Imagined communities: Reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism

What makes us modern? This is a classic question in philosophy as well as in political science. However it is often raised without including science and technology in its definition. The argument of this book is that we are modern as long as we split our political process in two - between politics proper, and science and technology. This division allows the formidable expansion of the Western empires. However it has become more and more difficult to maintain this distance between science and politics. Hence the postmodern predicament - the feeling that the modern stance is no longer acceptable but that there is no alternative. The solution, advances one of France's leading sociologists of science, is to realize that we have never been modern to begin with. The comparative anthropology this text provides reintroduces science to the fabric of daily life and aims to make us compatible both with our past and with other cultures wrongly called pre-modern.

We Have Never Been Modern

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Talking Science: Language, Learning, and Values

Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method is a systematic introduction to discourse analysis as a body of theories and methods for social research. It brings together three central approaches, Laclau and Mouffe's discourse theory, critical discourse analysis and discursive psychology, in order to establish a dialogue between different forms of discourse analysis often kept apart by disciplinary boundaries. The book introduces the three approaches in a clear and easily comprehensible manner, explaining the distinctive philosophical premises and theoretical perspectives of each approach as well as the methodological guidelines and tools they provide for empirical discourse analysis. The authors also demonstrate the possibilities for combining different discourse analytical and non-discourse analytical approaches in empirical study. Finally, they contextualize discourse analysis within the social constructionist debate about critical social research, rejecting the view that a critical stance is incompatible with social constructionist premises and arguing that critique must be an inherent part of social research.

/pdf/discourse-analysis-as-theory-and-method-4envkcrccs.pdf

Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method

http://ivl.cns.iu.edu/km/pres/2009-zoss-links/2009-zoss-links-research-design/references/borgattifoster.pdf

The Network Paradigm in Organizational Research: A Review and Typology

Les habitants des Etats-Unis d'Amerique consomment presque deux fois plus de sucre que les Francais : voila un fait qui interesse d'ordinaire l'economie et la politique. Est-ce tout ? Nullement : il suffit de passer du sucre-marchandise, abstrait, comptabilise, au sucre-aliment, concret, « mange » et non plus « consomme », pour deviner l'ampleur (probablement inexploree) du phenomene. Car cet exces de sucre, il faut bien que les Americains le mettent quelque part. Or quiconque a sejourne un peu aux Etats-Unis sait tres bien que le sucre impregne une part considerable de la cuisine americaine ; qu'il sature les aliments ordinairement sucres (pâtisseries), entraine a developper leur variete (glaces, gelees, sirops) et s'etend a de nombreux mets que les Francais ne sucrent pas (viandes, poissons, legumes, salades, condiments).

Pour une psycho-sociologie de l'alimentation contemporaine

Le degré zéro de l'écriture ; suivi, de Nouveaux essais critiques

https://monoskop.org/images/a/a5/Barthes_Roland_le_message_photographique_1961.pdf

Le message photographique

Roland Barthes (1915-1980) was a major French writer, literary theorist and critic of French culture and society. His classic works include Mythologies and Camera Lucida. Criticism and Truth is a brilliant discussion of the language of literary criticism and a key work in the Barthes canon. It is a cultural, linguistic and intellectual challenge to those who believe in the clarity, flexibility and neutrality of language, couched in Barthes' own inimitable and provocative style. Translated and Edited by Katrine Pilcher Keuneman Introduced by Philip Thody.

Criticism and Truth

"I define the Neutral as that which outplays the paradigm, or rather I call Neutral everything that baffles paradigm." With these words, Roland Barthes describes a concept that profoundly shaped his work and was the subject of a landmark series of lectures delivered in 1978 at the Coll ge de France, just two years before his death. Not published in France until 2002, and appearing in English for the first time, these creative and engaging lectures deepen our understanding of Roland Barthes's intellectual itinerary and reveal his distinctive style as thinker and teacher. The Neutral (le neutre), as Barthes describes it, escapes or undoes the paradigmatic binary oppositions that structure and produce meaning in Western thought and discourse. These binaries are found in all aspects of human society ranging from language to sexuality to politics. For Barthes, the attempt to deconstruct or escape from these binaries has profound ethical, philosophical, and linguistic implications. The Neutral is comprised of the prewritten texts from which Barthes lectured and centers around 23 "figures," also referred to as "traits" or "twinklings," that are possible embodiments of the Neutral (sleep, silence, tact, etc.) or of the anti-Neutral (anger, arrogance, conflict, etc.). His lectures draw on a diverse set of authors and intellectual traditions, including Lao-tzu, Tolstoy, German mysticism, classical philosophy, Rousseau, Baudelaire, Walter Benjamin, and John Cage. Barthes's idiosyncratic approach to his subjects gives the lectures a playful, personal, and even joyous quality that enhances his rich insights. In addition to his reflections on a variety of literary and scholarly works, Barthes's personal convictions and the events of his life shaped the course and content of the lectures. Most prominently, as Barthes admits, the recent death of his mother and the idea of mourning shape several of his lectures.

Roland Barthes

Papers

Pour une psycho-sociologie de l'alimentation contemporaine

Le degré zéro de l'écriture ; suivi, de Nouveaux essais critiques

Le message photographique

Criticism and Truth

The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France, 1977-1978