The concept of ‘performativity’ has risen to prominence throughout the humanities. The rise of financial derivatives reflects the power of the performative sign in the economic sphere. As recent debates about gender identity show, the concept of performativity is also profoundly influential on people’s personal lives. Although the autonomous power of representation has been studied in disciplines ranging from economics to poetics, however, it has not yet been evaluated in ethical terms. This book supplies that deficiency, providing an ethical critique of performative representation as it is manifested in semiotics, linguistics, philosophy, poetics, theology and economics. It constructs a moral criticism of the performative sign in two ways: first, by identifying its rise to power as a single phenomenon manifested in various different areas; and second, by locating efficacious representation in its historical context, thus connecting it to idolatry, magic, usury and similar performative signs. The book concludes by suggesting that earlier ethical critiques of efficacious representation might be revived in our own postmodern era.

Through Chaos to Logos provides a first-hand account of the powers behind creation and the role that those powers play in contemporary society. It is the defining work of a turn of the Century medium and Spiritual Teacher. The main body of this visionary work was written at the dawning of the "New Age," when the energy of the Himalayan Adepts spilled into the consciousness of the Western Mystic, giving birth to Western Mystery Schools such as the Rosicrucian Order, Builders of the Adytum, and the Theosophical and St. Germane Societies under the influence of certain Tibetan Masters -- primarily the renowned Koot Hoomi Lal Singh with whom Dorjie communicated for a period of 10 years.

"What corporations fear most are consumers who ask questions. Naomi Klein offers us the arguments with which to take on the superbrands." Billy Bragg from the bookjacket.

This is the first English translation and study of George Akropolites' History, the main Greek source for the history of Byzantium between 1204 and 1261. Akropolites relates what happened to Byzantium after the Latin conquest of its capital, Constantinople, by the Fourth Crusade in 1204. He narrates the fragmentation of the Byzantine world, describing how the newly established 'empire' in Anatolia prevailed over its foreign and Byzantine enemies to recapture the capital in 1261. Akropolites was an eyewitness to most of the events he relates and a man close to the emperors he served, and his account has therefore influenced modern perceptions of this period. It has been an essential source for all those studying the eastern Mediterranean in the thirteenth century. However, until now historians have made use of his History without knowing anything about its author. Ruth Macrides remedies this deficiency by providing a detailed guide to Akropolites' work and an analysis of its composition, which places it in the context of medieval Greek historical writing.

Completed in 1958, and not published until 1990 due to Soviet censorship, Daniel Andreev reviewed and summarized the entirety of world progress, calling it a meta-philosophy of history. In the centuries ahead he saw calamities to envelop the world, to be culminated by the reign of Rose of the World. This is an international movement unifying the best of all religious and philosophic teachings, and a worldwide Federation of governments, harmonically regulating economic and social movements in the interests of the spiritual development of a person. Rose of the World will install a genuine golden age in our world and abolish poverty, tyranny, war, and violence. Daniel Andreev at the same time had visions of other worlds, both subterranean and celestial, and recorded them, with the struggle between good and evil, and the progress of humans for the goal of moral perfection. A New Translation of selections from the Russian into English by Daniel H. Shubin, for the American Reader.

Money, magic and the theatre were powerful forces in early modern England. Money was acquiring an independent, efficacious agency, as the growth of usury allowed financial signs to reproduce without human intervention. Magic was coming to seem Satanic, as the manipulation of magical signs to performative purposes was criminalized in the great 'witch craze.' And the commercial, public theatre was emerging – to great controversy – as the perfect medium to display, analyse and evaluate the newly autonomous power of representation in its financial, magical and aesthetic forms. Money and Magic in Early Modern Drama is especially timely in the current era of financial deregulation and derivatives, which are just as mysterious and occult in their operations as the germinal finance of 16th-century London. Chapters examine the convergence of money and magic in a wide range of early modern drama, from the anonymous Mankind through Christopher Marlowe to Ben Jonson, concentrating on such plays as The Alchemist, The New Inn and The Staple of News. Several focus on Shakespeare, whose analysis of the relations between finance, witchcraft and theatricality is particularly acute in Timon of Athens, The Comedy of Errors, Antony and Cleopatra and The Winter's Tale.