Join us Monday, June 5th at 7pm for a conversation between David Kishik, author of The Manhattan Project, and Zed Adams, co-editor of Giving a Damn, at Book Culture on 112th St.

This sharp, witty study of a book never written, a sequel to Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project, is dedicated to New York City, capital of the twentieth century. A sui generis work of experimental scholarship or fictional philosophy, it analyzes an imaginary manuscript composed by a ghost.

Part sprawling literary montage, part fragmentary theory of modernity, part implosive manifesto on the urban revolution, The Manhattan Project offers readers New York as a landscape built of sheer life. It initiates them into a world of secret affinities between photography and graffiti, pragmatism and minimalism, Andy Warhol and Robert Moses, Hannah Arendt and Jane Jacobs, the flâneur and the homeless person, the collector and the hoarder, the glass-covered arcade and the bare, concrete street. These and many other threads can all be spooled back into one realization: for far too long, we have busied ourselves with thinking about ways to change the city; it is about time we let the city change the way we think.


David Kishik is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Emerson College. He is the author of The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City, which was just released in paperback by Stanford University Press. His previous books are The Power of Life: Agamben and the Coming Politics (Stanford, 2012) and Wittgenstein’s Form of Life (Continuum, 2008). He is also the co-translator of Giorgio Agamben’s Nudities and What Is an Apparatus.

Zed Adams is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. He is the author of Genealogy of Color: A Case Study in Historicized Conceptual Analysis (Routledge 2015) and the co-editor of Giving a Damn: Essays in Dialogue with John Haugeland (MIT 2016). He is currently working on a book on sound recording.

This is event is FREE and open to the public.
Event address:
536 W 112th St
New York, NY 10025
Can’t make it? Reserve a signed copy by calling our store today:
The Manhattan Project: A Theory of a City Cover Image
$22.95
ISBN: 9781503602779
Availability: On Our Shelves Now – Click Title to See Location Inventory.
Published: Stanford University Press – March 14th, 2017