Pierre Clastres

Robert Hurley

"The thesis is radical," writes Marshall Sahlins of this landmark text in anthropology and political science. "We conventionally define the state as the regulation of violence; it may be the origin of it. Clastres's thesis is that economic expropriation and political coercion are inconsistent with the character of tribal society - which is to say, with the greater part of human history."Can there be a society that is not divided into oppressors and oppressed, or that refuses coercive state apparatuses? In this beautifully written book, Pierre Clastres offers examples of South American Indian groups that, although without hierarchical leadership, were both affluent and complex. In so doing he refutes the usual negative definition of tribal society and poses its order as a radical critique of our own Western state of power.Born in 1934, Pierre Clastres was educated at the Sorbonne; throughout the 1960s he lived with Indian groups in Paraguay and Venezuela. From 1971 until his death in 1979 he was Director of Studies at the fifth section of the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris and held the Chair of Religion and Societies of the South American Indians there.Robert Hurley is the translator of the History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault and cotranslator of Anti-Oedipus by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

Essays in Political Anthropology

Society Against the State

Conspiracist Manifesto

Jacques Donzelot

The author, a student and colleague of Michel Foucault, offers an account of public intervention in the regulation of family affairs since the 18th century. Treating the family as the focal point for a multitude of discourses, he demonstrates how the state effected change in a private domain.

The Policing of Families

Georges Bataille

'The Accursed Share' provides an introduction to Bataille the philosopher. Here he uses his unique economic theory as the basis for an incisive inquiry into the very nature of civilization. Unlike conventional economic models based on notions of scarcity, Bataille's theory develops the concept of excess - a civilization, he argues, reveals its order most clearly in the treatment of its surplus energy.

An Essay on General Economy

The Accursed Share

Pierre Marie Beaude

Poétique du divin

Danièle Henky

Au XXe siècle, la société occidentale s'est progressivement laïcisée et sa culture semble aujourd'hui affranchie de l'influence du christianisme. Pourtant dès qu'on examine avec acuité les productions artistiques actuelles, on y rencontre de nombreux vestiges de la spiritualité chrétienne. Ainsi en littérature, par le biais de thématiques ou de personnages emblématiques, les marques de la tradition judéo-chrétienne sont aisément décelables. L'analyse de nombreuses productions francophones destinées à la jeunesse, qu'il s'agisse d'abécédaires, d'albums, de romans, ou encore de films a permis aux auteurs critiques de cet ouvrage collectif d'observer dans l'intrigue, par l'intermédiaire du comportement des héros ou de la mise en place du cadre spatio temporel, les différentes manifestations de cette culture judéo chrétienne et les effets produits sur le lecteur. Réunissant littéraires et théologiens, ce travail s'est avéré fécond et novateur en ce sens qu'il ouvre un chemin encore peu emprunté dans le champ de la critique contemporaine.

Robert Hurley

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