Shop > Artists' Books

Out of Stock
#04991

The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy

Artist
Charles Fourier
Date
2011
Publisher
Wakefield Press
Format
Artists' Books
Details
Softcover
ISBN
9780984115556
Size
11.5 × 18 × 1 cm
Length
95 
Description

Admired by Marx and Engels, the Surrealists, the Situationist International, Walter Benjamin, and Roland Barthes, the great utopian socialist Charles Fourier (1772-1837) has been many things to many people: a proto-feminist, a Surrealist ancestor, a cantankerous cosmologist, a social critic, and a humorist, and to this day one of France’s truest visionary thinkers.

In this zoological guidebook to cuckoldry and commerce, Fourier offers a caustic critique of the bankruptcy of marriage and the prostitution of the economy, and the hypocrisies of a civilization that over-regulates sexual congress while allowing the financial sector to screw over the public. Gathered together here for the first time are Fourier’s two “Hierarchies”—humorously regimented parades of civilization’s cheated and cheated-on in the domestic sphere of sex and the economic sphere of buying and selling commodities. “The Hierarchy of Cuckoldry”—translated into English for the first time—presents 72 species of the male cuckold, ranging from such “common class” cases as the Health-Conscious Cuckold to the Short-Horned Sympathetic, Optimist and Mystical Cuckolds, and the Long-Horned varieties of the Irate, Disgraced and Posthumous Cuckolds. For Fourier, these amount to 72 manifestations of women’s “secret insurrection” against the institution of marriage. “The Hierarchy of Bankruptcy” presents 36 species of the fraudulent bankrupt: a range of Light, Grandiose, and Contemptible shades of financial manipulators who force creditors, cities and even nations to bail them out of ultimately profitable bankruptcies. In these attacks on the morality of monogamy and the perils of laissez-faire capitalism, Fourier’s “Hierarchies” resonate uncannily with our contemporary world.

Translated by Geoffrey Longnecker


CBA

  1. The Hierarchies of Cuckoldry and Bankruptcy
 

Related Items

  1. Making Art Global, Part 1

The Third Havana Biennial 1989
  2. Josephine Pryde: The Enjoyment of Photography
  3. Paul Ryan: Two Is Not a Number, A Conversation with Ayreen Anastas and Rene Gabri
  4. Luis Jacob: Album IV
  5. Ian Wallace: The First documenta, 1955
  6. Notes on Georg Simmel’s Lessons, 1906/07, and on a “Sociology of Art,“ c. 1909
  7. Erkki Kurenniemi
  8. Christoph Menke: Aesthetics of Equality
  9. Jalal Toufic: Reading, Rewriting Poe’s “The Oval Portrait“
  10. G.M. Tamás: Innocent Power
  11. Péter György: The Two Kassels
  12. Kenneth Goldsmith: Letter to Bettina Funcke
  13. David Robbins: Concrete Comedy: An Alternative History of Twentieth-Century Comedy
  14. Angela Bulloch: Source Book 10
  15. Source Book 5 / 2008 Geoffrey Farmer
  16. Animal Spirits
  17. The New Public
  18. It is what it is. Or is it?
  19. Igor Zabel: Contemporary Art Theory
  20. Paul McCarthy: Rebel Dabble Babble
  21. Jon Beacham: The Brother in Elysium - Artwork and Publications 2008-2013
  22. Michael Schmelling: Land Line
  23. Carnets de Gisèle Freund
  24. Pawel Althamer: 2000 Words
  25. Roberto Cuoghi: 2000 Words
  26. Dan Graham: Nuggets: New and Old Writing on Art, Architecture, and Culture
  27. Die Damen
  28. Peter Greenaway: The OK Doll
  29. Peter Greenaway: Eisenstein in Guanajuato
  30. Raqs Media Collective: Casebook
  31. Carl Johan De Geer: DE GEER
  32. Robert Longo: Stand
  33. Michael Riedel: Oskar
  34. Richard Tuttle: Prints
  35. Robert Seydel: A Picture is Always a Book
  36. Ryan Gander: Culturefield
  37. Art or Sound
  38. Ryan Trecartin: Yet