Philosophy: aesthetics Books

Book SynopsisAmanda Parrish Morgan is a Writing Instructor at Fairfield University and a Westport Writers' Workshop Instructor. Her work has appeared in The Washington Post, Guernica, The Millions, The Rumpus, The American Scholar, Women's Running, JSTOR Daily, Ploughshares, and N+1, among other places.Trade ReviewFor Morgan, strollers aren't just tools we use, or products we buy; they're dense symbols, with no single or settled meaning, of our relationships to parenting. * New Yorker *Designed objects tell stories, and the stroller is no different - except perhaps that it's a typology that has received little sustained critical framing until this text. A compelling writer, Amanda Parrish Morgan deftly weaves together conversations around aspiration, accessibility, and aesthetics as they relate to this accouterment of modern parenthood and posits the stroller as a complex and sometimes confounding topic worthy of our attention and inquiry. This is an immensely readable volume, and we’re proud to have it on our bookshelves. * Michelle Millar Fisher and Amber Winick, authors of Designing Motherhood: Things That Make and Break Our Births *Part object history, part capitalist critique, a consistently acute and deeply felt depiction of the pleasures, traps, thrills, and dangers of early parenthood, Amanda Parrish Morgan's Stroller compellingly depicts the history and taxonomy of this most weighty and unruly device, ally, and antagonist. * Lynn Steger Strong, author of Want *Table of Contents1. Child-Friendly and Child-Centric 2. Carry the Baby 3. The Pram in the Hall 4. Prams of Good and Evil 5. The Years of Magical Worrying 6. Get Your Body Back 7. Strolling 8. A Taxonomy of Stroller as Metaphor Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. When you are born, the first thing you do is scream. Be it a response to fear, anger, sadness, or happiness, the scream is a declaration of being alive. The metal vocalist cupping the microphone blares out a deafeningly harsh scream. The drill instructor screams out commands to their soldiers. And then there's the bloodcurdling screams we know from horror films. A scream has many meanings, but it is an instinctive and reflexive action that, at its core, reveals raw emotion. Investigating popular and alternative cultures, art, and science, Michael J. Seidlinger tracks the resonance of the scream across media and literature and in his own voice. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewA comprehensive and deeply personal trip through the cultural history of the scream. From Slipknot to Edvard Munch to John Carpenter and back into his own body, Michael Seidlinger reminds us all why we scream. As a singer, this one really hit home! * Geoff Rickly, singer of Thursday *Michael J. Seidlinger dissects the emotional complexity of the scream and—using examples from history, pop culture, and his own life—analyzes the way it highjacks the rational mind. Scream is an unforgettable ode to auditory extremes. * Jim Ruland, author of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records *Table of ContentsVoice (Prologue) 1. A Scream in the Night 2. Stand and Deliver 3. Speak Up, Shout Out 4. Howl at the Wall 5. A Rollercoaster of Emotions 6. “OMG I’m Screaming” The Body (Epilogue) Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.A cylinder of baked graphite and clay in a wood case, the pencil creates as it is being destroyed. To love a pencil is to use it, to sharpen it, and to essentially destroy it. Pencils were used to sketch civilization's greatest works of art. Pencils were there marking the choices in the earliest democratic elections. Even when used haphazardly to mark out where a saw's blade should make a cut, a pencil is creating. Pencil offers a deep look at this common, almost ubiquitous, object. Pencils are a simple device that are deceptively difficult to manufacture. At a time when many use cellphones as banking branches and instructors reach students online throughout the world, pencil use has not waned, with tens of millions being made and used annually. Carol Beggy sketches out how the lowly pencil is still a mighty useful tool. Object Lessons is pTrade ReviewA fascinating voyage of discovery demonstrating why, in an age of electronic everything, the pencil still grips us. * Daniel Rosenberg, Professor of History, University of Oregon, USA, and author of Cartographies of Time: A History of the Timeline *This tribute to the lowly pencil is a celebration of the life of the mind and hand. Born in the sixteenth century, this familiar writing instrument lives on in our digital age as a tool of thought, indispensable for some, an object of nostalgia for others, collectible or disposable, a bond of community or a companion in solitude. Carol Beggy captures the presence of pencils in our lives with enthusiasm and wit. Her book is an object lesson in how to see and appreciate the humblest elements of existence and not to take anything for granted. * Robert A. Gross, author of The Transcendentalists and Their World (2021) *Table of ContentsIntroduction 1. Variations on a Theme 2. Making Their Mark 3. Tools of the Trade 4. People and Their Pencils 5. To Boldly Go 6. Collectors Versus Users 7. Pencils in the Wild 8. A Thoreau Job 9. Pencils Up 10. #FindYourPeople Afterword Notes Acknowledgments Selected Bibliography and Suggested Further Reading Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.As a former world-ranked swimmer whose journey toward naturalization and U.S. citizenship began with a swimming fellowship, Piotr Florczyk reflects on his own adventures in swimming pools while taking a closer look at artists, architects, writers, and others who have helped to cement the swimming pool's prominent and iconic role in our society and culture.Swimming Pool explores the pool as a place where humans seek to attain the unique union between mind and body.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewHaving spent most of my life around a pool, no one would fault me taking it for granted. But Swimming Pool tells a unique and compelling story of the swimming pool, allowing me to appreciate that it’s more than just a place to cool off or go back and forth along a black line. Florczyk has done a remarkable job bringing to the surface the potentially unanticipated way that pools have affected us, for the good and the bad. * Rada Owen, USA Olympic Swim Team, 2000 *A beautifully associative work, in which Florczyk makes visible the often-hidden role that swimming pools have long played in the global artistic, cultural, and literary landscape. Whether shaped like kidney beans and back lit or of Olympic dimensions with the perfect gutters and that ever-present black line—whether sighted jewel-like from the air as signs of suburban ‘white flight,’ or drained, abandoned, and re-appropriated by the skateboarders who also surf—swimming pools are emblems of everything from sanctuary, to privilege, to athleticism, to leisure. Florczyk’s language flows around this object, and I encourage all readers to plunge in. * Emily Hodgson Anderson, Professor of English and College Dean of Undergraduate Education, University of Southern California, USA *Table of Contents1. Where Do You Swim? 2. What Is Your Pool? 3. Why Do You Swim? 4. Who Gets to Swim? Afterword: From Pool to Page Acknowledgments Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.For a century, magazines were the authors of culture and taste, of intelligence and policy until they were overthrown by the voices of the public themselves online. Here is a tribute to all that magazines were, from their origins in London and on Ben Franklin's press; through their boom enabled by new technologies as creators of a new media aesthetic and a new mass culture; into their opulent days in advertising-supported conglomerates; and finally to their fall at the hands of the internet. This tale is told through the experience of a magazine founder, the creator of Entertainment Weekly at Time Inc., who was also TV critic at TV Guide and People and finally an executive at Condé Nast trying to shepherd its magazines into the digital age.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.Trade ReviewFew people have thought as hard or as well about magazines as Jeff Jarvis does. He describes Magazine as an elegy, and it's a beautiful one, but it's so much more—a love letter to the heyday of a glorious form, a roundhouse punch thrown at those who failed as its custodians, an elegant and insightful history of a medium, and a vivid, funny, unsparing memoir. It's a pleasure to read him, and a privilege to learn from him. * Mark Harris, journalist and author of Mike Nichols: A Life (2021) *A starter, lover, student, and doubter of magazines, Jeff Jarvis is here to explain to us—in beautiful and entertaining prose—what the magazine was when it was great, and how the internet undid it, by wiring us together in a different way, and giving everyone a printing press. The call that magazines once answered is still heard, he argues. It is to ‘set the idea of community free from geography.' * Jay Rosen, Associate Professor of Journalism, New York University, USA *Having devoted a chunk of my life to writing for and editing magazines, I wondered whether Jeff Jarvis’s smart little chronicle, Magazine, would feel like nostalgia or PTSD. He opened so well, it ceased to matter. * The Common Reader *Table of Contents1. The End 2. The Beginning of the End 3. The Beginning 4. Magazines' Golden Century 5. Inside the Gilded Factory 6. Tangled in the Web 7. Next Bibliography Notes Index

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Book SynopsisObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Barcodes are about as ordinary as an object can be. Billions of them are scanned each day and they impact everything from how we shop to how we travel to how the global economy is managed. But few people likely give them more than a second thought. In a way, the barcode's ordinariness is the ultimate symbol of its success. However, behind the mundanity of the barcode lies an important history. Barcodes bridged the gap between physical objects and digital databases and paved the way for the contemporary Internet of Things, the idea to connect all devices to the web. They were highly controversial at points, protested by consumer groups and labor unions, and used as a symbol of dystopian capitalism and surveillance in science fiction and art installations. This book tells the story of the barcode's complicated history and examines how an object so crucial to so many parts of ourTrade ReviewJordan Frith’s engaging storytelling and analysis makes Barcode a page-turner. He transforms the technical into the human, bringing lively cultural, political, and social analysis to something most of us overlook every day. But beware: After reading this book, you’ll want to talk about barcodes all the time. * Torie Bosch, Editor, First Opinion, STAT *Table of Contents1. The little black lines that changed the world 2. How we almost ended up with a bullseye barcode 3. An early bridge between the digital and the physical 4. Consumer protests, labor rights, and automation 5. President Bush and the barcode 6. Barcodes and the Bible 7. The cultural imaginary of the barcode 8. The long and winding road of the QR Code 9. Barcodes and fifty years of misplaced eulogies Notes Index

