Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisIan Buchanan is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Wollongong, Australia. He is the author of the Oxford Dictionary of Critical Theory (2010) and the editor of Deleuze Studies.Lorna Collins is an artist, critic and arts educator based in Cambridge, where she completed her PhD as a Foundation Scholar in French Philosophy, at Jesus College. She is the founder and co-organiser/curator of the trans-disciplinary Making Sense colloquia and co-editor of the series of Making Sense books. Her provocative practice as an artist (in paint, film, installation and performance) drives the motor that lies behind all her existential and epistemological (philosophical) enquiries.Table of ContentsNotes on Contributors List of Illustrations Introduction, Ian Buchanan and Lorna Collins Part I: Genealogy of Art and Schizoanalysis 1. The Clutter Assemblage, Ian Buchanan (Director for the Institute for Social Transformation Research, University of Wollongong, Australia) 2. Schizo-Revolutionary Art; Deleuze, Guattari and Communisation Theory, Stephen Zepke (author of Sublime Art) Part II: Raw Data for Schizoanalysis: Outsider Art 3. Pragmatics of Raw Art (For the Post-Autonomy Paradigm), Alexander Wilson (media artist, musician, theatre director and theorist) 4. Passional Bodies: The Interstitial Force of Artaud’s Drawings, Anna Powell (Reader in Film and English at Manchester Metropolitan University, UK) 5. Art, Therapy and the Schizophrenic, Lorna Collins (artist, poet and critical theorist) Part III: Art as an Abstract Machine 6. The Audience and the Art Machine: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Opera for a Small Room, Susan Ballard (School of the Arts, English and Media, University of Wollongong) 7. 1780 and 1945: An Avant-Garde Without Authority, Addressing the Anthropocene, jan jagodzinski (University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada) 8. Strategies of Camouflage: Depersonalisation, Schizoanalysis and Contemporary Photography, Ayelet Zohar (transdisciplinary artist, curator and Lecturer, Tel Aviv University, Israel) Part IV: Mobilizing Schizoanalysis: Collaborative Art Practice 9. The Event of Painting, Andrea Eckersley (artist) 10. In Response to the ‘Indiscreet Questioner’, Jac Saorsa (Cardiff University, Wales) 11. The Sinthome/Z-point Relation or Art as Non-Schizoanalysis, David Burrows and Simon O’Sullivan (Plastique Fantastique) (Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, UK and Goldsmiths College, University of London) 12. Art as Schizoanalysis: Creative Place-Making in South Asia, Leon Tan (Independent scholar) Index

Read more less

Trade ReviewThe book’s constructive project is worthy of attention. Kaspar uses the many objections to intuitionism to pare the theory down to its essentials; then, he develops a framework that promises to solve the explanatory and epistemological puzzles that the view faces. ... An engaging and accessible work. -- Robert William Fischer, Texas State University, USA * Philosophy in Review *In this exceptionally rewarding study of Deleuze and futurism, Helen Palmer enacts new possibilities for rigorous scholarship, where precise formal analysis and powerful conceptual innovation combine to give us the deepest practical explanation of Deleuze’s radical philosophy of language, while pointing to the continued importance of futurism as template for avant-garde movements. * James Williams, University of Dundee, UK *This important new study sheds more light on a movement that has profoundly influenced the development of literature and the arts in the 20th century internationally. While there are excellent books dealing with futurism, the avant-garde, and Deleuze’s philosophy individually, there is no book bringing together those two topics for comparison like this book does. It highlights for the first time the connection between the futurist manifestoes and Deleuze’s philosophical writings, from both a conceptual and a linguistic perspective * Anna Lawton, Adjunct Professor, Georgetown University, USA *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Poetics of Futurism: Zaum, Shiftology, Nonsense 2. Poetics of Deleuze: Structure, Stoicism, Univocity 3. The Materialist Manifesto 4. Shiftology #1: From Performativity to Dramatisation 5. Shiftology #2: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis 6. The See-Sawing Frontier: Linguistic Spatiotemporalities 7. Conclusion: Suffixing, Prefixing Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisDonald A. Landes is Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Concordia University, Montréal, Québec, Canada. Azucena Cruz-Pierre is an independent scholar in France.Trade ReviewIt is no exaggeration to say that Edward Casey is an extraordinary philosopher. And this book, consisting of an excellent introduction surveying the entirety of Casey’s work, a deeply probing interview, and thoughtful essays on Casey’s philosophical contributions by colleagues and former students, is much more than testimony to Casey’s influence. Exploring the remarkable range of his thought as the most creative, most exciting, most provocative inheritor of Husserlian phenomenology, the contributions to this volume take the reader on an unforgettable journey. To describe the significance and reward of his thought, I will borrow a concept that he has investigated with impressive rigor and simply say that he is one of the very few whose writing is on the cutting edge. -- David Kleinberg-Levin, Professor Emeritus, Northwestern University, USA, author of 'Gestures of Ethical Life' and 'Before the Voice of Reason'Edward S. Casey is widely known for his honest, attentive openness to phenomena, for his finely nuanced accounts of experience, and for his compelling descriptions of our shared world. The essays and interviews that comprise this work confirm that Casey numbers among the most incisive and creative philosophers today, making original contributions to fields broadly conceived as epistemology, aesthetics, the history of philosophy, and human geography. -- Anthony Steinbock, Professor of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, USATable of ContentsAbout the Authors Acknowledgments List of Abbreviations of Books by Edward S. Casey List of Figures and Images 1. Introduction Donald A. Landes and Azucena Cruz-Pierre Part I: Imagining, Memory, and Place 2. The Weight of Imagining, Memory, and Place: The Multiple Origins of Edward S. Casey’s Thought. Edward S. Casey, interviewed by Donald A. Landes 3. Place, Memory, and History David Carr 4. Casey’s Subliminal Phenomenology: On Edging Things Back into Place David Morris 5. The Remembrance of Place Jeff Malpas 6. A Philosophy of Place? Thierry Paquot, translated by Azucena Cruz-Pierre and Donald A. Landes 7. The Derivation Of Space Eugene Gendlin 8. Place(s) of Ornament Kent Bloomer 9. Plato, Levinas, and the Erotic Image Tanja Staehler Part II: Painting and Scapes 10. Framing the Landscape Edward S. Casey, interviewed by Azucena Cruz-Pierre 11. Glimpsing the Sublime: Casey, De Kooning, and Abstract Expressionism Galen Johnson 12. Slipping Glancer: Painting Place with Ed Casey Megan Craig 13. Drawing with/in and drawing out. A redefinition of architectural drawing through Edward S. Casey’s meditations on mapping Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Angeliki Sioli 14. Where In the World Is Art's Edge? An Artist's Quest Eve Ingalls Part III: Edges, Glances, and Worlds 15. The Reinscription of Place Edward S. Casey, interviewed by Azucena Cruz-Pierre 16. Casey Comes to the Edge: Borders, Boundaries, Diagrams, Arts and Islands Gary Shapiro 17. The Body as the Place of Care Eva Feder Kittay 18. Voices and the “Spirit of Place” Fred Evans Works Cited Appendix: Chronological Bibliography of the Work of Edward S. Casey (selected), compiled by Kathleen Hulley. Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisThe Bloomsbury Companion to Aesthetics presents a practical study guide to emerging topics and art forms in aesthetics and the philosophy of art.Placing contemporary discussion in its historical context, this companion begins with an introduction to the history of aesthetics. Surveying the central topics, terms and figures and noting the changes in the roles the arts played over the centuries, it also tackles methodological issues asking what the proper object of study in aesthetics is, and how we should go about studying it. Written by leading analytic philosophers in the field, chapters on Core Issues and Art Forms cover four major topics;- the definition of art and the ontology of art work- aesthetic experience, aesthetic properties, and aesthetic and