Andrew Hussey

Describes daily life in Paris throughout history from the point of view of the Parisians themselves, including the working classes, criminals, insurrectionists, street urchins, artists, and prostitutes.

The Secret History

Paris

The Life and Death of Guy Debord

The Game of War

If Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon described daily life in contemporary Paris, this book describes daily life in Paris throughout its history: a history of the city from the point of view of the Parisians themselves. Paris captures everyone's imaginations: It's a backdrop for Proust's fictional pederast, Robert Doisneau's photographic kiss, and Edith Piaf's serenaded soldier-lovers; a home as much to romance and love poems as to prostitution and opium dens. The many pieces of the city coexist, each one as real as the next. What's more, the conflicted identity of the city is visible everywhere-between cobblestones, in bars, on the métro. In this lively and lucid volume, Andrew Hussey brings to life the urchins and artists who've left their marks on the city, filling in the gaps of a history that affected the disenfranchised as much as the nobility. Paris: The Secret History ranges across centuries, movements, and cultural and political beliefs, from Napoleon's overcrowded cemeteries to Balzac's nocturnal flight from his debts. For Hussey, Paris is a city whose long and conflicted history continues to thrive and change. The book's is a picaresque journey through royal palaces, brothels, and sidewalk cafés, uncovering the rich, exotic, and often lurid history of the world's most beloved city.

Drawing on texts the French thinker wrote between 1938 and 1947, Hussey addresses the question and challenge of Bataille's relation to mysticism, examining the relation between his account of an inner experience of lost identity, and how he parallels it to traditional forms of religious mysticism. Subjects are not indexed. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR.

The Mysticism of Georges Bataille

The Inner Scar

The essays in this collection were originally given at the international colloquium Cent Ans de Bataille: La Bataille de Cent Ansheld at the Fondació Tàpies in Barcelona in September 1998. They are written from a variety of perspectives but are drawn together by the singular aim of addressing and interrogating Georges Bataille as our contemporary whose fascination with the rupture between mythical and experimental forms of discourse defines our own age as much as it did in Bataille's own time.More precisely, the essays in this collection range over Bataille's status as a novelist, a poet, an art critic, a philosopher and a prophet of post-modernity with this aim in mind. They not only seek to advance and clarify debate about Bataille's present status in the post-modern canon but also shed new light on the complex relation between Bataille and the present generation of readers who have come to him through the prism of post-modernist thought. It is of significance for each writer in this collection, most crucially, that the premonition of catastrophe which defined Bataille's fluid political positions is also located between tragedy and irony.

Georges Bataille and the Art of Transgression

The Beast at Heaven's Gate

Since his death in 1962, Georges Bataille has acquired the status of one of the most influential thinkers of the age. The fact that this reputation has been established by the likes of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva and Philippe Sollers appears to confirm Bataille as a precursor of the postmodernist condition. Few contemporary accounts of Bataille's thought have however engaged with those aspects of his thinking which are influenced by his interest in mysticism. This is an omission which is all the more striking given that Bataille considered his thought to be not only opposite to all philosophical traditions originating in the Enlightenment but also a form of speculation intricately related to the religious exigencies of the Christian Medieval period. This book presents the first major study in English of how Bataille's 'mystical' practices and texts interact with the outer worlds of politics, social relations and externalised discourse which Bataille sets up as the antipodes of his 'inner experience.' From this starting point, Andrew Hussey argues that the inner experience of limits in Bataille's work, the movement which he terms 'transgression', is, unlike the textual drams cherished by his postmodernist admirers, a non-metaphorical, even visceral event.

A provocative rethinking of France's long relationship with the Arab world To fully understand both the social and political pressures wracking contemporary France—and, indeed, all of Europe—as well as major events from the Arab Spring in the Middle East to the tensions in Mali, Andrew Hussey believes that we have to look beyond the confines of domestic horizons. As much as unemployment, economic stagnation, and social deprivation exacerbate the ongoing turmoil in the banlieues, the root of the problem lies elsewhere: in the continuing fallout from Europe's colonial era. Combining a fascinating and compulsively readable mix of history, literature, and politics with his years of personal experience visiting the banlieues and countries across the Arab world, especially Algeria, Hussey attempts to make sense of the present situation. In the course of teasing out the myriad interconnections between past and present in Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, Beirut, and Western Europe, The French Intifada shows that the defining conflict of the twenty-first century will not be between Islam and the West but between two dramatically different experiences of the world—the colonizers and the colonized.