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Book SynopsisIn The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film's connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema's singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of filmsfrom Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacyto demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel's analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.Trade ReviewIn his tremendously stimulating aesthetics of cinema, Martin Seel writes that films absorb the presence of the spectator more than all other works of art.... One of the merits of his book is that it is informed by a wide spectrum of film history, from the Marx Brothers to Fassbinder. * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *In his stimulating volume, the philosopher Seel looks for the essence and especially the particularity of the cinema, tracing the roots of cinema in other arts. According to Seel, film takes up elements from all of these arts and realizes its unique potential. Films like Hitchcock's North by Northwest or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point explode the boundaries of space and draw all of the spectator’s senses into it. * Deutschlandfunk [German Public Radio] *An exciting work of ‘philosophy meets cinema’—intellectually sophisticated but written in a rich, playful style—this book is both impressive and delightful. * academicworld.net *Seel grounds his philosophical work in close textual analysis of a small selection of representative films, including Hollywood classics, such as The Searchers; art films, such as Caché; and more recent action films, such as The Bourne Supremacy. As a work of philosophy and film theory, the book is notable for its lively engagement with complex ideas and for its inviting prose. It will appeal primarily to those with a strong interest in film aesthetics. * Choice *Anyone who studies, watches, or appreciates films for their beauty and artistic value will enjoy Seel's musings in philosophy and art. * Communication Booknotes Quarterly (CBQ) *Table of ContentsOpening Credits: Affairs—The Site of the Cinema—"Film"—The Course of Things—The Film Program 1. Film as Architecture: A Beginning—Division of Space—Ambient Sound—Some Opening Credits—Landscapes—Two Extremes—An Ending—Spatial Imagination—More Opening Credits 2. Film as Music: A Prelude—Time Connections—Action (1)—Double Motion—Action (2)—Spaces of Time—Higher Rhythm—Explosion 3. Film as Image: People Waiting—Pictorial Appearing—Image and Movement—Photography and Film—Another Trip— The Promise of Photography—Image Analysis—The Promise of Film—Another Ending 4. Film as Spectacle: Anarchy—Division of Space, Again—Virtuality—Sculpturality— Actors—Voices—Theatricality—Attractionism—Ecstasy 5. Film as Narrative: Three Films—Abstinence—Narrative Disposition—Telling Stories—Perspectivity—Filmic Storytelling—Cinema's Temporal Form—The Present Past 6. Film as Exploration: In Baghdad—Urban Landscapes—Realities—Processes of Documentation—A Double Promise—Techniques of Fiction— Questions of Style—Loss of Control—References to the World—The End 7. Film as Imagination: At Bakersfield—An Illusionistic Interpretation—The Figure of the Illusionist—Illusion and Immersion—Imagination Not Illusion—Photography and Film, Again—Twofold Attention—Illusion as a Technique—Caché 8. Film as Emotion: The End, Yet Again—The Illusionist's Final Appearance— Motion and Emotion—Corporeality—Sensate Understanding— Expressivity—Engagement—Twofold Attention, Again—Mixed Emotions—Godard 9. Film as Philosophy: Flashbacks—Another Affair—Three Dimensions—Cine- anthropology—Active Passivity—An Encore—Landscapes, Once Again Closing Credits: Notice—Thanks

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Book SynopsisMarc Redfield maintains that the literary genre of the Bildungsroman brings into sharp focus the contradictions of aesthetics, and also that aesthetics exemplifies what is called ideology. He combines a wide-ranging account of the history and theory of aesthetics with close readings of novels by Goethe, George Eliot, and Gustave Flaubert. For Redfield, these fictions of character formation demonstrate the paradoxical relation between aesthetics and literature: the notion of the Bildungsroman may be expanded to apply to any text that can be figured as a subject producing itself in history, which is to say any text whatsoever. At the same time, the category may be contracted to include only a handful of novels, (or even none at all), a paradox that has led critics to denigrate the Bildungsroman as a phantom genre.Trade ReviewA thoughtful, complex book that integrates aesthetic philosophy, close textual readings, and literary theories, all of which eventually make a leap to talk about what we mean by culture, history, and humanity, what we do when we read or teach literature, and why the twentieth-century institutionalization of literature has generated the curious phenomenon of ‘literary theory'. -- Lorely French * European Romantic Review *

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Book SynopsisIn The Arts of Cinema, Martin Seel explores film's connections to the other arts and the qualities that distinguish it from them. In nine concise and elegantly written chapters, he explores the cinema's singular aesthetic potential and uses specific examples from a diverse range of filmsfrom Antonioni and Hitchcock to The Searchers and The Bourne Supremacyto demonstrate the many ways this potential can be realized. Seel's analysis provides both a new perspective on film as a comprehensive aesthetic experience and a nuanced understanding of what the medium does to us once we are in the cinema.Trade ReviewIn his tremendously stimulating aesthetics of cinema, Martin Seel writes that films absorb the presence of the spectator more than all other works of art.... One of the merits of his book is that it is informed by a wide spectrum of film history, from the Marx Brothers to Fassbinder. * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *In his stimulating volume, the philosopher Seel looks for the essence and especially the particularity of the cinema, tracing the roots of cinema in other arts. According to Seel, film takes up elements from all of these arts and realizes its unique potential. Films like Hitchcock's North by Northwest or Antonioni's Zabriskie Point explode the boundaries of space and draw all of the spectator’s senses into it. * Deutschlandfunk [German Public Radio] *An exciting work of ‘philosophy meets cinema’—intellectually sophisticated but written in a rich, playful style—this book is both impressive and delightful. * academicworld.net *Seel grounds his philosophical work in close textual analysis of a small selection of representative films, including Hollywood classics, such as The Searchers; art films, such as Caché; and more recent action films, such as The Bourne Supremacy. As a work of philosophy and film theory, the book is notable for its lively engagement with complex ideas and for its inviting prose. It will appeal primarily to those with a strong interest in film aesthetics. * Choice *Anyone who studies, watches, or appreciates films for their beauty and artistic value will enjoy Seel's musings in philosophy and art. * Communication Booknotes Quarterly (CBQ) *Table of ContentsOpening Credits: Affairs—The Site of the Cinema—"Film"—The Course of Things—The Film Program 1. Film as Architecture: A Beginning—Division of Space—Ambient Sound—Some Opening Credits—Landscapes—Two Extremes—An Ending—Spatial Imagination—More Opening Credits 2. Film as Music: A Prelude—Time Connections—Action (1)—Double Motion—Action (2)—Spaces of Time—Higher Rhythm—Explosion 3. Film as Image: People Waiting—Pictorial Appearing—Image and Movement—Photography and Film—Another Trip— The Promise of Photography—Image Analysis—The Promise of Film—Another Ending 4. Film as Spectacle: Anarchy—Division of Space, Again—Virtuality—Sculpturality— Actors—Voices—Theatricality—Attractionism—Ecstasy 5. Film as Narrative: Three Films—Abstinence—Narrative Disposition—Telling Stories—Perspectivity—Filmic Storytelling—Cinema's Temporal Form—The Present Past 6. Film as Exploration: In Baghdad—Urban Landscapes—Realities—Processes of Documentation—A Double Promise—Techniques of Fiction— Questions of Style—Loss of Control—References to the World—The End 7. Film as Imagination: At Bakersfield—An Illusionistic Interpretation—The Figure of the Illusionist—Illusion and Immersion—Imagination Not Illusion—Photography and Film, Again—Twofold Attention—Illusion as a Technique—Caché 8. Film as Emotion: The End, Yet Again—The Illusionist's Final Appearance— Motion and Emotion—Corporeality—Sensate Understanding— Expressivity—Engagement—Twofold Attention, Again—Mixed Emotions—Godard 9. Film as Philosophy: Flashbacks—Another Affair—Three Dimensions—Cine- anthropology—Active Passivity—An Encore—Landscapes, Once Again Closing Credits: Notice—Thanks

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Book SynopsisIn this ambitious and venturesome book, Peter W. Rose applies the insights of Marxist theory to a number of central Greek literary and philosophical texts...