artistic value- specific art forms including music, dance, theatre, the visual arts as a whole, and the various forms of popular art- new areas in aesthetics and the philosophy of art, such as environmental aesthetics and globalTable of ContentsContributors Acknowledgements 1. Introduction, Anna Christina Ribeiro 2. Research Methods and Problems, Brandon Cooke Part I: Core Issues and Art Forms 3. Defining Art, Thomas Adajian 4. Artworks, Objects, and Structures, Sherri Irvin 5. The Aesthetic Experience, Derek Matravers 6. Aesthetic Properties, Elisabeth Schellekens 7. Aesthetic and Artistic Value, Sondra Bacharach and James Harold 8. Music, Jeanette Bicknell 9. Literature, Anna Christina Ribeiro 10. Theatre, David Osipovich 11. Dance, Renee M. Conroy 12. Visual Arts, John Kulvicki 13. Film, Amy Coplan 14. Architecture, Rafael De Clercq 15. Popular Art, Aaron Smuts 16. Environmental Aesthetics, Glenn Parsons 17. Global Standpoint Aesthetics: Towards a Paradigm, David Gandolfo and Sarah E. Worth 18. New Directions in Aesthetics, Paisley Livingston Part II: Resources 19. Chronology of Works in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Darren Hudson Hick 20. Research Resources in Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art, Darren Hudson Hick Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisLars Spuybroek is Professor of Architectural Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, USA. He is the author of NOX: Machining Architecture (2004), The Architecture of Continuity (2008), Research & Design: The Architecture of Variation (2009) and Research & Design: Textile Tectonics (2011). He is an award-winning architect with his practice NOX.Trade Review... exhilarating to watch elements of Ruskin's thought being taken on ... The Sympathy of Things is energetic, well written and full of examples. -- Matthew Reynolds * Times Literary Supplement *This is a dazzling, provocative, baffling, and sometimes vexing manifesto. The Sympathy of Things is an unforgettable book. * Carlyle Studies Annual *The term 'brilliant' is often misused in reviews, but the opening chapter on 'the digital nature of gothic' is truly scintillating. * Architectural Research Quarterly *Hundreds of threads that make an astonishingly rich tapestry ... Ruskin has at last found an interpreter with the breadth of learning and a poetic imagination to make his perceptions relevant to our own day. * Architectural Review *The author envisions a radical future for design and technology ... This book is undoubtedly a rich and original source of ideas for anyone across the many disciplines that increasingly care about materiality in the past, present or future. * Theory, Culture & Society *In this remarkable study, Spuybroek treats us to an astonishingly fresh upgrade of John Ruskin, who ends up no longer inhabiting an antique past but talks to us directly. Spuybroeck shows how Ruskin's aesthetic actually works, cutting through clouds of vagueness to get at a wonderfully algorithmic, procedural tactics with limpid clarity. But there's much more: something like a distinctive ontology emerges when we study Ruskin this way. This ontology radically decenters the human from its meaning-making position in the cosmos, allowing all kinds of other entities to show up without the usual visas and interrogations. What results is truly an ecology of things, making Ruskin sharply relevant for our age. * Professor Timothy Morton, Rita Shea Chair in English, Rice University, USA *The Sympathy of Things is a stirring call to action; an amazing reconstruction of the ideas of the Victorian sage John Ruskin; and, above all, a visionary look at the inner life of things. Lars Spuybroek makes the case that aesthetics is first philosophy, and proposes a radical new aesthetics for the digital age. -- Steven Shaviro, DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University, USAIf Spuybroek, like Ruskin, does not shake your design and aesthetic concepts, you haven’t understood him. -- Charles JencksThe Sympathy of Things is an astonishing and visionary work. I have never before come across a book so brimming with insight, written with such feeling, and so keenly in touch with life. Ostensibly a meditation on the oeuvre of John Ruskin, what Lars Spuybroek offers us is an intoxicating meditation on art, architecture and design that soars