Bøger udgivet af Zone Books

The history of Mexico's fearless intimacy with death--the elevation of death to the center of national identity.

Exploring the thought of Mulla Sadra Shirazi, an Iranian Shi'ite of the seventeenth century: a universe of politics, morality, liberty, and order that is indispensable to our understanding of Islamic thought and spirituality.

A study of the word pair "action and reaction" embracing philosophy, semantics, literature, and science.

A history and theory of the drive to hide in plain sight.

A provocative study of the iconoclastic impulse in medieval and modern art.

A novel attempt to make sense of our preoccupation with copies of all kinds--from counterfeits to instant replay, from parrots to photocopies.

An ancient tradition holds that Pythagoras discovered the secrets of harmony within a forge when he came across five men hammering with five hammers, producing a wondrous sound. Four of the five hammers stood in a marvelous set of proportions, harmonizing; but there was also a fifth hammer. Pythagoras saw and heard it, but he could not measure it; nor could he understand its discordant sound. Pythagoras therefore discarded it. What was this hammer, such that Pythagoras chose so decidedly to reject it? Since antiquity, "harmony" has been a name for more than a theory of musical sounds; it has offered a paradigm for the scientific understanding of the natural world. Nature, through harmony, has been transcribed in the ideal signs of mathematics. But, time and again, the transcription has run up against one fundamental limit: something in nature resists being written down, transcribed in a stable set of ideal elements. A fifth hammer, obstinately, continues to sound.

An exploration of the wakeful character of the dream and the dreamful character of wakefulness.

The Normal and the Pathological is one of the crucial contributions to the history of science in the last half century.

Listening across millennia, a cultural historian explores the process by which noise today has become as powerfully metaphorical--and intriguing--as the original Babel.

Essays examine nine intriguing objects made eloquent when matter and meaning converge.

The search to create a science of signatures that exceeds the attempts of semiology and hermeneutics to determine pure and unmarked signs.

The philosophical genealogy of a remarkable antagonist: the pirate, the key to the contemporary paradigm of the universal foe.

Rituals of war and images of violence in Mesopotamia ca. 3000-500 BCE examined as "magical technologies of warfare."