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Lyrical Individualism - Selected Writings On Henri Bergson And Anarchism

by Andre Colomer

~~46,36€~~ 41,72€ 10% OFF

 In the early twentieth century, André Colomer was perhaps the best-known figure in the anarchist movement. A poet, philosopher, activist, and public speaker, he was enmeshed in the Parisian political and artistic scene at a time of political and cultural revolution. Amid the avant-garde explosions of Cubism, futurism, and surrealism and the ferment of radical politics on left and right, Colomer became anarchism’s leading advocate. He galvanized the Parisian public through his agitational writing and organizing, as well as his involvement in a sensational murder case, while developing a distinctive philosophical account of anarchist individualism. Yet Colomer died in obscurity in Moscow, abandoned by his friends and comrades, and is scarcely known in the English-speaking world today. Lyrical Individualism presents a selection of Colomer’s crucial writings, with a focus on anarchist theory and the philosophy of Henri Bergson. It reveals the richness of Colomer’s philosophical work, particularly his creative engagement with Bergson, Max Stirner, and Friedrich Nietzsche to forge a novel anarchist ideology. Colomer’s writings not only offer valuable insights into interwar anarchism, they also present a distinctive philosophical vision that in many ways anticipates theories and debates animating radical political movements today. This book also showcases his acerbic and pugnacious political commentary on the turbulent events of the 1910s and 1920s. The first translation and publication of Colomer’s work since his untimely death in 1931, Lyrical Individualism allows a range of readers to discover this vital thinker.
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Leibnizing - A Philosopher In Motion

by Richard Halpern

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Why read Leibniz today? Can we still learn from him and not just about him? This book argues that Leibniz offers a powerful, productive model for transdisciplinary thinking that can push back against the narrowness of the humanities today. Richard Halpern recasts Leibniz as a great writer as well as a great philosopher, demonstrating that his philosophical project cannot be fully understood without taking its literary elements into account. He shows Leibniz to be a prescient thinker about art and beauty whose insights into the relationship between aesthetic experience and thought remain invaluable. Leibnizing asks readers to follow the dynamic movement of Leibniz’s writing instead of attempting to grasp a static philosophical system and to pay careful attention to the rhetorical and stylistic registers of Leibniz’s work as well as its conceptual and logical dimensions. For philosophers, this book offers a novel approach to reading and interpreting Leibniz. For literary and other theorists, it showcases the relevance of Leibniz’s thought to areas from aesthetics to politics and from metaphysics to computer science. Written in a lucid and even witty style, Leibnizing provides readers with an accessible entryway into Leibniz’s sometimes forbidding but ultimately rewarding philosophical vision.
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Art And Posthistory - Conversations On The End Of Aesthetics

by Arthur C. Danto e Demetrio Paparoni

26,49€ + 10% CARD

 From the 1990s until just before his death, the legendary art critic and philosopher Arthur C. Danto carried out extended conversations about contemporary art with the prominent Italian critic Demetrio Paparoni. Their discussions ranged widely over a vast range of topics, from American pop art and minimalism to abstraction and appropriationism. Yet they continually returned to the concepts at the core of Danto’s thinking—posthistory and the end of aesthetics—provocative notions that to this day shape questions about the meaning and future of contemporary art. Art and Posthistory presents these rich dialogues and correspondence, testifying to the ongoing importance of Danto’s ideas. It offers readers the opportunity to experience the intellectual excitement of Danto in person, speculating in a freewheeling yet erudite style. Danto and Paparoni discuss figures such as Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp, Franz Kline, Sean Scully, Clement Greenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Wang Guangyi, offering both insightful comments on individual works and sweeping observations about wider issues. On occasion, the artist Mimmo Paladino and the philosopher Mario Perniola join the conversation, enlivening the discussion and adding their own perspectives. The book also features an introductory essay by Paparoni that provides lucid analysis of Danto’s thinking, emphasizing where the two disagree as well as what they learned from each other.
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Politics Of Perception And The Aesthetics Of Social Change