above the ponderous deadweight of thing-theory to luxuriate in the unruly and exuberant proliferation of the things themselves. * Professor Tim Ingold, Chair of Social Anthropology, University of Aberdeen *Table of ContentsForeword Preface 1. The Digital Nature of Gothic 2. The Matter of Ornament 3. Abstraction and Sympathy 4. The Radical Picturesque 5. The Ecology of Design Notes Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisRomana Byrne is an independent scholar based in France. Formerly, she was a Research Fellow at The University of Melbourne, Australia, where she lectured in the history of queer theory, pornography and aesthetics, and sadomasochism in cinema. She has published in Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts and Papers on Language & Literature.Trade ReviewRomana Byrne’s philosophical, historical, and literary reflections on 'aesthetic sexuality', or pleasure as a form of self- and other-creation, provides us with a radical alternative approach to sadomasochism as it has existed since the eighteenth century. It illuminates the history and culture of sexual subjectivity in exhilarating ways. -- Joanna Bourke, Professor of History, Birkbeck, University of London, UKRomana Byrne’s Aesthetic Sexuality provocatively reveals sadomasochism as a scandalous art of sexuality embedded within Western culture. Tracking the connections between sadomasochism and aesthetic philosophy, from Kant to Baudrillard, Byrne deftly negotiates the pleasures and paradoxes of sexuality on the surface – sex as a matter of practices, games, and fleeting intensities. The result subtly subverts the demand we speak our sexuality as truth, and offers the pleasure of sexuality as aesthetic self-creation. -- Benjamin Noys, Reader in English, University of Chichester, UK and author of Georges Bataille: A Critical IntroductionAesthetic Sexuality reads against the grain of standard readings of the scientia sexualis versus ars erotica distinction Foucault made famous in his History of Sexuality. From Sade to Nietzsche to contemporary fetish fashion, Byrne brilliantly uses the aesthetics of sadomasochism to reconceptualize sexuality itself. A tour de force! -- Lynne Huffer, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Emory University, USATable of ContentsAcknowledgements 1. Introduction | Aesthetic sexuality: a literary history of sadomasochism 2. Universal perversion and the laws of judgment: the Marquis de Sade 3. Brutal beauty: Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads and Mirbeau’s Le Jardin des supplices 4. Tragic self-shattering I: Nietzsche’s aesthetics 5. Tragic self-shattering II: delirious materialism in Bataille’s L’Érotisme and Histoire de l’œil 6. Tragic self-shattering III: mortifying metaphysics in Réage’s Histoire d’O and Berg’s L’image 7. Sadomasochism as anti-aesthetic theatre 8. Conclusion | Fashioning BDSM today Works Cited Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisSeth Kim-Cohen is Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, USA.Trade ReviewAs an entreaty to sound artists and gallerists to think discursively about the artistic production of ambience, Kim-Cohen’s Against Ambience is a necessary and timely intervention. It should be read by anyone with a serious investment in the creation or presentation of ‘sound art’ or ‘environmental’ art installations. As aesthetic theory, the essay is at once discursively productive, cognitively stimulating, well organized, linguistically playful without indulgence, and frequently razor-sharp in its dissection of concepts ... The art world could use more ethical appeals such as Kim-Cohen’s, and his clarion call in Against Ambience justly deserves amplification. * Twentieth-Century Music *This fantastic new collection of essays confirms that Seth Kim-Cohen writes about sound and unsound, sense and nonsense, like no one else. Kim-Cohen polarizes—not just his readers, but his subjects and, inevitably, himself. The Big One-Thing is always cracked in two. Easy magic can’t get a break. But make no mistake. Kim-Cohen is a lover of intensities: litany becomes a hard bright joy, pleasure heaves its darkness into view. That love of intensity— faith, really—is what lets him break down the ‘superjoke’ of rock ’n roll without spoiling its punchline. An astonishing feat. We could all take a page. * Seth Brodsky, Assistant