Here are 74 books that Situationist International Anthology fans have personally recommended if you like
Situationist International Anthology.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
I have a passion for critical theory since I was intrigued by the heretical idea, which originates in Marx’s Capital, that what limits our freedom and democracy is not the apparent personified power held by the state and politicians. On the contrary, real power lies in the fact that, in capitalism, labour that must succumb to the standards of time is money, that runs through each one of us. So, to an extent, we all are forced to become slaves to the rationale of capital. In this book, I analyse this idea to the philosophers mentioned. This perspective is far away from their mainstream reading and casts a completely different light on their philosophy.
According to the Debord, concepts are fluid and open since they express alienation, class struggle, and the unavoidable contradictions inherent in capitalism.
Therefore, his theory has a strong anarchic character and does not ignore the economy or the social conflicts confronted in everyday life, as some readers of his theory may believe. The spectacle, as used by the Situationists and Debord, does not take place on a different plane from that of commodity fetishism or alienation in everyday living, as sadly some scholars hold.
His theory casts light on the idea of the inverted topsy-turvy world and the negativity that defetishises the apparent, closed, and reified forms, such as the bourgeois form of democracy and the state, that constitute a closed and fetishized social totality.
The Das Kapital of the 20th century. An essential text, and the main theoretical work of the situationists. Few works of political and cultural theory have been as enduringly provocative. From its publication amid the social upheavals of the 1960's up to the present, the volatile theses of this book have decisively transformed debates on the shape of modernity, capitalism, and everyday life in the late 20th century. This is the original translation by Fredy Perlman, kept in print continuously for the last 30 years, keeping the flame alive when no-one else cared.
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I have a passion for critical theory since I was intrigued by the heretical idea, which originates in Marx’s Capital, that what limits our freedom and democracy is not the apparent personified power held by the state and politicians. On the contrary, real power lies in the fact that, in capitalism, labour that must succumb to the standards of time is money, that runs through each one of us. So, to an extent, we all are forced to become slaves to the rationale of capital. In this book, I analyse this idea to the philosophers mentioned. This perspective is far away from their mainstream reading and casts a completely different light on their philosophy.
For my study, Benjamin succeeds in showing how the dominant social forms in each capitalist society can be debunked and that the official narrative that perpetuates the logic that supports the current system can be seriously questioned.
Benjamin’s goal was not to build another totality, another theoretical system that would bring certainty and stability to those who want to change the world radically towards socialism.
Rather, his philosophy encourages us to continue fighting to open the cracks in capitalism, to create multiple ruptures in the capitalist system, even though we do not have all the answers and are aware that our struggle will have an uncertain result.
This is how we redeem and vindicate past generations who spilled their blood for another world. This is how we redeem Benjamin himself, who dedicated his life's work to this purpose.
"To great writers," Walter Benjamin once wrote, "finished works weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire lives." Conceived in Paris in 1927 and still in progress when Benjamin fled the Occupation in 1940, The Arcades Project (in German, Das Passagen-Werk) is a monumental ruin, meticulously constructed over the course of thirteen years--"the theater," as Benjamin called it, "of all my struggles and all my ideas."
Focusing on the arcades of nineteenth-century Paris-glass-roofed rows of shops that were early centers of consumerism--Benjamin presents a montage of quotations from, and reflections on, hundreds of published sources, arranging them…
I have published 18 books of poetry, most recently the one I have listed here, as well as a collection of literary essays, Fables of Representation. My emphasis has always been on the more progressive and risk-taking kinds of expression, as seen with the Beat poets, Ginsberg and Corso, and the New York School poets, Ashbery and O'Hara. Seeing a lack of that perspective on bookshelves, I edited two editions of a major anthology, Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology, and 42 issues of the literary magazine, New American Writing. I have been reading, more recently, a lot of great writing by women, especially those writing at length, with the volume up.
The book contains 70 sonnets, all with the same title as the book. Quick-witted, ironic, and politically dedicated to good cause, Hayes speaks from his own experience as an African-American: “Probably twilight makes blackness dangerous/Darkness. Probably all my encounters/Are existential Jambalaya.”
Winner of the National Book Award for his earlier work, Lighthead, he is a poet to watch for his moral sense and mastery of poetic form. The book was written in the first two hundred days of the first Trump presidency.
Finalist for the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry
One of the New York Times Critics' Top Books of 2018
A powerful, timely, dazzling collection of sonnets from one of America's most acclaimed poets, Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award-winning author of Lighthead
"Sonnets that reckon with Donald Trump's America." -The New York Times
In seventy poems bearing the same title, Terrance Hayes explores the meanings of American, of assassin, and of love in the sonnet form. Written during the first two hundred days of the Trump presidency, these poems are haunted by the…
Coyote weather is the feral, hungry season, drought-stricken, and ready to catch fire. It’s 1967, and the American culture is violently remaking itself while the country is forcibly sending its young men to fight in a deeply unpopular war.
