Voices of the mind

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Giorgio Manfré

Le idee raccolta in questo saggio si muovono nell'ambito di un'area interdisciplinare di indagine, verso cui vengono fatti convergere orientamenti conoscitivi e di ricerca fra loro alquanto eterogenei: costruttivismo e teoria della società, storia sociale, antropologia, psicoanalisi. E la sfida consiste in questo: tornare, attraverso una ricognizione su alcune opere di tre protagonisti della cultura moderna - Niklas Luhmann, Karl Marx e Sigmund Freud - a interrogare le radici stesse della modernità, e ciò chiedendosi, andando in controtendenza, se la crisi della modernità (qui intesa come crisi del rapporto individuo-società) è un fatto irreversibile oppure, al contrario, superabile.

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Derek Hook, Bradley Franks, Martin Bauer

"This is the first comprehensive text on social psychological approaches to communication, providing an excellent introduction to theoretical perspectives, special topics, and applied areas and practice in communication. Bringing together scholars of international reputation, this book provides a unique contribution to the field"--

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Fatima Naqvi

This study analyzes the pervasive rhetoric of victimhood in European culture since 1968. In a radically fragmented public sphere, individuals perceive themselves as dissociated from all others, while at the same time they feel similar to everyone else. Where genuine solidarity and communality is attenuated, people present themselves as victims to garner media attention, create fragile social bonds, or escape supposed marginalization and oppression. Fatima Naqvi commences with interpretations of Sigmund Freud, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, arguing that contemporary discourse continues a trajectory mapped in the early 20th century?in the shadow of Nazism. In a series of paradigmatic readings of Reň Girard, Peter Sloterdijk, Michael Haneke, Anselm Kiefer, Christoph Ransmayr, Friederike Mayṟcker, Michel Houellebecq, Giorgio Agamben, and Elfriede Jelinek, she traces the on-going fascination with victimhood and the desire for victim status in the West. She looks at the way in which such cultural anxiety expresses itself; at how victim rhetoric calls itself into question; and, finally, at how it perpetuates itself in the moment that it becomes philosophically ungrounded.

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Erich Fromm

First published in 1962, Beyond the Chains of Illusion is Fromm's landmark book about Marx and Freud. Here he delivers original readings of these hugely influential thinkers and, in doing so, offers us new ways of understanding the individual and society. Perhaps even more revealing than these readings is the insight we get into Fromm's own thought and the political and social contexts in which he formed his ideas. Including a foreword by Fromm's Literary Executor, Rainer Funk, this is a unique introduction to Marx and Freud and also to Fromm's life and thought.