by Jason Miller

39,74€ + 10% CARD

 In both politics and art in recent decades, there has been a dramatic shift in emphasis on representation of identity. Liberal ideals of universality and individuality have given way to a concern with the visibility and recognition of underrepresented groups. Modernist and postmodernist celebrations of disruption and subversion have been challenged by the view that representation is integral to social change. Despite this convergence, neither political nor aesthetic theory has given much attention to the increasingly central role of art in debates and struggles over cultural identity in the public sphere. Connecting Hegelian aesthetics with contemporary cultural politics, Jason Miller argues that both the aesthetic and political value of art are found in the reflexive self-awareness that artistic representation enables. The significance of art in modern life is that it shows us both the particular element in humanity as well as the human element in particularity. Just as Hegel asks us to acknowledge how different historical and cultural contexts produce radically different experiences of art, identity-based art calls on its audiences to situate themselves in relation to perspectives and experiences potentially quite remote—or even inaccessible—from their own. Miller offers a timely response to questions such as: How does contemporary art’s politics of perception contest liberal notions of deliberative politics? How does the cultural identity of the artist relate to the representations of cultural identity in their work? How do we understand and evaluate identity-based art aesthetically? Discussing a wide range of works of art and popular culture—from Antigone to Do the Right Thing and The Wire—this book develops a new conceptual framework for understanding the representation of cultural identity that affirms art’s capacity to effect social change.
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Looking Through Images - A Phenomenology Of Visual Media

by Emmanuel Alloa

52,99€ + 10% CARD

 Images have always stirred ambivalent reactions. Yet whether eliciting fascinated gazes or iconoclastic repulsion from their beholders, they have hardly ever been seen as true sources of knowledge. They were long viewed as mere appearances, placeholders for the things themselves or deceptive illusions. Today, the traditional critique of the spectacle has given way to an unconditional embrace of the visual. However, we still lack a persuasive theoretical account of how images work. Emmanuel Alloa retraces the history of Western attitudes toward the visual to propose a major rethinking of images as irreplaceable agents of our everyday engagement with the world. He examines how ideas of images and their powers have been constructed in Western humanities, art theory, and philosophy, developing a novel genealogy of both visual studies and the concept of the medium. Alloa reconstructs the earliest Western media theory—Aristotle’s concept of the diaphanous milieu of vision—and the significance of its subsequent erasure in the history of science. Ultimately, he argues for a historically informed phenomenology of images and visual media that explains why images are not simply referential depictions, windows onto the world. Instead, images constantly reactivate the power of appearing. As media of visualization, they allow things to appear that could not be visible except in and through these very material devices.
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Social Appearances - A Philosophy Of Display And Prestige

by Barbara Carnevali

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 Philosophers have long distinguished between appearance and reality, and the opposition between a supposedly deceptive surface and a more profound truth is deeply rooted in Western culture. At a time of obsession with self-representation, when politics is enmeshed with spectacle and social and economic forces are intensely aestheticized, philosophy remains moored in traditional dichotomies: being versus appearing, interiority versus exteriority, authenticity versus alienation. Might there be more to appearance than meets the eye? In this strikingly original book, Barbara Carnevali offers a philosophical examination of the roles that appearances play in social life. While Western metaphysics and morals have predominantly disdained appearances and expelled them from their domain, Carnevali invites us to look at society, ancient to contemporary, as an aesthetic phenomenon. The ways in which we appear in public and the impressions we make in terms of images, sounds, smells, and sensations are discerned by other people’s senses and assessed according to their taste; this helps shape our ways of being and the world around us. Carnevali shows that an understanding of appearances is necessary to grasp the dynamics of interaction, recognition, and power in which we live—and to avoid being dominated by them. Anchored in philosophy and traversing sociology, art history, literature, and popular culture, Social Appearances develops new theoretical and conceptual tools for today’s most urgent critical tasks.
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Arts Of Address - Being Alive To Language And The World

