Reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state or aid in the creation of a just social order. Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates the contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question...(展开全部)

Today both reality and entertainment crowd our fields of vision with brutal imagery. The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away? Genre-busting author Maggie Nel...(展开全部)

In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing'...(展开全部)

In his stunning essay, Coldness and Cruelty, Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of the late 19th-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze's essay, certainly the most profound study yet produced on the relations between sadism and masochism, seeks to develop and explain Masoch's "peculiar way of 'desexualizing'...(展开全部)

A simple argument guides this book: motherhood is the place in our culture where we lodge, or rather bury, the reality of our own conflicts. By making mothers the objects of both licensed idealization and cruelty, we blind ourselves to the world’s iniquities and shut down the portals of the heart. Mothers are the ultimate scapegoat for our personal and political failings, for e...(展开全部)

“Cruelty, which is the ultimate negation of culture, could also mark its regeneration. In fact, cruelty opposes the extreme nihilism, the passive nihilism, in the form of indifference. Cruelty in disclosing its vicious side manifests at the same time its original vitality. It forces the nihilist to look deep in his/her protective barriers and to see beyond them. Purification is...(展开全部)

For Your Own Good, the contemporary classic exploring the serious if not gravely dangerous consequences parental cruelty can bring to bear on children everywhere, is one of the central works by Alice Miller, the celebrated Swiss psychoanalyst. With her typically lucid, strong, and poetic language, Miller investigates the personal stories and case histories of various self-dest...(展开全部)