Professor of Music and the Humanities, The University of Chicago, USA *Against Ambience and Other Essays is like one of those bombs the anarchists dreamed of back at the birth of modernism: exploding whole worlds with a single throw. In their case, some wood panelling was splintered, tuxedoes were spoiled, and a few (usually the wrong) people injured. But Kim-Cohen here, once again, pulls off the more utopian dream—and with aplomb. * Craig Dworkin, Professor of English at the University of Utah, USA *[Against Ambience and Other Essays is] a polemical air horn that might just wake celebrants of ambient art from their nostalgic dream of decontextualized sensory immersion. * Lytle Shaw, Professor of English, New York University, USA *Table of ContentsPreface Against Ambience Shallow Listenings: Sounds, Silences, Scenes, & Sites Nothing That Is Not There And The Nothing That Is: Doug Aitken’s Sonic Pavilion I Have Something To Say, But I’m Not Saying It That Jabbering Which Thinks It Sees: Robert Morris Sites His Sources Sound Today (Is No Longer A Function Of The Ear) or, Why Do I So Dislike Glee? The Conceptual Garage: Rock and Roll, Expanded No Depth: A Call for Shallow Listening Burden Bangs Joy Rock and Roll Lecture No. 1 Anxious, Dismal, Giddy, Aggressive: Seth Kim-Cohen Interviewed by Mark Peter Wright for Ear Room Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisJonathan Schroeder is William A. Kern Professor in Communications at Rochester Institute of Technology, USA.Anna Westerstahl Stenport is Chair and Professor in the School of Modern Languages at Georgia Institute of Technology, USA.Eszter Szalczer is Professor of Theatre and Head of History, Literature and Criticism of the Theatre Program at the University at Albany, New York, USA.Trade ReviewAugust Strindberg was not only a leading innovator in the modern theatre but also in modern art, in a new visual culture, on stage and on canvas. This highly stimulating book brings together a range of younger researchers, practitioners, artists, and prominent intellectuals to reassess a major literary figure from the perspective of visual theory and art history. * Göran Söderström, Professor Emeritus of Art History, Lund University and Stockholm University, Sweden, head of the Strindberg Museum (1973-1990), and author of Strindbergs måleri (2017) *This interdisciplinary collection brings together essays by Strindberg scholars, theater directors, and literary and cultural theorists that explore the interplay between writing, photography, painting, and modernity in Strindberg’s work. A welcome contribution to Strindberg’s scholarship, August Strindberg and Visual Culture illuminates the relationship of his work as a whole to visual cultures and different media since the turn of the last century. * Lynne R. Wilkinson, Associate Professor of Germanic Languages, Comparative Literature, and Women's and Gender Studies, University of Texas at Austin, USA *Table of ContentsForeword: An Extraordinary Transdisciplinary Artist Daniel Birnbaum, The Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm, Sweden 1. Introduction: Visual Culture, August Strindberg, and The Double Image of Modernity Eszter Szalczer, Anna Westerstahl Stenport, and Jonathan Schroeder 2. Hands, Dissection, and Embodied Seeing: Strindberg and Munch Allison Morehead, Queen’s University, Canada 3. May the Force Be With You”: Strindberg's Paintings Arnold Weinstein, Brown University, USA 4. Strindberg the Environmentalist? Blood-stained Landscapes and the French Tradition of Nature Painting Eszter Szalczer, University at Albany, SUNY, USA 5. Ghosts of the Brain Made Real: Anti-theatricality, Visuality, and Disembodiment Across Strindberg’s Late Chamber Media Amy Holzapfel, Williams College, USA 6. Méliès’s Dream Film and Strindberg’s Dream Play: Compressing Time and Space Scott MacKenzie, Queen’s University, Canada, and Anna Westerståhl Stenport, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA 7. Strindberg and the Images of the Stage: A Dramaturg’s Perspective Magnus Florin, The Royal Dramatic Theatre, Stockholm, Sweden 8. Staging Strindberg’s A Dream Play: A Visual Essay Robert Wilson, Artist and Director 9. Robert Wilson’s Photographic Elements of A Dream Play Jonathan Schroeder, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA 10. Dream-Playing the Archive: Exploring the 