Download or read book The Tyranny of Pleasure written by Jean Claude Guillebaud and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book stands the Sixties' Liberation on its head, taking an inventory of its unintended side-effects. No, liberty has not made us happy.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Pleasure written by Jean Claude Guillebaud and published by Algora Publishing. This book was released on 1999 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This provocative book stands our sixties' liberation on its head, taking an inventory of its unintended side-effects.--Le Nouvel Quotidien. (Philosophy)
Download or read book How Sex Got Screwed Up The Ghosts that Haunt Our Sexual Pleasure Book Two written by Jon Knowles and published by Vernon Press. This book was released on 2019-03-31 with total page 1034 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ghosts that haunt our sexual pleasure were born in the Stone Age. Sex and gender taboos were used by tribes to differentiate themselves from one another. These taboos filtered into the lives of Bronze and Iron Age men and women who lived in city-states and empires. For the early Christians, all sex play was turned into sin, instilled with guilt, and punished severely. With the invention of sin came the construction of women as subordinate beings to men. Despite the birth of romance in the late middle ages, Renaissance churches held inquisitions to seek out and destroy sex sinners, all of whom it saw as heretics. The Age of Reason saw the demise of these inquisitions. But, it was doctors who would take over the roles of priests and ministers as sex became defined by discourses of crime, degeneracy, and sickness. The middle of the 20th century saw these medical and religious teachings challenged for the first time as activists, such as Alfred Kinsey and Margaret Sanger, sought to carve out a place for sexual freedom in society. However, strong opposition to their beliefs and the growing exploitation of sex by the media at the close of the century would ultimately shape 21st century sexual ambivalence. Book Two of this two-part publication traces the history of sex from the Victorian Era to present day. Interspersed with ‘personal hauntings’ from his own life and the lives of friends and relatives, Knowles reveals how historical discourses of sex continue to haunt us today. This book is a page-turner in simple and plain language about ‘how sex got screwed up’ for millennia. For Knowles, if we know the history of sex, we can get over it.
Download or read book The Pleasure Zone written by Stella Resnick and published by Conari Press. This book was released on 1998-12-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Discusses the eight core pleasures--primal pleasure, pain relief, the pleasures of play and humor, and mental, emotional, sensual, sexual, and spiritual pleasure--and how they can enrich one's life
Download or read book Theories of Tyranny written by Roger Boesche and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2010-11-01 with total page 508 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ch. 10 (pp. 381-454), "Fromm, Neumann, and Arendt: Three Early Interpretations of Nazi Germany", discusses the views of Franz Neumann and Hannah Arendt on Nazi antisemitism. Neumann, in his "Behemoth" (1942), stated that the Nazis needed a fictitious enemy in order to unify the completely atomized German society into one large "Volksgemeinschaft". The terrorization of Jews was a prototype of the terror to be used against other peoples. Arendt contends in "The Origins of Totalitarianism" (1951) that it was imperialism which brought about Nazism, Nazi antisemitism, and the Holocaust. Totalitarianism is nothing but imperialism which came home. Insofar as imperialism transcends national boundaries, racism may be very helpful for it, because racism proposes another principle to define the enemy. Jews and other ethnic groups (e.g. Slavs) became easy targets as groups whose claims clashed with those of the expanding German nation. Terror is the essence of totalitarianism, and extermination camps were necessary for the Nazis to prove the omnipotence of their regime and their capability of total domination.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Perfection written by Michael Demkovich and published by . This book was released on 2020-03-13 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trust is vital in so many dimension of our private and public life. But why? Well, it is first and foremost about believing. It is a primary attitude one person shows toward another. Before we even learn to understand, our first condition is that of vulnerability which demands trust. Every helpless infant must trust in the good of humanity. Trust, we learn, can be given to persons and things, to an individual or a community, to an ideal, or to an object. It indicates a sense of reliability that both fashions and upholds the relationship. It also names the truth of the relationship, a genuine honesty of things. It can also speak to us of the abilities of another person or of things as trustworthy. That is the question this first in a trilogy on trust explores. It raises for us the question of a kind of default suspicion in society, a trend to assume the negative. Each