{"title":"Univocal Publishing LLC","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"9781937561475","title":"Cosmic Pessimism","description":"\u003cp\u003e“We’re doomed.” So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific hopes, desires, and disappointments. In the Anthropocene, pessimism is felt everywhere but rarely given its proper place. Though pessimism may be, as Eugene Thacker says, the lowest form of philosophy, it may also contain an enigma central to understanding the horizon of the human. Written in a series of fragments, aphorisms, and prose poems, Thacker’s \u003ci\u003eCosmic Pessimism\u003c\/i\u003e explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. “Crying, laughing, sleeping-what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309079409013,"sku":"9781937561475","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781937561475_dd136be6-9856-4cf3-b209-b97c2a85addc.jpg?v=1786030562"},{"product_id":"9781937561062","title":"Variations on the Body","description":"\u003cdiv\u003e\u003cp\u003eWorld-renowned philosopher, Michel Serres writes a text in praise of the body and movement, in praise of teachers of physical education, coaches, mountain guides, athletes, dancers, mimes, clowns, artisans, and artists. This work describes the variations, the admirable metamorphoses that the body can accomplish. While animals lack such a variety of gestures, postures, and movements, the fluidity of the human body mimics the leisure of living beings and things; what’s more, it creates signs. Already here, within its movements and metamorphoses, the mind is born. The five senses are not the only source of knowledge: it emerges, in large part, from the imitations the plasticity of the body allows. In it, with it, by it knowledge begins. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003c\/div\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309451587957,"sku":"9781937561062","price":17.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781937561062_d94590c5-3d1f-4bdf-806e-90fd7b6f37ca.jpg?v=1786030559"},{"product_id":"9781937561093","title":"Post-History","description":"\u003cp\u003eIs there any room left for freedom in a programmed world? This is the essential question that VilÉm Flusser asks in \u003ci\u003ePost-History\u003c\/i\u003e. Written as a series of lectures to be delivered at universities in Brazil, Israel, and France, it was subsequently developed as a book and published for the first time in Brazil in 1983. This first English translation of \u003ci\u003ePost-History\u003c\/i\u003e brings to an anglophone readership Flusser’s first critique of \u003ci\u003eapparatus\u003c\/i\u003e as the aesthetic, ethical, and epistemological model of present times.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eIn his main argument, Flusser suggests that our times may be characterized by the term “program,” much in the same way that the seventeenth century is loosely characterized by the term “nature,” the eighteenth by “reason,” and the nineteenth by “progress.” In suggesting this shift in worldview, he then poses a provocative question: If I function within a predictable programmed reality, can I rebel and how can I do it? The answer comes swiftly: Only malfunctioning programs and apparatus allow for freedom.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThroughout the twenty essays of \u003ci\u003ePost-History\u003c\/i\u003e, Flusser reminds us that any future theory of political resistance must consider this shift in worldview, together with the horrors that Western society has brought into realization because of it. Only then may we start to talk again about freedom.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":56309451882869,"sku":"9781937561093","price":18.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781937561093_ec38c054-36ea-4c02-9251-afd92feb3d14.jpg?v=1786030560"},{"product_id":"science-fiction-and-extro-science-fiction","title":"Science Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction","description":"\u003cp\u003eIn \u003ci\u003eScience Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction, \u003c\/i\u003eQuentin Meillassoux addresses the problem of chaos and of the constancy of natural laws in the context of literature. With his usual argumentative rigor, he elucidates the distinction between science fiction, a genre in which science remains possible in spite of all the upheavals that may attend the world in which the tale takes place, and fiction outside-science, the literary concept he fashions in this book, a fiction in which science becomes impossible. With its investigations of the philosophies of Hume, Kant, and Popper, \u003ci\u003eScience Fiction and Extro-Science Fiction\u003c\/i\u003e broadens the inquiry that Meillassoux began in \u003ci\u003eAfter Finitude,\u003c\/i\u003e thinking through the concrete possibilities and consequences of a chaotic world in which human beings can no longer resort to science to ground their existence. It is a significant milestone in the work of an emerging philosopher, which will appeal to readers of both philosophy and literature. The text is followed by Isaac Asimov’s essay “The Billiard Ball.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"Gardners","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":57492495794549,"sku":"9781937561482","price":16.99,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0612\/7193\/3106\/files\/9781937561482.jpg?v=1786529384"}],"url":"https:\/\/backstory.london\/collections\/publisher-univocal-publishing-llc.oembed","provider":"Backstory","version":"1.0","type":"link"}