Lisa Appignanesi

A law criminalizing incitement to religious hatred has been high on the Labour Government's list of priorities. It is a law with wide-ranging implications for freedom of expression in Britain: it could be used to censor anyone whether writer, comedian or person in the street who wishes to make a statement about religion that others might find offensive. "Free Expression is No Offence" tackles the issue of free speech in the post-9/11 world from a variety of angles. Its authors draw on their wide-ranging experience to show just why it is that attempts to curtail our freedom must be vigorously resisted by anyone who wants all faiths and none to live peaceably side by side and our many cultures to thrive.

Lisa Appignanesi and Sara Maitland

Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses provoked a furore of global dimensions. It also firmly placed on the cultural agenda a series of basic questions to which writers, thinkers, politicians, all of us, have been stirred to respond. How do we cope with the competing freedoms of expression and religion. What are the limits of liberalism? And what are the threats of fundamentalism of any creed?

Compiled in the immediate aftermath of the Fatwa levelled by the Ayatollah Khomeini on Salman Rushdie, this historic volume brings together documentation from all sides of the controversy. It provides a chronology of events and links these with key statements from leading political and religious as well as literary figures. Culling the huge international coverage, it places in print one of the key debates of the end of the last twenty years - whose ramificiations continue in global politics today.

Fourth Estate, UK, Syracuse University Press, US 1989
Translated into Dutch.

This seminal volume brings together articles by key thinkers in the wide-ranging cultural debate on Postmodernism. The essays found their origin in talks and discussions organized by Appignanesi at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and their spoken character, gives this volume a particular liveliness and accessibility. The book includes articles by Jean-François Lyotard on `Defining the Postmodern' and `Complexity and the Sublime'; Martin Jay `In the Empire of the Gaze' ; Kenneth Frampton, `On Architecture'; and Jacques Derrida with Geoff Bennington `On Colleges and Philosophy'.

Free Association Books, London 1989

Brought together on the occasion of Michel Foucault's death, this collection, culled from conferences at the ICA, charts the rise of contemporary French ideas. It offers a guide to the history of structuralist and post-structuralist concepts in philosophy, literature, Marxism, feminism, history and psychoanalysis. Contributers include Malcolm Bradbury, Michèle Barrett, Peter Dews, Christian Descamps, Terry Eagleton, John Forrester, Gareth Stedman-Jones, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie and Peter Burke.

Free Association Books, London, 1989

Edited by Hilary Lawson and Lisa Appignanesi

The status of truth is one of the central questions of our time. In the past truth has been sought in God, in phenomenal experience, in historical laws, but, above all, in science - whose claims more than those of any other discipline, have been consistently labelled and accepted as `true'.

Now these claims are under attack from philophers and historians of science, who question the nature of objectivity and the very foundations of the long tradition of Western rationalist thinking.

This volume, based on a conference at the ICA, brings together leading philsophers, scientists and social scientists to question the rhetoric of scientific truth. They include Richard Rorty, Bruno Latour, Richard Gregory, W.N. Newton-Smith, John Forrester and Harry Collins

`All our truths are, in a sense, fictions - they are stories we choose to believe.' Hilary Lawson

`We need to stop thinking of science as the place where the mind confronts the world.' Richard Rorty

`Longing for the naked truth is like longing for the purely spiritual, they are both dangerously close to nothingness. I prefer truth warmy clothed, incarnated and strong.' Bruno Latour

Weidenfeld and Nicolson 1989

Edited by Steven Rose and Lisa Appignanesi

This important volume brings together key debates on biogenetics and its social implications. Contributers include James Watson, Steven Rose, Maynard-Smith, and Patrick Bateson,

Blackwells 1986

Translated into Italian