Sternberg Press 2009

175 pages B&W reprodcutions. ISBN 9781933128627

16 x 22 cm English text. Softcover

As is so often the case, it is the poets, and to a certain extent the philosophers, who lead us deeper into the labyrinth of hunger. They have the right distance from the requirements with which the community-engendering meal is connected, either because they are outside the community, or because they have an appetite and a hunger that constantly exceed the boundaries of culture’s sacrosanct regulatory scheme. As a matter of custom, they have adopted a melancholic position, unable to forget the Golden Age of Saturn, an era associated with images of an infinitely rich, flowing abundance—a memory, so easily projected onto the future qua utopia, before which the world in its present form can easily fade into a pale backdrop.

Originally published in Swedish in 1992, As a Weasel Sucks Eggs examines the enigmatic relation of melancholia to an early kind of cannibalism, which psychoanalysis, in particular, stressed. It contains reading of, amongst others, Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Sigmund Freud, G. W. F. Hegel, and the Swedish poet Gunnar Ekelöf. The authors also quote Goethe and Rabelais, for whom food is a cosmic principle, the soil of fertility, on which all creation is based. In a transferred sense, food also plays that same role for the melancholiac—he who questions the normal order of things, who creates an other “unknown food,” with a variety of meanings. The authors “trace the desire for this other food through the ages, and scrutinize its relationship to both primitive sacrificial rites as well as contemporary anthropology, philosophy, and linguistic theory.”

Daniel Birnbaum is Director of the Städelschule and its Portikus gallery and Director of the Venice Biennale 2009. He is the author of several books on art and philosophy. Anders Olsson is a Swedish writer, professor of literature at Stockholm University, and member of the Swedish Academy that awards the Nobel Prize in Literature. Olsson has written some fifteen books on poetry and the history of literature.


Price:  £18.95

Harvard University Press 2009

448 pages ISBN 9780674035119

16 x 24 cm Englsih text. Hardcover

When Empire appeared in 2000, it defined the political and economic challenges of the era of globalization and, thrillingly, found in them possibilities for new and more democratic forms of social organization. Now, with Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri conclude the trilogy begun with Empire and continued in Multitude, proposing an ethics of freedom for living in our common world and articulating a possible constitution for our common wealth.

Drawing on scenarios from around the globe and elucidating the themes that unite them, Hardt and Negri focus on the logic of institutions and the models of governance adequate to our understanding of a global commonwealth. They argue for the idea of the “common” to replace the opposition of private and public and the politics predicated on that opposition. Ultimately, they articulate the theoretical bases for what they call “governing the revolution.”

Though this book functions as an extension and a completion of a sustained line of Hardt and Negri’s thought, it also stands alone and is entirely accessible to readers who are not familiar with the previous works. It is certain to appeal to, challenge, and enrich the thinking of anyone interested in questions of politics and globalization.

RRP £25.95

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Price:  £23.36