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THE ART AND THOUGHT OF HERACLITUS



"We must realize that war is universal and strife is justice, and that all things come into the world and pass away through strife"





In the sixth century B.C. — twenty-five hundred years before Einstein — Heraclitus of Ephesus declared that energy is the essence of matter, that everything becomes energy in flux, in relativity. His great book, On Nature, the world's first coherent philosophical treatise and touchstone for Plato, Aristotle, and Marcus Aurelius, has long been lost to history — but its surviving fragments have for thousands of years tantalized our greatest thinkers, from Montaigne to Nietzsche, Heidegger to Jung.



Behind the superficial obscurity of what fragments we have of Heraclitus' thought, Professor Kahn claims that it is possible to detect a systematic view of human existence, a theory of language which sees ambiguity as a device for the expression of multiple meaning, and a vision of human life and death within the larger order of nature. The fragments are presented here in a readable order; translation and commentary aim to make accessible the power and originality of a systematic thinker and a great master of artistic prose. The commentary locates Heraclitus within the tradition of early Greek thought, but stresses the importance of his ideas for topical theories of language, literature and philosophy.







THE GAY SCIENCE



"[This book] mirrors all of Nietzsche's thought and could be related in hundreds of ways to his other books, his notes, and his letters. And yet it is complete in itself. For it is a work of art."

- Walter Kaufmann in the Introduction





Nietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of all my books". It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God — to which a large part of the book is devoted — and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.



Walter Kaufmann's commentary, with its many quotations from previously untranslated letters, brings to life Nietzsche as a human being and illuminates his philosophy. The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic.



Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. We encounter Zarathustra in these pages as well as many of Nietzsche's most interesting philosophical ideas and the largest collection of his own poetry that he himself ever published.



Walter Kaufmann's English versions of Nietzsche represent one of the major translation enterprises of our time. He is the first philosopher to have translated Nietzsche's major works, and never before has a single translator given us so much of Nietzsche.







BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL: PRELUDE TO A PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE



"That which is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil"





After the great affirmation of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-5), Nietzsche produced a devastating diagnosis of the worthlessness of contemporary existence. In Beyond Good and Evil (1886), described by Michael Tanner in his introduction as "one of the greatest books of a very great thinker", Nietzsche returned to a favourite theme: how cultures lose their creative drive and become decadent. He offers a wealth of fresh insights into the self-destructive urge of Christianity, the prevalence of "slave moralities" and the terrible (and now very obvious) dangers in the headlong pursuit of philosophical or scientific truth. And yet, as always in Nietzsche, his savage criticisms are only a prelude to a more optimistic vision.







ON THE GENEALOGY OF MORALS: A POLEMIC



"Reason, seriousness, mastery over the emotions, the whole murky affair which goes by the name of thought, all the privileges and showpieces of man: what a high price has been paid for them! How much blood and horror is at the bottom of all 'good things'!"





On the Genealogy of Morals (1887) is a book about the history of ethics and about interpretation. Nietzsche rewrites the former as a history of cruelty, exposing the central values of the Judaeo-Christian and liberal traditions — compassion, equality, justice — as the product of a brutal process of conditioning designed to domesticate the animal vitality of earlier cultures. The result is a book which raises profoundly disquieting issues about the violence of both ethics and interpretation. Nietzsche questions moral certainties by showing that religion and science have no claim to absolute truth, before turning on his own arguments in order to call their very presuppositions into question.







TWILIGHT OF THE IDOLS AND THE ANTI-CHRIST



"One must be superior to mankind in force, in loftiness of soul — in contempt..."





In these two devastating works, Nietzsche offers a sustained and often vitriolic attack on the morality and the beliefs of his time, in particular those of Hegel, Kant and Schopenhauer. Twilight of the Idols is a "grand declaration of war" on reason, psychology and theology that combines highly charged personal attacks on his contemporaries with a lightning tour of his own philosophy. It also paves the way for The Anti-Christ, Nietzsche's final assault on institutional Christianity, in which he identifies himself with the "Dionysian" artist and confronts Christ: the only opponent he feels worthy of him.









ECCE HOMO: HOW ONE BECOMES WHAT ONE IS



"I am not a man, I am dynamite"





In late 1888, only weeks before his collapse into madness, Nietzsche set out to compose his autobiography, and Ecce Homo remains the most intriguing and bizarre example of the genre ever written. In this extraordinary work Nietzsche traces his life, work and development as a philosopher, examines the heroes he has identified with, struggled against and then overcome — Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, Christ — and predicts the cataclysmic impact of his "forthcoming revaluation of all values". Both self-celebrating and self-mocking, penetrating and strange, Ecce Homo gives the final, definitive expression to Nietzsche's main beliefs and is in every way his last testament.