1915-18 Düsseldorf production of A Dream Play Astrid von Rosen, University of Gothenburg, Sweden 11. Anticipations of the Digital: Dispersing Strindberg Berndt Clavier, Malmö University, Sweden, and Timothy Engström, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA 12. Picturing Miss Julie: Gender and Visuality in Performance Practice Kristina Hagström-Ståhl, Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Art, Sweden 13. Strindberg’s Self-Portraits in Context Lisa Hostetler, George Eastman Museum, Rochester, New York, USA 14. My Strindberg Selfies Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark 15. Scenography, Photography, Cinematography: Strindberg and the Technologies of Visual Representation Freddie Rokem, Tel Aviv University, Israel 16. Liv Ullmann’s Miss Julie: An Interview with Reflections Liv Ullmann, Director and Actress

Read more less

Book SynopsisMatthew Harle is a writer, archive curator and Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Barbican Centre, UK. His writing has appeared in a number of publications, such as Sight & Sound, Screen, CITY and Cineaste, and he is the co-editor of Of Mud and Flame: A Penda's Fen Sourcebook (2018).Trade ReviewOne of the foundational manoeuvres of the critical historian of culture is to turn finished works into unfinished ones. Matthew Harle has a head’s start here, and he capitalises on it brilliantly revealing the unrealised, the unmade and the abandoned as the ghostly DNA of the cultural sphere. * Ben Highmore, Professor of Cultural Studies, University of Sussex, UK *A glorious typology of the abandoned, failed and unfinished. Matthew Harle enthusiastically traces entropic utopias, ill-advised transport schemes, unraveled cinematic collaborations and unrealised literary projects in a compelling account of the enemies of promise that haunt fallible archives. It is a book that celebrates creative failure and thoughtfully explores the material spaces of incompletion. In a tour de force of intertextuality, it juxtaposes the infinite potential of the unfinished against the mundane inadequacies of the archive. Full of poignant foreclosures, this is a subtle, funny and excitingly original glimpse into the realms of arrested achievement. * Barry Curtis, Tutor in Critical and Historical Studies, Royal College of Art, UK *Most literary historians discuss abandoned art in doleful, pitying terms. Not Matthew Harle: he sees 'failure' as fertile. In this delightful and whip-smart cultural travelogue, he drifts across the 20th century and the institutions that (sometimes bathetically) try to archive it, offering a series of fascinating meditations on utopian colonies in Los Angeles, postwar British urban planning, Harold Pinter's efforts to bring Proust to the big screen. These projects, in their different ways unfinished and incomplete, emerge as zones of intellectual possibility, conceptual play, infinite and eccentric potential. * Sukhdev Sandhu, Associate Professor of English Literature and Social and Cultural Analysis, New York University, USA *Table of ContentsList of Illustrations Acknowledgments 1. On the Shelf: An Introduction to Abandoned Work 2. The Writing and Rewriting of Place: The Story of Llano del Rio 3. Town Fictions: Planning the Future in Postwar London 4. A Shattering Achievement: Piecing Together Pinter’s Proust 5. The Frugal Charade: Ideas for Books in Literary Archives 6. Remains to Be Seen: Afterword Bibliography Index

Read more less

Book SynopsisAlthough beauty, in the pre-modern Arab world, was enjoyed and promoted almost everywhere, Islam does not possess a general theory on aesthetics or a systematic theory of the arts. This is a study of the Arabic discourse on beauty. The author had to search for her evidence in written statements from a wide variety of sources, such as the Qur'an, legal, religious and Sufi texts, chronicles, biographies, belle-lettres, literary criticism, and scientific, geographic and philosophical literature. The result is a compendium of references to beauty in chapters on the Religious Approach, Secular Beauty and Love, Music and Belle-Lettres, and the Visual Arts. This approach is informative and provocative. For the generalist, it provides comparative material for an understanding of the early Arab cultural context. For the specialist, it raises questions of sponsorship and purpose.