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Book SynopsisModernism''s Inhuman Worlds explores the centrality of ecological precarity, species indeterminacy, planetary change, and the specter of extinction to modernist and contemporary metamodernist literatures. Modernist ecologies, Rasheed Tazudeen argues, emerge in response to the enigma of how to imagine inhuman beingincluding soils, forests, oceans, and the earth itselfthrough languages and epistemologies that have only ever been humanist. How might (meta)modernist aesthetics help us to imagine (with) inhuman worlds, including the worlds still to be made on the other side of mass extinction? Through innovative readings of canonical and emergent modernist and metamodernist works, Tazudeen theorizes inhuman modernism as a call toward further receptivity to the worlds, beings, and relations that tend to go unthought within Western humanist epistemologies. Modernist engagements with the figures of enigma, riddle, and metaphor, according to the book''s central ar

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Book SynopsisAn accessible introduction to Badiou's key ideas In this short and accessible book, the French philosopher Alain Badiou provides readers with a unique introduction to his system of thought, summed up in the trilogy of Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. Taking the form of an interview and two talks and keeping in mind a broad audience without any prior knowledge of his work, the book touches upon the central concepts and major preoccupations of Badiou's philosophy: fundamental ontology, mathematics, politics, poetry, and love. Well-chosen examples illuminate his thinking in regards to being and universality, worlds and singularity, and the infinite and the absolute, among other topics. A veritable tour de force of pedagogical clarity, this new student-friendly work is perhaps the single best general introduction to the work of this prolific and committed thinker. If, for Badiou, the task of philosophy consists in thinking through the truths of our time, the texts collected in this small volume could not be timelier.Trade Review"Badiou by Badiou synthesizes Badiou's key ideas with a personal touch, inviting readers into his presentation of what philosophy is and his highly original way of philosophizing. Badiou is brilliant at making anyone want to engage with philosophical questions."—Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics"This book captures the latest developments in Alain Badiou's thought, while providing an excellent introduction for new readers. Badiou by Badiou, his most legible work, is a riveting tour of the domains of art, love, politics, and science."—Héctor Hoyos, author of Things with a History"Badiou proves himself again to be, like Socrates, a corrupter of the youth. With this clear entry point into his metaphysical project, Badiou demonstrates the dangerously transformative character of philosophy."—Jodi Dean, author of Comrade"As the 21st century shapes up to be all about ends, Badiou challenges us to think ab novo. This latest installment of his firebrand philosophy will ignite youth even among those who think its time has passed."—Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There's No WomanTable of ContentsPart One: Event, Truths, Subject Part Two: Philosophy Between Mathematics and Poetry Part Three: Ontology and Mathematics

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Book SynopsisWhat do we really mean when we call something "graphic"? In American Graphic, Rebecca Clark examines the "graphic" as a term tellingly at odds with itself. On the one hand, it seems to evoke the grotesque; on the other hand, it promises the geometrically streamlined in the form of graphs, diagrams, and user interfaces. Clark's innovation is to ask what happens when the same moment in a work of literature is graphic in both ways at once. Her answer suggests the graphic turn in contemporary literature is intimately implicated in the fraught dynamics of identification. As Clark reveals, this double graphic indexes the unseemliness of a lust—in our current culture of information—for cool epistemological mastery over the bodies of others. Clark analyzes the contemporary graphic along three specific axes: the ethnographic, the pornographic, and the infographic. In each chapter, Clark's explication of the double graphic reads a canonical author against literary, visual and/or performance works by Black and/or female creators. Pairing works by Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon with pieces by Mat Johnson, Kara Walker, Fran Ross, Narcissister, and Teju Cole, Clark tests the effects and affects of the double graphic across racialized and gendered axes of differences. American Graphic forces us to face how closely and uncomfortably yoked together disgust and data have become in our increasingly graph-ick world. Trade Review"This stylishly written book offers a series of masterful examples of the value of close reading, opening up provocative connections between formality and filthiness, detachment and disgust."—Eugenie Brinkema, Massachusetts Institute of Technology"A smart, lively, consistently unsettling book. Clark's superb analysis of works that are at once grotesque and clinical boldly charts the sentimental politics of affect and identification for our age of data-driven cool."—Justus Nieland, Michigan State University"Clark has written a groundbreaking and timely book, one that interrogates the social implications of the flat registers that digital and visual culture create. She disrupts our relationships with sleek digital artifacts and the consequential flat affects that shape our everyday lives. And in doing so, she pushes on the limits of what the digital humanities can be and do."—Liliana M. Naydan, American Literary HistoryTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Graphic and the Graph-ick 1. The American Grotesque: A Graphic Digest 2. The Ethnographic 3. The Pornographic 4. The Infographic Conclusion: Identification and Its Discontents

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Book SynopsisAn accessible introduction to Badiou's key ideas In this short and accessible book, the French philosopher Alain Badiou provides readers with a unique introduction to his system of thought, summed up in the trilogy of Being and Event, Logics of Worlds, and The Immanence of Truths. Taking the form of an interview and two talks and keeping in mind a broad audience without any prior knowledge of his work, the book touches upon the central concepts and major preoccupations of Badiou's philosophy: fundamental ontology, mathematics, politics, poetry, and love. Well-chosen examples illuminate his thinking in regards to being and universality, worlds and singularity, and the infinite and the absolute, among other topics. A veritable tour de force of pedagogical clarity, this new student-friendly work is perhaps the single best general introduction to the work of this prolific and committed thinker. If, for Badiou, the task of philosophy consists in thinking through the truths of our time, the texts collected in this small volume could not be timelier.Trade Review"Badiou by Badiou synthesizes Badiou's key ideas with a personal touch, inviting readers into his presentation of what philosophy is and his highly original way of philosophizing. Badiou is brilliant at making anyone want to engage with philosophical questions."—Emily Apter, author of Unexceptional Politics"This book captures the latest developments in Alain Badiou's thought, while providing an excellent introduction for new readers. Badiou by Badiou, his most legible work, is a riveting tour of the domains of art, love, politics, and science."—Héctor Hoyos, author of Things with a History"Badiou proves himself again to be, like Socrates, a corrupter of the youth. With this clear entry point into his metaphysical project, Badiou demonstrates the dangerously transformative character of philosophy."—Jodi Dean, author of Comrade"As the 21st century shapes up to be all about ends, Badiou challenges us to think ab novo. This latest installment of his firebrand philosophy will ignite youth even among those who think its time has passed."—Joan Copjec, author of Imagine There's No WomanTable of ContentsPart One: Event, Truths, Subject Part Two: Philosophy Between Mathematics and Poetry Part Three: Ontology and Mathematics

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Book SynopsisIn Anteaesthetics, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity. Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation—an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.Trade Review"Anteaesthetics is the study of black aesthetics I didn't know I sorely needed. Bradley offers a razor-sharp and sumptuous meditation on black aesthetics in, through, and vestibular to an anti-black world."—Alexander Ghedi Weheliye, Brown University"Rizvana Bradley's searching theory of black aesthesis traces black art's recursions through the violent origins of the aesthetic. Anteaesthetics opens a mode of reading for black art's non-instrumental exploration of abyssal descent. An incisive and energizing book through and through."—Rei Terada, University of California, Irvine"In this brilliantly conceived and exquisitely rendered study, Bradley offers a path-breaking analysis that will revolutionize how we approach, contest, and undo the Western visual field. Anteaesthetics offers an indispensable and undisciplined new frame for black feminist theorizing."—Huey Copeland, University of Pennsylvania"Incisive and compelling, Bradley's Anteaesthetics restores to thought and feeling a capacious sense of the aesthetic, revealing its tremendous and violent power as nothing less than foundational to a racially typified modern world."—Shane Denson, Stanford University"Anteaesthetics limns the depths of aesthetic and semiotic violence, refocusing our theoretical vision. This is an indispensable text—a tour de force."—Calvin Warren, Emory UniversityTable of ContentsIntroduction 1. Toward a Theory of Anteaesthetics 2. The Corporeal Division of the World, or Aesthetic Ruination 3. Before the Nude, or Exorbitant Figuration 4. The Black Residuum, or That Which Remains 5. Unworlding, or the Involution of Value

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Book SynopsisWhat do we really mean when we call something "graphic"? In American Graphic, Rebecca Clark examines the "graphic" as a term tellingly at odds with itself. On the one hand, it seems to evoke the grotesque; on the other hand, it promises the geometrically streamlined in the form of graphs, diagrams, and user interfaces. Clark's innovation is to ask what happens when the same moment in a work of literature is graphic in both ways at once. Her answer suggests the graphic turn in contemporary literature is intimately implicated in the fraught dynamics of identification. As Clark reveals, this double graphic indexes the unseemliness of a lust—in our current culture of information—for cool epistemological mastery over the bodies of others. Clark analyzes the contemporary graphic along three specific axes: the ethnographic, the pornographic, and the infographic. In each chapter, Clark's explication of the double graphic reads a canonical author against literary, visual and/or performance works by Black and/or female creators. Pairing works by Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabokov, and Thomas Pynchon with pieces by Mat Johnson, Kara Walker, Fran Ross, Narcissister, and Teju Cole, Clark tests the effects and affects of the double graphic across racialized and gendered axes of differences. American Graphic forces us to face how closely and uncomfortably yoked together disgust and data have become in our increasingly graph-ick world. Trade Review"This stylishly written book offers a series of masterful examples of the value of close reading, opening up provocative connections between formality and filthiness, detachment and disgust."—Eugenie Brinkema, Massachusetts Institute of Technology"A smart, lively, consistently unsettling book. Clark's superb analysis of works that are at once grotesque and clinical boldly charts the sentimental politics of affect and identification for our age of data-driven cool."—Justus Nieland, Michigan State University"Clark has written a groundbreaking and timely book, one that interrogates the social implications of the flat registers that digital and visual culture create. She disrupts our relationships with sleek digital artifacts and the consequential flat affects that shape our everyday lives. And in doing so, she pushes on the limits of what the digital humanities can be and do."—Liliana M. Naydan, American Literary HistoryTable of ContentsIntroduction: The Graphic and the Graph-ick 1. The American Grotesque: A Graphic Digest 2. The Ethnographic 3. The Pornographic 4. The Infographic Conclusion: Identification and Its Discontents