by Monique Roelofs

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Modes of address are forms of signification that we direct at living beings, things, and places, and they at us and at each other. Seeing is a form of address. So are speaking, singing, and painting. Initiating or responding to such calls, we participate in encounters with the world. Widely used yet less often examined in its own right, the notion of address cries out for analysis. Monique Roelofs offers a pathbreaking systematic model of the field of address and puts it to work in the arts, critical theory, and social life. She shows how address props up finely hewn modalities of relationality, agency, and normativity. Address exceeds a one-on-one pairing of cultural productions with their audiences. As ardently energizing tiny slippages and snippets as fueling larger impulses in the society, it activates and reaestheticizes registers of race, gender, class, coloniality, and cosmopolitanism. In readings of writers and artists ranging from Julio Cortázar to Jamaica Kincaid and from Martha Rosler to Pope.L, Roelofs demonstrates the centrality of address to freedom and a critical political aesthetics. Under the banner of a unified concept of address, Hume, Kant, and Foucault strike up conversations with Benjamin, Barthes, Althusser, Fanon, Anzaldúa, and Butler. Drawing on a wide array of artistic and theoretical sources and challenging disciplinary boundaries, the book illuminates address’s significance to cultural existence and to our reflexive aesthetic engagement in it. Keeping the reader on the lookout for flash fiction that pops up out of nowhere and for insurgent whisperings that take to the air, Arts of Address explores the aliveness of being alive.
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Videophilosophy - The Perception Of Time In Post-Fordism

by Maurizio Lazzarato

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 The Italian philosopher Maurizio Lazzarato has earned international acclaim for his analysis of contemporary capitalism, in particular his influential concept of immaterial labor and his perceptive writings on debt. In Videophilosophy, he reveals the underpinnings of contemporary subjectivity in the aesthetics and politics of mass media. First written in French and published in Italian and later revised but never published in full, this book discloses the conceptual groundwork of Lazzarato’s thought as a whole for a time when his writings have become increasingly influential. Drawing on Bergson, Nietzsche, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, and the film theory and practice of Dziga Vertov, Lazzarato constructs a new philosophy of media that ties political economy to the politics of aesthetics. Through his concept of "machines that crystallize time," he argues that the proliferation of digital technologies over the past half-century marks the transition to a new mode of capitalist production characterized by unprecedented forms of subjection. This new era of the commodification of the self, Lazzarato declares, demands novel types of political action that challenge the commercialization and exploitation of time. This crucial text by an essential contemporary thinker offers vital new perspectives on aesthetics, politics, and media and critical theory.
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Public Art And The Fragility Of Democracy - An Essay In Political Aesthetics

by Fred Evans

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Public space is political space. When a work of public art is put up or taken down, it is an inherently political statement, and the work’s aesthetics are inextricably entwined with its political valences. Democracy’s openness allows public art to explore its values critically and to suggest new ones. However, it also facilitates artworks that can surreptitiously or fortuitously undermine democratic values. Today, as bigotry and authoritarianism are on the rise and democratic movements seek to combat them, as Confederate monuments fall and sculptures celebrating diversity rise, the struggle over the values enshrined in the public arena has taken on a new urgency. In this book, Fred Evans develops philosophical and political criteria for assessing how public art can respond to the fragility of democracy. He calls for considering such artworks as acts of citizenship, pointing to their capacity to resist autocratic tendencies and reveal new dimensions of democratic society. Through close considerations of Chicago’s Millennium Park and New York’s National September 11 Memorial, Evans shows how a wide range of artworks participate in democratic dialogues. A nuanced consideration of contemporary art, aesthetics, and political theory, this book is a timely and rigorous elucidation of how thoughtful public art can contribute to the flourishing of a democratic way of life.
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Sprezzatura - Concealing The Effort Of Art From Aristotle To Duchamp

