Camera Historica: The Century in Cinema
by Antoine De Baecque

Publisher: Columbia University Press, 2012
Translated by Ninon Vinsonneau & Jonathan Magidoff from L'Histoire-Caméra, Gallimard 2008

Antoine de Baecque proposes a new historiography of cinema, exploring film as a visual archive of the twentieth century, as well as history’s imprint on the cinematic image. Whether portraying events that occurred in the past or stories unfolding before their eyes, certain twentieth-century filmmakers used a particular mise-en-scène to give form to history, becoming in the process historians themselves. Historical events, in turn, irrupted into cinema. This double movement, which de Baecque terms the “cinematographic form of history,” disrupts the very material of film, much like historical events disturb the narrative of human progress.

"Thanks to this book I now understand precisely why and how I am gothic."
Tim Burton

“Cinema and history are in lively dialogue here, which creates much more exciting reading... highly recommended.”
Choice

“Camera Historica marks a new stage in thinking about the relationship between cinema (as art) and history (as both real and narrative). Going beyond the classic 'histories of cinema,' this book reveals what cinema makes of history, its way of making history visible, and of allowing us to judge it.”
Alain Badiou

[Les Jardiniers]
by Véronique Bizot

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by Yuna Kwak from Les Jardiniers, Actes Sud, 2008

[...]: English titles to be announced

My Lorenzo
by Sébastien Smirou

Publisher: Burning Deck, 2012
Translated by Andrew Zawacki from Mon Laurent, P.O.L. 2003

MY LORENZO is an elegant, funny, often sad meditation on the fifteenth-century Italian statesman, art patron, and poet Lorenzo de Medici. Obliquely narrated, it telescopes historic depth into intimacy. And it is as concerned with physical arrangement as it is with linguistic ambiguity and matters philosophical, political, and sentimental. Reading the book with its purposely tableau-like shape is akin to touring the Uffizi, its Renaissance paintings hung meticulously along otherwise blank walls.

In the lineage of Jacques Roubaud and of Louis Zukofsky's 80 Flowers for its conceptual and numerical constraint, MY LORENZO however combines traditional form with an unapologetically modern idiom that shuttles vertiginously between theoryspeak and speakeasy slang.

[Sérénissime Assassinat]
by Gabrielle Wittkop

Publisher: Seeking an American Publisher
Translated by Louise Rogers Lalaurie from Sérénissime Assassinat, Gallimard 2006

Gabrielle Wittkop (1920-2002) was a self-styled modern Sadeian. Her works explore cruelty, transgressive sensuality, death, decay, and corruption, both physical and moral. But her writing also shows a keen empathy with human suffering and degradation, a fine sense of beauty, art and the spirit of place, and a very real enjoyment of the "stuff of life." Sérénissime assassinat is a tale of 18th-century poison and transgression, a high camp Venetian romp, a perceptive portrait, rich in historical detail, of a great State in which things are clearly very rotten indeed, and a chilling memento mori. Works by Wittkop have recently been reissued in Folio in France, and translated into Spanish, Italian, Hungarian, Russian, Swedish, Portuguese, Greek, German and Romanian. Her only English translation to date is The Necrophiliac (trans. Don Pabst / ECW Press) published to critical acclaim in 2011.

[...]: English titles to be announced

[Retour à Reims]
by Didier Eribon

Publisher: Semiotext(e), forthcoming
Translated by Michael Lucey from Retour à Reims, Fayard 2009

[...]: English titles to be announced

[The Society of Salons: Sociability and Worldliness]
by Antoine Lilti

Publisher: Oxford University Press, forthcoming in 2012
Translated by Lydia Cochrane from Le monde des salons: sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, Fayard 2005

Antoine Lilti teaches modern history at the École Normale Supérieure. His research interests include history and historiography of the French Enlightenment, sociability in modern Europe, and forms of celebrity. He has published to much critical acclaim Le Monde des salons. Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle, which received the prize Gustave Chaix d’Est-Ange from the Académie des sciences morales et politiques.

[...]: English titles to be announced

Without Offending Humans: A Critique of Animal Rights
by Elisabeth de Fontenay

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 2012
Translated by William Bishop from Sans offusquer le genre humain, Editions Albin Michel, 2008

A central thinker on the question of the animal in continental thought, Élisabeth de Fontenay moves in this volume from Jacques Derrida’s uneasily intimate writing on animals to a passionate frontal engagement with political and ethical theory as it has been applied to animals—along with a stinging critique of the work of Peter Singer and Paola Cavalieri as well as with other “utilitarian” philosophers of animal–human relations.

Humans and animals are different from one another. To conflate them is to be intellectually sentimental. And yet, from our position of dominance, do we not owe them more than we often acknowledge? In the searching first chapter on Derrida, she sets out “three levels of deconstruction” that are “testimony to the radicalization and shift of that philosopher’s argument: a strategy through the animal, exposition to an animal or to this animal, and compassion toward animals.” For Fontenay, Derrida’s writing is particularly far-reaching when it comes to thinking about animals, and she suggests many other possible philosophical resources including Adorno, Leibniz, and Merleau-Ponty.

Fontenay is at her most compelling in describing philosophy’s ongoing indifference to animal life—shading into savagery, underpinned by denial—and how attempts to exclude the animal from ethical systems have in fact demeaned humanity. But Fontenay’s essays carry more than philosophical significance. Without Offending Humans reveals a careful and emotionally sensitive thinker who explores the unfolding of humans’ assessments of their relationship to animals—and the consequences of these assessments for how we define ourselves.

"Without Offending Humans is an excellent, timely, well-argued book. Élisabeth de Fontenay is an original thinker, urging us to consider a rethought version of historical materialism and a utopic animalism."
Leonard Lawler, author of Early Twentieth Century Continental Philosophy