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Book SynopsisIn this new book, Florian Klinger gives readers a basic action-theoretical account of the aesthetic. While normal action fulfills a determinate concept, Klinger argues, aesthetic action performs an indeterminacy by suspending the action's conceptual resolution. Taking as examples work by Tino Sehgal, Kara Walker, Mazen Kerbaj, Marina Abramović, Cy Twombly, and Franz Kafka, the book examines indeterminacy in such instances as a walk that is at once leisurely and purposeful, a sound piece that is at once joyous and mournful and mechanical, or a sculpture that at once draws one in and shuts one out. Because it has irresolution as its point, aesthetic action presents itself as an unsettling of ourselves, our ways, our very sense of who we are. As performers of such action, we don't recognize one another as bearers of a shared human form as we normally would, but find ourselves tasked anew with figuring out what sharing a form would mean. In conversation with philosophers such as Kant, Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Anscombe; political thinkers such as Marx and Lorde; and contemporary interlocutors such as Michael Thompson, Sebastian Rödl, and Thomas Khurana, Klinger's book makes a case for a conception of the human form that systematically includes the aesthetic: an actualization of the form that is indeterminate and nevertheless rational. The book gives the project of Western philosophical aesthetics a long-overdue formulation for our present that aims to do justice to contemporary aesthetic production as it actually exists. It will appeal to those working in philosophy, art, and political thought. Trade Review"With ingenious, stunning readings, Klinger breaks new ground in aesthetics. This is a philosophy of art with which thinkers and scholars will contend for years to come."—Henry W. Pickford, Duke University"Aesthetic Action offers a highly original and substantial outline of a new understanding of aesthetics. This is an important and rigorous contribution to emerging conversations in philosophy, of highest interest for readers interested in giving an account of contemporary art."—Rüdiger Campe, Yale University"Klinger gives us an entirely new way of understanding the indeterminacy of our encounters with art. In his incisive analyses he offers a truly fresh view of art, one that opens the fields of interaction each work creates."—Niklaus Largier, University of California, Berkeley"This book rethinks action through aesthetics and aesthetics through action, providing us with a new insight into the kind of unsettling that the aesthetic is and affords."—María del Rosario Acosta López, University of California, RiversideTable of ContentsPreface ONE. The Unsettling 1. The Thought of Aesthetic Distinction 2. Life Form and Settledness 3. Aesthetic Unsettling 4. The Use of Unsettling 5. The Account TWO. Accounting for Ourselves 1. Determinacy 2. The Original Scene of Self-Determination 3. Form as Answer: Hegel's Conception of the Aesthetic as Determinacy 4. Form as Question: A Conception of the Aesthetic as Indeterminacy 5. The Task of a Unified Accounting THREE. A Three-Way Capacity 1. Rationality and Indeterminacy 2. A Rational Capacity 3. Failed Attempts at Conceiving Indeterminacy 4. Indeterminacy as Part of Our Form 5. Indeterminacy as Such FOUR. Logical Account of Aesthetic Action: Aspectual Irresolution 1. The Concept of Aesthetic Action 2. Distinction through Aspectual Irresolution 3. Internal Unity in Crisis 4. Aesthetic Indeterminacy 5. External Unity with Action at Large FIVE. Material Account of Aesthetic Action: Bond without Terms 1. Logical and Material Accounting 2. Bond without Terms 3. Aesthetic Interaction 4. Life as Such 5. The Question of Who We Are SIX. Aesthetic Transformation 1. Aesthetic Action as Transformation 2. Performance without Resources 3. The Work of Aspectual Irresolution 4. Transformation That Includes Its Terms 5. The Aesthetic Self SEVEN. The Use of the Aesthetic 1. The Political as Example 2. Our Form as Political Task 3. Tino Sehgal: Genus Politics 4. Kara Walker: Politics of Difference 5. Mazen Kerbaj: Politics of Life as Such Notes Bibliography Index

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Book SynopsisAmid the turmoil of economic crisis, Greece has become the first European experiment of left rule in a sea of neoliberalism. What happens when a government of the Left, committed to social justice and the reversal of austerity, is blackmailed into following policies it has fought against and strongly opposes? What can the experience of the Syriza government tell us about the prospects for the Left in the twenty-first century? In this engaging and provocative book, Costas Douzinas uses his position as an 'accidental politician', unexpectedly propelled from academia into the world of Greek politics as a Syriza MP, to answer these urgent questions. He examines the challenges facing Syriza since its ascent to power in 2015 and draws out the theoretical and political lessons from one of the boldest and most difficult experiments in governing from the Left in an age of neoliberalism and austerity.Trade Review"What a rare and wonderful book! Douzinas reflects with searing honesty on the challenges facing left parties trying to govern and protect embattled nations in an age of financialization and globalization. Because he is one of the most perspicacious critical legal and political theorists of our time, he has also offered a brilliant set of political theoretical meditations. By turns ironic, tragic, caustic and moving, Syriza in Power is essential reading for serious leftists everywhere." Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley "While the Syriza government, elected in 2015 in Greece, was teaching the world a lesson of courage and fidelity, Costas Douzinas, its "professor elect", was teaching a lesson of lucidity, intelligence and imagination. Above all, he makes plain that, in the darkest hour, history is not finished, because the resistance is rooted in the life and ideals of the people itself. Whether one entirely agrees or not with Douzinas' "left Euroscepticism that can save Europe", his politics of truth will prove immensely helpful." Étienne Balibar, Kingston UniversityTable of Contents Prologue: The Accidental Politician A. Resistance Rising 1. From Utopia to Dystopia and Resistance, a Short Run 2. Hunger Strikers and Hunger Artists 3. Radical Philosophy Encounters Syriza 4. A Philosophy of Resistance B. Syriza Agonistes 5. A Very European Coup 6. Contradiction is the Name of the Governing Left C. Reflections on Life as Politician 7. Welcome To The Desert Of Disorderly Order 8. Learning from Ideology 9. The Curious Incident of the Missing TV Licenses D. The Moral Advantage of the Left 10. The Ethos of the Left 11. Greeks or Europeans? 12. The Euro, the Sacred and the Holy E. Left History 13. The Left and the Philosophy Of History 14. 1949, 1969, 1989: The Cycles of History F. From Grexit to Brexit 15. Putting the Demos On Stage 16. Grexit and Brexit, Oxi and Leave 17. Brexit and Euroscepticism G. Finis Europae 18. Finis Europae? 19. The Left and the Future of Europe H. Cities of Refuge 20. Europe Between Two Infant Deaths 21. Human Rights For Martians Notes

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Book SynopsisAmid the turmoil of economic crisis, Greece has become the first European experiment of left rule in a sea of neoliberalism. What happens when a government of the Left, committed to social justice and the reversal of austerity, is blackmailed into following policies it has fought against and strongly opposes? What can the experience of the Syriza government tell us about the prospects for the Left in the twenty-first century? In this engaging and provocative book, Costas Douzinas uses his position as an 'accidental politician', unexpectedly propelled from academia into the world of Greek politics as a Syriza MP, to answer these urgent questions. He examines the challenges facing Syriza since its ascent to power in 2015 and draws out the theoretical and political lessons from one of the boldest and most difficult experiments in governing from the Left in an age of neoliberalism and austerity.Trade Review"What a rare and wonderful book! Douzinas reflects with searing honesty on the challenges facing left parties trying to govern and protect embattled nations in an age of financialization and globalization. Because he is one of the most perspicacious critical legal and political theorists of our time, he has also offered a brilliant set of political theoretical meditations. By turns ironic, tragic, caustic and moving, Syriza in Power is essential reading for serious leftists everywhere." Wendy Brown, University of California, Berkeley "While the Syriza government, elected in 2015 in Greece, was teaching the world a lesson of courage and fidelity, Costas Douzinas, its "professor elect", was teaching a lesson of lucidity, intelligence and imagination. Above all, he makes plain that, in the darkest hour, history is not finished, because the resistance is rooted in the life and ideals of the people itself. Whether one entirely agrees or not with Douzinas' "left Euroscepticism that can save Europe", his politics of truth will prove immensely helpful." Étienne Balibar, Kingston University"Costas Douzinas’ Syriza in Power carries a wondrous resemblance to Niccolò Machiavelli’s The Prince... Both works scrutinise without moralization the world of politics at a critical historical juncture… As they set out to expose the tensions between the logic of moral rectitude and the demands of public action, they advance positions that are in direct conflict with the dominant doctrines of the time. The insights into the world of politics are invariably delivered with flair and erudition that simultaneously seduce and intimidate."Open DemocracyTable of Contents Prologue: The Accidental Politician A. Resistance Rising 1. From Utopia to Dystopia and Resistance, a Short Run 2. Hunger Strikers and Hunger Artists 3. Radical Philosophy Encounters Syriza 4. A Philosophy of Resistance B. Syriza Agonistes 5. A Very European Coup 6. Contradiction is the Name of the Governing Left C. Reflections on Life as Politician 7. Welcome To The Desert Of Disorderly Order 8. Learning from Ideology 9. The Curious Incident of the Missing TV Licenses D. The Moral Advantage of the Left 10. The Ethos of the Left 11. Greeks or Europeans? 12. The Euro, the Sacred and the Holy E. Left History 13. The Left and the Philosophy Of History 14. 1949, 1969, 1989: The Cycles of History F. From Grexit to Brexit 15. Putting the Demos On Stage 16. Grexit and Brexit, Oxi and Leave 17. Brexit and Euroscepticism G. Finis Europae 18. Finis Europae? 19. The Left and the Future of Europe H. Cities of Refuge 20. Europe Between Two Infant Deaths 21. Human Rights For Martians Notes