by Paolo D'Angelo

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 The essence of art is to conceal art. A dancer or musician does not only need to perform with ability. There should also be a lack of visible effort that gives an impression of naturalness. To disguise technique and feign ease is to heighten beauty. To express this notion, Italian has a word with no exact equivalent in other languages, sprezzatura: a kind of unaffectedness or nonchalance. In this book, the first to consider sprezzatura in its own right, philosopher of art Paolo D’Angelo reconstructs the history of concealing art, from ancient rhetoric to our own times. The word sprezzatura was coined in 1528 by Baldassarre Castiglione in The Book of the Courtier to mean a kind of grace with a special essence: the ability to conceal art. But the idea reaches back to Aristotle and Cicero and forward to avant-garde works such as Duchamp’s ready-mades, all of which share the suspicion of the overt display of skill. The precept that art must be hidden turns up in a number of fields, from cosmetics to interior design, politics to poetry, the English garden to shabby chic. Through exploring different articulations of this idea, D’Angelo shows the paradox of aesthetics: art hides that it is art, but in doing so it reveals itself to be art and becomes an assertion about art. When art is concealed, it appears as spontaneous as nature—yet, paradoxically, also reveals its indebtedness to technique. An erudite and surprising tour through aesthetics, philosophy, and art history, Sprezzatura presents a strikingly original argument with deceptive ease.
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Artaud The Moma

by Jacques Derrida

27,81€ + 10% CARD

 In 1996 Jacques Derrida gave a lecture at the Museum of Modern Art on Antonin Artaud. Artaud the Moma reveals the challenge that Artaud posed to Derridaâ€"and to art and its institutional history. It is a powerful interjection into the museum halls, a crucial moment in Derridaâ€™s thought, and an insightful reading of a challenging writer and artist.
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Adorno'S Theory Of Philosophical And Aesthetic Truth

by Owen Hulatt

86,11€ + 10% CARD

 Owen Hulatt undertakes an original reading of Theodor W. Adornoâ€™s epistemology, deepening our understanding of his theories of truth, art, and the nonidentical. Hulattâ€™s interpretation casts Adornoâ€™s theory of philosophical and aesthetic truth as substantially unified, supporting his claim that both philosophy and art are capable of being true.
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Autonomy Of Pleasure - Libertines, License, And Sexual Revolution

by James A. Steintrager

99,36€ + 10% CARD

 What would happen if pleasure were made the organizing principle for social relations and sexual pleasure ruled over all?
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Doing Aesthetics With Arendt - How To See Things

by Cecilia Sjoholm

79,49€ + 10% CARD

 Constructs an Arendtian theory of aesthetics from the philosopherâ€™s fragmentary writings on art and perception.
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Politics And Poetics Of Cinematic Realism

by Hermann Kappelhoff

42,39€ + 10% CARD

 Casts the evolution of cinema as an ongoing struggle to relate audiences to their historical moment.
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Practices Of The Enlightenment - Aesthetics, Authorship, And The Public

by Dorothea E. Von Mucke

112,61€ + 10% CARD

 "Rethinking the relationship between eighteenth-century Pietist traditions and Enlightenment thought and practice, (the author) unravels the complex and often neglected religious origins of modern secular discourse. Mapping surprising routes of exchange between the religious and aesthetic writings of the period and recentering concerns of authorship and audience, this book (re-examines) scholarship on the Enlightenment"--Dust jacket flap.
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On Slowness - Toward An Aesthetic Of The Contemporary

by Lutz Koepnick

66,24€ + 10% CARD

 A counterintuitive take on the deceleration of time and its function in contemporary art and culture.
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Photography And Its Violations

by John Roberts

49,01€ + 10% CARD

 A passionate defense of the mediumâ€™s truth-telling powers.
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Head Cases - Julia Kristeva On Philosophy And Art In Depressed Times