Read more less

Book SynopsisLeash extends the logic of S&M to its inexorable and startling conclusion, darkly and hilariously revealing the masochistic impulse as the urge to disappear from the chores, obligations, and emotional vacuity of daily life.No more jobs, no more taxes, no more checkbook, no more bills, no more credit cards, no more credit, no more money, no more mortgages, no more rent, no more savings, no more junk mail, no more junk, no more mail, no more phones, no more faxes, no more busy signals, no more computers, no more cars, no more drivers' licenses, no more traffic lights, no more airports, no more flying, no more tickets, no more packing, no more luggage, no more supermarkets, no more health clubs... While her current spends the summer researching public housing in Stockholm, a moderately wealthy, object-oppressed, and terminally hip New York female of a certain age seeks adventure in the sedate dyke bars of lower Manhattan. Finding none, she answers a personal ad. She is ordered to put on a blindfold before the first meeting with the woman she knows only as Sir. Not knowing what someone looks like turns out to be freeing, as do the escalating constraints that alienate her not just from her former life, but from her very conception of who she is. Part Georges Bataille, part Fran Leibowitz, this is the Story of O told with a self-referentially perverse sense of humor. Leash extends the logic of S&M to its inexorable and startling conclusion, darkly and hilariously revealing the masochistic impulse as the urge to disappear from the chores, obligations, and emotional vacuity of daily life. First published in 2002.

Read more less

Book SynopsisUgliness is very much alive in the history of art. From ritual invocations of mythic monsters to the scare tactics of the early twentieth-century avant-garde, from the cabinet of curiosities to the identity politics of today, the ugly has been every bit as active as the beautiful, and often much more of a reality - Why then has it been so neglected? This book seeks to remedy this oversight through both broad theoretical reflection and concrete case studies of ugliness in various historical and cultural contexts. The protagonists range from cooks to psychoanalysts, from war prostheses to plates of asparagus, on a world stage stretching from ancient Athens to Singapore today. Drawing across disciplinary and cultural boundaries, the writers illuminate why ugliness, associated over the millennia with negative categories ranging from sin and stupidity to triviality and boredom, remains central to art and cultural practice.Table of ContentsAndrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich, Rethinking Ugliness . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Politics of Ugliness Gretchen E. Henderson, The Ugly Face Club: A Case Study in the Tangled Politics and Aesthetics of Deformity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Suzannah Biernoff, The Face of War . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Brandon Taylor, Picasso and the Psychoanalysts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Mechtild Widrich, The ‘Ugliness’ of the Avant-garde . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . The Experience of Ugliness Edward Payne, Ribera’s Grotesque Heads: Between Anatomical Study and Cultural Curiosity . . . . . Frédérique Desbuissons, The Studio and the Kitchen: Culinary Ugliness as Pictorial Stigmatisation in Nineteenth-Century France . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kathryn Simpson, I’m Ugly Because You Hate Me: Ugliness and Negative Empathy in Oskar Kokoschka’s Early Self-Portraiture . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Adele Tan, From Political Travesties to Aesthetic Justice – the Ugly in Teo Eng Seng’s D Cells . . . . The Theory of Ugliness Andrei Pop, Can Beauty and Ugliness Coexist? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Kassandra Nakas, Putrefied, Deliquescent, Amorphous: The ‘Liquefying’ Rhetoric of Ugliness . . . . . Odeta Žukauskien?, Orderly Ugliness, Anamorphosis and Visionary Worlds. Jurgis Baltrušaitis’ Contribution to Art History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Three Definitions of Ugliness (1765, 1843, 1882) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis book provides a unique, philosophical interpretation of a significant twentieth-century painter - Wassily Kandinsky. Michel Henry was one of the leading French philosophers of the twentieth century. His numerous works of philosophy are all organized around the theme of life. In contrast to the scientific