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Book SynopsisIn this book, the founder of object-oriented ontology develops his view that aesthetics is the central discipline of philosophy. Whereas science must attempt to grasp an object in terms of its observable qualities, philosophy and art cannot proceed in this way because they don't have direct access to their objects. Hence philosophy shares the same fate as art in being compelled to communicate indirectly, allusively, or elliptically, rather than in the clear propositional terms that are often taken – wrongly – to be the sole stuff of genuine philosophy. Conceiving of philosophy and art in this way allows us to reread key debates in aesthetic theory and to view art history in a different way. The formalist criticism of Greenberg and Fried is rejected for its refusal to embrace the innate theatricality and deep multiplicity of every artwork. This has consequences for art criticism, making pictorial content more important than formalism thinks but less entwined with the social sphere than anti-formalism holds. It has consequences for art history too, as the surrealists, David, and Poussin, among others, gain in importance. The close link between aesthetics and ontology also invites a new periodization of modern philosophy as a whole, and the habitual turn away from Kant’s thing-in-itself towards an increase in philosophical "immanence" is shown to be a false dawn. This major work will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, art history and cultural theory.Trade Review“An essential guide by the foremost philosopher of our age. This book will educate and delight both aficionados and those unfamiliar with the first major philosophical movement of the twenty-first century.”Timothy Morton, Rice University “Harman presents a clear overview of the development of Speculative Realism’s core debates. He not only reconstructs its genealogy but offers a remarkably concise introduction to his own ontology by putting it in its larger context.”Markus Gabriel, University of Bonn". . . Harman is a wonderful writer. He’s accessible and lively, a real joy to read."The University BookmanTable of ContentsAbbreviations for Frequently Cited Works Preliminary Note Introduction: Formalism and the Lessons of Dante 1. OOO and Art: A First Summary 2. Formalism and its Flaws 3. Theatrical, Not Literal 4. The Canvas is the Message 5. After High Modernism 6. Dada, Surrealism, and Literalism 7. Weird Formalism Notes Works Cited

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Book SynopsisIn this book, the founder of object-oriented ontology develops his view that aesthetics is the central discipline of philosophy. Whereas science must attempt to grasp an object in terms of its observable qualities, philosophy and art cannot proceed in this way because they don't have direct access to their objects. Hence philosophy shares the same fate as art in being compelled to communicate indirectly, allusively, or elliptically, rather than in the clear propositional terms that are often taken – wrongly – to be the sole stuff of genuine philosophy. Conceiving of philosophy and art in this way allows us to reread key debates in aesthetic theory and to view art history in a different way. The formalist criticism of Greenberg and Fried is rejected for its refusal to embrace the innate theatricality and deep multiplicity of every artwork. This has consequences for art criticism, making pictorial content more important than formalism thinks but less entwined with the social sphere than anti-formalism holds. It has consequences for art history too, as the surrealists, David, and Poussin, among others, gain in importance. The close link between aesthetics and ontology also invites a new periodization of modern philosophy as a whole, and the habitual turn away from Kant’s thing-in-itself towards an increase in philosophical "immanence" is shown to be a false dawn. This major work will be of great interest to students and scholars of philosophy, aesthetics, art history and cultural theory.Trade Review“An essential guide by the foremost philosopher of our age. This book will educate and delight both aficionados and those unfamiliar with the first major philosophical movement of the twenty-first century.”Timothy Morton, Rice University “Harman presents a clear overview of the development of Speculative Realism’s core debates. He not only reconstructs its genealogy but offers a remarkably concise introduction to his own ontology by putting it in its larger context.”Markus Gabriel, University of Bonn". . . Harman is a wonderful writer. He’s accessible and lively, a real joy to read."The University BookmanTable of ContentsAbbreviations for Frequently Cited Works Preliminary Note Introduction: Formalism and the Lessons of Dante 1. OOO and Art: A First Summary 2. Formalism and its Flaws 3. Theatrical, Not Literal 4. The Canvas is the Message 5. After High Modernism 6. Dada, Surrealism, and Literalism 7. Weird Formalism Notes Works Cited

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Book SynopsisBeauty today is a paradox. The cult of beauty is ubiquitous but it has lost its transcendence and become little more than an aspect of consumerism, the aesthetic dimension of capitalism. The sublime and unsettling aspects of beauty have given way to corporeal pleasures and 'likes', resulting in a kind of 'pornography' of beauty. In this book, cultural theorist Byung-Chul Han reinvigorates aesthetic theory for our digital age. He interrogates our preoccupation with all things slick and smooth, from Jeff Koon's sculptures and the iPhone to Brazilian waxing. Reaching far deeper than our superficial reactions to viral videos and memes, Han reclaims beauty, showing how it manifests itself as truth, temptation and even disaster. This wide-ranging and profound exploration of beauty, encompassing ethical and political considerations as well as aesthetic, will appeal to all those interested in cultural and aesthetic theory, philosophy and digital media.Trade Review"In this provocative analysis Han agitates against contemporary notions of smooth air-brushed beauty. Instead he pleads for an aesthetic based on a generative, creative, commitment to truth that can encompass negativity injury and disaster. Ranging from pornography to classical literature this tour de force of thinking about our understanding of beauty reminds us that philosophy can have teeth. Han writes with a compelling urgency about how we live in the here and now, but also how we could live better. Saving Beauty is an aesthetic call to arms; an example of how philosophy can militate for a better world and make us see anew." Karen Leeder, Oxford University “Thrilling… a passionate and engaging read on a notion of beauty that has lost its standing in a digitized world.”Philosophy TodayTable of Contents1. The Smooth 2. The Smooth Body 3. The Aesthetics of the Smooth 4. Digital Beauty 5. The Aesthetics of Veiling 6. The Aesthetics of Injury 7. The Aesthetics of Disaster 8. The Ideal of Beauty 9. Beauty as Truth 10. The Politics of Beauty 11. Pornographic Theatre 12. Lingering on Beauty 13. Beauty as Reminiscence 14. Giving Birth in Beauty Notes

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Book SynopsisFrom mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.Trade Review“The universe of video games and the action they involve us in render perfectly the illusions and antagonisms of our ideological predicament - the popularity of post-apocalyptic games tells it all. But perhaps even more important is the type of subjectivity a gamer has to adopt when immersed into a game: a mixture of extreme engagement and loss of reality, a universe of immortality where actions are indefinitely repeatable. So it is not that we can understand the impact of these games only through the analysis of our social reality - it's also the other way round: to understand how our societies work you have to know video games And Alfie Bown does this at such a high level that he produces an instant classic, a book that everyone who seeks to find a way in our confused social life will have to read. The Playstation Dreamworld is unputdownable, once you start reading it you will get addicted to it... as in a good video game!” Slavoj Žižek “If you ever asked yourself what Freud and Lacan would think if they had a chance to play video games, Alfie Bown gives you the answer. As a passionate gamer and a playful philosopher, he succeeds in showing not only why video-games matter but why they might carry subversive potential. This exciting psychoanalysis of video games shows why Pokémon GO and other games were only the beginning of a brave new world."Srećko Horvat From mobile phones to consoles to tablet, we are now a generation of gamers. This book dissects the structure of our relationships to all forms of technological entertainment at a time when digital enjoyment has become ubiquitous.Alfie Bown is Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong and co-editor of the Hong Kong Review of Books."A significant contribution to the debate around virtual reality" TLSTable of Contents Contents Acknowledgements Note on the Games Tutorial: The Pokémon Generation Level 1. From Farming Simulation to Dystopic Wasteland: Gaming and Capitalism Work and Play - Cultures of Distraction - Pastoral Dystopia, Apocalyptic Utopia – No Alternative Level 2. Dreamwork: Cyborgs on the Analyst’s Couch Japanese Dreams, American Texts – The Dreamworld - Repetitions and the Dromena – Immersion and Westworld Level 3. Retro Gaming: The Politics of Former and Future Pleasures 90s Rational Gaming – Virtual/Reality - Subject, Object, Enjoyment - Jouissance in the Arcades Bonus Features: How to be a Subversive Gamer Game Index Endnotes