by Elaine P. Miller

66,24€ + 10% CARD

 While philosophy and psychoanalysis privilege language and conceptual distinctions and mistrust the image, the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva recognizes the power of art and the imagination to unblock important sources of meaning. She also appreciates the process through which creative acts counteract and transform feelings of violence and depression. Reviewing Kristeva''s corpus, Elaine P. Miller considers the intellectual''s "aesthetic idea" and "thought specular" in their capacity to reshape depressive thought on both the individual and cultural level. She revisits Kristeva''s reading of Walter Benjamin with reference to melancholic art and the imagination''s allegorical structure; her analysis of Byzantine iconoclasm in relation to Freud''s psychoanalytic theory of negation and Hegel''s dialectical negativity; her understanding of Proust as an exemplary practitioner of sublimation; her rereading of Kant and Arendt in terms of art as an intentional lingering with foreignness; and her argument that forgiveness is both a philosophical and psychoanalytic method of transcending a "stuck" existence. Focusing on specific artworks that illustrate Kristeva''s ideas, from ancient Greek tragedy to early photography, contemporary installation art, and film, Miller positions creative acts as a form of "spiritual inoculation" against the violence of our society and its discouragement of thought and reflection.
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Crowds And Democracy - The Idea And Image Of The Masses From Revolution To Fascism

by Stefan Jonsson

86,11€ + 10% CARD

 Spanning aesthetics, cultural studies, intellectual history, and political theory, this volume unpacks the significance of the shadow agent known as â€œthe massâ€ during a critical period in European history.
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Feminist Aesthetics And The Politics Of Modernism

by Ewa Plonowska Ziarek

39,74€ + 10% CARD

 Ewa Ziarek fully articulates a feminist aesthetics, focusing on the struggle for freedom in women''s literary and political modernism and the devastating impact of racist violence and sexism. She examines the contradiction between women''s transformative literary and political practices and the oppressive realities of racist violence and sexism, and she situates these tensions within the entrenched opposition between revolt and melancholia in studies of modernity and within the friction between material injuries and experimental aesthetic forms. Ziarek''s political and aesthetic investigations concern the exclusion and destruction of women in politics and literary production and the transformation of this oppression into the inaugural possibilities of writing and action. Her study is one of the first to combine an in-depth engagement with philosophical aesthetics, especially the work of Theodor W. Adorno, with women''s literary modernism, particularly the writing of Virginia Woolf and Nella Larsen, along with feminist theories on the politics of race and gender. By bringing seemingly apolitical, gender-neutral debates about modernism''s experimental forms together with an analysis of violence and destroyed materialities, Ziarek challenges both the anti-aesthetic subordination of modern literature to its political uses and the appreciation of art''s emancipatory potential at the expense of feminist and anti-racist political struggles.
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Literature, Life, And Modernity

by Richard Eldridge

86,11€ + 10% CARD

 Richard Eldridge explores the ability of dense and formally interesting literature to respond to the complexities of modern life, arguing that beyond entertainment, difficult modern works cultivate reflective depth and help their readers order and interpret their lives in relation to complex economies and technological systems.
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Music, Madness, And The Unworking Of Language

by John T Hamilton

45,04€ + 10% CARD

 John T. Hamilton investigates how literary, philosophical, and psychological treatments of music and madness challenge the limits of representation, thereby creating a crisis of language. He particularly focuses on the decidedly autobiographical impulse of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where musical experience and mental disturbance disrupt the expression of referential thought, illuminating the irreducible aspects of the self before language can work them back into a discursive system. The study begins in the 1750s with Diderot's "Neveu de Rameau," and situates that text in relation to Rousseau's reflections on the voice and the burgeoning discipline of musical aesthetics. Hamilton then traces the linkage of music and madness that courses through the work of Herder, Hegel, Wackenroder, and Kleist before turning his attention to E. T. A. Hoffmann, whose writings of the first decades of the nineteenth century accumulate and qualify preceding traditions. Throughout his analysis, Hamilton considers the particular representations that link music and madness, exploring underlying motives, preconceptions, and ideological premises that facilitate the association of these two experiences.
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Things Beyond Resemblance - Collected Essays On Theodor W. Adorno

by Robert Hullot-Kentor

46,36€ + 10% CARD

 Theodor W Adorno was a major twentieth-century philosopher and social critic whose writings on oppositional culture in art, music, and literature increasingly stand at the center of contemporary intellectual debate. This collection gathers together sixteen essays about the philosopher.
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