University Of Minnesota Press: 838 books

The magnum opus of a Japanese master of speculative fiction, and a book that established Yoshio Aramaki as a leading representative of the genre, The Sacred Era is part post-apocalyptic world, part faux-religious tract, and part dream narrative. In a distant future ruled by a new Papal Court serving...

Virginia Woolf, to whom university admittance had been forbidden, watched the universities open their doors. Though she was happy that her sisters could study in university libraries, she cautioned women against joining the procession of educated men and being co-opted into protecting a “civilization”...

On contemporary communication in its various human and nonhuman forms Contemporary communication puts us not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery. Machine communication—to communicate not just via but also with machines—is therefore the focus of this volume....

Engaging with remains and remainders of media cultures As new, as current, as now—this is primarily our understanding of technologies and their mediating of our social constructions. But past media and past practices continue to haunt and inflect our present social and technical arrangements....

On the social consequences of machines Automation, animation, and ecosystems are terms of central media-philosophical concern in today’s society of humans and machines. This volume describes the social consequences of machines as a mediating concept for the animation of life and automation...

A media theory of markets Markets abound in media—but a media theory of markets is still emerging. Anthropology offers media archaeologies of markets, and the sociology of markets and finance unravels how contemporary financial markets have witnessed a media technological arms race. Building...

Complex, haunting, imaginative and profoundly literary, Didactic Poetries is Beck’s response to Schiller’s statement: “We are still waiting for a didactic poem where thought itself would be and would remain poetic,” and Hegel’s claim that, “strictly speaking, didactic poetry isn’t poetry.”For...

The museum of contemporary art might be the most advanced recording device ever invented. It is a place for the storage of historical grievances and the memory of forgotten artistic experiments, social projects, or errant futures. But in late nineteenth and early twentieth-century Russia, this recording...

From Almanac of Fall (1984) to The Turin Horse (2011), renowned Hungarian filmmaker Béla Tarr has followed the collapse of the communist promise. The “time after” is not the uniform and morose time of those who no longer believe in anything. It is the time when we are less interested in histories...

The French philosopher Félix Guattari frequently visited Japan during the 1980s and organized exchanges between French and Japanese artists and intellectuals. His immersion into the “machinic eros” of Japanese culture put him into contact with media theorists such as Tetsuo Kogawa and activists...

In our current landscape of communicative and connective excess, a very novel contemporary exhaustion exacerbated by our relation to the postdigital terrain is ever present. The Brazilian philosopher and schizoanalyst Peter Pál Pelbart pushes the vital question of our nihililstic age to the limits:...

“We’re doomed.” So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific...

Before the world knew of the thinker who “philosophizes with a hammer,” there was a young, passionate thinker who was captivated by the two forces found within Greek art: Dionysus and Apollo. In this essay, which was the forerunner to his groundbreaking book The Birth of Tragedy, The Dionysian Vision...

In On Doubt, Vilém Flusser refines Martin Heidegger’s famous declaration that “language is the dwelling of Being.” For Flusser, “the word is the dwelling of being,” because in fact, in the beginning, there was the word. On Doubt is a treatise on the human intellect, its relation...