellectuals. Beyond his work in cultural and literary theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis, Todorov's influence is extraordinarily far-reaching specifically because of the clarity of his writing and his r...

In this collection of essays, Ashis Nandy uses the metaphor of the future – imagined utopias, conceptions of cultural possibilities, social critiques of things to come – to redefine the present. Nandy's effort is to demonstrate that, in a world incre...

"All my life I have seen only troubled times, extreme divisions in society, and immense destruction; I have taken part in these troubles" – Guy Debord. Guy Debord is one of the 20th Century's most prophetic critics. His bestselling work, "Society of...

Bukharin's "Prison Manuscripts" were written in Moscow's Lubyanka prison during 1937-1938 while awaiting his inevitable liquidation. Like Antonio Gramsci's Prison Notebooks, Bukharin's Manuscripts too have their central emphasis on issues such as cul...

Jean-Paul Sartre, novelist, playwright, biographer, was undoubtedly one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Above all, however, he was an embodiment of the engage intellectual, active in a variety of political causes, as well as an indi...