The Long War Between France and Its Arabs

The French Intifada

Christoph Lindner

The postwar histories of Paris and Amsterdam have been significantly defined by the notion of the “underground” as both a material and metaphorical space. Examining the underground traffic between the two cities, this book interrogates the countercultural histories of Paris and Amsterdam in the mid to late-twentieth century. Shuttling between Paris and Amsterdam, as well as between postwar avant-gardism and twenty-first century global urbanism, this interdisciplinary book seeks to create a mirroring effect over the notion of the underground as a driving force in the making of the contemporary European city.

Essays on Cultural Resistance, Subversion, and Diversion

Paris-Amsterdam Underground

Since his death in 1994 (when he put a bullet through his heart in his lonely farmhouse) Guy Debord has been hailed as one of the key thinkers of the age. In Britain and the United States, his theories on the 'spectacle' of modern life were simultaneously hailed as deadly truths by underground subversives and accorded the highest academic prestige. In the same way, the Situationist International (SI), a volatile group of artists, revolutionaries and intellectuals which he led through the 1950s and 1960s, is considered to be the most important art movement since Dada and the Surrealists. Debord himself was a welter of contradictions, whose public life was entirely predicated upon the singlemindedness of his revolutionary intentions, but who privately sought oblivion in infamy, exile and alcoholism. Implicated in the events of May 1968, Italian terrorism and the murder of his friends, and under surveillance by the French secret police for over a decade, he mixed in elite art, business and political circles, and has had admirers and devotees of all political colours and ranks. This biography is an appraisal of a lone and defiant figure whose story follows and, at one historic moment in 1968, appears to lead the drift of art and politics in post-war Paris. 'It could almost be believed that I was the only person to have loved Paris,' Debord said. Then, almost with a shrug, 'but no one has twice raised Paris to revolt.'

Het onbekende, duistere Parijs Ontdek het Parijs achter het cliché van de ansichtkaart: de duistere kant, de stad van de opstanden en opstootjes, revolutionaire ideeën en onmogelijke verlangens. Hussey legt de rauwe werkelijkheid bloot van de petites gens, de gewone mensen op straat, die de geschiedenis van Parijs grotendeels hebben bepaald, op de barricaden, en in de bars, kunstsalons en bordelen. Hij toont de turbulente ontwikkeling van de stad, van de prehistorie tot de rellen in de banlieue en de aanslagen in 2015. Parijs belicht de subversieve elementen die hun sporen hebben nagelaten in het werk van Balzac, Bataille en Breton, Sartre en de existentialisten, Guy Debord en de situationisten, tot aan Michel Houellebecq.

de verborgen geschiedenis

Parijs

« Après la lecture de ce livre, vous aurez une compréhension plus profonde d'un peuple que le reste du monde a toujours envié. » The Washington Post Paris, ville des arts et de l'élégance, du raffinement parfumé, de la poésie romantique ? Qui croit encore à ce cliché de surface ? Le vrai Paris s'est au fil des siècles construit sur autre chose que de la ouate : du sang, de la boue et du sperme. C'est la thèse soigneusement et passionnément démontrée par Andrew Hussey, érudit iconoclaste tellement amoureux de la capitale française qu'il en accepte tous les vices passés. Scènes de débauche, cannibalisme, corruption, massacres, famines, prostitution, maladies et autres réjouissances colmatent les fondations de cette ville sublimement monstrueuse. Il fallait un Anglais pour scruter sans chichis le roman de Paris, à travers les yeux des petites gens, des bas-fonds, des classes dangereuses et des insurgés. La Grande Histoire n'est pourtant pas négligée - on croise dans ce récit titanesque les plus grands noms, de Philippe le Bel à Catherine de Médicis -, mais elle montre son vrai visage, cruel et fou. Best-seller dans les pays anglo-saxons, voici un regard joyeusement sombre sur la Ville Lumière, qui fera date. Andrew Hussey, universitaire, dirige les études françaises à l'université du London Institute à Paris. Journaliste, il collabore avec la BBC, The Guardian et The Observer. Il vit à Paris.

