Books by Oskar Negt

Public Sphere and Experience: Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Public Sphere

by Alexander Kluge, Oskar Negt

The “public sphere” is a key concept in political discourse, designating a space for political action. But is this a single authoritative and universal space in which various positions compete for recognition, or does it consist of multiple local spaces spread over diverse collectivities? In Kluge and Negt’s groundbreaking book they examine the material conditions of experience in an arena that had previously figured only as an abstract term: the media of mass and consumer culture. With new, up-to-date introduction from Alexander Kluge.

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History and Obstinacy (Zone Books)

by Alexander Kluge, Oskar Negt

If Marx’s opus Capital provided the foundational account of the forces of production in all of their objective, machine formats, what happens when the concepts of political economy are applied not to dead labor, but to its living counterpart, the human subject? The result is Kluge and Negt’s History and Obstinacy, a breathtaking archaeology of the labor power that has been cultivated in the human body over the last 2,000 years.

Supplementing classical political economy with the insights of fields ranging from psychoanalysis and phenomenology to evolutionary anthropology and systems theory, History and Obstinacy examines the complex ecology of expropriation and resistance as it reaches down into the deepest strata of unconscious thought, genetic memory, and cellular life. First published in 1981, this epochal collaboration has now been edited, expanded, and updated by the authors in response to global developments of the last decade to create an entirely new analysis of “the capitalism within us.”

“This book is an astounding manifestation of an improbable constellation between a great writer/filmmaker and an important social philosopher. Readers will enjoy the illuminating insights and surprising discoveries from the revealing assemblage of ideas, arguments, and imaginations.”― Jürgen Habermas

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