The essential work on Proust--now in paperback! In a remarkable instance of literary and philosophical interpretation, the incomparable Gilles Deleuze reads Marcel Proust's work as a narrative of an apprenticeship--more precisely, the apprenticeship of a man of letters. Considering the search to be one directed by an experience of signs, in which the protagonist learns to interpret and decode t…
First written by Marcel Mauss and Henri Humbert in 1902, A General Theory of Magic gained a wide new readership when republished by Mauss in 1950. As a study of magic in 'primitive' societies and its survival today in our thoughts and social actions, it represents what Claude Lévi-Strauss called, in an introduction to that edition, the astonishing modernity of the mind of one of the century's …
Headlines and television news reports feature accounts of reincarnation, the predictions of astrologers, and psychic "miracles." Citizens report UFO sightings. Police departments call on psychics to provide clues in baffling crimes. From every available information source, the public is bombarded with unsubstantiated claims of paranormal phenomena. How much of the evidence is reliable? What is …
This volume brings together Pierre Bourdieu’s highly original writings on language and on the relations among language, power, and politics. Bourdieu develops a forceful critique of traditional approaches to language, including the linguistic theories of Saussure and Chomsky and the theory of speech-acts elaborated by Austin and others. He argues that language should be viewed not only as a m…