Essai

Paris, ville catin : des origines à 1800

L'édition française s'est fait attendre treize ans, mais la voici enfin : un train à petite vitesse qui arrive à bout de souffle en gare du Nord et déverse ses opinions rougeaudes et ses analyses à chevelure filasse dans une grande vague de bière chaude ; un tsunami brun qui descend les boulevards, passe par-dessus la Seine et inonde la rive gauche. Quelle honte ! Se faire mettre les points sur les "i" par un Angliche, laisser l'une des créatures mythiques de la vie intellectuelle parisienne se faire abattre, empailler et accrocher au-dessus d'une cheminée anglo-saxonne, assister à la dissection de ses délicates arabesques théoriques par de gros doigts plus adaptés à l'étoupe et à la corde ! Evidemment, si l'on y réfléchit sérieusement une seconde, cette attitude possessive est une absurdité - on parle ici de Guy Debord, un penseur qui, à la fin de sa vie particulièrement, considérait les frontières nationales comme de simples lignes d'eau barbouillées sur des sables mouvants. Will Self.

"La société du spectacle" et son héritage punk

Guy Debord

A vibrant account of both the sensuous cultural scene of postwar Paris and the life of an alluring icon of modern art. Isidore Isou was a young Jew in wartime Bucharest who barely survived the Romanian Holocaust. He made his way to Paris, where, in 1945, he founded the avant-garde movement Lettrism, described as the missing link between Dada, Surrealism, Situationism, and May '68. In Speaking East, Andrew Hussey presents a colorful picture of the postwar Left Bank, where Lettrist fists flew in avantgarde punch-ups in Jazz clubs and cafés, and where Isou--as sexy and as charismatic as the young Elvis--gathered around him a group of hooligan disciples who argued, drank, and had sex with the Parisian intellectual élite. This is a vibrant account of the life and times of a pivotal figure in the history of modern art.

The Strange and Enchanted Life of Isidore Isou

Speaking East

Khālid Amīn

Barry Tharaud

أصوات طنجة

A vibrant account of both the sensuous cultural scene of postwar Paris and the life of an alluring icon of modern art. Isidore Isou was a young Jew in wartime Bucharest who barely survived the Romanian Holocaust. He made his way to Paris, where, in 1945, he founded the avant-garde movement Lettrism, described as the missing link between Dada, Surrealism, Situationism, and May ’68. In Speaking East, Andrew Hussey presents a colorful picture of the postwar Left Bank, where Lettrist fists flew in avantgarde punch-ups in Jazz clubs and cafés, and where Isou—as sexy and as charismatic as the young Elvis—gathered around him a group of hooligan disciples who argued, drank, and had sex with the Parisian intellectual élite. This is a vibrant account of the life and times of a pivotal figure in the history of modern art.

Beyond the affluent centre of Paris and other French cities, in the deprived banlieues, a war is going on. This is the French Intifada, a guerrilla war between the French state and the former subjects of its Empire, for whom the mantra of 'liberty, equality, fraternity' conceals a bitter history of domination, oppression, and brutality. This war began in the early 1800s, with Napoleon's lust for martial adventure, strategic power and imperial preeminence, and led to the armed colonization of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia, and decades of bloody conflict, all in the name of 'civilization'. Here, against the backdrop of the Arab Spring, Andrew Hussey walks the front lines of this war - from the Gare du Nord in Paris to the souks of Marrakesh and the mosques of Tangier - to tell the strange and complex story of the relationship between secular, republican France and the Muslim world of North Africa. The result is a completely new portrait of an old nation. Combining a fascinating and compulsively readable mix of history, politics and literature with Hussey's years of personal experience travelling across the Arab World, The French Intifada reveals the role played by the countries of the Maghreb in shaping French history, and explores the challenge being mounted by today's dispossessed heirs to the colonial project: a challenge that is angrily and violently staking a claim on France's future.

Andrew Hussey

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