An ambitious theoretical experiment whose aim is to produce a general approach to the notion of collaboration through a vast series of historical examples taken from different artistic practices. Through the core concept of Fictive World Formulae, inspired by Giambattista Vico and Markus Gabriel, the notion of "fiction" is used as a generator of possibility. A fictive world, in other words, is what Deleuze calls the "virtual" not a parallel world or a constructed representation, but a poiein as creation of possibility within the real. The theme of possibility is in this sense underlying and sustaining the whole project: the purpose of an intellectual and pedagogical collaboration, suggests Collet, is to create possibility; collaboration consists in generating possibility. This is maybe the ultimate meaning of what Collet calls "Zero spaces." Alongside with Alain Badiou's ontological notion of ensemble vide, the zero space is an empty space not in a nihilistic sense, but as a void that contains all the possibilities that can be generated in collaborative contexts. The Zero space is the space in which the fictive world formulae are created. It is a literal, in-the-world model of creation. As the author doesn't fail to underline, the "zero" is not only a set but also a circle, i.e. a context of collaboration in which the poiein as creation of possibility can take place. - Alessandro De Francesco

'In the Vineyard, as in all of Illich's writings, the search runs through accepted certainties, whatever their times and places, questioning them for truths still valid in the formation of personal wisdom.'-Mother Jerome von Nagel, O.S.B., Abbey of Regina LaudisThis book commemorates the dawn of scholastic reading. It tells about the emergence of an approach to letters that George Steiner calls bookish, and which for eight hundred years legitimated the establishment of western secular religion, and schooling its church.

When early Christians began to study the Bible, and to write their own history and that of the Jews whom they claimed to supersede, they used scholarly methods invented by the librarians and literary critics of Hellenistic Alexandria. But Origen and Eusebius, two scholars of late Roman Caesarea, did far more. Both produced new kinds of books, in which parallel columns made possible critical comparisons previously unenvisioned, whether between biblical texts or between national histories. Eusebius went even farther, creating new research tools, new forms of history and polemic, and a new kind of library to support both research and book production. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book combines broad-gauged synthesis and close textual analysis to reconstruct the kinds of books and the ways of organizing scholarly inquiry and collaboration among the Christians of Caesarea, on the coast of Roman Palestine. The book explores the dialectical relationship between intellectual history and the history of the book, even as it expands our understanding of early Christian scholarship. Christianity and the Transformation of the Book attends to the social, religious, intellectual, and institutional contexts within which Origen and Eusebius worked, as well as the details of their scholarly practices--practices that, the authors argue, continued to define major sectors of Christian learning for almost two millennia and are, in many ways, still with us today.,

This is the first modern history of one of the most famous schools in the English-speaking world. It takes an even-handed approach, covering the schools failings as well as its successes. It includes frank discussions of Harrow's financial, educational, and sexual scandals along with a survey of its many great moments as the school of Byron, Churchill (and six other prime ministers), and Nehru.