Intent on letting the reader experience the pleasure and intellectual stimulation in reading classic authors, the How to Read series will facilitate and enrich your understanding of texts vital to the canon. Emphasizing the Romantic heritage and modernist legacy of Karl Marx’s writings, Peter Osborne presents Marx’s thought as a developing investigation into what it means, concretely, for humans to be practical historical beings. Drawing on passages from a wide range of Marx’s writings, and showing the links among them, Osborne refutes the myth of Marx as a reductively economistic thinker. What Marx meant by “materialism,” “communism,” and the “critique of political economy” was much richer and more original, philosophically, than is generally recognized. With the renewed globalization of capitalism since 1989, Osborne argues, Marx’s analyses of the consequences of commodification are more relevant today than ever before. Extracts are taken from the full breadth of Marx’s writings, including Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, and The Communist Manifesto to Capital.

How to Read Marx

Business & Money

Osborne, Peter

Economics

W.W.Norton&Company

Philosophy in Cultural Theory

Philosophy in Cultural Theory boldly crosses disciplinary boundaries to offer a philosophical critique of cultural theory today. Drawing on the legacy of Walter Benjamin, Peter Osborne looks critically at central philosophical debates in cultural theory, such as:* the relationship between sign and image* the technological basis of cultural form* the conceptuality of art* the place of fantasy in human affairs.It will appeal to those in philosophy, cultural studies and art theory.

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

Routledge

Conceptual Art (Spanish Edition)

History

Phaidon Press

Traveling Light: Photography, Travel and Visual Culture (The Critical Image)

This is a thoroughly illustrated study of the close and continuous relationship between two of modern culture’s central phenomena: the photographic image and travel. Contributing to the growing literature of travel and its representations, the book argues that from its beginnings, photography has played a constitutive role in the formation of travel--comparable in importance to its part in the portrayal of social identity. It shows how, in turn, travel has shaped the use and language of all types of photographic production.

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

Manchester University Press

Located in the northeastern corner of Pennsylvania is a beautiful state park with the compelling name of Promised Land. It is visited by thousands annually, and many of those visitors have been coming to the park for generations. Promised Land State Park features more than 200 images that have been preserved by the state park, state agencies, historical organizations, and individuals. Through these unique images, many published here for the first time, the fascinating history of one of Pennsylvania's most popular parks is documented.

Promised Land State Park (PA) (Images of America)

Americas

Arcadia Publishing

If Aristotle sought to understand time through change, might we not reverse the procedure and seek to understand change through time? Once we do this, argues Peter Osborne, it soon becomes clear that ideas such as avant-garde, modern, postmodern and tradition—which are usually only treated as markets for empirically discrete periods, movements or styles—are best understood as categories of historical totalization. More specifically, Osborne claims, such ideas involve distinct “temporalizations” of history, giving rise to conflicting politics of time. His book begins with a consideration of the main aspects of modernity and develops though a series of critical engagements with the major twentieth-century positions in the philosophy of history. He concludes with a fascinating history of the avant-garde intervention into the temporality of everyday life in surrealism, the situationists and the work of Henri Lefebvre.

The Politics of Time: Modernity and Avant-Garde

World

Verso

Artists have always used their imaginations to see beyond visible matter--to posit other physics, other energies, new ways of conceiving the visible and new models for art--but the past century has seen an explosion of such investigations. In the fashion of a Wunderkammer, The Quick and the Dead takes stock of the 1960s and 70s legacy of experimental, or "research" art by pioneers like George Brecht, who posited objects as motionless events and asked us to consider "an art verging on the non-existent, dissolving into other dimensions," and Lygia Clark, whose foldable sculptures sought to dissolve the boundary between inside and outside, each "a static moment within the cosmological dynamics from which we came and to which we are going." In a series of encounters with art made strange by its expansions, contractions, inversions and implosions in time and space, The Quick and the Dead surveys more than 80 works by a global, multigenerational group of 50 artists, scientists and musicians--among them James Lee Byars, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Harold Edgerton, Ceal Floyer, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Pierre Huyghe, The Institute for Figuring, Paul Ramirez Jonas, Stephen Kaltenbach, On Kawara, Christine Kozlov, David Lamelas, Louise Lawler, Paul Etienne Lincoln, Mark Manders, Kris Martin, Steve McQueen, Helen Mirra, Catherine Murphy, Bruce Nauman, Rivane Neuenschwander, Claes Oldenburg, Roman Ondák, Adrian Piper, Roman Signer and Shomei Tomatsu, among many others. Includes reprints of texts by diverse luminaries such as John McPhee, Jalal Toufic, Oliver Sacks, Allan Kaprow and Robert Smithson.

The Quick and the Dead

Blom, Ina

Eleey, Peter

Blanke, Olaf

Wertheim, Margaret and Christine

Walker Art Center

Graphics in Training

Parthenon Pub. Group

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Books by Osborne, Peter