work in the trilogy will explore the sources of suspicion, the deep seated absolute distrust of all pleasure, wealth, and power regardless of virtuous or noble purpose. The philosophical genesis of this suspicion can be found in the thought of Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Together they have been called the "Masters of Suspicion" by Paul Ricoeur for their negative presuppositions in all interpretation. And yet, trust is perhaps as critical to our environment as are clean air and clean water. A climate of trust is vital to human flourishing and skepticism is like a poison that destroys a community's ability to risk and to be vulnerable. We have seen a steady decline in the levels of trust. The Pew Research Center has been studying the question of trust in society for decades. Alarmingly, 71% of adults believe Americans are less confident in each other than they were 20 years ago. "About three-in-four Americans (79%) think their fellow citizens have too little confidence in each other. Relatedly, a fifth of adults (21%) think personal confidence in the country has worsened for little good reason" (29). The question of distrust is alarming and we need to examine its harm and what will heal it. In this work, The Tyranny of Perfection, we see how suspicion has robbed us of the simple delight of being. This Freudian fracturing and critical analysis of the person into id, ego, superego has left us unable to trust pleasure itself. This self-alienation denies that necessary wholeness of life. It compartmentalizes life and how we think about life. Freud is just one player in Modernity's abuse of science, casting it as superior to all other disciplines. Fragmentation and specialization have alienated the disciplines of science, art, and religion. Rather than the three together providing the integration of life and living, science, art, and religion have wrongly been cast as opposed to each other. The tyranny is this undermining of the greatest pleasure, our ability to love life with all its fragile qualities. Wealth and power, we will see, also attack our sense of trust, but for now, we will look at the tragic loss of trust in pleasure. The other two works in this trilogy, The Want of Wealth and The Bondage of Power, examine the seeds of suspicion that have led us to mistrust both economics and politics, both wealth and power. It is this widespread mistrust that has brought us to tragic levels of alienation and isolation, not pleasure, wealth, and power per se. These can be abused as tools of alienation, division and suspicion. As we will see in this trilogy, we must learn to love, to believe, and to hope again as our social corrective. If these three books help to initiate greater interest in our learning to trust once more, then they will have served a good and noble purpose
Download or read book On Tyranny written by Leo Strauss and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2013-11-15 with total page 359 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On Tyranny is Leo Strauss’s classic reading of Xenophon’s dialogue Hiero, or Tyrannicus, in which the tyrant Hiero and the poet Simonides discuss the advantages and disadvantages of exercising tyranny. Included are a translation of the dialogue from its original Greek, a critique of Strauss’s commentary by the French philosopher Alexandre Kojève, and the complete correspondence between the two. This revised and expanded edition introduces important corrections throughout and expands Strauss’s restatement of his position in light of Kojève’s commentary to bring it into conformity with the text as it was originally published in France.
Download or read book The Book of Pleasures written by Raoul Vaneigem and published by . This book was released on 2014 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work written by Alain De Botton and published by Emblem Editions. This book was released on 2010-06-01 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the international bestselling author of The Architecture of Happiness and How Proust Can Change Your Life comes this lyrical, erudite look at our world of work. We spend most of our time at work, but what we do there rarely gets discussed in the sort of lyrical and descriptive prose our efforts surely deserve. Determined to correct this lapse, armed with a poetic perspective and his trademark philosophical sharpness, Alain de Botton heads out into the world of offices and factories, ready to take in the beauty, interest, and sheer strangeness of the modern workplace. De Botton spends time in and around some less familiar work environments, including warehouses, container ports, rocket launch pads, and power stations, and follows scientists, landscape painters, accountants, cookie manufacturers, therapists, entrepreneurs, and aircraft salesmen as they do their jobs. Along the way, de Botton tries to answer some of the most urgent questions we can pose about work: Why do we do it? What makes it pleasurable? What is its meaning? To what end do we daily exhaust not only ourselves but also our planet? Equally intrigued by work’s pleasures and its pains, Alain de Botton offers a characteristically lucid and witty tour of the working day and night, in a book sure to inspire a range of life-changing and wise thoughts.