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Book SynopsisFrom mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.Trade Review“The universe of video games and the action they involve us in render perfectly the illusions and antagonisms of our ideological predicament - the popularity of post-apocalyptic games tells it all. But perhaps even more important is the type of subjectivity a gamer has to adopt when immersed into a game: a mixture of extreme engagement and loss of reality, a universe of immortality where actions are indefinitely repeatable. So it is not that we can understand the impact of these games only through the analysis of our social reality - it's also the other way round: to understand how our societies work you have to know video games And Alfie Bown does this at such a high level that he produces an instant classic, a book that everyone who seeks to find a way in our confused social life will have to read. The Playstation Dreamworld is unputdownable, once you start reading it you will get addicted to it... as in a good video game!” Slavoj Žižek “If you ever asked yourself what Freud and Lacan would think if they had a chance to play video games, Alfie Bown gives you the answer. As a passionate gamer and a playful philosopher, he succeeds in showing not only why video-games matter but why they might carry subversive potential. This exciting psychoanalysis of video games shows why Pokémon GO and other games were only the beginning of a brave new world."Srećko Horvat From mobile phones to consoles to tablet, we are now a generation of gamers. This book dissects the structure of our relationships to all forms of technological entertainment at a time when digital enjoyment has become ubiquitous.Alfie Bown is Assistant Professor of Literature at HSMC, Hong Kong and co-editor of the Hong Kong Review of Books. "A significant contribution to the debate around virtual reality" TLSTable of Contents Contents Acknowledgements Note on the Games Tutorial: The Pokémon Generation Level 1. From Farming Simulation to Dystopic Wasteland: Gaming and Capitalism Work and Play - Cultures of Distraction - Pastoral Dystopia, Apocalyptic Utopia – No Alternative Level 2. Dreamwork: Cyborgs on the Analyst’s Couch Japanese Dreams, American Texts – The Dreamworld - Repetitions and the Dromena – Immersion and Westworld Level 3. Retro Gaming: The Politics of Former and Future Pleasures 90s Rational Gaming – Virtual/Reality - Subject, Object, Enjoyment - Jouissance in the Arcades Bonus Features: How to be a Subversive Gamer Game Index Endnotes

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Book SynopsisThroughout modernity there has been a clear divide between art and commerce. Objects could either be consumed as commerce or contemplated as art. Today, as museums are facing increasing financial pressure and as stores have become inventive locations for new modes of display, this clear divide has begun to dissolve. There is one place that represents a key stage in this evolution: 10 Corso Como. It was founded in Milan, at that very address, by fashion editor Carla Sozzani and has since expanded to Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and New York. The name “concept store”, which has now spread across our globalized world, was originally coined to describe this new form. This book is the first philosophical inquiry into this new form of store and it sheds new light on how categories that have governed our modern lives, such as commerce, art, fashion, and museum, are being redefined today.Trade Review“Coccia and Grau's insightful account of 10 Corso Como presents a model where multiple disciplines do not just sit side by side but blend together holistically under one roof. This is a compelling case study of a transitional and ever-shifting space that is wholly in tune with the rhythm and pace of our time.”Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London “Is some of the future of the art museum to be found in the intimate experience that comes in 10 Corso Como, the ultimate, curated ‘concept store’? Coccia and Grau have found food for museum thought in a retail temple of fashion and living.”Michael Govan, CEO and Director, Los Angeles County Museum of ArtTable of Contents Foreword. In Action Chapter 1. Absolute Commerce Chapter 2. The Eternal and the Ephemeral Chapter 3: The Confines of Fashion Postface. At Calm Notes

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Book SynopsisThroughout modernity there has been a clear divide between art and commerce. Objects could either be consumed as commerce or contemplated as art. Today, as museums are facing increasing financial pressure and as stores have become inventive locations for new modes of display, this clear divide has begun to dissolve. There is one place that represents a key stage in this evolution: 10 Corso Como. It was founded in Milan, at that very address, by fashion editor Carla Sozzani and has since expanded to Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, and New York. The name “concept store”, which has now spread across our globalized world, was originally coined to describe this new form. This book is the first philosophical inquiry into this new form of store and it sheds new light on how categories that have governed our modern lives, such as commerce, art, fashion, and museum, are being redefined today.Trade Review“Coccia and Grau's insightful account of 10 Corso Como presents a model where multiple disciplines do not just sit side by side but blend together holistically under one roof. This is a compelling case study of a transitional and ever-shifting space that is wholly in tune with the rhythm and pace of our time.”Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London “Is some of the future of the art museum to be found in the intimate experience that comes in 10 Corso Como, the ultimate, curated ‘concept store’? Coccia and Grau have found food for museum thought in a retail temple of fashion and living.”Michael Govan, CEO and Director, Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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Book SynopsisThe time of the landscape is not the time when people started describing gardens, mountains and lakes in poems or representing them in works of art: it is the time when the landscape imposed itself as a specific object of thought. It is the time when both the harmony of arranged gardens and the disharmony of wild nature led to a revolution in the criteria of the beautiful and in the meaning of the word “art.” It coincided with the birth of aesthetics, understood as a regime for shaping how art is seen and thought, and also with the French Revolution, understood as a revolution in the very idea of what binds together a human community. The time of the landscape is the time when the conjunction of these two upheavals brought into focus, however hazily, a common horizon: that of a revolution that no longer concerns only the laws of the state or the norms of art, but the very forms of sensible experience. This brilliant and wide-ranging book will be of interest to students and scholars in philosophy, literature, the visual arts, and the humanities generally, and to anyone interested in critical theory and philosophy.Trade Review“This short, polemical intervention in the history of landscape aesthetics is sure to energize a fresh debate about the relations of painting, architecture, and visual experience in the nineteenth century.”W. J. T. Mitchell, University of Chicago“A decisive treatment of the perception and management of nature, The Time of the Landscape contends that the design and management of gardens in the post-revolutionary regime signal a sea-change in the ways we perceive, experience, and shape the world around us.”Tom Conley, Harvard UniversityTable of ContentsAbbreviations of frequently cited works List of Illustrations Foreword I. A Newcomer to the Fine Arts II. Scenes of Nature III. The Landscape as Painting IV. Beyond the Visible V. Politics of the Landscape Epilogue Notes

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, bioaesthetics has used the latest discoveries in evolutionary studies and neuroscience to provide new ways of looking at art and aesthetics. Carsten Strathausen’s remarkable exploration of this emerging field is the first comprehensive account of its ideas, as well as a timely critique of its limitations. Strathausen familiarizes readers with the basics of bioaesthetics, grounding them in its philosophical underpinnings while articulating its key components. Importantly, he delves into the longstanding problem of the “two cultures” that separate the arts and the sciences. Seeking to make bioaesthetics a more robust way of thinking, Strathausen then critiques it for failing to account for science’s historical and cultural assumptions. At its worst, he says, biologism reduces artworks to mere automatons that rubber-stamp pre-established scientific truths. Written with a sensitive understanding of science’s strengths, and willing to refute its best arguments, Bioaesthetics helps readers separate the sensible from the specious. At a time when humanities departments are shrinking—and when STEM education is on the rise—Bioaesthetics makes vital points about the limitations of science, while lodging a robust defense of the importance of the humanities.Trade Review"If you’ve ever wondered how we’ve gotten to the point where virtually every cultural theory field now boasts a ‘bio-’ or ‘neuro-’ subfield, Carsten Strathausen’s Bioaesthetics is an excellent guide. Setting the stage with scrupulous readings of historical controversies, Strathausen then incisively critiques the reductionist ‘biologism’ he finds in ‘literary Darwinism,’ ‘biopoetics,’ ‘neuroaestethics,’ and so on, before judiciously tackling Deleuze and affect theory. A powerful and insightful study, Bioaesthetics rewards the reader with clarifying and careful mappings of important contemporary concepts."—John Protevi, author of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the SciencesTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionThe Biological Nature of What?Against Consilience What Is Bioaesthetics?Structure and Chapters1. Human Nature after KantKant and BiologyPreformation and Epigenesis before 1800Emergent Life (Autopoiesis and Cognition)Sensus Communis Aestheticus2. Marxism and BiologyMarx and DarwinChance and Necessity, or, Kant RevisitedScience and PoliticsA Biologistic Theory of HistoryOn Norm-Circularity and Aleatory Materialism3. Cultural EvolutionSociobiologyEvolutionary Psychology (EP)Social Learning and SociogenesisOf Memes and Culturgens Technogenesis4. Evolutionary AestheticsArt and NatureA Survey of the FieldLiterary Darwinism RevisitedCognitive Studies5. NeuroaestheticsHow to “Read” a Brain ScanThe Cerebral SubjectConsciousnessNeuronal Aesthetics: The Historical ViewNeuroaesthetics: The Scientific View“The Pre-existing Idea within Us”: Zeki’s PlatonismCodaDeleuze and AffectA Posthuman Aesthetics?NotesIndex

