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All items are available in the City Lights Bookstore (Map & Directions). You can also order these items directly from our web site, simply click on the "add to cart" button next to the book of your choice. All orders will be sent by DHL Ground service. For expedited shipping or international orders, please see our Ordering Information .

The Ethics of Identity
by Kwame Anthony Appiah
Race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, gender, sexuality: in the past couple of decades, a great deal of attention has been paid to such collective identities. They clamor for recognition and respect, sometimes at the expense of other things we value. But to what extent do "identities" constrain our freedom, our ability to make an individual life, and to what extent do they enable our individuality? In this beautifully written work, renowned philosopher and African Studies scholar Kwame Anthony Appiah draws on thinkers through the ages and across the globe to explore such questions.
$19.95
Princeton University Press

Adorno in America
by David Jenemann
In the first in-depth account of this period of Adorno’s life, David Jenemann examines Adorno’s confrontation with the burgeoning American “culture industry” and casts new light on Adorno’s writings about the mass media. Contrary to the widely held belief—even among his defenders—that Adorno was disconnected from America and disdained its culture, Jenemann reveals that Adorno was an active and engaged participant in cultural and intellectual life during these years.
$22.95
Univ Of Minnesota Press

Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions
by Fredric Jameson
The relationship between utopia and science fiction is explored through the representations of otherness–alien life and alien worlds–and a study of the works of Philip K. Dick, Ursula LeGuin, William Gibson, Brian Aldiss, Kim Stanley Robinson and more. Jameson's essential essays, including "The Desire Called Utopia," conclude with an examination of the opposing positions on utopia and an assessment of its political value today. Archaeologies of the Future is the third volume, after Postmodernism and A Singular Modernity, of Jameson's project on the Poetics of Social Forms.
$24.95
Verso

The Chomsky-Foucault Debate: On Human Nature
by Noam Chomsky & Michel Foucault
In 1971, at the height of the Vietnam War and at a time of great political and social instability, two of the world's leading intellectuals, Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault, were invited by Dutch philosopher Fons Edlers to debate an age-old question: is there such a thing as "innate" human nature independent of our experiences and external influences? What begins as a philosophical argument rooted in linguistics (Chomsky) and the theory of knowledge (Foucault), soon evolves into a broader discussion encompassing a wide range of topics, from science, history, and behaviorism to creativity, freedom, and the struggle for justice in the realm of politics.
$14.95
New Press

Did Somebody Say Totalitarianism?
by Slavoj Zizek
Totalitarianism, as an ideological notion, has always had a precise strategic function: to guarantee the liberal-democratic hegemony by dismissing the Leftist critique of liberal democracy as the obverse, the twin, of the Rightist Fascist dictatorships. Instead of providing yet another exposition of the history of this notion, Zizek's book addresses totalitarianism in a Wittgensteinian way, as a cobweb of family resemblances. He concludes that the devil lies not so much in the detail of what constitutes totalitarianism but in what enables the very designation totalitarian: the liberal-democratic consensus itself.
$18.00
Verso

Infancy and History: On the Destruction of Experience
by Giorgio Agamben
Agamben's profound and radical meditation on language and philosophy.
$12.95
Verso

Spinoza: Practical Philosophy
by Gilles Deleuze
Spinoza's theoretical philosophy is one of the most radical attempts to construct a pure ontology, with a single infinite substance. This book, which presents Spinoza's main ideas in dictionary form, has as its subject the opposition between ethics and morality, and the link between ethical propositions and ontological propositions.
$12.95
City Lights

Discipline & Punish: The Birth of the Prison
by Michel Foucault
In this brilliant work, the most influential philosopher since Sartre suggests that such vaunted reforms as the abolition of torture and the emergence of the modern penitentiary have merely shifted the focus of punishment from the prisoner's body to his soul.
$14.95
Vintage

The Order of Things
An Archeology of the Human Sciences
by Michael Foucault
In the work that established him as the most important French thinker since Sartre, Michel Foucault offers startling evidence that "man" – man as a subject of scientific knowledge – is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture.
$15.00
Vintage

Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon
by Daniel C. Dennett
For all the thousands of books that have been written about religion, few until this one have attempted to examine it scientifically: to ask why–and how–it has shaped so many lives so strongly. Is religion a product of blind evolutionary instinct or rational choice? Is it truly the best way to live a moral life? Ranging through biology, history, and psychology, Daniel C. Dennett charts religion’s evolution from “wild” folk belief to “domesticated” dogma. Not an antireligious screed but an unblinking look beneath the veil of orthodoxy, Breaking the Spell will be read and debated by believers and skeptics alike.
$16.00
Penguin

Berlin Childhood around 1900
by Walter Benjamin
"Writing in Italy in 1932, Benjamin felt he might never again see the city of his childhood. Through descriptions of furniture, rooms, buildings, parks, objects and the slight interactions between boy and world, Benjamin explores the dichotomies of longing, remembering and forgetting. During his lifetime, Benjamin published several versions of the book, two of which (the 1932-34 and final versions) are included." – Publishers Weekly
$14.95
Harvard University Press

Minima Moralia:
Reflections on a Damaged Life
by Theodor Adorno
“A staggering variety of topics is covered, moving in each section from the most intimate personal experiences to the most general theoretical problems.” — Radical Philosophy
$12.00
Verso

Illuminations
by Walter Benjamin
Studies on contemporary art and culture by one of the most original, critical and analytical minds of this century. Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction," an illuminating discussion of translation as a literary mode, and his thesis on the philosophy of history.
$15.00
Schocken