THUS SPOKE ZARATHUSTRA: A BOOK FOR EVERYONE AND NO ONE



"I tell you: one must have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star. I tell you: you still have chaos in you."





Nietzsche was the most revolutionary and subversive thinker in the history of philosophy, and Thus Spoke Zarathustra remains his most famous and influential work. It describes how the ancient Persian prophet Zarathustra descends from his solitude in the mountains to tell the world that God is dead and that the Superman, the human embodiment of divinity, is his successor. With blazing intensity and poetic brilliance, Nietzsche argues that the meaning of existence is not to be found in religious pieties or meek submission, but in an all-powerful life force: passionate, chaotic and free.



"Enigmatic, vatic, emphatic, passionate ... often breathtakingly insightful, Nietzsche's works together make a unique statement in the literature of European ideas." - A. C. Grayling







THE WILL TO POWER



"Of what is great one must either be silent or speak with greatness. With greatness — that means cynically and with innocence"





Nietzsche's notebooks, kept by him during his most productive years, offer a fascinating glimpse into the workshop and mind of the great thinker. The Will to Power, compiled from the notebooks, is one of the most famous books of the past hundred years, but few have studied it. Here, at last, is the first critical edition in any language.



Down through the Nazi period The Will to Power was often mistakenly considered to be Nietzsche's crowning systematic labor; since World War II it has frequently been denigrated, just as fallaciously, as being not worth reading. In fact, it represents a stunning selection from Nietzsche's notebooks, in a topical arrangement that enables the reader to find what Nietzsche wrote on nihilism, art, morality, religion, the theory of knowledge, and whatever else interested him. But no previous edition — even in the original German — shows which notes Nietzsche utilized subsequently in his works, and which sections are not paralleled in the finished books. Nor has any previous edition furnished a commentary or index.



Walter Kaufmann, in collaboration with R. J. Hollingdale, brings to this volume his unsurpassed skills as a Nietzsche translator and scholar. Professor Kaufmann has included the approximate date of each note. His running footnote commentary offers the information needed to follow Nietzsche's train of thought, and indicates, among other things, which notes were eventually superseded by later formulations, and where all German editions, including the very latest, depart from the manuscripts. The comprehensive index serves to guide the reader to the extraordinary riches of this book.







HUMAN, ALL TOO HUMAN: A BOOK FOR FREE SPIRITS



"... driven now by the spirit, we advance from opinion to opinion, through one party after another, as noble traitors to all things that can in any way be betrayed — and yet we feel no sense of guilt"





In this wide-ranging work Nietzsche first employed his celebrated aphoristic style, so perfectly suited to his iconoclastic, penetrating, and multi-faceted thought. Many themes of his later work make their first appearance here, expressed with unforgettable liveliness and subtlety. Human, All Too Human well deserves its subtitle — "A Book For Free Spirits" — and its original dedication to Voltaire, whose project of radical enlightenment here found a new champion.









DAYBREAK: THOUGHTS ON THE PREJUDICES OF MORALITY



"We have to learn to think differently — in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently"





Daybreak marks the arrival of Nietzsche's "mature" philosophy and is indispensable for an understanding of his critique of morality and "revaluation of all values". This volume presents the distinguished translation by R. J. Hollingdale, with a new introduction that argues for a dramatic change in Nietzsche's views from Human, All Too Human to Daybreak, and shows how this change, in turn, presages the main themes of Nietzsche's later and better-known works such as On the Genealogy of Morals. The main themes of Daybreak are located in their intellectual and philosophical contexts: in Nietzsche's training as a classical philologist and his fascination with the Sophists and Thucydides; in the moral philosophies of Kant and Schopenhauer, which are the central foci of Nietzsche's critique of morality; and in the German Materialist movement of the 1850s and after, which shaped Nietzsche's conception of persons. The edition is completed by a chronology, notes and a guide to further reading.