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Book SynopsisIn recent years, bioaesthetics has used the latest discoveries in evolutionary studies and neuroscience to provide new ways of looking at art and aesthetics. Carsten Strathausen’s remarkable exploration of this emerging field is the first comprehensive account of its ideas, as well as a timely critique of its limitations. Strathausen familiarizes readers with the basics of bioaesthetics, grounding them in its philosophical underpinnings while articulating its key components. Importantly, he delves into the longstanding problem of the “two cultures” that separate the arts and the sciences. Seeking to make bioaesthetics a more robust way of thinking, Strathausen then critiques it for failing to account for science’s historical and cultural assumptions. At its worst, he says, biologism reduces artworks to mere automatons that rubber-stamp pre-established scientific truths. Written with a sensitive understanding of science’s strengths, and willing to refute its best arguments, Bioaesthetics helps readers separate the sensible from the specious. At a time when humanities departments are shrinking—and when STEM education is on the rise—Bioaesthetics makes vital points about the limitations of science, while lodging a robust defense of the importance of the humanities.Trade Review"If you’ve ever wondered how we’ve gotten to the point where virtually every cultural theory field now boasts a ‘bio-’ or ‘neuro-’ subfield, Carsten Strathausen’s Bioaesthetics is an excellent guide. Setting the stage with scrupulous readings of historical controversies, Strathausen then incisively critiques the reductionist ‘biologism’ he finds in ‘literary Darwinism,’ ‘biopoetics,’ ‘neuroaestethics,’ and so on, before judiciously tackling Deleuze and affect theory. A powerful and insightful study, Bioaesthetics rewards the reader with clarifying and careful mappings of important contemporary concepts."—John Protevi, author of Life, War, Earth: Deleuze and the SciencesTable of ContentsContentsAcknowledgmentsIntroductionThe Biological Nature of What?Against Consilience What Is Bioaesthetics?Structure and Chapters1. Human Nature after KantKant and BiologyPreformation and Epigenesis before 1800Emergent Life (Autopoiesis and Cognition)Sensus Communis Aestheticus2. Marxism and BiologyMarx and DarwinChance and Necessity, or, Kant RevisitedScience and PoliticsA Biologistic Theory of HistoryOn Norm-Circularity and Aleatory Materialism3. Cultural EvolutionSociobiologyEvolutionary Psychology (EP)Social Learning and SociogenesisOf Memes and Culturgens Technogenesis4. Evolutionary AestheticsArt and NatureA Survey of the FieldLiterary Darwinism RevisitedCognitive Studies5. NeuroaestheticsHow to “Read” a Brain ScanThe Cerebral SubjectConsciousnessNeuronal Aesthetics: The Historical ViewNeuroaesthetics: The Scientific View“The Pre-existing Idea within Us”: Zeki’s PlatonismCodaDeleuze and AffectA Posthuman Aesthetics?NotesIndex

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Book SynopsisMichel Foucault had been concerned about painting and the meaning of the image from his earliest publications, yet this aspect of his thought is largely neglected within the disciplines of art history and aesthetic theory. In Foucault on Painting, Catherine M. Soussloff argues that Foucault’s sustained engagement with European art history critically addresses present concerns about the mediated nature of the image in the digital age.Foucault’s writing on painting covers four discrete periods in European art history (seventeenth-century southern Baroque, mid-nineteenth century French painting, Surrealism, and figurative painting in the 1960s and ‘70s) as well as five individual artists: Velázquez, Manet, Magritte, Paul Reyberolle, and Gérard Fromanger. As Soussloff reveals in this book, Foucault followed a French intellectual tradition dating back to the seventeenth century, which understands painting as a separate area of knowledge. Painting, a practice long considered silent in its operations and effects, afforded Foucault an ideal discipline to think about history and philosophy simultaneously. Using a comparative approach grounded in art history and aesthetics, Soussloff explores the meaning of painting for Foucault’s philosophy, and for contemporary art theory, proposing a new relevance for a Foucauldian view of ethics and the pleasures and predicaments of contemporary existence.Trade Review"Catherine Soussloff is certainly one of the most intellectually intelligent and reflective art historians I can think of. Foucault on Painting is a clear, deeply thoughtful, and perfectly written contribution to the important field of intersect between art and philosophy."—James Rubin, Stony Brook University"Soussloff has produced a brief but thorough engagement with Michel Foucault’s philosophy of painting. Admirers of Foucault will love the book as will anyone with the patience and willingness to revisit some of the primary sources." —CHOICETable of ContentsContentsPreface Introduction: What Painting Does1. Systems of Art Historical and Philosophical Thought2. The Place of Painting: Velázquez’s Las Meninas3. The Limits of Irony: Manet’s Painting4. The Negativity of Painting: Magritte’s This Is Not a Pipe5. Painting in the Light of Photography: Fromanger’s MethodsAcknowledgmentsNotesIndex

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Book SynopsisOn the complex aesthetics and ontology at work in Étienne Souriau’s unique oeuvre In this concise but expansive exegesis of the philosophical aesthetics of Étienne Souriau, philosopher David Lapoujade provides a lucid introduction to many of the key concepts underpinning Souriau’s existential pluralism. Among the various modes of existence that populate a world, Souriau grants particular importance to virtual beings—the lesserexistences. Always taking the form of a sketch or an outline, the perfection of such existences lies precisely in the incompletion with which they imbue all reality. They exist with a problematizing force, posing questions and inviting the establishment of an “art” that would make them more real. And yet, for this to happen, another existence must first see them—must be capable of hearing their appeals—and must be willing to defend their right to exist.Through discussions of modern art ranging from the dispossessed characters of Kafka and Beckett to the grids of Agnes Martin and the protographies of Oscar Muñoz, Lapoujade leads the reader into a complex philosophical world, brimming with modal existences and animated by a unique conception of creative processes, where the philosopher as artist or artist as philosopher becomes an advocate, defending the right of certain realities to gain in existence. For Souriau, nothing is given in advance, everything is a work in the making: such is the instaurative practice that grounds his entire oeuvre.Table of ContentsContentsAbbreviations1. One Monad Too Many?2. Modes of Existence3. How to See4. Distentio animi5. Of Instauration6. The DispossessedAppendix. Art and PhilosophyÉtienne SouriauNotes

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Book SynopsisA wide-ranging and challenging exploration of design and how it engages with the self The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects but rather extends from carefully crafted individual styles and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Superhumanity seeks to explore and challenge our understanding of “design” by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.” This volume brings together more than fifty essays by leading scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, originally disseminated online via e-flux Architecture between September 2016 and February 2017 on the invitation of the Third Istanbul Design Biennial. Probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, this book asks: Who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others? This vital and far-reaching collection of essays and images seeks to explore and reflect on the ways in which both the concept and practice of design are operative well beyond tangible objects, expanding into the depths of self and forms of life. Contributors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Shumon Basar, Ruha Benjamin, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ina Blom, Benjamin H. Bratton, Giuliana Bruno, Tony Chakar, Mark Cousins, Simon Denny, Keller Easterling, Hu Fang, Rubén Gallo, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Rupali Gupte, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Thomas Keenan, Sylvia Lavin, Yongwoo Lee, Lesley Lokko, MAP Office, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann, Ahmet Ögüt, Trevor Paglen, Spyros Papapetros, Raqs Media Collective, Juliane Rebentisch, Sophia Roosth, Felicity D. Scott, Jack Self, Prasad Shetty, Hito Steyerl, Kali Stull, Pelin Tan, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Paulo Tavares, Stephan Trüby, Etienne Turpin, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Liam Young, and Arseny Zhilyaev. Trade Review"The essays themselves offer valuable and engaging interdisciplinary perspectives on design and design theory, and could be successfully assigned in a design studio, exposing students to the too-often overlooked failures in design thinking and execution."—Design and Culture

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Book SynopsisA wide-ranging and challenging exploration of design and how it engages with the self The field of design has radically expanded. As a practice, design is no longer limited to the world of material objects but rather extends from carefully crafted individual styles and online identities to the surrounding galaxies of personal devices, new materials, interfaces, networks, systems, infrastructures, data, chemicals, organisms, and genetic codes. Superhumanity seeks to explore and challenge our understanding of “design” by engaging with and departing from the concept of the “self.” This volume brings together more than fifty essays by leading scientists, artists, architects, designers, philosophers, historians, archaeologists, and anthropologists, originally disseminated online via e-flux Architecture between September 2016 and February 2017 on the invitation of the Third Istanbul Design Biennial. Probing the idea that we are and always have been continuously reshaped by the artifacts we shape, this book asks: Who designed the lives we live today? What are the forms of life we inhabit, and what new forms are currently being designed? Where are the sites, and what are the techniques, to design others? This vital and far-reaching collection of essays and images seeks to explore and reflect on the ways in which both the concept and practice of design are operative well beyond tangible objects, expanding into the depths of self and forms of life. Contributors: Zeynep Çelik Alexander, Lucia Allais, Shumon Basar, Ruha Benjamin, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Daniel Birnbaum, Ina Blom, Benjamin H. Bratton, Giuliana Bruno, Tony Chakar, Mark Cousins, Simon Denny, Keller Easterling, Hu Fang, Rubén Gallo, Liam Gillick, Boris Groys, Rupali Gupte, Andrew Herscher, Tom Holert, Brooke Holmes, Francesca Hughes, Andrés Jaque, Lydia Kallipoliti, Thomas Keenan, Sylvia Lavin, Yongwoo Lee, Lesley Lokko, MAP Office, Chus Martínez, Ingo Niermann, Ahmet Ögüt, Trevor Paglen, Spyros Papapetros, Raqs Media Collective, Juliane Rebentisch, Sophia Roosth, Felicity D. Scott, Jack Self, Prasad Shetty, Hito Steyerl, Kali Stull, Pelin Tan, Alexander Tarakhovsky, Paulo Tavares, Stephan Trüby, Etienne Turpin, Sven-Olov Wallenstein, Eyal Weizman, Mabel O. Wilson, Brian Kuan Wood, Liam Young, and Arseny Zhilyaev. Trade Review"The essays themselves offer valuable and engaging interdisciplinary perspectives on design and design theory, and could be successfully assigned in a design studio, exposing students to the too-often overlooked failures in design thinking and execution."—Design and Culture