Jerry has stubbornly made no plans for the future because he…
I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to study in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. I wrote a paper on cities and urban spaces that I later published. But this period of study coincided with the creation of early sections of Drifter, and the work in this collection draws from the books I’ve listed as energy sources, inspiration, and confirmation. I love anything that tries to open the mind to the limited ways we see and feel. That’s what I’m after on this journey, and these books are worthy companions and teachers.
“The moon swung bare on its black cord over the house,” Forche writes in her famous poem from this collection, “The Colonel.” I knew there was a connection between what I saw in Forche’s poetry and what I was after as I was cooking up my aesthetic with a good dose of Debord and Baudelaire and others.
I love that these are little dream movies, narrative flashes that spike up in your mind and then drift away like something you caught a glimpse of on that river moving quickly out of sight. And like Debord, there’s a little of the political, a little psychological, and more mystery to keep me coming back.
Carolyn Forche's The Country Between Us bears witness to what she saw in El Salvador in the late 1970s, when she travelled around a country erupting into civil war. Documenting killings and other brutal human rights abuses, while working alongside Archbishop Oscar Romero's church group, she found in her poetry the only possible way to come to terms with what she was experiencing first-hand.
By 1980, when the fighting was becoming too dangerous, Archbishop Romero urged Forche to return home, asking her to 'talk to the American people, tell them what is happening to us. Convince them to stop the…
I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to study in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. I wrote a paper on cities and urban spaces that I later published. But this period of study coincided with the creation of early sections of Drifter, and the work in this collection draws from the books I’ve listed as energy sources, inspiration, and confirmation. I love anything that tries to open the mind to the limited ways we see and feel. That’s what I’m after on this journey, and these books are worthy companions and teachers.
I love the distinction Debord makes between the flaneur of Baudelaire and the wanderers practicing the dérive. It’s worth meditating on, and you just might spot what he means as you read these poems that paint a picture of Paris as an urban kaleidoscope of images, strange and alluring.
As much as I might want to switch labels on cans in the grocery store (derive, in one version), I can’t help but see a throughline from “When the cruel sun redoubles it's sharp stroke/I walk alone, absorbed in my curious exercise” and Debord’s observation: “the evident division of a city into zones of distinct psychic atmospheres.”
The bilingual, illustrated, and National Book Award-winning edition of Charles Baudelaire's masterpiece. The complete French text is accompanied with an English translation by Richard Howard.
Charles Baudelaire's 1857 masterwork was scandalous in its day for its portrayals of sex, same-sex love, death, the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city and lost innocence, Les Fleurs Du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) remains powerful and relevant for our time.
In "Spleen et ideal," Baudelaire dramatizes the erotic cycle of ecstacy and anguish-of sexual and romantic love. "Tableaux Parisiens" condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city's soul and…
I was fortunate enough to receive a fellowship to study in Washington, DC, at the Library of Congress. I wrote a paper on cities and urban spaces that I later published. But this period of study coincided with the creation of early sections of Drifter, and the work in this collection draws from the books I’ve listed as energy sources, inspiration, and confirmation. I love anything that tries to open the mind to the limited ways we see and feel. That’s what I’m after on this journey, and these books are worthy companions and teachers.
They hit you like a brick in the forehead: solid poems that look like letters from an exile. Both personal and strange, these poems capture the feeling of the wanderer where “it isn’t a mirror anymore but a window.” That’s what I want as I go: shots of wake-up words. Something to charge the eyes for the spectacles on the way.
A genre-bending collection of prose poems from Pulitzer Prize–winner Franz Wright brings us surreal tales of childhood, adolescence, and adult awareness, moving from the gorgeous to the shocking to a sense of peace. Wright’s most intimate thoughts and images appear before us in dramatic and spectral short narratives: mesmerizing poems whose colloquial sound and rhythms announce a new path for this luminous and masterful poet.
In these journeys, we hear the constant murmured “yes” of creation—“it will be packing its small suitcase soon; it will leave the keys dangling from the lock and set out at last,” Wright tells us.…
Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…
I have a passion for critical theory since I was intrigued by the heretical idea, which originates in Marx’s Capital, that what limits our freedom and democracy is not the apparent personified power held by the state and politicians. On the contrary, real power lies in the fact that, in capitalism, labour that must succumb to the standards of time is money, that runs through each one of us. So, to an extent, we all are forced to become slaves to the rationale of capital. In this book, I analyse this idea to the philosophers mentioned. This perspective is far away from their mainstream reading and casts a completely different light on their philosophy.
Nietzsche demystifies the idea that the state in capitalism provides stability and certainty in our lives and, as a result, the concept that it is necessary.
He has a dialectic between phenomenon and essence, for which the state is the social form that corresponds to the alienation we experience in our everyday life in capitalism.
Thus, as a corresponding social form to the mass culture, it reiterates our unfreedom. Nietzsche holds a concept of fetishization that brings him much closer to critical Marxism than previously thought.