UNTIMELY MEDITATIONS



"Some birds are blinded so that they may sing more beautifully; I do not think the men of today sing more beautifully than their grandfathers, but I know that they have been blinded"





These four short works were published by Nietzsche between 1873 and 1876. In addition to the ostensible subjects of their individual titles, they deal with such broad topics as the relationship between popular and genuine culture, strategies for cultural reform, the task of philosophy, the nature of education, and the relationship between art, science and life. They also include Nietzsche's earliest statement of his own understanding of human selfhood as a process of endlessly "becoming who one is". As Daniel Breazeale shows in his introduction to this new edition of R. J. Hollingdale's translation of the essays, these four early texts are key documents for understanding the development of Nietzsche's thought and clearly anticipate many of the themes of his later writings. Nietzsche himself always cherished his Untimely Meditations and believed that they provide valuable evidence of his "becoming and self-overcoming" and constitute a "public pledge" concerning his own distinctive task as a philosopher.







THE BIRTH OF TRAGEDY OUT OF THE SPIRIT OF MUSIC



"Blessed Hellenic people! How great Dionysus must be among you, if the Delphic god thinks such magic necessary to heal your dithyrambic madness!"





The Birth of Tragedy is one of the seminal philosophical works of the modern period. Nietzsche's discussion of the nature of culture, of the conditions under which it can flourish and of those under which it will decline, his analysis of the sources of discontent with the modern world, his criticism of rationalism and of traditional morality, his aesthetic theories and his conception of "the Dionysiac" have had a profound influence on the philosophy, literature, music, and politics of the twentieth century. This edition presents a new translation by Ronald Speirs and an introduction by Raymond Geuss that sets the work in its historical and philosophical context.







SIMULACRA AND SIMULATION



"The simulacrum is never what hides the truth. It is truth that hides the fact that there is none.



The simulacrum is true."





Simulacra and Simulation is most known for its discussion of images and signs and how they relate to contemporary society. Baudrillard claims that our current society has replaced all reality and meaning with symbols and signs, and that what humans experience today is a simulation of reality. Moreover, these simulacra are not merely mediations of reality; they are not based in a reality at all, nor do they hide it; they simply hide the fact that the concept of reality is irrelevant to our current understanding of our lives. The simulacra that Baudrillard refers to are the significations and symbolism of culture and media that construct perceived reality, the acquired understanding by which our lives and shared existence is rendered legible, saturating society with these constructs to such an extent that all meaning has been rendered meaningless by becoming infinitely mutable, and giving rise to a phenomenon he calls the "precession of simulacra".







AMERICA



"Everything is destined to reappear as simulation. Landscapes as photography, woman as the sexual scenario, thoughts as writing, terrorism as fashion and the media, events as television. Things seem only to exist by the virtue of this strange destiny. You wonder whether the world itself isn't just here to serve as advertising copy in some other world."





In this, his most accessible and evocative book, France's leading philosopher of postmodernism takes to the freeways in a collection of traveler's tales from the land of hyperreality.



"Occasionally provocative and almost always infuriating ... America is filled with perceptive, almost poetic observations." - Rolling Stone



"Since de Toqueville, French thinkers have been fascinated with America. But when it comes to mysterious paradoxes and lyrical complexity no French intellectual matches Jean Baudrillard in contemplating the New World... [He] has become a sharp-shooting Lone Ranger of the post-Marxist left." - The New York Times



"A mixture of crazy notions and dead-on insights, America is a valuable (and voluble) picture of what Mr. Baudrillard calls 'the only remaining primitive society' ... ours." - The New York Times Book Review







THE CONSUMER SOCIETY: MYTHS AND STRUCTURES



"The whole of the discourse on needs is based on a naïve anthropology: that of the natural propensity to happiness. ... But what is this happiness which haunts modern civilization with such ideological force? ... the myth of happiness is the one which, in modern societies, takes up and comes to embody the myth of Equality."





The Consumer Society is Baudrillard's most organized examination of mass media culture, and the meaning of leisure and anomie in affluent societies, while a discussion of the body demonstrates Baudrillard's extraordinary insight into a vital subject in contemporary cultural theory. This text is essential reading for students of sociology and cultural studies.



"The Consumer Society is the young Baudrillard at his best ... a sociological study of the society of consumption of the finest order, this text continues to shed light on the subject and object of consumption, around which contemporary societies are organized." - Douglas Kellner, University of Texas/UCLA







IN THE SHADOW OF THE SILENT MAJORITIES ...OR THE END OF THE SOCIAL



"The masses aren't the Social. They absorb all the social energy, but no longer refract it. They absorb every sign and every meaning, but no longer reflect them. They never participate. They are the reversion of any social and of any socialism. They wander through meaning, politics, representation, history, ideology, with a somnambulent strength of denial. Indeed the only phenomenon that may be in a relation of affinity with it, is terrorism. Contemporary terrorism aims at the Social in response to the terrorism of the Social."