Download or read book Unforbidden Pleasures written by Adam Phillips and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2016-05-17 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much has been written of the forbidden pleasures. But what of the "unforbidden" pleasures? Unforbidden Pleasures is the singular new book from Adam Phillips, the author of Missing Out, Going Sane, and On Balance. Here, with his signature insight and erudition, Phillips takes Oscar Wilde as a springboard for a deep dive into the meanings and importance of the unforbidden, from the fall of our "first parents," Adam and Eve, to the work of the great psychoanalytic thinkers. Forbidden pleasures, he argues, are the ones we tend to think about, yet when you look into it, it is probable that we get as much pleasure, if not more, from unforbidden pleasures than from those that are taboo. And we may have underestimated just how restricted our restrictiveness, in thrall to the forbidden and its rules, may make us. An ambitious book that speaks to the precariousness of modern life, Unforbidden Pleasures explores the philosophical, psychological, and social dynamics that govern human desire and shape our everyday reality.
Download or read book A Tyranny of Queens written by Foz Meadows and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2017-05-02 with total page 412 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embark on another “nerve-biting and explosive” adventure between worlds in this refreshingly intersectional portal fantasy for adult readers (Tor.com) Saffron Coulter has returned from the fantasy kingdom of Kena. Threatened with a stay in psychiatric care, Saffron has to make a choice: to forget about Kena and fit back into the life she’s outgrown—or pit herself against everything she’s ever known and everyone she loves. Meanwhile, in Kena, Gwen is increasingly troubled by the absence of Leoden—the cruel ruler of the kingdom—and his plans for the captive worldwalkers. Elsewhere, Yena must confront the deposed Kadeja in Veksh. What is their endgame? Who can they trust? And what will happen when Leoden returns?
Download or read book The Tyranny of Virtue written by Robert Boyers and published by Scribner. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From public intellectual and professor Robert Boyers, “a powerfully persuasive, insightful, and provocative prose that mixes erudition and first-hand reportage” (Joyce Carol Oates) addressing recent developments in American culture and arguing for the tolerance of difference that is at the heart of the liberal tradition. Written from the perspective of a liberal intellectual who has spent a lifetime as a writer, editor, and college professor, The Tyranny of Virtue is a “courageous, unsparing, and nuanced to a rare degree” (Mary Gaitskill) insider’s look at shifts in American culture—most especially in the American academy—that so many people find alarming. Part memoir and part polemic, Boyers’s collection of essays laments the erosion of standard liberal values, and covers such subjects as tolerance, identity, privilege, appropriation, diversity, and ableism that have turned academic life into a minefield. Why, Robert Boyers asks, are a great many liberals, people who should know better, invested in the drawing up of enemies lists and driven by the conviction that on critical issues no dispute may be tolerated? In stories, anecdotes, and character profiles, a public intellectual and longtime professor takes on those in his own progressive cohort who labor in the grip of a poisonous and illiberal fundamentalism. The end result is a finely tuned work of cultural intervention from the front lines.
Download or read book Law and Enjoyment written by Daniel Hourigan and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-06-05 with total page 177 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book advocates, and develops, a critical account of the relationship between law and the largely neglected issue of ‘enjoyment’. Taking popular culture seriously – as a lived and meaningful basis for a wider understanding of law, beyond the strictures of legal institutions and professional practices – it takes up a range of case studies from film and literature in order to consider how law is iterated through enjoyment, and how enjoyment embodies law. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, this book addresses issues such as the forced choice to enjoy the law, the biopolitics of tyranny, the enjoyment of law’s contingency, the trauma of the law’s symbolic codification of pleasure, and the futuristic vision of law’s transgression. In so doing, it forges an important case for acknowledging and analyzing the complex relationship between power and pleasure in law – one that will be of considerable interest to legal theorists, as well as those with interests in the intersection of psychoanalytic and cultural theory.