The Hermeneutics of the Subject:
Lectures at the College de France 1981--1982
by Michel Foucault
The Hermeneutics of the Subject is the third volume in the collection of Michel Foucault's lectures at the Collège de France. In the lectures comprising this volume, Foucault focuses on how the "self" and the "care of the self" have been conceived during the period of antiquity, beginning with Socrates. The problems of the ethical formation of the self, Foucault argues, form the background for modern conceptions of the self and remain at the center of contemporary moral thought.
$16.00
Picador

Songs of Experience: Modern American and European Variations on a Universal Theme
by Martin Jay
As he explores the manifold contexts for understanding experience – epistemological, religious, aesthetic, political, and historical – Jay engages an exceptionally broad range of European and American traditions and thinkers from the American pragmatists and British Marxist humanists to the Frankfurt School and the French poststructuralists, and he delves into the thought of individual philosophers as well, including Montaigne, Bacon, Locke, Hume and Kant, Oakeshott, Collingwood, and Ankersmit.
$21.95
University of California Press

The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World
by Matthew Stewart
Philosophy in the late seventeenth century was a dangerous business. No careerist could afford to know the reclusive, controversial philosopher Baruch de Spinoza. Yet the wildly ambitious genius Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who denounced Spinoza in public, became privately obsessed with Spinoza's ideas, wrote him clandestine letters, and ultimately met him in secret.
$15.95
W. W. Norton

Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974)

Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995
by Gilles Deleuze
Covering the last twenty years of Gilles Deleuze's life (1975-1995), the texts and interviews gathered in this volume complete those collected in Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974). This book provides a prodigious entry into the work of the most important philosopher of our time. Unlike Foucault, Deleuze never stopped digging further into the same furrow. Concepts for him came from life. He was a vitalist and remained one to the last.
$17.95
Semiotext(e)

The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays
by Albert Camus
"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest– whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories–comes afterwards. These are games; one must first answer." So begins this seminal tract of existential philosophy.
$12.95
Vintage

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 3, 1935-1938
by Walter Benjamin
In the frenzied final years of the Weimar Republic, amid economic collapse and mounting political catastrophe, Walter Benjamin emerged as the most original practicing literary critic and public intellectual in the German-speaking world.
$18.95
Harvard University Press

Tete-a-Tete: The Tumultuous Lives and Loves of Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre
by Hazel Rowley
Passionate, freethinking existentialist philosopher-writers Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre are one of the world's legendary couples. Their committed but notoriously open union generated no end of controversy in their day. Biographer Hazel Rowley offers the first dual portrait of these two colossal figures and their intense, often embattled relationship. Through original interviews and access to new primary sources, Rowley portrays Sartre and Beauvoir up close.
$15.95
Harper Perennial

On Hashish
by Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin's posthumously published collection of writings on hashish is a detailed blueprint for a book that was never written--a "truly exceptional book about hashish," as Benjamin describes it in a letter to his friend Gershom Scholem. A series of "protocols of drug experiments," written by himself and his co-participants between 1927 and 1934, together with short prose pieces that he published during his lifetime, On Hashish provides a peculiarly intimate portrait of Benjamin, venturesome as ever at the end of the Weimar Republic, and of his unique form of thought.
$14.95
Harvard/ Belknap

Desert Islands and Other Texts (1953-1974)
by Gilles Deleuze
This book anthologizes 40 texts and interviews written over 20 years by renowned French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who died in 1995. The early texts, from 1953-1966 (on Rousseau, Kafka, Jarry, etc.), belong to literary criticism and announce Deleuze's last book, Critique and Clinic (1993). But philosophy clearly predominates in the rest of the book, with sharp appraisals of the thinkers he always felt indebted to: Spinoza, Bergson, & Jean-Paul Sartre.
$17.95
Semiotext(e)
Temporarily out of stock

Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940
by Walter Benjamin
Working at the height of his powers to the very end, Benjamin refined his theory of the mass media that culminated in the final version of his essay "The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility." Also included in this volume is his influential piece "On the Concept of History," completed just before his death. The book is remarkable for its inquiry into the nature of "the modern" (especially as revealed in Baudelaire), for its ideas about the transmogrification of art and the radical discontinuities of history, and for its examples of humane life and thought in the midst of barbarism. The entire collection is eloquent testimony to the indomitable spirit of humanity under siege.
$19.95
Harvard University Press

The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire
by Walter Benjamin
Walter Benjamin's essays on the great French lyric poet Charles Baudelaire revolutionized not just the way we think about Baudelaire, but our understanding of modernity and modernism as well. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flâneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes.
$15.95
Belknap Press

Descartes's Secret Notebook: A True Tale of Mathematics, Mysticism, and the Quest to Understand the Universe
by Amir D. Aczel
Descartes had a mysterious and mystical side. Almost certainly a member of the occult brotherhood of the Rosicrucians, he kept a secret notebook, now lost, most of which was written in code. After Descartes’s death, Gottfried Leibniz, inventor of calculus and one of the greatest mathematicians in history, moved to Paris in search of this notebook—and eventually found it in the possession of Claude Clerselier, a friend of Descartes. Leibniz called on Clerselier and was allowed to copy only a couple of pages—which, though written in code, he amazingly deciphered there on the spot. Leibniz’s hastily scribbled notes are all we have today of Descartes’s notebook, which has disappeared.
$14.95
Broadway

Rousseau's Dog: Two Great Thinkers at War in the Age of Enlightenment
by David Edmonds & John Eidinow
Rousseau's Dog is the fascinating true story of the bitter and very public quarrel that turned the Age of Enlightenment's two most influential thinkers into deadliest of foes–a most human tale of compassion, treachery, anger, and revenge; of celebrity and its price; of shameless spin; of destroyed reputations and shattered friendships.
$14.95
Harper Perennial

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