understanding of life as a biological process, Henry's philosophy develops a conception of life as an immediate feeling of one's own living."Seeing the Invisible" marks Henry's most sustained engagement in the field of aesthetics. Through an analysis of the life and works of Wassily Kandinsky, Henry uncovers the philosophical significance of Kandinsky's revolution in painting: that abstract art reveals the invisible essence of life. Henry shows that Kandinsky separates colour and line from the constraints of visible form and, in so doing, conveys the invisible intensity of life - a force rooted in the corporeity and pathos of all living beings. More than just a study of art history, this book presents Kandinsky as an artist who is engaged in the project of painting the invisible and thus offers invaluable methodological clues for Henry's own phenomenology of the invisible.Trade Review"Michel Henry's work consistently re-imagines the means through which life incarnates or makes manifest to itself the very essence of its being. In Seeing the Invisible Henry extends his philosophy, as material phenomenology, to the aesthetic, reappraising abstract art in terms of affectivity, emotional life and the essential communication that takes place between the community and the artwork at the level of sensibility. Scott Davidson's clear and timely translation provides the reader with both a revolutionary take on twentieth century art and a gateway into the thought of one of the leading French philosophers of the past fifty years." - Dr Michael O'Sullivan, The Chinese University of Hong KongTable of ContentsTranslator's Preface; Introduction; Internal/External: The Invisible and the Visible; The Meaning of 'Abstract' in the Expression 'Abstract Painting'; Form; Pure Pictorial Form; Abstract Form: The Theory of Elements; The Disclosure of Pictoriality; Point; Line; The Picture Plane; The Unity of the Elements; Invisible Colors; Forms and Colors; Difficulties Concerning the Unity of Colors and Forms; Composition; Monumental Art; Music and Painting; The Essence of Art; All Painting is Abstract; Art and the Cosmos; Index.

Read more less

Book SynopsisThis work provides a unique, philosophical interpretation of a significant twentieth-century painter - Wassily Kandinsky. Michel Henry was one of the leading French philosophers of the twentieth century. His numerous works of philosophy are all organized around the theme of life. In contrast to the scientific understanding of life as a biological process, Henry's philosophy develops a conception of life as an immediate feeling of one's own living. "Seeing the Invisible" marks Henry's most sustained engagement in the field of aesthetics. Through an analysis of the life and works of Wassily Kandinsky, Henry uncovers the philosophical significance of Kandinsky's revolution in painting: that abstract art reveals the invisible essence of life.Henry shows that Kandinsky separates colour and line from the constraints of visible form and, in so doing, conveys the invisible intensity of life - a force rooted in the corporeity and pathos of all living beings. More than just a study of art history, this book presents Kandinsky as an artist who is engaged in the project of painting the invisible and thus offers invaluable methodological clues for Henry's own phenomenology of the invisible.Trade Review"Michel Henry's work consistently re-imagines the means through which life incarnates or makes manifest to itself the very essence of its being. In Seeing the Invisible Henry extends his philosophy, as material phenomenology, to the aesthetic, reappraising abstract art in terms of affectivity, emotional life and the essential communication that takes place between the community and the artwork at the level of sensibility. Scott Davidson's clear and timely translation provides the reader with both a revolutionary take on twentieth century art and a gateway into the thought of one of the leading French philosophers of the past fifty years." - Dr Michael O'Sullivan, The Chinese University of Hong KongTable of ContentsTranslator's Preface; Introduction; Internal/External: The Invisible and the Visible; The Meaning of 'Abstract' in the Expression 'Abstract Painting'; Form; Pure Pictorial Form; Abstract Form: The Theory of Elements; The Disclosure of Pictoriality; Point; Line; The Picture Plane; The Unity of the Elements; Invisible Colors; Forms and Colors; Difficulties Concerning the Unity of Colors and Forms; Composition; Monumental Art; Music and Painting; The Essence of Art; All Painting is Abstract; Art and the Cosmos; Index.

Read more less