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Book SynopsisA philosophical and cultural distillation of the bleak joys in today’s ambivalent ecologies and patterns of lifeBleak Joys develops an understanding of complex entities and processes—from plant roots to forests to ecological damage and its calculation—as aesthetic. It is also a book about “bad” things, such as anguish and devastation, which relate to the ecological and technical but are also constitutive of politics, the ethical, and the formation of subjects.Avidly interdisciplinary, Bleak Joys draws on scientific work in plant sciences, computing, and cybernetics, as well as mathematics, literature, and art in ways that are not merely illustrative of but foundational to our understanding of ecological aesthetics and the condition in which the posthumanities are being forged. It places the sensory world of plants next to the generalized and nonlinear infrastructure of irresolvability—the economics of indifference up against the question of how to make a home on Planet Earth in a condition of damaged ecologies. Crosscutting chapters on devastation, anguish, irresolvability, luck, plant, and home create a vivid and multifaceted approach that is as remarkable for its humor as for its scholarly complexity.Engaging with Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin, among others, Bleak Joys captures the modes of crises that constitute our present ecological and political condition, and reckons with the means by which they are not simply aesthetically known but aesthetically manifest.Trade Review"Bleak Joys is a tour de force—a survey of some of the most important ideas and environmental issues of our times."—Eben Kirksey, author of Emergent Ecologies and editor of The Multispecies Salon"With Bleak Joys, Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova take us on an extraordinary exploration of aesthetic transformations in the era of the new climate regime. Not only does the book offer a unique perspective on a new framework of thought, but it also questions the perceptual, emotional, and ethico-aesthetic transformations imposed on us by the ecological crisis that constitutes our present."—Didier Debaise, author of Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible

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Book SynopsisA philosophical and cultural distillation of the bleak joys in today’s ambivalent ecologies and patterns of lifeBleak Joys develops an understanding of complex entities and processes—from plant roots to forests to ecological damage and its calculation—as aesthetic. It is also a book about “bad” things, such as anguish and devastation, which relate to the ecological and technical but are also constitutive of politics, the ethical, and the formation of subjects.Avidly interdisciplinary, Bleak Joys draws on scientific work in plant sciences, computing, and cybernetics, as well as mathematics, literature, and art in ways that are not merely illustrative of but foundational to our understanding of ecological aesthetics and the condition in which the posthumanities are being forged. It places the sensory world of plants next to the generalized and nonlinear infrastructure of irresolvability—the economics of indifference up against the question of how to make a home on Planet Earth in a condition of damaged ecologies. Crosscutting chapters on devastation, anguish, irresolvability, luck, plant, and home create a vivid and multifaceted approach that is as remarkable for its humor as for its scholarly complexity.Engaging with Deleuze, Guattari, and Bakhtin, among others, Bleak Joys captures the modes of crises that constitute our present ecological and political condition, and reckons with the means by which they are not simply aesthetically known but aesthetically manifest.Trade Review"Bleak Joys is a tour de force—a survey of some of the most important ideas and environmental issues of our times."—Eben Kirksey, author of Emergent Ecologies and editor of The Multispecies Salon"With Bleak Joys, Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova take us on an extraordinary exploration of aesthetic transformations in the era of the new climate regime. Not only does the book offer a unique perspective on a new framework of thought, but it also questions the perceptual, emotional, and ethico-aesthetic transformations imposed on us by the ecological crisis that constitutes our present."—Didier Debaise, author of Nature as Event: The Lure of the Possible

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Book SynopsisA new speculative ontology of aesthetics In Aesthesis and Perceptronium, Alexander Wilson presents a theory of materialist and posthumanist aesthetics founded on an original speculative ontology that addresses the interconnections of experience, cognition, organism, and matter. Entering the active fields of contemporary thought known as the new materialisms and realisms, Wilson argues for a rigorous redefining of the criteria that allow us to discriminate between those materials and objects where aesthesis (perception, cognition) takes place and those where it doesn’t. Aesthesis and Perceptronium negotiates between indiscriminately pluralist views that attribute mentation to all things and eliminative views that deny the existence of mentation even in humans. By recasting aesthetic questions within the framework of “epistemaesthetics,” which considers cognition and aesthetics as belonging to a single category that can neither be fully disentangled nor fully reduced to either of its terms, Wilson forges a theory of nonhuman experience that avoids this untenable dilemma. Through a novel consideration of the evolutionary origins of cognition and its extension in technological developments, the investigation culminates in a rigorous reevaluation of the status of matter, information, computation, causality, and time in terms of their logical and causal engagement with the activities of human and nonhuman agents. Trade Review"Aesthesis and Perceptronium offers a nuanced engagement with science, technology, and art that is otherwise largely missing from contemporary debates, exploring the significance of aesthetics in the aftermath of neomaterialist and nonrepresentational theories of perception, cognition, and intelligence."—Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths, University of London

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Book SynopsisA new speculative ontology of aesthetics In Aesthesis and Perceptronium, Alexander Wilson presents a theory of materialist and posthumanist aesthetics founded on an original speculative ontology that addresses the interconnections of experience, cognition, organism, and matter. Entering the active fields of contemporary thought known as the new materialisms and realisms, Wilson argues for a rigorous redefining of the criteria that allow us to discriminate between those materials and objects where aesthesis (perception, cognition) takes place and those where it doesn’t. Aesthesis and Perceptronium negotiates between indiscriminately pluralist views that attribute mentation to all things and eliminative views that deny the existence of mentation even in humans. By recasting aesthetic questions within the framework of “epistemaesthetics,” which considers cognition and aesthetics as belonging to a single category that can neither be fully disentangled nor fully reduced to either of its terms, Wilson forges a theory of nonhuman experience that avoids this untenable dilemma. Through a novel consideration of the evolutionary origins of cognition and its extension in technological developments, the investigation culminates in a rigorous reevaluation of the status of matter, information, computation, causality, and time in terms of their logical and causal engagement with the activities of human and nonhuman agents. Trade Review"Aesthesis and Perceptronium offers a nuanced engagement with science, technology, and art that is otherwise largely missing from contemporary debates, exploring the significance of aesthetics in the aftermath of neomaterialist and nonrepresentational theories of perception, cognition, and intelligence."—Luciana Parisi, Goldsmiths, University of London

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Book SynopsisReconsiders exceptionalism between aesthetics and politics Here, Arne De Boever proposes the notion of aesthetic exceptionalism to describe the widespread belief that art and artists are exceptional. Against Aesthetic Exceptionalism challenges that belief by focusing on the sovereign artist as genius, as well as the original artwork as the foundation of the art market. Engaging with sculpture, conceptual artwork, and painting by emerging and established artists, De Boever proposes a worldly, democratic notion of unexceptional art as an antidote to the problems of aesthetic exceptionalism.Forerunners: Ideas First Short books of thought-in-process scholarship, where intense analysis, questioning, and speculation take the leadTrade Review"De Boever’s work offers an ongoing intellectual and critical project."—Collateral

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Book SynopsisIn light of current discourses on AI and robotics, what do the various experiences of art contribute to the rethinking of technology today?Art and Cosmotechnics addresses the challenge of technology to the existence of art and traditional thought, especially in light of current discourses on artificial intelligence and robotics. It carries out an attempt on the cosmotechnics of Chinese landscape painting in order to address this question, and further asks: What is the significance of shanshui (mountain and water) in face of the new challenges brought about by the current technological transformation? Thinking art and cosmotechnics together is an attempt to look into the varieties of experiences of art and to ask what these experiences might contribute to the rethinking of technology today.Trade Review "This book opens the way to rethinking technology beyond Gestell, by exploring the obscure paths of the experience of art."—Augustin Berque, author of Thinking Through Landscape "Art and Cosmotechnics is a must-read, especially for Westerners, to unlock the transformative potential of art vis-à-vis technologies."—Neural "Yuk Hui has played a key role in creating a framework within which current art-historical discourse regarding this vital subject can thrive."—Leonardo Reviews

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