Download or read book Metamorphoses written by Rosi Braidotti and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-07-10 with total page 747 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The discussions about the ethical, political and human implications of the postmodernist condition have been raging for longer than most of us care to remember. They have been especially fierce within feminism. After a brief flirtation with postmodern thinking in the 1980s, mainstream feminist circles seem to have turned their back on the staple notions of poststructuralist philosophy. Metamorphoses takes stock of the situation and attempts to reset priorities within the poststructuralist feminist agenda. Cross-referring in a creative way to Deleuze's and Irigaray's respective philosophies of difference, the book addresses key notions such as embodiment, immanence, sexual difference, nomadism and the materiality of the subject. Metamorphoses also focuses on the implications of these theories for cultural criticism and a redefinition of politics. It provides a vivid overview of contemporary culture, with special emphasis on technology, the monstrous imaginary and the recurrent obsession with 'the flesh' in the age of techno-bodies. This highly original contribution to current debates is written for those who find changes and transformations challenging and necessary. It will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, feminist theory, gender studies, sociology, social theory and cultural studies.
Download or read book Out of Nowhere Into Nothing written by Caryl Pagel and published by Fiction Collective 2. This book was released on 2020-09-15 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essays on the apparitional, the incomprehensible, and the paranormal in conversation with art, travel, and storytelling The ghosts—literal and figurative—that drive our deepest impulses, disturb our most precious memories, and haunt the passages of our daily lives are present in this collection of sublime meditations on the unbelievable, the coincidental, and the apparitional. Often containing reflections on the art of storytelling, Caryl Pagel’s essays blend memoir, research, and reflection, and are driven by a desire to observe connections between the visual and the invisible. The narrator of Pagel’s essays explores each enigma or encounter (a football coach’s faked death, the faces of women walking, historical accounts of hallucinations, a city’s public celebration gone wrong) as an intellectual detective ascending a labyrinthine tower of clues in pursuit of a solution to an unreachable problem: always curious, and with a sense of profound wonder. Out of Nowhere Into Nothing is a sprawling, highly associative consideration of the ways in which the observed material world recalls us to larger narrative and aesthetic truths. Interspersed with documentary-style photographs, Pagel’s first collection of prose is a radiant, obsessive investigation into the mysteries at the center of our seemingly mundane lives.
Download or read book Realm of Lesser Evil written by Jean-Claude Michea and published by Polity. This book was released on 2009-07-27 with total page 159 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winston Churchill said of democracy that it was ‘the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.’ The same could be said of liberalism. While liberalism displays an unfailing optimism with regard to the capacity of human beings to make themselves ‘masters and possessors of nature’, it displays a profound pessimism when it comes to appreciating their moral capacity to build a decent world for themselves. As Michea shows, the roots of this pessimism lie in the idea – an eminently modern one – that the desire to establish the reign of the Good lies at the origin of all the ills besetting the human race. Liberalism’s critique of the ‘tyranny of the Good’ naturally had its costs. It created a view of modern politics as a purely negative art – that of defining the least bad society possible. It is in this sense that liberalism has to be understood, and understands itself, as the ‘politics of lesser evil’. And yet while liberalism set out to be a realism without illusions, today liberalism presents itself as something else. With its celebration of the market among other things, contemporary liberalism has taken over some of the features of its oldest enemy. By unravelling the logic that lies at the heart of the liberal project, Michea is able to shed fresh light on one of the key ideas that have shaped the civilization of the West.
Download or read book The Tyranny of Metrics written by Jerry Z. Muller and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-04-30 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How the obsession with quantifying human performance threatens business, medicine, education, government—and the quality of our lives Today, organizations of all kinds are ruled by the belief that the path to success is quantifying human performance, publicizing the results, and dividing up the rewards based on the numbers. But in our zeal to instill the evaluation process with scientific rigor, we've gone from measuring performance to fixating on measuring itself—and this tyranny of metrics now threatens the quality of our organizations and lives. In this brief, accessible, and powerful book, Jerry Muller uncovers the damage metrics are causing and shows how we can begin to fix the problem. Filled with examples from business, medicine, education, government, and other fields, the book explains why paying for measured performance doesn't work, why surgical scorecards may increase deaths, and much more. But Muller also shows that, when used as a complement to judgment based on personal experience, metrics can be beneficial, and he includes an invaluable checklist of when and how to use them. The result is an essential corrective to a harmful trend that increasingly affects us all.