Published one year after Forget Foucault, In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities (1978) may be the most important sociopolitical manifesto of the twentieth century: it calls for nothing less than the end of both sociology and politics. Disenfranchised revolutionaries (the Red Brigades, the Baader-Meinhof Gang) hoped to reach the masses directly through spectacular actions, but their message merely played into the hands of the media and the state. In a media society meaning has no meaning anymore; communication merely communicates itself. Jean Baudrillard uses this last outburst of ideological terrorism in Europe to showcase the end of the "Social". In the electronic media society, all the masses can do — and all they will do — is enjoy the spectacle. In In the Shadow of the Silent Majorities ideological terrorism doesn't represent anything anymore, writes Baudrillard, not even itself. It is just the last hysterical reaction to discredited political illusions.



Internationally renowned as a twenty-first-century philosopher, reporter and provocateur, Jean Baudrillard has upset all existing theories of contemporary society with scathing humor and clinical precision.







SYMBOLIC EXCHANGE AND DEATH



"If political economy is the most rigorous attempt to put an end to death, it is clear that only death can put an end to political economy"





Jean Baudrillard is one of the most celebrated and most controversial of contemporary social theorists. This major work, appearing in English for the first time, occupies a central place in the rethinking of the humanities and social sciences around the idea of postmodernism.



It leads the reader on an exhilarating tour encompassing the end of Marxism, the enchantment of fashion, the body and sex, economic versus symbolic exchange and their differing effects on rituals of death. Most significantly, the book represents Baudrillard's fullest elaboration of the concept of the three orders of simulacra, defining the historical passage from production to reproduction to simulation.



A classic in its field, Symbolic Exchange and Death is a key source for the redefinition of contemporary social thought. Baudrillard's critical gaze appraises social theories as diverse as cybernetics, ethnography, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, communications theory and semiotics.



"This is easily Baudrillard's most important work. It is a key intervention in the debates on modernity and postmodernity and the site of his postmodern turn. Anyone who wants to understand the complexity and provocativeness of Baudrillard's richest period must read this text." - Douglas Kellner, University of Texas/UCLA







THE TRANSPARENCY OF EVIL: ESSAYS ON EXTREME PHENOMENA



"In every compulsion to resemblance, every extradition of difference, in all contiguity of things and their own image, all conflation of beings and their own code, lies the threat of an incestuous virulence, a diabolical otherness boding the breakdown of all this humming machinery"





In this, his most important collection of essays since Symbolic Exchange and Death, Jean Baudrillard contemplates Western culture "after the orgy" — the orgy, that is, of the revolutions of the '60s. The sexual revolution has led, he argues, not to sexual liberation but to a confusion of the categories of man and woman — to the "androgynous and Frankensteinian appeal of a Michael Jackson". The revolution in art has engendered a "transaesthetic realm of indifference". The cybernetic revolution has blurred the distinction between man and machine, while the political revolution has led to a "transpolitics" that merely simulates old political forms. Such are the points of Baudrillard's compass as he steers his way through the mental landscape of this febrile fin de siècle.



"Such quality and accuracy of insight indicate both the power of Baudrillard's initial position and the value of the French tradition of the grand philosophical analyst moving freely through the culture." - Brian Appleyard, The Spectator



"We may not like Baudrillard's merciless honesty about the modern age. But we need his voice: the crow on the shoulder." - Pat Kane, The Scotsman







THE INTELLIGENCE OF EVIL OR THE LUCIDITY PACT



"The world is not what we think; it is what thinks us in return"





We are at war. Human cultures are divided into two basic types, two antagonistic forces, one based on symbolic exchange, which is dual and reciprocal, and one based on money and sign exchange, which is totalising.



Non-western societies can create genuinely symbolic, durable cultures. But the western world-system, based on a logic of empire, is designed to create an integrated and sealed reality, to snap tight around the world and its image. If the first is indestructible and the second is irresistible, who can win and what will victory look like? The answer may lie in the capacity for violence in the world-system itself, threatening that system from within with the purest of symbolic forms, the challenge of resistance.



The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact is the summation of Baudrillard's work over twenty years. It is the essential analysis of the fundamental conflict of our time.







ORGY OF THE WILL: A PHILOSOPHY OF THE FUTURE



"The days of the book-philosopher are over"





In this work of absolute genius, after two and a half thousand years of progress the path of philosophy arrives at an end, and the intellect at last draws, one by one, its ultimate conclusions. Apocalyptic, uncompromising and merciless, Orgy of the Will constitutes nothing less than a declaration of war on the so-called "human species".