This English translation-the first since 1909-restores Human, All Too Human to its proper central position in the Nietzsche canon. First published in 1878, the book marks the philosophical coming of age of Friedrich Nietzsche. In it he rejects the romanticism of his early work, influenced by Wagner and Schopenhauer, and looks to enlightened reason and science. The "Free Spirit" enters, untrammeled by all accepted conventions, a precursor of Zarathustra. The result is 638 stunning aphorisms about everything under and above the sun.
I am the primary writer and podcaster behind The Blockchain Socialist, a platform for exploring the intersection of crypto and left politics. I’ve published over 35 blogs for my website and on the web3 native blogging platform Mirror as well as for outlets like FWB and Outland Magazine. I’ve also recorded over 150 podcasts which included incredible guests with a wide ranging spectrum of political views and expertises like Vitalik Buterin, Cory Doctorow, Douglas Rushkoff, Nick Srnicek, Lawrence Lessig, and many more. And I don’t just talk about but I do it as I am also a co-founder of Breadchain Cooperative where we make blockchain applications from a post-capitalist perspective.
I have to say I absolutely loved this book because it was so thought provoking and relevant for understanding our current economic system because it is true, the capitalism written about in the 1800s and even 1900s is completely different than what we have today.
Even before web3, it’s plainly obvious that the role of information has increased in importance against the commodity and it’s vital to understand its implications.
In this radical and visionary new book, McKenzie Wark argues that the all-pervasive presence of data in our networked society has given rise to a new mode of production, one not ruled over by capitalists and their factories but by those who own and control the flow of information. Yet, if this is not capitalism anymore, could it be something worse? What if the world we're living in is more dystopian than the techno utopias of the Silicon Valley imagination? And, if this is the case, how do we find a way out? Capital Is Dead offers not only the…
After hearing scholars argue that the “Latinx” category is solely an ethnicity, not a race, I questioned my assumption that “Latinx” was a race—and this led me to ask, “What is race?” To answer this, I read extensively, reflecting on my education and experience as a high school Spanish teacher. At the time, I was also studying a bilingual education program, and I started noticing how the program socially constructed race and the Latinx racialized group. Now, as a UCLA professor researching and teaching about Latinx education, I’m sharing insights in my book, a book that helps readers rethink race and see how schools construct Latinidad.
I picked up this book because I was struggling to make sense of the different ways race is theorized in education. Zeus Leonardo’s work blew me away—it’s like he handed me a map to navigate the complexities of race frameworks. He breaks down four major approaches, critiques their limitations, and then introduces his own concept of “race ambivalence,” which completely shifted my perspective.
What I love most is how Leonardo doesn’t just theorize; he challenges readers to think critically about how these frameworks play out in real life. This book isn’t just for educators—it’s for anyone who wants to understand the nuances of race in society. It’s a book I keep coming back to, and it’s one I always recommend to friends who are ready to dig deeper.
This is a comprehensive introduction to the main frameworks for thinking about, conducting research on, and teaching about race and racism in education. Renowned theoretician and philosopher Zeus Leonardo surveys the dominant race theories and, more specifically, focuses on those frameworks that are considered essential to cultivating a critical attitude toward race and racism. The book examines four frameworks: Critical Race Theory (CRT), Marxism, Whiteness Studies, and Cultural Studies, with a critique following each one in order to analyze its strengths and set its limits. The last chapter offers a theory of "race ambivalence," which combines aspects of all four…
Marriage and Fatherhood in the Nazi SS
by
Amy Carney,
When I was writing this book, several of my friends jokingly called it the Nazi baby book, with one insisting it would make a great title. Nazi Babies – admittedly, that is a catchy title, but that’s not exactly what my book is about. SS babies would be slightly more…
Rich Weiner co-edited this featured volume with Francesca Forno. He is a political sociologist with a strong foundation in the history of political and social thought. He has served for twenty-two years as dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. His focus has been on non-statist political organizations and social movements with a perspective of middle-range theorizing enriched by three generations of Frankfurt School critical theory of society.
Wide-ranging philosophical conversation and moral critique of capitalism as an instituted social order wherein a structure of domination establishes and reinforces an entire way of life attuned to the hegemony of exchange value as well as commodity production, and their social reproduction.
I very much appreciate the book’s strategy of cogent, accessible and explorative dialogue rather than tit-for-tat debate.
In this important new book, Nancy Fraser and Rahel Jaeggi take a fresh look at the big questions surrounding the peculiar social form known as "capitalism," upending many of our commonly held assumptions about what capitalism is and how to subject it to critique. They show how, throughout its history, various regimes of capitalism have relied on a series of institutional separations between economy and polity, production and social reproduction, and human and non-human nature, periodically readjusting the boundaries between these domains in response to crises and upheavals. They consider how these "boundary struggles" offer a key to understanding capitalism's…
